The Therapist by B.A. Paris
Twenty-Seven
Leo phones me when I’m on my way home but by the time I’ve shifted my bags into one hand, tucked the flowers under my arm, and taken my mobile from my pocket, his call has gone through to voicemail. I listen to his message and feel relieved when he says that Ginny and Mark have invited him for the weekend, because I’ve been feeling guilty about him being alone. My phone rings again and I smile when I see that it’s Ginny.
I put my bags between my feet while I talk to her. ‘Yes, I know, Leo is spending the weekend with you,’ I say, because I know she’ll feel that she has to tell me.
‘That is alright, isn’t it?’ she asks anxiously. ‘Mark said we should invite him.’
‘Yes, of course, it’s lovely of you.’
‘I don’t want you to think we’re taking sides.’
‘I don’t. You said I could stay with you, remember?’
‘What about you, are you doing anything nice?’
‘I’m having Eve, Tamsin, Maria and their partners over for dinner. I’m doing a curry, nothing major.’
‘Sounds lovely.’
‘I have to go, I’m on the way back from the shops and it’s freezing. Let’s catch up after the weekend.’
‘Definitely! I’ll phone you on Monday.’
I start walking again, my mind going over my conversation with Tamsin. I can understand her relief now that she knows Connor didn’t have an affair with Nina, because it must have been terrible to have that hanging over her. But if she didn’t tell the police about Oliver’s habit of going to sit in the square to protect Connor, shouldn’t she be wracked with guilt? She didn’t seem to be so maybe she did tell the police and they dismissed it. Or it’s as I thought, and both conversations – the one I overheard yesterday and the one I had just now with Tamsin – have been fabricated for my benefit.
As I cut across the square to the house, I happen to look up, and see the blur of a face at the study window. My heart plummets. Leo must have come to get something before going to Ginny and Mark’s. I wish he’d mentioned in his voicemail that he was coming to the house. If he had, I’d have gone for another coffee so that I wouldn’t have to see him. I don’t want him putting pressure on me to let him come home.
I put my shopping down in the hall, expecting him to appear at the top of the stairs.
‘Leo!’ I call. There’s no answer so I go upstairs and push open the door to his study. It’s empty. I check the guest room, because it’s at the front of the house and maybe I got the wrong window, calling for him as I go. I stop in the doorway of our bedroom. It seems empty but there’s something in the air – the scent of his aftershave maybe – that tells me he was here. The bathroom door is ajar. I head towards it nervously.
‘Leo, are you there? You’d better not be hiding behind the door to scare me!’ I try to make my voice jokey but inside I’m shaking at the thought he might jump out at me.
I give the door a shove and it smashes back against the wall with a bang. The noise ricochets through the house, a gun being fired over and over again. Stupidly, I’ve managed to scare myself even more.
I hurry back through to the bedroom, coming to a momentary stop when I see that the framed photograph I keep on the chest of drawers, of me and Leo in Harlestone, has been laid face down. Pathetic! I think, as I go downstairs, the drumming of my feet igniting my anger at the stupid game he’s playing. He must have gone down to the kitchen as soon as he saw me walking across the square.
Gone completely, it seems, because there’s no sign of him anywhere. I can’t believe he actually left by the French windows and sneaked around the side of the house as I was going through the front door to avoid seeing me. But didn’t you want to avoid him? a voice asks. If you had known he was coming, you would have waited in a café until he’d left.
The voice calms my anger. It’s sobering to think that Leo doesn’t want to see me any more than I want to see him.
By seven-twenty everyone has arrived. Tamsin and Connor are the last; they had trouble getting the girls to bed before the babysitter arrived, Tamsin explains, giving me a kiss.
‘Until I tanned their wee hides,’ Connor growls.
I look nervously at him, wary of the scowl on his face.
Tamsin smiles. ‘Don’t worry, he’s joking.’
Connor leaves to go and talk to Will and Tim and I find myself thinking about Lorna. When I took the flowers around earlier, it was Edward who came to the door. I hoped he would invite me in, but he kept me on the doorstep, telling me that she was having a nap. Which means I’m still no nearer to knowing what she whispered, or if she whispered.
I mentioned in my text message to Tamsin and Maria that Leo wouldn’t be here tonight, so there are no awkward questions. Eve and Maria are in deep conversation and I leave Tamsin to join them while I get her and Connor drinks. I don’t usually make snap judgements but there’s something about Connor that makes me wary. I’m surprised that he and Tamsin are a couple. She’s beautiful, fragile, while there’s something almost brutish about him. He’s a big man, muscle not fat. It’s easy to imagine him overpowering someone.
‘You seem miles away.’ Connor’s eyes find mine and I realise he saw me watching him. I search for something to say.
‘I was just wondering why you didn’t ask for a whisky, given that your job revolves around it.’
‘That’s why I don’t drink it socially. I love whisky, but I drink too much of it for work purposes. Does Leo like whisky?’
‘Not really. He’s more a G&T man.’
I give him the beer he asked for and take a glass of wine to Tamsin.
‘Lovely,’ she says, taking it gratefully.
‘I’ll just go and say hello to Connor, otherwise he’ll think I’m ignoring him,’ Maria says.
Tamsin waits until she leaves. ‘I was telling Eve earlier about bumping into you this morning, and our subsequent chat,’ she says.
Her choice of words jars slightly. It’s as if she wants me to know that she’s told Eve I know about Connor and Nina.
‘I hope you also told her about the two slices of cake we demolished.’
She grins. ‘That too.’
I look around for my glass, which I’d put down to go and answer the door. It’s on the table and I go to fetch it because the more time I spend with Eve and Tamsin, the more confused I feel. There always seems to be an undercurrent of something I can’t quite explain.
Still, it’s a fun evening. Connor and Will are the perfect foil for each other. Will tells jokes and stories with a nervous energy and Connor’s interventions are witty and ironic. He’s also surprisingly laid-back. Tim is quieter, and perfectly lovely, jumping up to help me fetch and clear plates, totally at home in my kitchen, which must be the same as theirs, because he doesn’t have to ask where anything is. It’s not possible that any of them murdered Nina, I think, and again feel ashamed that I could have thought that one of them might have. Connor catches my eye and looks steadily back at me, as if he’s read my mind and knows that my motive for inviting them tonight wasn’t just to be neighbourly. For some reason – maybe for that reason – I feel slightly afraid of him.
‘Tamsin said that you found out about Nina from a journalist,’ he says, and the conversations that had been going on around us comes to a sudden halt.
‘That’s right. I’d rather have heard it from Leo, then it wouldn’t have been such a shock when the reporter asked me what it was like living in a house where a murder had taken place,’ I say.
‘Why didn’t Leo tell you?’ Connor’s eyes are the same tawny colour, I notice, as his hair. If he were an animal, he would be a lion.
‘Because he knew that if he did, I wouldn’t want to live here and he really wanted this house. So, in a way, he did the right thing, because once I knew, it was too late to leave.’
‘Why?’ He’s curious, not aggressive.
‘Because I already felt invested in my life here. And I don’t like to give up easily.’
‘That’s good to know,’ he says, raising his glass towards me.
‘Well, we’re glad you’re still here, aren’t we, Will?’ Eve says.
‘Definitely. I can’t think of anyone better to replace Nina and Oliver than you and Leo.’
There it is again, the slightly awkward phrasing, this time from Will. Or is it just me being overly sensitive?
‘By the way, did you ever discover who the man was, the one who gate-crashed your party, pretending to be me?’ Tim asks.
‘He wasn’t really pretending to be you, I don’t think. He just used the fact that I thought he was you to get into the house. But no, I haven’t managed to find out who he was. I’d completely forgotten about him, to be honest.’
‘It’s strange nobody saw him,’ Tamsin muses.
‘I don’t think he stayed around long enough.’
‘Then what was the point of him coming along?’
I take a sip of wine to steady my nerves. ‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ I tell her.
She exchanges a smile with Eve that I don’t much like. Thankfully, Connor launches into a joke and everyone relaxes into the evening again.
I don’t know if it’s the effect of there being so many people in the house, but later, when I close the door behind them, the silence seems heavier than usual. I stack the dishwasher, unnerved by the memory of Leo’s clandestine visit. Why did he come? Was it to fetch something from the locked filing cabinet, something that he didn’t want me to see? Is that why he left in such a hurry?
I delay going to bed, annoyed that Leo’s secret visit has managed to destroy the relative peace of mind I’d managed to cultivate over the past few days. My dreams are a mix of him and Nina, and when I half-wake in the middle of the night, it’s Leo I sense standing at the foot of my bed, not her. I go back to sleep but suddenly find myself sitting bolt upright in the bed, trying frantically to catch on to something that had occurred to me as I slept, something to do with what Ginny had said about Leo having had an affair with Nina. And then I realise – the woman who had come to Harlestone, supposedly wanting to know what it was like to live in the village, had had long blond hair.