The Therapist(70)

I pick up my navy jumper from the floor but leave the others where they are, wanting to get out of the house as quickly as possible. My arm is still throbbing so I go to my study and peel off my T-shirt to check for damage. There’s a huge lump below my elbow, where I whacked it against the chair as I fell, and I’m betting on a massive bruise appearing on my leg in the next few days. There’s also a bump on the back of my head.

Needing some water, I head to the kitchen. There are more strands of my hair on the worktop and it seems like the last straw in an already lousy day. I go to brush them into the bin, and stop. Caught in the light coming from the fluorescent bulb fixed to the underside of a shelf, they are a pale blond, a shade paler than my hair. I pick one up carefully and roll it between my fingers. It isn’t real.

Dropping it into the palm of my hand, I run back upstairs to the bedroom and take the ponytail from the shelf. It confirms what I expected; the hair I found on the worktop comes from the ponytail.

It’s hard to get my head around this new twist in Leo’s game; I never told him about losing my hair after my parents and sister died, so he wouldn’t have known how much it would upset me to find strands of it all over the place. He must have had some other motive. Was I meant to think that it was Nina’s hair? Has it been him creeping around the house at night, leaving hair for me to find? It can’t have been, because that very first time, on the Sunday after our drinks evening, he was the one who heard someone in the house, not me. Unless he only pretended to have heard someone, so that in the future, I would blame the prowler for any nocturnal creeping I heard.

But why would he have done that? The answer comes to me almost immediately – so that, when I found out about Nina, if I didn’t want to be with him because of his lie, I’d be too anxious to stay by myself. And he’d get to stay in the house while I moved out.

Except that it hadn’t worked out like that. He had moved out and I had stayed. So he had upped his game and prowled the house at night, hoping to terrorise me into leaving. I remind myself that he’s been in Birmingham most of the time, not in London. But I don’t know that he actually stayed there. He could have been here, staying in a hotel at night and commuting to Birmingham each morning, just like he had before. I try and reconcile the Leo I know with a person who would creep around a house where his ex-partner is sleeping, to scare her into leaving, and can’t. I’m being ridiculous. If Leo had wanted me to leave before now, he would have told me. After all, the house is his.





Thirty-Five


The hotel is lovely, the room beautifully decorated in subtle shades of grey, with a grey marble bathroom and white fluffy towels. Relief washes through me. For the first time in weeks, I feel safe.

So that Ginny and Eve won’t worry, I message them to say I’m going away for a few days and that I’ll be back at the house on Thursday. I ask Ginny not to tell Leo and she promises she won’t. If Leo knows I’m not there, he might move back in.

I toss and turn all night, and in the morning, I feel so empty that all I want to do is hibernate until I check out on Thursday morning. I’d intended to carry on working from the hotel but I don’t want to think about anything, not my translation, not my parents or my sister, not Leo and his lies, not Nina’s murder. All I want is to lie in the dark, with the curtains drawn, and switch off from everything.

For the next two days, I sleep, listen to podcasts, take long baths and order food from room service, telling the lovely girl who brings it that I’m feeling under the weather. At one point I find myself thinking about Thomas, and remembering that I haven’t told him about the murder in France, I call him.

‘Both women had their hair cut off,’ I say once I’ve told him about Marion Cartaux. ‘Do you think the two murders could be linked?’

‘They could be,’ he says. ‘But it’s more likely to be two murders committed by two different people with the same fetish. It’s infuriating to think that nobody on my team – or me, for that matter – thought to look abroad. You’d make a very good investigator, Alice.’

‘Thank you,’ I say, pleased.

‘I’ll get my people to do a bit of digging and get back to you.’ I sense him hesitate. ‘Maybe I could come by tomorrow afternoon and let you know what I find? Or Friday, if you prefer.’

‘Tomorrow is better for me.’

‘Two o’clock?’

‘Perfect.’

I hang up. I could have chosen to see him Friday, because I’ll be back at the house by then. But it seemed too long to wait.

The next day, I walk back to the house at the end of the morning, feeling bad that I’m looking forward to seeing Thomas when Leo and I have only just split up. But at this moment in time, he’s one of the few people I can trust.

It’s a crisp October day and apart from a handful of parents and children in the play area, the square is almost deserted. I glance over at Tamsin’s house, wondering what her plans are for the morning, and see someone standing at one of the upstairs windows. I’m unable to make out if it’s her or Connor but I lift my hand in a wave, knowing that whoever it is can see me.

‘Alice!’

Turning, I see Will running to catch up with me, a brightly coloured scarf around his neck.

‘Hi, Will,’ I say cheerfully, hoping he didn’t see me coming out of the hotel. If I didn’t want anyone to know I was staying there, I should have chosen one further away from The Circle. ‘Have you been shopping?’