The Therapist by B.A. Paris
Twelve
‘Stay as long as you like,’ Will says the next morning, taking his plate and coffee cup from the breakfast bar and putting them into the dishwasher. ‘Just pull the door behind you when you leave.’
‘Thanks,’ I say gratefully.
‘Are we leaving together, Eve?’ he asks, pushing his shirt, which he’d been wearing loose for breakfast, into the waistband of his jeans. ‘Because I need to go now.’
Eve slides off her bar-stool and looks anxiously at me. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to cancel my mum? She won’t mind.’
‘No, it’s fine, I need to think about what I’m going to say to Leo.’
‘Then yes, Will, I’m coming with you.’ She gives me a quick hug. ‘If you need me at all, just call. You have my mobile.’
‘And we’re both here this evening,’ Will adds, picking up his backpack.
‘Thank you. You’ve both been so kind.’
Eve hovers. ‘Will you be alright?’
‘I’ll be fine. I have work to do.’
But I’m too wound up to concentrate on the book I’m meant to be reading. And hurt. And insecure. For Leo to have lied to me, and about me, makes me wonder what else he might have hidden from me. I actually know very little of his life before we met. I know that he left home at eighteen because of his difficult family background and drifted from one low-paid job to another, until he realised that education was the answer to his problems. He studied hard and worked for a couple of investment management companies before setting himself up as a freelance consultant in risk management.
Needing something to do, I open my laptop and then pull out the business card Eve passed to me when she took me back to the house last night. I hold it tightly along the edges; the font is black in a block print: THOMAS GRAINGER. I type ‘Thomas Grainger, Private Investigator’ into my search engine, to see if he’s legit. To my surprise, he is. His website is professional and discreet and his offices are in Wimbledon. I put the address into my phone. With new motivation, I begin to research Nina Maxwell’s murder. I want to know everything there is to know although I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s my subconscious telling me I’ll feel better if I have all the facts. Something to do with feeling in control, instead of completely out of control.
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.
‘What’s almost worse is that you lied about me, not just to me.’
‘What do you mean?’ he mumbles.
‘You insinuated to Ben that I was fine about living here, because it meant that I could keep my cottage in Harlestone.’
He stares at me for so long that I think he’s going to deny it, or tell me that Ben misunderstood. After what seems an eternity, he pulls out the chair he’s been holding onto, and sinks onto it.
‘I’m sorry.’ The relief on his face tells me he’s glad it’s out in the open.
‘What were you thinking? Were you hoping that I wouldn’t find out?’
He studies his hands. ‘No, I knew you would. I was hoping that you wouldn’t before I could tell you.’
‘And when were you going to tell me?’
‘I – I just wanted you to be a bit more settled here.’
‘Why?’
‘So that you’d find it harder to leave. It’s why I didn’t tell you before I bought the house. I knew you would refuse to live here and—’ he raises his eyes to mine, ‘I really wanted to.’
‘So much that you were willing to overlook that a woman had died here?’
‘It’s not the same house, Alice. It’s been redecorated and renovated, and I’ve changed the layout upstairs.’
I slam my hand down on the table. ‘It’s exactly the same house! I don’t understand how you can’t see that! It’s still the house where a murder took place!’
He gives a helpless shrug, which does nothing to calm me. ‘Then maybe it’s just that I’m able to live with that. I know it might sound callous, but it doesn’t really bother me. And I remember you saying once, when someone pointed out that people must have died in your cottage, given that it’s two hundred years old, that it wouldn’t bother you if they had.’
‘There’s a huge difference between someone dying peacefully in their bed of old age and being brutally murdered at thirty-eight years old!’
‘We can’t always know the history of the houses we live in. Somebody might have been murdered in the cottage in Harlestone.’
I hate that he has a point.
‘I mean, if somebody phoned you tomorrow, and said, “Hey, I’ve just discovered that fifty years ago, somebody was murdered in your cottage”, would you leave immediately and never spend another day there?’
I hesitate. I love my cottage. Noticing, he leans forward.
‘You would still stay there, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t sell up.’
‘Yes, actually, I would. I’d put it on the market. Even fifty years is too close.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ he says, rubbing his face with his hands.
My anger flares again. ‘Since when has this become about me? And since when have you started not believing me? I’m not the one in the wrong, Leo, you are!’
‘I know, and I’m sorry.’ He reaches for my hand but I move it away.
‘What must people have thought on Saturday, when I offered to take them upstairs to see the changes we’d made? They thought I knew about the murder.’
‘I never expected you to show people around.’
‘That’s why you didn’t want to have people over, isn’t it?’ I stand up, needing to put distance between us. ‘You were worried someone would mention what had happened here.’ I move to the other side of the kitchen and lean against the worktop. ‘I don’t understand, I don’t understand how you thought you could get away with it.’
He opens his hands, pleading with me to understand. ‘I wasn’t trying to get away with it. I was going to tell you, as soon as the time was right.’
‘And until then, you didn’t mind people thinking I was a callous bitch.’
‘I’m sure no-one thought that.’
‘Tamsin did.’
‘The redhead?’
‘Yes. I overheard her say that she couldn’t believe it didn’t bother me. I had no idea what she was talking about. Now I do.’
He sighs. ‘What do you want to do?’
I grab a cloth and start wiping the worktop, which is already clean. ‘I can’t stay here, not now.’
‘We could go and stay in a hotel for few days.’
‘And then what? Come back here and pretend the murder never happened?’
He flinches. ‘Not that it never happened, no. But maybe accept that it happened, and move on. I think you should give the house a chance, Alice.’
I stop wiping and turn to look at him. ‘What do you mean?’
He leans forward, fixing me with his eyes. ‘Make new memories for it. Be happy here.’
Resentment bursts out of me. ‘Be happy here? How can I?’ I throw the cloth angrily into the white enamel sink. ‘She was called Nina, Leo!’
‘I know, and that’s another reason I hesitated about telling you.’ His voice, quiet and reasonable, is designed to calm me. ‘I was worried that, just when you’d decided to try and let go of the past by leaving Harlestone, it would bring everything back. You’ve done so well by actually agreeing to move here. Can’t we build on that?’ He waits for me to speak but I can’t because what he said about making new memories for the house has struck a chord. He rubs at his face again. ‘What do you want to do? Do you want to go back to Harlestone? Do you want me to put this house up for sale and rent a flat in London while I wait for it to be sold? Because that’s what I’d have to do. I couldn’t take all that travelling from Harlestone to Birmingham each day so I’d have to live in London during the week and see you at the weekends – sometimes, occasionally, just like we did before we moved here. Is that what you want?’
He sits there, waiting for my answer, the fine lines around his eyes deeper than before. But I can’t give him one. I want everything he suggested and none of what he suggested. I don’t want to stay – but I don’t want to go. I want him to leave – but if I’m going to stay here in the house, at least tonight, I don’t want to be alone. The only thing I’m sure about is that, for the moment, I don’t want to be anywhere near him. Or anywhere near the room upstairs.
I move towards the door. ‘I don’t know what I want,’ I say, my voice tight. ‘And until I do, I’ll be sleeping in my study.’
It’s only when I’m making up the sofa bed that I realise I didn’t ask him why he wanted the house so much.