A hazudozók

The next day, I was exhausted after work at the salon. My colleagues and I had been working hard all day. We had a particularly challenging appointment booked in. Our client was a young woman who had lost her hair after chemotherapy. It had only started growing back two or three months earlier and was still very short — just one or two centimetres in places. Difficult cases like this always demand great care and concentration, often involving five or six hours of coordinated teamwork.

We finished the demanding job at around five in the afternoon. Along with her hair, our client had regained her sense of femininity. She left the salon beaming with happiness. I sat down for a short rest. That was when I first remembered that my friend was expecting me that evening, so we could continue yesterday’s conversation. Suddenly, my tiredness vanished. I was eager to find out how the story would unfold…

‘Would you like a coffee?’ Lilla asked when I arrived.

‘No thanks. It’s too late for me. But I’d be grateful for a sandwich. I haven’t had time to eat all day at the salon. I only managed to stop for a cereal bar and a smoothie.’

‘OK. Of course. I’ll make you one now.’

‘I’m dying to know what you found out about Mr Liar,’ I said, sitting down at the kitchen island.

‘OK, OK. I’ll tell you… Where did we leave off yesterday?’

‘At what you discovered when you started investigating that night.’

‘Oh, yes. I didn’t have his name, only Alex and Fehérvár, so following that lead got me nowhere. No wonder, really, since it turned out later that neither the name nor the place was right.’

‘But how did you manage to track him down?’ I interrupted excitedly.

‘I couldn’t find anything about him on social media. Then, finally, I had an idea. I simply typed his phone number into Google. And would you believe it — an advert came up with that number in it.’

‘Oh! What was the advert for?’

‘Someone was selling puppies in Agárd, near Székesfehérvár.’

‘Was it him?’

‘After a bit of detective work, I found out that it was.’

‘Ah! Now I understand why he said he lived in Fehérvár.’

‘Of course. He knows the area, so he wouldn’t get caught out if someone happened to ask him about something in Fehérvár.’

‘Cunning!’

‘He is. I suppose that’s a classic trick for people like him.’

‘And what else did you find out?’

‘Following that lead, I found a Facebook page too. But there was something very odd about it.’

‘What was odd?’

‘The profile name was written in Cyrillic letters. Of course, it turned out later that even that wasn’t his real name.’

‘And what was on the page you found?’

‘Imagine this: there he was, posing in the middle of a lovely family photograph, beside an attractive blonde woman in her thirties and a beautiful little girl.’

‘Wow. What a bastard!’

‘I didn’t understand it… Actually, I don’t understand men in general… Why did he need me if he had such a lovely family? Besides, his wife or girlfriend was the complete opposite of me. Slim, tall, blonde and barely over thirty… I found her Facebook profile too.’

‘What else did you find out about him?’

‘It turned out he was only thirty-one, not thirty-nine as he’d told me. Nothing he’d said was true. Not a thing. Not his name, even on that profile, not where he lived, not his age. The whole man was a walking lie.’