The secret signs he’s lying to you

She’s spent years studying the psychology of deception as one half of bestselling crime writing duo Nicci French. Now she reveals...

We all lie. We tell white lies, darker ones; lies that damage and lies that protect. an intricate web of honesty and deception, sincerity and pretence, is essential for our relationships with other people.

We all have secrets, good and bad, and we all hide beneath our surface-self and hope to get away with it. The most successful liars are those who believe in their own lies, conning themselves before they con their victims. Most of us are more transparent, like bad actors stumbling on to the stage with no lines to speak.

Recently, I lied blatantly to one of my (grown-up) daughters. I had furtively smoked a cigarette — something that I do about four times a year.

I came into the room and she said at once: ‘Have you been smoking?’ Perhaps it was the smell of tobacco, though I had cleaned my teeth to conceal this.

Perhaps it was the smell of the toothpaste. Perhaps I wore an expression of post-cigarette-guilt.

I felt the blood rush to my face and my heart started thumping. I stared at her incredulously. I lifted my hands in an exaggerated gesture of surprise. In a loud, slightly aggrieved voice I told her that of course I hadn’t. I think I patted my pockets and invited her to search me. She looked at me very seriously and kindly.

I left the room, breathed deeply, returned and confessed to her. It was such a trivial thing, but I remember it vividly because of the storm of emotions that came over me: I had been caught out and was obscurely humiliated and ashamed.

My husband Sean French and I write psychological thrillers together under the name of Nicci French. Deception is our plot and our subject, the terrible secrets that lie beneath the surface. In our world, normality is the thin ice we all try to walk on, and underneath are dark waters.

In our current series, the central character, Frieda Klein, is a psychotherapist. We chose her because she is a detective of the mind, someone who, while being good at hiding her own secrets, has a sixth sense for the secrets of others.

Readers sometimes ask us if we like Frieda, who is prickly and reserved, and we answer that while we like her a great deal, we aren’t sure what she would make of us. She has the gift that is also a curse of seeing through people, like an x-ray vision that pierces pretence and self-protection to uncover what is hidden.

Over the years, Sean and I have spent a lot of time talking to therapists, scientists and police officers, going to trials, reading about the mind and strange psychological conditions: sometimes people behave so weirdly you couldn’t put it in a novel.

It was Freud who wrote: ‘He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.’

There is no crime that doesn’t leave a trace and no inner feeling that remains entirely covered up. People betray themselves in ways they don’t realise, instinctively and unconsciously revealing things they believe they are hiding. Here’s how . . . WHeN people make statements, detectives have learned to be suspicious of chronological coherence, witness statements with a beginning, a middle and an end. People don’t think like that: if we describe an event, we tend to move backwards and forwards in time, forgetting things, making mistakes and correcting ourselves; remembering as we go. Similarly, if a narrative is too fluent and well-shaped, too precise and accurate, it’s probably a lie.

In the book we have just finished writing, Frieda Klein suspects a person not because he doesn’t have an alibi but because his alibi is too good, too convenient. Most people don’t have perfect alibis — messy, flawed, incoherent life isn’t like that.

If this sounds paradoxical, think of the way in which an excuse that is too detailed sounds unconvincing.

If you ask someone to dinner and they say they can’t come because they are going to the theatre, and anyway they are coming down with flu, and they might have to finish a piece of important work that evening, the likelihood is those are all lies. The truth is they just don’t want to.

HIS STORY IS TOO SLICK AND DETAILED HE MAKES LOTS OF EYE CONTACT WITH YOU

IN FIlMS, people who are feeling guilty avoid eye contact. It is a cinematic and literary trope that people who look away are uneasy and hiding something. In real life it’s uncomfortable, and even threatening, to look someone directly in the eye for too long. Try it. It causes a kind of oppressive embarrassment, a feeling of wrongness.

When people are talking to each other, their eyes flick back and forth, to each other’s eyes, to their face, then back again. If someone stares you in the eye for too long when

they’re talking, it might not be a proof of their honesty, but rather an attempt to intimidate you into accepting their lie. People often avoid eye contact not to tell a lie but when they want to tell a difficult truth.

in psychoanalysis, patients will stare anywhere but into the eyes of the listener, while they say things they have never dared utter. i used to say to my children that if there were things they found it hard to discuss, we should do it on a walk, or doing the washing up, rather than face-to-face.

HE REPEATS YOUR QUESTION

OTHER linguistic clues can point to a lie: someone who is tense with the effort of deception may avoid relaxed contractions, saying ‘it was not me driving the car’ rather than ‘it wasn’t me driving the car’. Language stiffens itself along with the speaker.

A repetition is sometimes used to buy time, and a pause before answering can be suspicious — or, of course, it can be simply a space to allow genuine recall.

if someone is asked: What were you doing six weeks ago, it would be odd not to pause. But if they are asked: ‘Did you steal the car’, then a pause is unexpected.

HE TRIES TO AVOID USING THE WORD ‘I’

DISCOMFORT caused by lying can show itself in the way we use language. For example, if someone is lying, they tend to automatically avoid the word ‘i’, using ‘we’ instead, or contorting a sentence to avoid a pronoun at all. When we are avoiding the admission of guilt we talk of mistakes being made, of what was done, what happened, not ‘what i did’.

HE USES YOUR NAME FAR TOO MUCH

DALE CARNEGIE, author of how To Win Friends And influence People, believed that a person’s name is the sweetest sound in any language for that person. hearing it validates our existence and bolsters our identity.

however humans are acutely attuned to nuances of language and behaviour: tiny, almost undetectable ways of behaving that just strike a wrong note. We might not know what we are reacting against, but we know when something jars.

We’ve all become used to listening to politicians repeat someone’s name when talking to them. it should feel friendly and democratic, making a connection across a divide. instead there’s often a wincing chumminess about it, a fraudulent attempt at intimacy.

A name is a doorway into the self, a way of recognising someone. ‘Charming’ people will often involve using a name repeatedly: beware of charm. in our novels, the person who uses someone’s name often is to be regarded with suspicion. They are trying to handle the other person often in order to force a lie on them.

using a name as often as possible has become the bloodsport of tele-marketers, where it’s called ‘repeat signifying’. Ask yourself whether a tele-marketer’s first priority is the truth.

HE IS OVERLY ATTENTIVE

ONE of the most terrifying forms of lying is pretending you’re being loving when you’re really being controlling — using intimacy to dominate and even abuse. Bullying can mimic love.

Personal space is hugely important to most of us — it’s like a buffer zone between us and the rest of the world, and almost an extension of our own bodies. When someone stands too close, it can feel oppressive. We tend to reduce our own movements, and eye contact, fold our arms, smile less — and take a step back.

What is the right amount of space? Apparently, it’s about 10 in. Come any nearer and it can feel sexually intrusive; at the very least it indicates a lack of social intelligence. When someone breaks through the invisible border between self and other, you can smell their breath, see the pores on their skin, feel their body heat. You can feel trapped.

it’s something predators understand: get close, touch the person. it’s a way of establishing control and forcing them to accept the predator’s version of events. even if it’s a lie.

So many of the ways in which we betray our inner selves involve breaking tiny rules we weren’t even aware existed.

We all reveal and betray ourselves; and we are all detectives of other people’s unconscious confessions. With this beautiful fragile web of truth and lies we read and decode each other. in the psychological thriller, as in everyday life, when the web is torn; truth breaks through.