The Marriage Act(43)



According to the report he’d sent to Adrian shortly before burning their house to the ground, Tanya had been frequently physically and verbally violent towards her husband. Jeffrey had detailed how he had moved in with them to defuse fraught situations and had offered her anger-management strategies. But, he’d claimed, the toxicity had spread too deeply for his assistance to be effective.

‘Sorry about that,’ Adrian said as he returned to the room and his chair. He continued to discuss the Knoxes and referenced other Relationship Responders who had experienced traumatic outcomes with their clients. But Jeffrey wasn’t really listening. Instead, he wondered if there were any others like him out there, Responders who became too deeply invested in their clients or who understood that sometimes it was necessary to take matters into your own hands.

‘So have you had any more thoughts about accepting my offer of counselling?’ asked Adrian. ‘I know you like to think you’re a tough cookie, but we all have a breaking point.’

‘I have considered it, yes,’ Jeffrey said, but he hadn’t. He didn’t want anyone poking about inside his head. ‘But, to be honest, Adrian, I’ve also considered that this might not be the right career path for me.’

Adrian raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh, please don’t say that.’

‘Look at my track record. My last clients died in a murder-suicide; before that, one of them took his own life and let’s not forget the Armitages who vanished before counselling was complete. The last time I asked, the police still haven’t found them.’

Jeffrey’s memory lingered on the latter. He’d had an inkling they were hiding something from him. But he’d only discovered they were members of Freedom for All when he’d broken into their Cloud and learned they’d been secretly filming their sessions with Jeffrey to publicly expose Relationship Responders as ‘woefully undertrained cod psychologists’. He wondered how long it had taken the husband to die without food and water, chained up in an abandoned Suffolk farmhouse with only his wife’s dead body for company.

And then there was Arjun and Mickey. He and Arjun had clicked the moment they’d met, and Jeffrey had found himself falling hard and fast for him. He’d used his full arsenal of persuasive skills to make Arjun understand that his and Mickey’s relationship was doomed to fail. But his warnings had fallen on deaf ears. In desperation, Jeffrey had removed Mickey from the picture by weighing his body down with rocks and rope and dumping it in a Welsh reservoir. Arjun, believing his husband to have left him after reading a text message typed by Jeffrey into Mickey’s phone, had been devastated and too broken for Jeffrey to repair. Jeffrey had reluctantly departed, both men pining for different lost loves.

‘But you’ve had many, many successes over the last three years,’ said Adrian. ‘You’re only focusing on the negatives. Some couples were so easy to counsel you were finished within three weeks.’

In the early days of his Responding, the job was not what Jeffrey had hoped it might be. He’d found it impossible to make a connection with most couples. Their marital issues had been so bland and tedious that he’d given them a clean bill of health so that he could make his escape as quickly as possible. To prevent history from repeating itself, he’d begun to spend more time delving deeper into potential clients before committing to helping them, listening to the recordings of their conversations and carrying out background checks. The more interesting their dynamic, the more he immersed himself in their lives. And the more frequently emotional lines blurred.

‘And as I’ve said to you before, it’s all down to the couples you choose,’ Adrian continued. ‘You care too much. You have an in-built need to get stuck into the most challenging of marriages. So you cannot take it personally when they don’t always work out. None of what happened is your fault.’

‘What about management? What do they think? They must be aware of my failure rate.’

‘Let’s just say there’s a reason why there is no official record of our involvement in inquests or police reports. It wouldn’t benefit the public to know. The people above us, well, their priority is the big picture and the success stories so they don’t trouble themselves focusing on the details. But I am sure they agree with me. We need people like you; however, your own mental health is also paramount. I can arrange to take this latest couple off your hands if you like?’ Adrian looked to his computer. ‘Noah and Luca Stanton-Gibbs, is it?’

‘No, no, it’s fine,’ he said quickly. ‘If you still trust my judgement then I’ll see this through and perhaps I’ll take a break afterwards.’

Jeffrey’s chest tightened at the thought of being separated from Luca. And the depth of his need to be around his client took him by surprise.

*

St Mary the Virgin’s church cemetery in the tiny village of Great Brington was barely a minute’s walk from where Jeffrey had parked his car.

He took in the century-old oak trees with unpruned canopies that sheltered the headstones from the sun as he read each inscription until he found the one he was searching for. After sixteen years, he was finally here. His eyes brimmed with nostalgia.

This grave had not been tended for some time. Dregs of water in the glass vase were stained by algae and the petals that were once attached to peony heads were now brown and lying upon the decorative stones.

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