I’m not asking for your secrets because I want to get some dirt on you that I can use against you later. I’m asking you to face and state the truth for your own good. That’s my recommendation as a therapist, but, frankly, I don’t care whether you do it or not. If you want to be screwed up forever, stay in denial. Be my guest.
The reason I can’t tell you my guilty secrets in exchange for yours is that we’re not two people chatting here. I’m a therapist, and I take pride in my work. I’ve invested some time and considerable effort in trying to help you, and I’m damned if I’m going to wreck it by confiding in you as if we’re best friends. If I start telling you about my life, my personal history, my mistakes, I become Ginny-the-woman, and believe you me, she’s not going to be nearly as helpful to you as Ginny-the-therapist. I told you before: I’m a means to an end here, nothing more. My personality and experiences have got nothing to do with anything.
I’m sorry, Simon. You must be hoping I’ll invent some lie to keep her happy, to get it out of her, whatever it is, but I’m not going to do that. Or maybe you’re hoping I’ll tell the truth? Share my intimate secrets with the two of you, all in the good cause of helping to catch a murderer? Well, sorry, but it’s not going to happen. I’ve made quite a few exceptions today to my general rules, but this is a boundary too far.
Let’s be very clear about this, Amber. If we make no further progress today, my unwillingness to share guilty secrets with you in exchange for yours is not responsible. You can blame your own unhelpful attitude. I was willing to set aside my whole morning for you. I even cancelled two appointments, and you swear at me and walk out, exactly like you did on Tuesday. Then Simon persuades me to give up my afternoon as well, and he persuades you to . . . I don’t know what he got you to agree to, to be honest. Certainly not to cooperate. You strut back in here with a list of ridiculous over-the-top rules: I’m not allowed to ask any direct questions, I mustn’t expect any answers, you’ll talk when you feel like talking and apart from that you’ll just lie there and let me do all the work, making it clear you think I’m a complete waste of space. And what do I do? I agree. I agree to your ridiculous counterproductive rules, I cancel yet more appointments, because I, too, want to help Simon. I have to go through my hypnosis script three times before I’m sure it’s worked, because you’re intent on interrupting me to argue about how many steps there ought to be in an imaginary staircase! You’re positively garrulous when you see an opportunity to bait me, and silently, sneerily detached the rest of the time. Still, I give you the benefit of the doubt: I talk myself hoarse. I rack my brains for helpful things I can say, I describe the difference between memories and stories, I talk you through every detail of your life and your preoccupations, like some bloody This is Your Life host, in the hope of drawing you into a dialogue, but it doesn’t work. You’re determined to say only the bare minimum.
Yes, I want to help Simon, but I’m not sure I want to help you any more, if I’m honest. I’m not sure you deserve it. There, is that equal enough for you? Are you feeling sufficiently unpatronised?
Yes, I’ve got secrets. Haven’t we all? Yes, there are things I feel guilty about and ashamed of, but I can promise you one thing: speaking my mind now will never be one of them. Now get out of my clinic, both of you.
12
3/12/2010
‘Don’t blame yourself,’ said Simon. He and Amber were sitting in his car across the road from Ginny Saxon’s house, with the heater on full blast, not going anywhere. Simon wasn’t ready to move. Ginny might have kicked him out of her clinic, but he was entitled to keep his car parked outside it on a public road for as long as he wanted. ‘She overreacted. You asked her to do something she didn’t want to do. She could have said no without throwing a tantrum.’
‘It won’t work.’ Amber leaned her head against the window.
‘What won’t?’
‘Flattery. Massaging my ego. I had no right to ask.’
‘You wanted to start a fight,’ said Simon. ‘Get us kicked out.’
‘Think that if you want to.’
‘It’s not true?’
She shook her head. ‘Ginny said she was willing to be unprofessional to impress me. I wanted to see if she meant it. I didn’t do it to wind her up, or make her feel uncomfortable. I don’t even want to know her secrets. She’s nothing to do with me. I’d rather not know them.’
‘Then why ask for them?’ Simon felt uncomfortable. He’d spent too long listening to Ginny, had temporarily lost his ability to differentiate between interview questions and therapy questions. Did he ask that last one because it would help solve a crime or crimes, or because he was interested in the workings of Amber’s mind? Too easy to tell himself they amounted to the same thing.
‘I just . . . wanted her to understand what she was asking me to do,’ Amber said. ‘It’s a bit too easy to tell someone they need to cut their heart open in public and let all the crap spill out in front of strangers. I wanted her to feel the . . . horror’s too strong a word. I’ll be moderate for a change and call it extreme reluctance.’ She shifted in the passenger seat so that she was facing Simon. ‘So extreme you feel it physically, not just as an idea, not a purely intellectual preference for secrecy over sharing. I may have cocked up our working relationship . . .’ – she mimed inverted commas – ‘. . . but at least now Ginny knows how I felt every time she ordered me to reveal all for the good of my psyche.’
Simon nodded. How many therapy patients swallowed the for-your-own-good line? Nobody who genuinely valued their privacy, surely. He didn’t want to risk alienating Amber – she seemed to be in favour of him where she was against everybody else, for some reason he couldn’t fathom – but privately he decided her conditional stance was dubious. Either she could bear to talk about whatever the hell it was or she couldn’t. If she could, if telling didn’t feel absolutely impossible, why the hell wasn’t she giving him the information he needed?
‘I could have done with the moral support, to be honest,’ she went on. ‘Why should I be the only one parading my guilt? If a therapist can share his or her own personal story and make a client feel they’re both in it together, equally frail and fucked-up, why is that such a bad idea?’
‘Even if it is,’ said Simon, thinking. ‘Don’t tell me training for psychotherapists doesn’t include ground rules about how to deal with patients who cross the line and get too personal.’
‘Like me, you mean?’
‘There’ll be a script. Ginny must know it by heart, like she knows the rest of her lines: “breathing slowly and deeply, calmly and quietly”, all that shit. She should have been able to handle you without losing it.’
‘You say that, but hardly anyone can.’ Amber smiled. ‘Only you.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ Simon batted away the compliment, if that was what it was. It felt more like an encroachment. Which gave him an idea. ‘What about me?’ The words slipped out before he’d had a chance to think. Now it was too late. Was he about to make her a genuine offer, or would he cheat if it came down to it, make something up? ‘Would it work if I did it instead?’
‘Did what?’
Simon gestured towards the wooden clinic building in Ginny’s garden. ‘She’s nothing to do with any of this. Someone kills Kat Allen, someone kills your friend Sharon, your house gets torched – it’s nothing to her, is it? We’re the ones this matters to, you and me. Forget Ginny. If I tell you something about me that I haven’t ever told anyone else, will you tell me what you wouldn’t tell her?’ It wasn’t strictly true that he’d told nobody, though the version he’d given Charlie had been minimal and stilted. Simon had sensed that there was a lot more he could have said if he’d wanted to, without allowing himself to wonder what that more might be.
No, he wasn’t going to tell Amber. He’d sooner cut his tongue out.
‘I was wondering if and when that might occur to you,’ she said.
‘You sound as if you’re sorry it did.’
�
�I hate to sound noble, especially since I’m the opposite, but I can’t let you do it. Wouldn’t be fair. You don’t want to tell me anything, and why should you? Ginny’s a therapist. She dishes it out, she ought to be able to take it. You’re . . . well, you’re just an innocent bystander. She’s the one who chose a career that gives her a free pass to crack open people’s heads and poke around in all the icky stuff.’
‘My job’s not so different,’ Simon told her.
She smiled at him. ‘Shut up and thank me for digging you out of a hole. You’d only have had to dream up a convincing lie, and you’d have felt like shit if your scam had worked. I’ll settle for being told how long you’ve known about Jo and Neil owning Little Orchard.’
‘Since yesterday.’
‘Charlie told you about our conversation in the café?’
Simon nodded.
‘Why would Jo lie?’ Amber muttered. ‘Why not tell us they’ve got a second home? No one would have been jealous.’
‘Did you know about Neil Utting’s business? Hola Ventana?’
Amber nodded. ‘Named by Jo. They make window films. Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock.’
‘Sorry?’ Simon was confused.
‘Doesn’t matter. It’s a stupid name for a company. It means “Hello, window” in Spanish. It’s supposed to have an accent on the “a” of “Hola”, but Jo thought that looked too foreign.’
‘You didn’t wonder where all the profit from the firm was going?’ Simon asked. ‘Why the owner of a business as successful as Neil Utting’s would be living in a house that’s too small for his family on a treeless street in the dodgy bit of Rawndesley?’
The surprise on Amber’s face said it all. ‘I had no idea there was any success or profit involved. To be honest, I could never work out how they afforded a full-time nanny. Neil doesn’t talk about work, and Jo’s always made it sound as if Hola Ventana was barely keeping its head above water financially.
‘Far from it,’ said Simon, who’d been briefed by the Inland Revenue earlier about Neil Utting’s recession-defying business.
‘Did she think we’d ask for hand-outs? No.’ Amber shook her head, arguing with herself. ‘Whatever else you might want to say about her, Jo’s not tight with money. The opposite. She’s always treating people. She subsidises her brother Ritchie, says he’s the baby of the family and she enjoys spoiling him.’
‘You don’t know the half of it.’ Simon told her the story he’d heard last night from Sam, about Hilary’s will and Jo’s efforts to ensure that her mother’s house was left exclusively to Ritchie. ‘I’ve been trying to work out what it means,’ he said. ‘All the evidence says Jo’s generous, but she doesn’t want anyone to know she’s got more than enough herself. So maybe she gets a kick out of being seen to make sacrifices. Or maybe she’s worried you’d all be after her for more than she’s willing to give if you knew how much she had. Whereas if you think she’s skint, you’ll be grateful for whatever she offers.’
Amber was shaking her head. ‘No. I don’t buy it. If you’re that paranoid about your family finding out how rich you are, you’re also the sort of person who imagines you can’t spare a penny of your huge fortune. You give away nothing, don’t even treat a friend to a pizza on her birthday.’
She might have been the voice of Simon’s brain; that was exactly the thought process he’d followed, down to the last detail. He felt the need to create some distance between Amber and himself. Turning on the windscreen wipers might help; he would feel less claustrophobic if he had a view of something other than snow.
Amber nudged him with her elbow. ‘Look,’ she said. The blades had flicked away the whiteness to reveal Ginny standing at the wooden clinic’s curtainless window, staring at them. ‘What’s she doing?’
‘Wondering why we’re still here. Wishing we’d leave.’
‘I’m with her on both.’ Amber sighed. ‘But we’re not leaving, are we? There’s a reason we’re sitting here instead of going somewhere else to talk, a reason you’re not telling me.’
Simon said nothing.
‘Jo sent Neil to bed alone so that she could talk to Ritchie and Hilary about Hilary’s will,’ said Amber slowly. ‘If we put together everything we know, from all the different sources, that’s our conclusion, right?’
‘Probably.’
‘So the argument about the will was the catalyst for Jo and Neil’s vanishing act. It had to be. Ginny would say it was, for sure. Simon, if I—’ She broke off.
‘What?’ He couldn’t understand why he was being so patient. Normally by now he’d be doing everything he could to extract whatever knowledge she was withholding. What was it about Amber Hewerdine that kept him more focused on her needs than his own? He had to get himself together, remember what he was here for. ‘If you’re in two minds about telling me something, please could you do everything in your power to get into the one that’s saying “Tell him, for fuck’s sake”?’
Amber closed her eyes. Simon could hear her breathing: short, loud bursts. ‘I think Jo set fire to my house,’ she said. ‘I think she killed Sharon. She couldn’t have killed Kat Allen because she was on a DriveTech course pretending to be me, but she arranged for Kat to be killed. I don’t know who she got to do it. Neil or Ritchie, I’m guessing. Probably Neil. Ritchie would have messed it up.’
‘Why, why and why?’ Simon asked.
‘I can only answer one of those,’ said Amber. ‘This week’s fire was a warning. She knew I’d be awake. I’m awake most of every night, or I was. It was a risk, but she’d have been fairly sure she wouldn’t kill anyone. She doesn’t want to hurt Dinah and Nonie. Though if she could be certain she’d end up with them under her roof, she might try to get me and Luke out of the way. If we adopt them, I wouldn’t put it past Jo to suggest we make a will saying that if anything were to happen to us, we’d want the girls to go to her.’ Amber laughed, covered her face with her hands. ‘What am I saying?’ she mumbled through her fingers. ‘Tell me I’m talking shit. Please.’
‘Slow down,’ said Simon. ‘Go back to the warning. Warn you off doing what?’
‘Helping the police. Talking to you. Didn’t really work, did it?’
‘So . . . Jo killed Sharon and had Kat Allen killed, but you don’t know why? No idea at all?’
‘None. None for Kat Allen and only stupid ones for Sharon.’
‘Such as?’
‘Jo knew how close I was to Sharon. Jealousy. She wanted me to have no one but her.’
‘Which suggests you’re the prize she’s after,’ Simon pointed out the discrepancy. ‘Yet you said she’d kill you to get the girls.’
‘Why aren’t you telling me I’m crazy?’ Amber snapped. ‘I must be wrong. I must be.’
‘You weren’t wrong about Jo owning Little Orchard. Ginny might have been the one who said the words, but you’d realised it long before she said anything. I could see from your face that you knew.’
She looked as if she wanted to deny it. ‘I should have known at the time, in 2003. It was obvious to anyone with a brain. There were so many things: the way Jo went ballistic when I suggested opening the locked door, way out of proportion to the situation. I should have known then that she wouldn’t have gone so mad unless the private things in that room were hers – the cat well and truly out of the bag if anyone went in and started nosing around. Same bloody trampoline in the garden, the exact same model. Other things, too: an electric blanket on Jo and Neil’s bed at Little Orchard, but none on any of the other beds. Jo’s got an electric blanket on her bed in Rawndesley too. And . . . there was a manual for guests, explaining how to use everything. Jo didn’t look at it. She bragged about not looking at it! “Those things are pointless,” she said. “Any fool can work out how to live in a house for a few days.”’
Amber looked as angry as she sounded. ‘She talked about the locked study. How did she know the locked room was a study if she hadn’t read . . . if she hadn’t written the manual? How stupid am I, that I’
m only thinking of this now?’
‘You can’t blame yourself for not realising,’ said Simon. ‘You’d been told it was a rented holiday house. It wouldn’t have occurred to you to doubt it.’
‘I saw that Jo hadn’t put the key to the study back where I’d found it, hanging from the dresser.’ Amber shook her head angrily, unwilling to let herself off the hook. ‘I should have known then. I would have, except . . . I didn’t want to. Denial – different from repression, remember? If I’d allowed myself to know the truth about Little Orchard, how would I have fended off all the other truths I’d been avoiding?’
Simon waited. Ginny was no longer at the window. He wondered if she’d be gratified to know that Amber was quoting her.
‘I never really believed someone from the residents’ association had murdered Sharon. Why did I try to persuade the police that was what happened? Not to save Terry Bond.’
‘To protect Jo.’
‘Even though I hate her. If she died, I’d be relieved. If I could prove she’d killed Sharon, I’d kill her with my bare hands.’ Simon could hear that she was crying. He wouldn’t look at her again until she’d stopped. Charlie hated what she called his ‘crying policy’, but nothing she said would ever persuade him it wasn’t the right thing to do. Who wanted to be watched when they were in a state?
‘I said nothing and did nothing for so long,’ Amber whispered.
‘We don’t go round accusing people of murder if we can’t prove it,’ Simon told her. ‘If it makes you feel better, I’m in the same boat, and I’ve had experience of murder investigations. Never like this, though. This is a new one for me.’ He heard a sniff, hoped it signified the tears drying up, Amber pulling herself together.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘When I interviewed Jo yesterday, I knew. Like you’re saying you know, without understanding how or being able to rationalise it. No evidence, but that didn’t bother me. We’ll find it. Lack of evidence won’t be a problem. But no idea about motive, no theories . . .’ Would it be safe to look at her now? Simon decided to risk it. ‘Like you, I know it’s Jo I’m after, but I’ve no idea why. There has to be a motive. No one commits three serious crimes, two of them murders, without a motive.’ He swore under his breath, then regretted it. He wanted Amber to believe he was more in control of this mess than he felt.
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