The Therapist by B.A. Paris
Thirty-Four
It’s raining the next day, so instead of going for a walk in Hyde Park, I head to the British Library, where I wander around in awe at the magnitude of the place. When I come across a bank of computers, I remember my conversation with Thomas the previous day and type in ‘hair fetishism’. I read a few articles and then, on impulse, type in ‘hair fetishism in murders’. Several links come up, to articles that appeared in a variety of French newspapers and as I scan them quickly, I realise that they all are about the same murder, which took place in Paris. My French is quite good and, as I read the first article my blood begins to run cold. The victim, a thirty-one-year-old woman called Marion Cartaux, had had her hair cut off before she was strangled.
I study the photos of her. Like Nina, she had long blond hair. I look at the date of the murder – 11th December 2017, approximately fifteen months before Nina was murdered.
It doesn’t take me long to read everything I can find. I want to dig deeper but when I check the time, I’m already late for my appointment with Eve.
I hurry to the Orangery.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ I apologise, tucking my wet umbrella under the table and giving her a hug. ‘I went to the British Library and got carried away looking at all the beautiful first editions.’
‘When I saw the rain, I thought you might change your plans.’
‘This is lovely,’ I say, looking around. ‘I’m glad you managed to get a table by the window.’
‘I nearly didn’t get a table at all. Apparently, you have to book ages in advance. They’d just had a cancellation, so I was lucky.’
We order tea and while we’re waiting for it to arrive, Eve tells me that she couldn’t sleep last night and almost phoned me for a chat, because she saw my lights on.
‘I actually slept well last night,’ I say. ‘But there’ve been a few times when I thought there was someone in the house, and even though I know it’s just my imagination,’ I add, because I’m not about to tell her that I believe in spirits, ‘I always leave the light on in the stairwell now.’ She frowns, so I carry on guiltily, ‘I know I shouldn’t waste electricity but it makes me feel safer.’
She shakes her head. ‘That’s not why I’m frowning. It’s just that there were a couple of times when Nina thought there was someone in the house. But as it was always when Oliver was away, like you, she put it down to her imagination. It used to freak her out, though.’
My heart thumps. ‘When was this?’
‘A few months before she died.’
‘Did you tell the police?’
‘No, because it was only you saying the same thing that made me remember. As it happened when Oliver wasn’t there, I thought the same as she did, that she was feeling vulnerable because she was alone in the house. I know if Will is away, I’m much more aware of noises in the house. Every creak could be a footstep on the stairs, that sort of thing.’
I sit back to let the waiter place a stand of sandwiches, scones and cakes on the table, followed by two pots of tea. ‘What did Nina say, exactly?’
‘Just that she would wake suddenly and think there was someone in the room. Then the feeling would disappear.’
I reach for one of the teapots and fill her cup, not wanting her to see how much her words have affected me. If Nina experienced the same thing as me, maybe it’s time to stop trying to convince myself that it’s her spirit I’ve been sensing – and face up to the horrible reality that someone really has been coming into the house at night.
I don’t say anything to Eve but when I get home, I open my laptop and find a small boutique hotel not far from The Circle. I book myself in for four nights, then go upstairs to the bedroom where Leo and I used to sleep and begin filling a large canvas bag with a few basic necessities – pyjamas, underwear, toiletries. I don’t like giving up but I can’t sleep in the house, not since my conversation with Eve. But if someone has been getting into the house, how have they been doing it? And why would they come back time and again and risk being seen? How do they manage to slip away undetected, without leaving the slightest trace of themselves? Whoever it is must have keys. As far as I know, only Leo and I have keys.
I open the wardrobe to get some jeans and T-shirts and give a sigh of exasperation. Once again, some of my shoes have been pushed to one side and I’m suddenly overwhelmed by memories of me and Nina playing hide and seek in the cottage in Harlestone. There were plenty of places to hide but Nina would always choose one of the wardrobes, knowing I’d be too scared to open the door in case she jumped out at me. Sometimes I’d get Dad to help and we’d creep quietly to the wardrobe where I thought Nina was hiding and, when I opened the door, he would roar and scrabble among the clothes like a tiger, giving her an even bigger fright than she would have given me. Sometimes we chose the wrong wardrobe and we’d all end up in fits of giggles.
I blink away the tears that happy memories of my family always bring. I miss Nina, I miss my parents, I miss all the things we were never able to do together. And then, as I stand there in front of the wardrobe, it hits me. Someone, at some point, has hidden inside it.
Stunned, I sink onto the bed. It has to be Leo. The day I thought I saw him at the study window, I had smelt his aftershave in this bedroom. I’d thought he was hiding behind the bathroom door but he must have been in the wardrobe. He told me he wasn’t here, and Ginny had confirmed he was upstairs in the bedroom at hers when he phoned. Ginny wouldn’t lie to me so he must have sneaked out when she wasn’t looking, while Mark was playing golf with Ben. Why didn’t he want me to know he’d been here? I can’t get my head around it. It’s such a bizarre thing for a grown man to do, hide in a wardrobe. Would he even fit? It’s extra deep, with a good space between the door and the rail, so maybe he would.
I go over and step inside, then turn myself around so that I’m facing the bedroom, and close the doors. There’s plenty of room for me, plenty of room for Leo once he’d made enough room for his feet. And more importantly, if someone were to come into the bedroom now, I’d be able to see them through the slats in the doors. But they wouldn’t be able to see me.
I push open the doors and step back into the room, freaked out at the thought of Leo hiding in the wardrobe. All I want is to get out of the bedroom, out of the house. I reach up to the shelf above the rail where my jumpers are folded in a neat pile. The one that I want – navy, to match my jeans – is at the bottom of the pile. I put my hand under it to ease it from the shelf without disturbing the rest of the jumpers and my fingers brush against something soft, like fur. I cry out and instinctively pull my hand back, shuddering at the thought of what I might have touched, thinking a dead mouse or a giant spider. I wait for my heartrate to slow; I want to be able to lift the pile of jumpers so that I can see what’s lurking underneath, rather than pull the whole lot out, bringing whatever it is with them. The shelf is too high, so I fetch the chair from the corner of the room and place it in front of the wardrobe. I climb onto the chair and, steeling myself, carefully lift the jumpers.
A scream bursts from me and, losing my balance, I topple over the back of the chair, the jumpers flying from my hands as I crash to the floor. Horribly winded, I struggle to catch my breath, assessing myself for damage. My elbow and left leg are throbbing painfully and the back of my head doesn’t feel good either. I take a moment, then force myself to my feet, using the fallen chair to lever myself upright, ignoring the needles of pain shooting through my arm. Tears of fright spring to my eyes. I want to believe that I imagined the swathe of long blond hair that was hidden under the jumpers but I know that I didn’t. My mind spins with jumbled denials – it can’t be Nina’s hair, it can’t be, Leo didn’t know her, he didn’t kill her, he can’t have, he wouldn’t have – which collide with the facts – he wanted this house, this particular house – and reach a terrifying conclusion – he knew Nina, he killed her here in this house, he cut off her hair and kept some as a trophy. And now, he’s returned to the scene of the crime.
My fear that the hair is Nina’s is greater than any pain I’m experiencing. I reach for my mobile to phone the police, aware that I’m going to sound crazy. Maybe I am crazy, maybe it was my imagination, maybe it was something else I saw. Shaking, I inch nearer to the wardrobe, craning my neck towards the shelf. It’s still there, an amputated ponytail of long blond hair, tied top and bottom with red ribbon.
Except that Leo can’t have killed Nina. And while I’m going through all the reasons why Leo can’t be Nina’s murderer, my eyes still fixed on the hair, my mind is registering that there’s something not quite right about it. I move nearer for a closer look; the texture – unnaturally glossy – looks too perfect. I don’t want to touch it – but I need to know, so I reach out and run a tentative finger along it. And breathe a sigh of relief. The hair isn’t real, it’s synthetic.
I slump onto the bed. Why has Leo hidden a ponytail of synthetic hair in the wardrobe, which anyone seeing it – anyone who knows what happened to Nina here in this house – might mistake for her hair? Did he put it there to frighten me? Did he see me take the key from his wallet that day and decide to play a little game with me in retaliation?
A cold anger takes hold. I’m tempted to call the police and tell them I’ve found a ponytail of Nina’s in my wardrobe, tell them they should arrest my partner. But they’d come here first to check, and would see that it’s synthetic. Maybe I should call Leo and pretend that I’ve called the police, frighten him a little. But he would laugh at my naïvety, tell me it was just his little joke. I’m dismayed at how little I know him, dismayed that he could stoop so low. Furious, I send him a message. FYI, the hair is pathetic! He replies almost at once. I didn’t do it for you to like it.
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.