The Therapist(24)

I read article after article, making notes as I go, but I don’t learn much more. She was killed at around 9 p.m. Her husband called 999 at approximately 9.20 p.m. to say that he’d come home from work and had found her dead in the bedroom.

My stomach churns when I remember Leo’s insistence on knocking the two bedrooms into one. ‘I want to change things around a bit up here,’ he’d said. I bet you did, I think resentfully. I bet you wanted to change things around so that when I eventually found out about the murder, I wouldn’t be able to freak out about sleeping in the same bedroom, because essentially, it wouldn’t be the same. Except that essentially, it is.

According to one of the more detailed reports, there had been a struggle during which Nina Maxwell had put up a valiant fight before been rendered unconscious, then tied to a chair with belts from bathrobes belonging to her and her husband. As far as I could see, everything pointed to her husband being the killer.

A text arrives: Hope to be home by 7. I’ve got the Residents’ Association meeting tonight so I’ll only have time for a quick dinner. Can’t wait to see you xx

I text back: Message me when you arrive at Euston.

Had he noticed that I didn’t put my usual two kisses? When he texts from Euston at six forty-five, I take my courage, laptop, book and bag in my hands, and go home.

Home. This is my home now, I remind myself as I put the key in the door. In the few weeks that I’ve been here, I’ve made it our home, mine and Leo’s. What’s going to happen if I can’t bring myself to stay here?

In the hall, I try to think about the happy times Nina Maxwell must have had in this house. Because she must have been happy; she’d had friends and from what Eve had said, her husband was lovely. Except that he had ended up killing her. From the photos I’ve seen of him during my research and the testimonies I’ve read, he didn’t seem capable of murder. But then, not many people do.

Determined to think of them as Nina and Oliver, rather than victim and perpetrator, I walk around the house using memories of my sister and her boyfriend to picture their life together. I imagine them in the kitchen, chatting as they made dinner, then curled up on the sofa in the sitting room, watching a film, Nina’s legs hooked over Oliver’s, living a perfectly normal life until something terrible had changed their lives forever. Just as it had my sister’s.

By focusing on Nina and Oliver as people, I manage to lose some of the anxiety that has gripped me since yesterday. Wanting to test myself, I move towards the stairs. I’m fine when I get to the landing, fine when I go into the spare bedroom; it’s just a bedroom. But when I push open the door on the other side of the landing and peer into the room beyond, all I can see is what I’ve tried to block from my mind – Nina’s lifeless body tied to a chair, her long blond hair strewn on the floor around her. The image is so vivid I can hardly breathe. Slamming the door behind me, I hurry downstairs, clutching dizzily onto the handrail. Aware that Leo will be arriving at any moment, I go to the kitchen and scoop water from the tap onto my face, then sit down at the table, waiting to find out how it is that I’m living in a house where a woman was murdered.

I don’t have long to wait before I hear Leo’s key in the door, his footsteps in the hall, the thump of his bag as he lets it drop to the floor.

‘I’m home!’

The soft brush of material as he slips his jacket from his shoulders, the chink of coins as he hangs it over the newel post, the whip of his tie as he pulls it from under his collar, the sigh as he eases his neck – I hear them all.

‘Alice, where are you?’ he calls.

I can’t see the frown that crosses his face at the silence that greets him, I can only imagine it. He walks across the hall and into the kitchen, his shoes still on his feet, the frown still on his face, which quickly turns to relief when he sees me sitting at the table.

‘There you are,’ he says, a smile in his voice. He bends to kiss me and I twist away from him.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asks, alarmed.

‘Who are you, Leo?’

The colour drains from his face so fast that my instinct is to jump up and make him sit down. But I stay where I am and watch dispassionately as he grabs hold of a chair, leaning heavily on it as he tries desperately to recover his composure.

‘How could you? How could you keep something so – so terrible, so horrible, from me?’ I say, frustrated that I can’t find anything better than ‘terrible’ or ‘horrible’ to describe what happened upstairs. ‘How did you think I wouldn’t find out?’

‘Who told you?’ he asks, his voice so low I have trouble hearing him.

‘A neighbour.’ I don’t care that I’m lying. I’ll tell him about Thomas Grainger once I’ve got to the bottom of his deception.

He looks up, shock visible beneath the anguish on his face.

‘A neighbour told you?’

I hold his gaze. ‘Yes.’

‘But—’ He runs a hand through his hair, keeping hold of the chair with the other. ‘Which neighbour?’

‘What does it matter who it was?’ I say impatiently. ‘How could you lie to me, Leo?’

‘I -I—’ He sounds close to tears and I feel a twinge of alarm, and also a little ashamed. He must have been living in dread of me finding out. But I can’t forgive him, not yet.