Maggie, she realised, was holding onto her composure by a thread.
‘You’re a fucking psychologist,’ she said tightly. ‘Oh, you’re full of all the answers now. I’m sure you’ve analysed it half to death. Just like that daft psychiatrist we took Nick to right before he murdered Dean and tried to murder Isla. Oh, nothing to worry about, Mr and Mrs Clyde. Nick’s only problem, as far as I can see, is the common wee bint he’s got for a stepmother.’ Maggie nodded. ‘That was the gist of it. I’ve emailed that bastard Jamie Stirling-Stewart, going on about how I’m going to report him for professional negligence, and I’ll maybe go to the press and all.’ She smiled grimly. ‘Emailed me right back grovelling – oh aye, full of apologies now, but he didn’t think to try and contact me, did he, when Nick was all over the media? Thought he’d got away with it, the fucker.’
Lulu felt a momentary pang of sympathy for the psychiatrist.
Maggie focused her attention back on Lulu. ‘How come you didn’t rumble him sooner? You were in denial, I suppose, like Duncan was. Love does that to you, eh?’ And her face changed. ‘Fuck. Sorry.’
‘It’s okay,’ Lulu said wearily. ‘That’s all gone. It’s all gone as if it never was, what I felt for him. That Nick wasn’t real. He was playing a part, I think, right from the start. I think he must have seen me in Ithaca and for some reason fixated on me. Apparently, it was a lie, what he told me about stuff going missing from that guest house, about the owners being dodgy. One of my brothers emailed the police there to ask about it. There’s never been any trouble there before. We think Nick must have broken into my room and stolen all my stuff. Then he lay in wait and followed me around as I tried to find a police station; followed me to the taverna. Threw himself into the role of my knight in shining armour.’
None of it had been true, she supposed. He didn’t have her weird sense of humour. He hadn’t made up stories about people when he was a teenager. He probably didn’t even like falafels.
‘Aye, that sounds like the Nick I know.’
Lulu swallowed. She still found herself thinking Nick would love this if something entertainingly surreal happened. She’d never admit it to anyone, but part of her still loved that Nick, the mirage, and missed him like crazy. But she had to stop thinking like that. The mirage had been so dangerous in so many ways. ‘And the one I know, now. Now I’m seeing him clearly. Now I’m seeing –’
‘The psychopath,’ Maggie supplied.
‘Yes. I suppose so. Everything he said, everything he did – I can see behind it, now. Like his obsession with the Romans, who were so civilised and yet so savage. So inventively savage. He used to talk about what they did to people in the arena. I think he enjoyed all that.’ She swallowed. ‘Although – in my defence, he’s not a classic psychopath. Karla, one of my old professors at uni, she’s been very supportive, but she’s also . . . well, to tell the truth, she’s alarmingly enthusiastic about the fact that Nick could represent a rare psychopath subtype.’ Lulu smiled. ‘She can’t help herself. She wants to write a paper with me when I’m back in Australia.’
The penthouse apartment had been sold, and Lulu had netted just over three million in the divorce settlement. For the moment, she was renting a cottage near Maggie and Isla in Wales. Better for a dog than London. Lulu had gone straight to the dog shelter after Nick’s arrest and got Milo out of there. He had been so pathetically glad to see her, wriggling around her legs like he didn’t know what to do with himself. She had picked him up in her arms and wept.
Maggie and Isla had fallen in love with him too, and he was spoilt rotten. He adored their smallholding, particularly the hay barn, where he spent many happy hours snuffling around attempting to look like a proper country dog – but if a mouse or, as on one memorable occasion, a rat happened to show itself, Milo was out of there like greased lightning, much to Isla’s amusement.
But best of all were the long winter nights when Milo and Lulu snuggled on the sofa in front of a roaring log-burner in her little cottage, often with Maggie and/or Isla for company – and for a few days before the trial had started, her whole family had descended, squeezing themselves into the room with much hilarity. Mum said the cosy scene had almost converted her to bad British weather.
The plan was for Mum to stay with Lulu after the trial until she’d had the baby, and then Mum, Lulu, baby and Milo would return to Leonora. ‘Plenty galahs in Leonora need therapy, love,’ as Dad had put it.
Milo would love Braemar Station.
She hoped he was okay now, staying for the duration of the trial with a friend of Maggie’s. The friend had an assertive cat which despised poor Milo.
‘A rare subtype?’ Maggie repeated sceptically.
‘Rare because he can form attachments. He genuinely did feel something approaching love – for Duncan, for me. Only, it was warped. It was all about him.’
‘Then it wasn’t love, was it?’ Maggie looked off, and Lulu knew she was thinking about Duncan. ‘Real love is all about the other person.’
Lulu nodded slowly. ‘When he was so worried for my safety in London, at Sunnyside, he kept saying he couldn’t lose me too. You’re right. He wasn’t thinking of me, he wasn’t worried for me. He was worried for himself and how my death would affect him. The emotion was all about him. Maybe there was no actual empathy involved.’ Part of her, the scientific, objective part, felt a little surge of enthusiasm of her own, wondering if Karla had thought of that and hoping she hadn’t, hoping this could be her own insight.