The Therapist

by Paris, B. A.

  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.

  Thirty-Five

  The hotel is lovely, the room beautifully decorated in subtle shades of grey, with a grey marble bathroom and white fluffy towels. Relief washes through me. For the first time in weeks, I feel safe.

  So that Ginny and Eve won’t worry, I message them to say I’m going away for a few days and that I’ll be back at the house on Thursday. I ask Ginny not to tell Leo and she promises she won’t. If Leo knows I’m not there, he might move back in.

  I toss and turn all night, and in the morning, I feel so empty that all I want to do is hibernate until I check out on Thursday morning. I’d intended to carry on working from the hotel but I don’t want to think about anything, not my translation, not my parents or my sister, not Leo and his lies, not Nina’s murder. All I want is to lie in the dark, with the curtains drawn, and switch off from everything.

  For the next two days, I sleep, listen to podcasts, take long baths and order food from room service, telling the lovely girl who brings it that I’m feeling under the weather. At one point I find myself thinking about Thomas, and remembering that I haven’t told him about the murder in France, I call him.

  ‘Both women had their hair cut off,’ I say once I’ve told him about Marion Cartaux. ‘Do you think the two murders could be linked?’

  ‘They could be,’ he says. ‘But it’s more likely to be two murders committed by two different people with the same fetish. It’s infuriating to think that nobody on my team – or me, for that matter – thought to look abroad. You’d make a very good investigator, Alice.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, pleased.

  ‘I’ll get my people to do a bit of digging and get back to you.’ I sense him hesitate. ‘Maybe I could come by tomorrow afternoon and let you know what I find? Or Friday, if you prefer.’

  ‘Tomorrow is better for me.’

  ‘Two o’clock?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  I hang up. I could have chosen to see him Friday, because I’ll be back at the house by then. But it seemed too long to wait.

  The next day, I walk back to the house at the end of the morning, feeling bad that I’m looking forward to seeing Thomas when Leo and I have only just split up. But at this moment in time, he’s one of the few people I can trust.

  It’s a crisp October day and apart from a handful of parents and children in the play area, the square is almost deserted. I glance over at Tamsin’s house, wondering what her plans are for the morning, and see someone standing at one of the upstairs windows. I’m unable to make out if it’s her or Connor but I lift my hand in a wave, knowing that whoever it is can see me.

  ‘Alice!’

  Turning, I see Will running to catch up with me, a brightly coloured scarf around his neck.

  ‘Hi, Will,’ I say cheerfully, hoping he didn’t see me coming out of the hotel. If I didn’t want anyone to know I was staying there, I should have chosen one further away from The Circle. ‘Have you been shopping?’

  ‘No, just for a walk. I’m reading through a new script and I needed a break. Are you back already? Eve said you’d gone away.’

  Too late, I remember that I was meant to be away until tomorrow. ‘Yes, I just got back,’ I tell him.

  He nods distractedly. ‘Eve really enjoyed the Orangery the other day.’

  ‘Me too. I don’t know about Eve, but I ate far too much.’

  ‘I just wanted to say – Eve told me that there’s been a couple of occasions when you’ve thought there was someone in the house at night?’

  ‘It was probably my imagination,’ I say, wondering why he’s mentioning it.

  He gives me a quick look. ‘I don’t want to worry you but I think Eve told you that Nina thought the same thing.’

  ‘Yes, she did.’

  ‘Then – are you sure you’re happy staying there on your own? If Leo isn’t coming back yet, you’re welcome to stay with us.’

  ‘That’s lovely of you but honestly, I’m fine.’

  He turns his blue eyes on me. ‘I’m sorry, Alice, I don’t understand why you’re willing to risk it, especially after what happened to Nina.’

  ‘But if Oliver killed Nina, how can I be at risk?’

  ‘What if he didn’t?’

  I stop walking. ‘What are you saying, Will?’

  He shoves his hands in his pockets. ‘Just that I’ve never been entirely happy with the theory that he killed her. I didn’t know Oliver well, we’d only been neighbours for five months, but I knew him well enough to be as shocked as everyone else when he was accused of murdering Nina. But when they said his suicide proved his guilt – that I couldn’t believe. I didn’t say anything because as I said, everyone knew him better than me, so I thought there was something about him that I’d missed. Then you arrived and began questioning things, and now, I don’t know. What if the real killer is still living among us, hiding in plain sight?’

  He seems so genuine, so completely genuine. But at the back of my mind, there’s a voice telling me that he’s an actor, an incredibly good actor. If Eve told him of the conversation we had in the Orangery, did she also tell him what I said last week, that I no longer think there’s a mystery to solve? Has Will just laid a trap for me?

  ‘I’m really sorry if I’ve made you question what happened,’ I say, walking on, because I want this conversation to end as quickly as possible. ‘I didn’t have all the facts at the beginning but now that I do, I honestly believe that Oliver killed Nina over the affair she was having. And if the police didn’t think there was anything further to investigate, I’m not quite sure why I did.’ I give a self-conscious laugh, because I can act too. ‘Sometimes I wonder if it was just to make myself more interesting than I actually am – you know, to try and make my mark here in The Circle.’

  ‘Oh. Well, in that case, I guess I’ll have to accept it too,’ he says, and I can’t work out if he’s disappointed or relieved.

  We reach the gate opposite our houses.

  ‘Good luck with the script,’ I say, heading towards my drive.

  ‘Thanks, Alice. And remember, if you need anything, I’m just next door.’

  I give an involuntary shiver. It should have sounded comforting. But somehow it had felt like a threat.

  Thirty-Six

  Thomas turns up at two-thirty, wearing a dark blue suit and light blue shirt, and looking paler than usual.

  ‘I’ve just come from Helen’s,’ he says.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Not good. It’s hard sometimes, remembering how she was.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, wondering again if he and Helen were more than friends.

  We go to sit in the kitchen.

  ‘We went out together once or twice when we were at university,’ he says, uncannily reading my mind. ‘But we realised we were better friends than girlfriend and boyfriend.’ He dips his hand into the inside pocket of his jacket and draws out his wallet. ‘This is us in better days,’ he says, taking out a photo. ‘I took it with me this morning, to show Helen.’

  I study it a moment. The younger version of him has longer hair, and his arm is around the shoulders of a girl with a pretty face and laughing blue eyes. They look so carefree that I wonder how hard it was for Helen to see the photo.

  ‘She said she was glad she didn’t know then that her life would b
e cut short at the age of forty-three,’ Thomas says. ‘Sometimes I wonder if Nina had the same thought, when she knew she was about to die.’

  I hand the photo back to him. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, chastened. ‘I always feel down after I’ve visited Helen but it’s unprofessional to bring my low mood to work with me.’ I feel a momentary disappointment that he thinks of me as work. ‘Also, I didn’t have time for lunch so I probably need sugar. I’m diabetic.’

  I jump to my feet. ‘You should have said, I thought you looked pale. Let me give you something to eat – what can I get you?’

  ‘A biscuit or banana will be fine, if you have either of those.’

  ‘I do, but I haven’t had lunch yet and I was going to make myself an omelette. Cheese and mushroom – will that do?’

  ‘It sounds amazing, but I don’t want to put you to any trouble.’

  ‘It’s not a problem.’

  He takes out his phone and lays it on the table. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have any news about the murder in France. I should hear back before the end of the week, though.’

  ‘I couldn’t find anything about anyone being arrested for it,’ I say.

  ‘I couldn’t either. Which makes me think it’s an ongoing case. That said, I still think it’s a long shot that the two murders are connected, given that they occurred in different countries.’

  While I peel the mushrooms, I tell him about the conversation I overheard between Eve and Tamsin when I went to Tamsin’s for coffee. I feel bad for telling him, but I want his take on it.

  ‘Does Leo know about the gaps in the fence between your house and your neighbours?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes, I told him. He thought it was a good idea.’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how are things between you?’

  ‘He isn’t living here at the moment.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’