The Therapist(93)

‘Two months ago. I stayed with Debbie at first.’

‘You must be happy to be back.’

‘I am. I feel safe here.’

She tips her head to one side, observing me. ‘Your hair. It suits you.’

‘Thanks.’ I raise my hand to my head. ‘I always wanted to know what it would be like to have short hair and now I know.’ I don’t tell her that I hate it, that every time I look in the mirror, I see Thomas Grainger standing behind me, his face contorted with malice. But I’m getting good at blinking the image away; I refuse to let him carry on impacting on my life.

I glance at her neat little bump.

‘When is your baby due?’

‘At the beginning of August.’

‘Wow. In four months. I’m so pleased for you, Eve. Will must be delighted.’

She laughs. ‘He is. You’d think he was the first man to become a father.’

I take mugs from the cupboard and milk from the fridge. ‘So, how is everyone?’

‘Struggling,’ she says and I nod, because I know this from Leo. ‘Maria and Tim have already left; they put their house on the market almost at once, for less than it was worth, and managed to sell it relatively quickly. Tamsin and Connor will be the next to leave. Then Will and me. We’re trying to stagger it so that the price of the houses isn’t affected too much. But we’ll still be selling at a loss.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

She gives me a little smile. ‘It’s not your fault.’ But she’s wrong, it is my fault. If I hadn’t been so gullible, it wouldn’t have come to this. Shame heats my cheeks, and I busy myself making the tea so that she won’t see.

‘We feel so bad, Alice, and not just because we didn’t really believe that a strange man had turned up at your party. We feel terrible about Oliver. We accepted too easily that he was guilty. We needed so much to believe that her killer had been caught so that we could carry on with our lives. We took the easy way out and that’s hard to live with.’

I carry the mugs over to the table and sit down opposite her. I want to say something to comfort her, but I can’t find anything.

‘Leo said that you saw Lorna,’ Eve says, breaking the silence that has grown between us.

‘Yes, a few months ago.’

‘How is she?’

I give a slight smile. ‘Struggling. She’s living with her sister in Dorset while she’s awaiting trial.’

‘They’ll be lenient with her, won’t they?’

‘I hope so.’

While Eve sips her tea, my mind goes back to the day when Lorna and I were in the ambulance together. She had been so strong. A sort of euphoria had set in; she had managed to free herself, she had managed to save me. It hadn’t yet hit her that Edward was gone forever, and that she had killed her son. That although one nightmare was over, another was about to begin.

When I’d next seen her, two months later in Dorset, it was very different. She was huddled in a chair, her sister hovering behind her. She seemed to have shrunk to half her size, and aged by ten years. It was hard to see her so diminished.

‘Oliver killed himself because I betrayed him,’ she whispered, her eyes blurred by tears. ‘He said I was the mother he never had and I betrayed him. I betrayed you too. John made me write that letter.’

It took me a while to remember the letter I received, supposedly from Helen, the letter that had given me new resolve just when I was beginning to have doubts about helping solve Nina’s murder.

I took her hand. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

She told me then, how it had all started, how even as a child John would quickly become obsessed by a particular person; first, the little girl who lived next door, then classmates at school, to the point where the mothers and teachers had worried words with Lorna before putting a distance between her child and the others. As a teenager, he developed a dangerous obsession with one of his teachers, and it had come out during his police interview – when, at fifteen years old, he’d been cautioned for stalking her – that he had interpreted innocent actions on her part as a sign that his love for her was reciprocated. One example he gave was that she would sometimes release her hair from its ponytail and let it swing around her shoulders for a moment before attaching it again, in what he believed was a secret and intimate message to him. Lorna and Edward sought help from doctors and therapists and John was diagnosed with Obsessive Love Disorder. He cleverly played along, leading everyone to believe that his obsessive personality was under control.

During his university years, Lorna and Edward rarely saw their son and after graduating in 2003, he disappeared from their lives completely. It was the start of the Gulf War, and without news, Lorna and Edward convinced themselves that he had joined the army. One night, thirteen years later, he turned up at their Bournemouth home. He told them that he had come to stay for a couple of weeks and when they asked him if he was in the army, he told them that yes, he’d been fighting in Iraq. He was charming to the neighbours, telling them that he was home on leave, and was going to build his parents the terrace they had always wanted. For three weeks, he worked long into the evenings until he left as suddenly as he came, taking their car with him and leaving his behind.

‘Did you have any idea why Thom—’ I caught myself, ‘John, was building the terrace?’ I asked Lorna, because after her interviews with the police, the terrace at their former home had been dug up. Human remains had been found, later identified as Justine Bartley.