The Therapist(94)
She shook her head violently. ‘We knew there was something not right but not that, never that. All the time he was with us, we hadn’t felt safe. He was aggressive, threatening, and we were frightened of him. We told ourselves it was because of his experiences in Iraq but deep down, we knew that he had never been in the army and that the darkness in him came from something else. It was a relief when he left and we were scared that he would come back, so we decided to move somewhere he wouldn’t find us.’ She touched her hand to her pearls and I was glad to see this old gesture of hers, glad that there was still something left of her previous self. ‘We told our neighbours we were moving to Devon and moved instead to London. And when we arrived, we told everyone our son had been killed in Iraq. I know it sounds terrible, disowning our son like that but—’ Her voice trailed off. ‘And then, one day, we woke up and found him waiting in the back garden.’
‘Is that when he began keeping you prisoner?’
She nodded and repeated what she had already told me while I’d sat tied to the chair. ‘He kept to the bedrooms at the back of the house and at night, we could hear him moving around. He never seemed to sleep. But often, at six in the morning, he would wake us and lock us in the downstairs room and only let us out at lunchtime, so we thought that was when he probably slept.’ She paused to gather her thoughts. ‘I wasn’t allowed out of the house, only Edward was, to put the bins out and do some gardening at the front, to keep up appearances. He would put his hands around my neck and squeeze until I could barely breathe and tell Edward he would strangle me properly if he tried to alert anyone to what was going on. We were allowed to answer the door but he would stand behind us, listening to everything we said.’ Her hands moved to the pink patchwork blanket covering her knees and began plucking at it. ‘The day that you came over, asking about Nina, he was listening to everything. I tried to warn you, I tried to tell you not to trust him, I couldn’t give you a name because I knew he wouldn’t be using John. I knew he’d gone to your drinks evening, he’d seen the invitation on the WhatsApp group and after what he did to poor Nina, I was scared for you.’ Tears rolled down her cheeks as she quickly dug a tissue from her sleeve.
‘I thought you said that I wasn’t to trust anyone,’ I told her.
She dabbed at her eyes. ‘No, I said “Don’t trust him”. But he knew I had whispered something to you and he was so angry. I swore that I hadn’t but then he found out that I had and he hit me.’
‘It was me,’ I said, appalled that I had been the cause of such violence. ‘I told him you’d told me not to trust anyone. But Lorna, there’s something I don’t understand.’ I moved closer. ‘When I told you and Edward that a man had turned up at our drinks evening, why did you say that you had let him in to The Circle? Wouldn’t it have been better to deny all knowledge of him?’
‘I was going to, but then you said that Leo wanted to go to the police and I panicked. John was there, listening, and I was scared that if he thought the police might turn up, asking questions, he would kill us in case we gave him away.’
There was something else that had been puzzling me but I wasn’t sure she could give me an answer. ‘I don’t understand why he pretended to be a private investigator looking into a murder that he himself had committed. It seems such a risky thing to do.’
‘I suppose it was the only way he could think of to hook you in, tell you that he was looking into a miscarriage of justice and ask you to help him. He would never have expected you to get to the truth. It was why he was willing to take the risk.’
‘But if I had told everyone about him?’
‘He must have known that you wouldn’t,’ she said and I blushed, realising how well he had read me. ‘And even if you had, it wouldn’t have mattered. The private detective would have disappeared into the night. But he would have found some other way to get to you,’ she added, and I wondered how he had got to Nina, if it had been a card through the door advertising his services as a therapist to therapists. ‘It was a game to him, everything was about manipulating people into thinking he was something he wasn’t, like pretending to our neighbours in Bournemouth that he was the perfect son, and that the reason he hadn’t been home for years was because he used his leave to help war orphans. He was so charming that everybody believed him. Even Edward and I believed him at first.’ She paused. ‘Perhaps that was because we wanted to believe there was good in our son, even though he scared us. But we never imagined he was capable of evil, not until he told us he’d killed Nina. I hate myself for lying for him, for telling the police that I had heard Nina and Oliver arguing, that Nina had told me she’d been having an affair. But he threatened to kill Edward if I didn’t and somewhere underneath it all, he was still my son.’ Her hands began to shake. ‘I can’t believe what I did, I can’t believe I killed him.’
I held her hands between mine, stilled the shaking. ‘You saved my life,’ I told her. ‘That’s what you did. You saved my life.’ I leaned to kiss her. ‘Thank you.’
It didn’t seem enough. But what do you say to a mother who killed her son, who severed, so violently and with such finality, the umbilical cord that bound them together, to save the life of an almost-stranger?
She rallied then, became suddenly stronger. ‘Then if I saved your life, will you do something for me?’ she asked. ‘And for Edward, because he would have wanted it too.’