Lasting Damage

Chapter 5

Saturday 17 July 2010



‘1.2 million pounds? Oh . . . Ow! Ouch.’ My mother has missed the five mugs lined up on the worktop and poured boiling water over her left hand instead. Deliberately, though I can’t prove it. She has burned herself, and it’s my fault for causing her more worry than she can cope with. Again. She wants everybody to notice and blame me. If they do, if Fran or Anton or Dad says, ‘Look what you’ve done, Con,’ Mum will stick up for me, but her defence will be a veiled attack: ‘It wasn’t Connie’s fault – I should have known better than to look away, with a kettle full of boiling water in my hand, but I was so shocked, I couldn’t help it.’

Is this what being close to someone means – knowing their limitations, their ego-boosting delusions and self-serving grottiness, as well as you know your own? Being able to predict their reactions, their facial expressions, down to the last word and grimace, so that disappointment and a sickening sense of predictability surge up and crush the breath out of you the moment you clap eyes on them, before anyone’s uttered a word? Kit would say that was too pessimistic an analysis, but then he was never close to his parents, and now he has no relationship with them at all. He is for ever saying he envies me my membership of what he calls ‘the Monk clan’. I don’t dare tell him the truth; he would accuse me of being ungrateful. He’d probably be right.

The truth is that I would rather be less close to my family, so that they could surprise me from time to time. So that their disapproval, when it came, wouldn’t have the capacity to burrow so deeply into me and plant seeds of self-doubt, pre-programmed to grow to the size of large oak trees. At least Kit is free.

‘Come on, Benji,’ Fran whispers. ‘One more bit of broccoli and then you can have a chocolate finger. Just the curly bit at the top. Please.’

‘Go on, Benji, mate – show Mummy and Daddy how brave you are. Like a superhero!’ Anton doesn’t bother to lower his voice. It hasn’t occurred to him that there’s anything more important going on in his parents-in-law’s kitchen today than Benji’s war on green vegetables; he feels no need to confine the broccoli negotiations to the background. Making a loudspeaker out of his hands, he puts on a booming voice and says, ‘Can one little boy defeat the broccoli monster? Is Benji brave enough to eat . . . his . . . broccoli? If he proves that he’s as brave as a superhero, his reward will be two . . . chocolate . . . fingers!’

Am I going mad? Didn’t Anton hear any of what I said, about seeing a murdered woman lying in a pool of blood, and talking to a detective this morning? Why is no one telling him to shut up? Did nobody hear me? That none of them should have anything to say on the subject seems as impossible to me as what I saw on my laptop last night – impossible, yet real, unless I’ve lost my capacity to distinguish reality from its opposite.

Kit thinks I have. Maybe my family do also, and that’s why they’re ignoring me.

‘Don’t say two,’ Fran admonishes Anton in a sing-song voice, wearing an exaggerated smile in order, presumably, to prevent their son from wondering if the emotional carnage of a broken home might be all he has to look forward to. ‘One’s enough, isn’t it, Benji?’

‘I want two chocolate fingers!’ my five-year-old nephew wails, red in the face.

I open my mouth, then close it. Why waste my breath? I’ve done what I came here to do: told my family what they need to know. In order not to look as if I’m waiting to be asked questions, I glance out of the window at the swing, slide, climbing-frame, treehouse, free-standing sandpit and two trampolines in my parents’ back garden: Benji’s private playground. Kit calls it ‘Neverland’.

‘Ow,’ Mum says again, making a big show of examining the red skin on her hand. She’s wasting her time with Fran and Anton; she ought to know that the ordeal of Benji’s supper has driven away all other thoughts, as well as their normal powers of observation.

‘All right, two chocolate fingers,’ says Fran wearily. ‘Sorry about this, everybody. Come on, though, Benji – eat this first.’ She takes the fork from his hand, impales the broccoli on it and holds it in front of his mouth, so that it’s touching his lips.

He yanks his head away, spitting, and nearly falls off his chair. Together, like anxious cheerleaders, Fran and Anton yell, ‘Don’t fall off your chair!’

‘I hate broccoli! It looks like a yucky lumpy snot tree!’

Privately, Kit and I refer to him as Benjamin Rigby. Kit started it, and, after a few cursory protests, I went along with it. His full name is Benji Duncan Geoffrey Rigby-Monk. ‘You’re joking,’ Kit said, when I first told him. ‘Benji? Not even Benjamin?’ Duncan and Geoffrey are his two grandads’ names – both unglamorous and old-dufferish, in Kit’s view, and not worth inflicting on a new generation – and Rigby-Monk is a fusion of Fran’s surname and Anton’s. ‘As far as I’m concerned, he’s Benjamin Rigby,’ said Kit, after the first time we met him. ‘He seems like a decent baby and he deserves a decent name. Not that his father’s got one, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.’ Kit thinks it’s only acceptable to ‘go around calling yourself Anton’, as he puts it, if you’re Spanish, Mexican or Colombian, or if you’re a hairdresser or a professional ice-skater.

He tells me I ought to be grateful for my family, and pleased to live so near to them, and then he mocks them mercilessly in front of me, and avoids seeing them whenever he can, sending me round here on my own instead. I never complain; I feel guilty for entangling him. I would hate to marry someone with a family as overwhelming and ever-present as mine.

‘Leave the poor child alone, Fran,’ says my mum. ‘It’s not worth the effort, for one measly floret of broccoli. I’ll make him ch—’

‘Don’t!’ Fran cuts her off with a frantic wave of the arm, before the fatal words ‘chicken nuggets and chips’ are spoken aloud. ‘We’re fine, aren’t we, Benj? You’re going to eat your nice yummy healthy greens, aren’t you, darling? You want to grow big and strong, don’t you?’

‘Like Daddy,’ Anton adds, flexing his muscles. He used to be a personal trainer at Waterfront, but gave up his job when Benji was born. Now he lifts weights and hones his biceps, or sinews, or whatever fit people call the parts of their body that need honing, on various odd-looking machines in his and Fran’s garage, which he’s turned into a home gym. ‘Daddy ate all his greens when he was little, and look at him now!’

At this point my father would normally pipe up with, ‘The only way to turn children into good eaters is to present them with a simple choice: they eat what everyone else is eating, or nothing at all. That soon teaches them. It worked with you two. You’ll eat anything, both of you. You’d eat your mother if she was on the plate!’ He’s said that, or a version of it, at least fifty times. Even when Fran hasn’t been there, he still says ‘you two’ rather than ‘you and Fran’, because he’s so used to all of us being together in this room, exactly as we are now: him sitting at the rickety pine trestle table that’s been in Thorrold House’s kitchen since before I was born, with the Times in front of him; Mum bustling around preparing food and drinks and waiting on everybody, refusing all offers of help so that she can sigh and rub the small of her back when she finally finishes loading the dishwasher; Anton leaning diagonally – in the manner of someone too cool to stand upright – against the rail of the Aga, which was once red but is now cross-hatched with silver from years of scratches; Fran fussing over Benji, trying to force one Brussels sprout, one leaf of spinach, one pea into his mouth, offering him vats of chocolate mousse, mountains of crisps and endless sugary butter balls as an incentive.

And me sitting in the rocking-chair by the window, fantasising about wrapping a thick blanket around my head and smothering myself, biting back the urge to say, ‘Wouldn’t it be better for him to have fish, potatoes and no courgette rather than fish, potatoes, a bit of courgette, twenty Benson and Hedges, a bottle of vodka and some crack cocaine? Just wondering.’

I’m at my most vicious when I’m with my family. One good reason why I shouldn’t live a hundred and fifty yards down the road from them.

‘Do you think I ought to run it under the cold tap,’ Mum says to Dad, stroking her hand. ‘Isn’t that what they say you should do with burns? Or are you supposed to put butter on them? I haven’t burned myself for years.’ She’s given up hope of attracting Fran’s or Anton’s attention, but she’s a fool if she can’t see that Dad’s too angry with me to listen to anything she might say. The extent of his fury is clear from his posture: head bowed, forehead pulled into a tight frown, shoulders hard and hunched, hands balled into fists. He’s wearing a blue and yellow striped shirt, but I’m sure if Alice were here she would agree with me that the energy radiating from him is a stony grey. He hasn’t moved at all for nearly fifteen minutes; the grinning, back-slapping Dad who ushered me in here when I arrived has vanished and been replaced by a statue, or sculpture, which, if I were the artist, I would call ‘Enraged Man’.

‘Have you lost your marbles?’ He spits the words at me. ‘You can’t afford a house for 1.2 million!’

‘I know that,’ I tell him. It isn’t only the prospect of my financial recklessness that’s bothering him. He resents the upheaval I’ve brought into his life without consulting him. We used to be a family that, between us, had never seen a murdered woman who then inexplicably disappeared. Now, thanks to me, that’s no longer true.

‘If you know you can’t afford a 1.2-million-pound house, then why were you looking at one?’ Mum says, as if she’s caught me out with a particularly clever logical manoeuvre. She shakes her head from side to side slowly, rhythmically, as if she intends to carry on for ever, as if I’ve given her more than enough cause for eternal anguish. In her mind, I’ve already bankrupted myself and brought shame on the family. She has the capacity to enter a dimension that’s inaccessible to most ordinary mortals: the ten-years-into-the-future worst-case scenario. It’s as real to her as the present moment; so vivid is it, in fact, that most of the time the present doesn’t stand a chance against it.

‘Don’t you ever look at things you can’t afford?’ I ask her.

‘No, I certainly do not!’ Conversation over. Like the metal clasp of an old-fashioned purse, clipping shut. I should have known. My mother never does anything apart from the most sensible thing. ‘And nor should you, and nor would you, unless you were tempted, and considering mortgaging yourself up to the hilt for the—’

‘Mum, there’s no way they’d get a mortgage for that much,’ Fran chips in. ‘You’re worrying about nothing, as usual. They won’t buy that house because they can’t. In the current climate, Melrose Cottage would sell for maximum three hundred thousand, most of which would go back to the Rawndesley and Silsford Building Society. Even if Con and Kit put in all their savings, no lender in their right mind would let them borrow over a million quid.’

It makes me want to scream that my sister knows as much about Kit’s and my finances as we do. When she says ‘savings’, she has an exact figure in mind – the correct one. I know about her and Anton’s money in the same way: their ISAs, their mortgage, their exact monthly income now that Anton has stopped working, how much they pay in school fees for Benji (hardly anything), how much Mum and Dad pay (almost all of it). ‘I don’t know why some families are so cagey about all things financial,’ Mum has been saying for as long as I can remember. ‘Why treat the people closest to you like strangers?’

When I was twelve and Fran ten, Mum showed us the blue pocket-book for her and Dad’s Halifax savings account, so that we could see that they’d saved four hundred and seventy-three thousand pounds and fifty-two pence. I remember staring at the blue handwritten figure and being impressed and somewhat stunned by it, thinking my parents must be geniuses, that I could never hope to be as clever as them. ‘We’re always going to be okay, because we’ve got this money as a cushion,’ Mum said. Both Fran and I fell for her propaganda, and spent our teenage years hoarding our pocket money in our savings accounts, while our friends were blowing every penny they had on lipstick and cider.

‘If you think your mother and I are going to lend you money so that you can live beyond your means, you can forget it,’ says Dad. In his and Mum’s eyes, living beyond one’s means is on a par, ethically, with tipping small babies out of windows.

‘I don’t think that,’ I tell him. I wouldn’t ask my parents to lend me a hundred pounds, let alone a million. ‘I wouldn’t want to buy 11 Bentley Grove even if I could afford it ten times over and there were no other houses in the world.’ I stop short of explaining why. It ought to be obvious.

‘Do you really think my hypothetical extravagance is what we ought to be talking about? What about the dead woman lying in her own blood? Why don’t we talk about that instead? Why are you all avoiding it? I did tell you, didn’t I? I could have sworn I told you what I saw on Roundthehouses, and about the detective who came round—’

‘You didn’t see a dead woman on Roundthehouses or anywhere else,’ Dad cuts me off. ‘I’ve never heard such a load of twaddle in my life. You said yourself: when Kit came to look, there was no body. Right?’

‘That’s what you said,’ Mum adds nervously, as if she fears I’m a loose cannon, likely to change my story.

I nod.

‘Then there was no body – you imagined it,’ says Dad. ‘You ought to ring that copper and apologise for wasting his time.’

‘I’m sure if I stayed up until goodness knows what time of night, I’d start hallucinating too,’ Mum contributes. ‘I keep telling you, but you never listen: you need to look after yourself better. You and Kit both work too hard, you stay up too late, you don’t always eat properly . . .’

‘Give it a rest, Mum,’ says Fran. ‘You don’t do yourself any favours. Come on, Benji, open your mouth, for Christ’s sake. Big wide mouth!’

‘Do you think I imagined it, Fran?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Not necessarily. Maybe. Three chocolate fingers, Benji, if you open your mouth and eat this yummy . . . That’s right! Bit wider . . .’

‘What do you think, Anton?’ I ask him.

‘I don’t think you’d have seen it if it wasn’t there,’ he says. I’m considering leaping out of my chair and throwing my arms around him when he ruins it by adding, ‘Sounds like someone’s idea of a practical joke to me. I wouldn’t let it worry you.’ As answers go, it’s only a fraction less dismissive than, ‘I can’t be bothered with this – it’s too much effort.’

‘You shouldn’t be looking at houses in Cambridge at any price,’ says Mum. ‘Millionaires’ Row or . . . Paupers’ Parade. Have you forgotten what happened last time you went down that route?’

‘Mum, for God’s sake!’ says Fran.

‘At least there was a reason last time – Kit being offered a promotion.’

Which he couldn’t accept, because I ruined everything for him. Thanks for reminding me.

‘Why now, all of a sudden?’ Mum pleads, adopting what’s probably her favourite of her many voices: the frail, reedy warble of a broken woman. ‘You and Kit have got a thriving business, a lovely home, you’ve got all of us right on your doorstep, your sister, lovely Benji – why would you want to move to Cambridge now? I mean, if it was London, I could understand it, with Kit working there as much as he does – though heaven knows why anyone would want to live in such a noisy, scruffy hell-hole – but Cambridge . . .’

‘Because we should have moved in 2003, and we didn’t, and I’ve regretted it ever since.’ I’m on my feet, and I’m not sure why. Did I plan to storm out of the room? Out of the house? Mum and Dad stare at me as if they don’t understand what I’ve just said. Dad turns away, makes a breathy, growling noise I haven’t heard before. It frightens me.

Why do I always ruin things for everybody? What’s wrong with me?

‘Hooray! Benji ate his broccoli!’ Anton cheers, again through a pretend loudspeaker, apparently oblivious to the invisible strings of tension stretched tautly from one end of the kitchen to the other. Maybe I am suffering from a disease that makes you hallucinate; I can see those strings as clearly as if they were real, with unspoken threats and glowing grudges hanging from them like Christmas decorations.

‘Benji’s the champion!’ Anton bellows, as Fran waves the empty fork in the air in triumph.

‘Benji’s five, not two,’ I snap. ‘Why don’t you try talking to him normally, instead of like a low-budget children’s party entertainer?’

‘Because’ – Anton continues in his false booming voice – ‘it’s only when Daddy talks like this and makes him laugh . . . that he eats his broccoli!’

Benji isn’t laughing. He’s trying not to gag on the food he hates.

Anton’s impermeable jollity makes me want to scream a torrent of insults at him. The only time I’ve ever seen the mildest of frowns pass across his face was when a Monk & Sons customer referred to him as a house-husband. Fran quickly corrected her in a way that sounded forced, learned by heart. I made the mistake of repeating the story to Kit, who instantly developed a Pavlovian response to hearing Anton’s name: ‘Anton – not a house-husband, but a personal trainer taking an open-ended career break.’

‘Low-budget!’ Mum pounces on the phrase. ‘Of course, you’re high-end now, aren’t you, with your 1.2-million-pound house?’

‘Completely unaffordable 1.2-million-pound house,’ Fran is quick to say. It bothers her that Kit and I are better off than she and Anton are, though I’m not sure she would admit it to herself. It’s been worse since Kit left Deloitte and we started our own business. If Nulli came a cropper, Fran would be sympathetic, upset on our behalf, but also relieved. I’m certain of this, but I can’t prove it. I can’t prove a lot of things at the moment.

Fran and Anton live in a cottage called Thatchers that’s smaller than my house, and closer to my parents – almost directly opposite Thorrold House, across the green. Like Melrose Cottage, Thatchers is a two-up two-down, but the kitchen is no more than a tiny strip at one end of the lounge, and the bedrooms are in the thatched roof and therefore triangular, difficult to stand up in. As it happens, Anton and Fran suffer hardly at all from a lack of space – effectively, they have lived with Mum and Dad since Benji was born. Thatchers, which they persist in referring to as ‘home’, is empty almost all the time.

Why does nobody ever point out how crazy it is to have an empty house just standing there? Crazier than looking at houses in Cambridge on the internet. Crazier than considering moving to one of England’s most beautiful, vibrant cities instead of spending the rest of your life in Little Holling, Silsford, with its one pub and its population of fewer than a thousand people.

‘Ignore Connie, Anton,’ Mum says. ‘She’s clearly taken leave of her senses.’

‘She can make it up to me.’ Anton winks at me. ‘Extra babysitting, Con, yeah?’

I try to smile, though the prospect of any more babysitting makes me swell with resentment. I already babysit for Benji every Tuesday night. In my family, if something happens once and goes well, it’s only a matter of time before someone suggests that it ought to become a tradition.

‘One choccie finger, two choccie fingers, three choccie fingers!’ Fran is hamming up her dealings with Benji now, to demonstrate her support for Anton and his silly voices. She’s on his side, Dad and Mum are on each other’s, and nobody’s on mine. Suits me fine; anything that makes me feel less like one of the Little Holling Monks has to be a good thing.

‘There’s nothing wrong with my senses,’ I tell Mum. ‘I know what I saw. I saw a dead woman in that room, lying in a pool of her own blood. The detective I spoke to this morning is taking it seriously. If you don’t want to, that’s up to you.’

‘Oh, Connie, listen to yourself!’ Mum says sorrowfully.

‘Don’t waste your breath, Val,’ Dad mutters. ‘When does she ever pay attention to what we say?’ He lifts his right arm and studies the table beneath as if he expects to find something there. ‘What happened to that cuppa you were making?’

‘I’m sorry, but it makes no sense, love,’ Mum says to me in a hushed voice as she refills the kettle, shooting guilty glances in Dad’s direction, hoping he won’t notice her continued willingness to engage with the daughter he just dismissed as not worth bothering with. ‘I mean, you only have to think about it for two seconds to realise it’s a non-starter, don’t you? Why would anyone put a murdered woman’s body on a property website? A murderer wouldn’t do it, would he, because he’d want to hide what he’d done. An estate agent wouldn’t do it because he’d want to sell the house, and no one’s going to buy a—’

‘Except my eldest daughter,’ Dad announces loudly. ‘Not only my daughter – also my book-keeper, which is even more worrying. Oh, she’s more than happy to mortgage herself into penury to buy the gruesome death house for 1.2 million pounds!’ I don’t know why he’s glaring at Benji as he says this, as if it’s his fault.

‘Dad, I don’t want to buy 11 Bentley Grove. I can’t afford to buy it. You’re not listening to me.’ As usual. What did he mean by the book-keeper comment? That he’s afraid I might steal from Monk & Sons? That my profligate tendencies are likely to bankrupt the family business? I’ve never done anything but a brilliant job for him, and it counts for nothing. I needn’t have bothered.

And now I’m thinking like a martyr. Don’t they say all women turn into their mothers?

Tell them all you’re leaving Monk & Sons. Resigning. Work full-time for Nulli – that’s what you want to do, isn’t it? What is it about these people that makes it impossible to say what you mean and do what you want?

‘You’re contradicting yourself,’ I say to Dad. ‘If I imagined the body, then it’s not a gruesome death house, is it?’

‘So you do want to buy it. I knew it!’ He thumps his fist down on the table, making it rock.

‘The vendor wouldn’t do it,’ Mum burbles to herself, wrapping her burned hand in a piece of kitchen roll while she waits for the kettle to boil. ‘Presumably he or she wants the house to sell as much as the estate agent does.’

‘Please stop cataloguing everyone who wouldn’t put a dead body up on a website, Mum,’ Fran groans. ‘You’ve made your point: no one would do it.’

‘Well, if no one would do it, Connie can’t have seen it, can she?’ Mum nods triumphantly at me, as if that ought to be the end of the matter.

Why do my family always make me feel like this? Whenever I talk to them for any length of time, I end up wriggling in discomfort, desperately searching for a pocket of air as the oxygen is slowly squeezed from the conversation.

I can’t bear to be around them any longer. Nor can I stand the thought of going home to Kit, who will ask me how it went, and laugh as though at a sitcom when I bring it to life for him, as he will expect me to, as if I am a comedian and my family entertaining and harmless, joke-fodder. There’s only one person I want to talk to at the moment, and although it’s a Saturday, it’s also an emergency.

Is it? Are you sure?

When was I last sure of anything?

I pull my mobile phone out of my bag and leave the room. Mum shouts after me, ‘You don’t have to go into another room. We won’t listen.’



‘And the ridiculous thing was, I nearly didn’t do it. I found myself thinking, “But it’s not a real emergency – you’re not bleeding to death, or hanging from a cliff by your fingernails. Save your permission to ring in an emergency for a life-or-death situation, don’t squander it on this.’ But why not? I mean, it is a life-and-death situation: the woman I saw had been murdered – she must have been. And why did I decide it was a once-only thing and that after I’d used up my ringing-in-an-emergency allowance, it would be gone for ever? Would you be angry if I rang you outside working hours in a few months, or even years, if I was unlucky enough to feel as bad as this again?’

‘Are you noticing the words you’re choosing?’ Alice asks. ‘ “Saving”, “squandering”?’

No, I didn’t notice. Admitting as much would be too depressing, so I say nothing. When I first started to see Alice, the long silences unsettled me. Now I’m used to them. I’ve grown to like them. Sometimes I count how long they last: one elephant, two elephants, three elephants. Sometimes I go into a kind of trance, staring at the clear glass beads that run along the bottom of the cream silk blind, or at the pink butterflies chandelier.

‘Why did you tell your family about seeing the woman and the blood?’ Alice says eventually.

‘Kit asked me the same thing. ‘‘Why tell them?’’ he said. ‘‘They’ll give you a hard time and make you feel a hundred times worse.’’ I knew he was right, but I still went round and put myself in the firing line.’

‘You often describe your parents as suffocating.’ Alice remembers every word I have uttered in her presence since we first met, without the help of notes. Maybe the pink butterflies are hiding some kind of recording device. ‘Why did you go round to be suffocated, on no sleep and after the worst shock of your life?’

‘I had to tell them. A detective came to interview me. It was . . . too big to keep from them, too important. I can’t be involved with the police and hide it from my family.’

‘Can’t?’

No secrets between people who love each other. I’ve had it drummed into me all my life. I’m not sure it’s possible to explain that sort of programming to someone who hasn’t experienced it.

‘Yet you’ve kept quiet about the other big, important thing in your life at the moment,’ says Alice. ‘The problem that’s been preoccupying you since January.’

I laugh, though I feel like crying. ‘It’s not the same. That might be nothing. It probably is.’

‘The dead woman you saw might be nothing, if you imagined her.’

‘I didn’t. I know I didn’t.’

Alice takes off her glasses, drops them in her lap. ‘You didn’t imagine what happened in January, either,’ she says. ‘You don’t know what it means, but you didn’t imagine it.’

‘I can’t tell Mum and Dad that I’m afraid Kit might have a whole other life that I don’t know about,’ I say, loathing the sound of the words. ‘It’s just not an option. You don’t understand. I might have changed my surname, but I’m still a Monk. Everything in the Monk family is nice and normal and happy. That’s not a coincidence, it’s a rule. There are no problems, ever, apart from Benji not eating his sodding broccoli – that’s the worst thing that’s allowed to happen. It’s out of the question, absolutely forbidden, for there to be anything weird going on – really bad weird, I mean. Weird funny is okay, as long as it makes a good anecdote.’

I wipe my face, try to compose myself. ‘The only thing worse than bad-weird is uncertain. My parents don’t accept ambiguity of any kind – literally, as soon as it dares to make an appearance, they show it the door in no uncertain terms. And, yes, I said that deliberately. Everything Mum and Dad do, they do in no uncertain terms. Uncertainty is the enemy. One of the enemies,’ I correct myself. ‘Change is the other. And sponta-neity, and risk; there’s a whole gang of them.’

‘No wonder your parents are scared,’ says Alice. ‘You said it yourself: they’re being persecuted by a gang.’

Is she going to give me the same remedy she gave me last time? Kali Phos, it was called. For people who have an aversion to their own relatives. Kit threatened to steal the bottle for himself when I told him that.

‘Kit’s so unhappy,’ I tell Alice. ‘I’ve made him unhappy. He can’t understand why I don’t believe him. Neither can I. Why can’t I accept that strange things happen sometimes, and put it behind me? I know Kit loves me, I know he’s desperate for things to go back to normal. I’m all he’s got, and . . . I love him. It’ll sound crazy, but I love him more than ever – I feel outraged on his behalf.’

‘Because he’s probably innocent, and his own wife doesn’t believe in him?’ Alice guesses.

I nod. ‘How can I tell Mum and Dad, and Fran, and make them suspect him too, when there’s no way to end that suspicion, ever? Haven’t I made him miserable enough already?’

‘So it’s for Kit’s sake that you’re keeping it from your family?’

‘His and theirs. Mum and Dad couldn’t live with it – I know they couldn’t. They’d try not to allow me to live with it. They’d hire a private detective . . . No, that would mean admitting they were mixed up in something unsavoury, if they did that. I know what they’d do.’ It feels like a revelation, though on one level I know I’m making it up. ‘They’d put pressure on me to leave him and move back to Thorrold House. Just in case. They’d say, “If you’re not a hundred per cent sure he’s trustworthy, you can’t stay with him.” ’

‘Is that such a stupid thing to say?’

‘Yes. I’d rather have the rest of my life ruined by suspicions that achieve nothing than leave a man I love who’s very probably done nothing wrong.’

Alice puts her glasses back on and leans forward. Her leather swivel chair creaks. ‘Explain something to me,’ she says. ‘You say there’s no way for the suspicion to end, ever, but in the next breath you mention the possibility of hiring a private detective. You might not want to do that, and I’d understand if you didn’t, but wouldn’t that be one way to find out for sure if Kit’s lying?’

‘Are you saying you think I should hire a detective?’ If she says yes, I’m never coming back here. ‘Wouldn’t it be dangerous for someone as paranoid as me to imagine that I can pay for certainty whenever I need it? Wouldn’t I be better off trying to cultivate trust? What if the detective followed Kit for a month and found nothing? Would I finally accept that nothing’s going on, or would I worry that the detective had been slapdash and missed something?’

Alice smiles. ‘And yet only this morning, you told a detective all about seeing a dead woman on the internet. He might be slapdash – he might miss something.’

‘Then I’ll go to Cambridge and find a conscientious detective, and make him listen to me,’ I say fiercely.

‘Because you want to find out the truth.’

‘It’s not about me, it’s about the woman I saw, whoever she is. Someone murdered her. I can’t just—’

‘You want to find out the truth,’ Alice says again.

‘All right, then, yes! I saw a dead woman on the floor in that house. Wouldn’t you want the truth, in my position?’

‘Connie, can I speak frankly? When it comes to the dead woman, your truth-seeking energy is really strong. I can feel it – it’s tangible in this room. Normally, that would help to attract the truth to you. When we focus on something we want with all our energy, believe we’re going to get it one day and pursue it with great determination, resolved that we will never give up, usually what we’re seeking comes to us – it’s just a matter of how long it takes to reach us. In your case, there’s a complication: in another area of your life, you’re terrified of finding out the truth, and you’re transmitting an equally strong truth-repelling energy.’ She folds her arms, waits for my reaction.

‘Kit, you mean? That’s not fair. You know how hard I’ve tried.’

‘You haven’t,’ says Alice gently. ‘You’re lying to yourself if you think you have.’

I must be quite exceptionally convincing, in that case. ‘What, so you’re saying that the contradictory energies are getting mixed up and sending out a muddled signal? That my fear of finding out the truth about Kit is repelling all truth?’

Alice says nothing.

‘So, whoever’s in charge of all this energy and attraction stuff, up there in the cockpit of the universe – God, or Fate, or whatever you want to call him – he’s short-sighted, is he?’ I say irritably. ‘He can’t quite read the shopping list – item one: truth about dead woman; item two: no truth about possibly treacherous husband. They blur together, do they, so that he doesn’t know what exactly he’s supposed to deliver? Can’t he focus really hard and attract a decent pair of reading glasses? As the all-powerful controller of the universe, that shouldn’t be beyond him.’

‘Nothing has blurred together,’ says Alice. ‘The two items were never separate. They’re linked by an address: 11 Bentley Grove, Cambridge.’

I feel as if I’m going to throw up.

Kit didn’t kill her. He can’t have. He’s not a killer. I wouldn’t love a killer.

‘Do you want only part of the truth, or do you want all of it?’ Alice asks. ‘What if it was all or nothing? Which would you choose?’

‘All,’ I whisper. My stomach twists.

‘Good. Your phone’s ringing.’

I didn’t hear it.

‘Nothing like an immediate result to convince a hardened sceptic,’ Alice says.

‘Do you mind if I . . .? Hello?’

‘Is that Connie Bowskill?’

‘Speaking.’

‘Sam Kombothekra.’

‘Oh.’ My heart jolts. Kombothekra, Kombothekra. I try to remember the name.

‘Can you get to Spilling police station by nine thirty, Monday morning?’

‘I . . . Has something happened? Have you spoken to Cambridge police?’

‘I’d like to speak to you face to face,’ he says. ‘Monday morning, nine thirty?’

‘All right. Can’t you even—?’

‘I’ll see you then.’

He’s gone.

Alice raises her water glass in what looks like a toast. ‘Well done,’ she says, beaming at me. I have no idea what she’s congratulating me for.





*



POLICE EXHIBIT REF: CB13345/432/21IG



D,

Don't forget to nip to supermarket and buy:



Pitta breads, passata, bag of salad, lamb mince, feta cheese, cinnamon, chargrilled artichokes (in oil in jar, from deli section – NOT a tin of artichokes from canned veg section) new pencil case for Riordan, something for Tilly so she doesn't feel left out – Barbie mag or something. Ta!



E xx