Need You Dead

1 Thursday 14 April

At the first salon she worked in after qualifying as a hairdresser, Lorna had a client who was an anthropologist at Sussex University. He’d told her his theory, and it intrigued her. That early human beings communicated entirely by telepathy, and we only learned to speak so that we could lie.

Over the subsequent fifteen years she’d come to realize there really might be some truth in this. There’s the side of us we show and the side we keep private, hidden. The truth. And the lies. That’s how the world rolls.

She got that.

Boy, did she.

And right now she was hurting badly from a lie.

As she brushed the colour into Alison Kennedy’s roots, she was thinking. Distracted. Not her usually chatty self. Thinking about Greg. Devastated by what she had discovered about her lover. She was desperate to finish Alison and get back to her laptop before her husband, Corin, came home in an hour’s time.

Her six Labradoodle puppies that she had bred from their mother, Milly, yapped away in the conservatory adjoining the kitchen that doubled, these days, as her salon. She’d started working from home, much to Corin’s annoyance, so that she could indulge in her passion of breeding these lovely creatures, and it brought in a decent extra bit of income — although Corin sneered at it. He sneered at pretty much everything she did these days, from the food she put in front of him to the clothes she wore. At least her dogs loved her. And, she had thought, so did Greg.

Client after client opened up to her, treating their time with her, whilst she did their hair, as being in a kind of psychiatrist’s chair. They would tell her their most intimate relationship problems, and reveal even the secrets they kept from their partners. Alison was babbling away excitedly, telling her about her latest affair, this time with her personal trainer.

Was there anyone who didn’t have a secret? Lorna sometimes wondered.

She had also just discovered, by chance from a client earlier today, sometime before Alison, something intensely painful. Finding out the truth about someone — in particular someone you love — can hurt like hell. A truth that a part of you really wishes you hadn’t learned. A truth that can turn your entire world upside down. Because you can’t unlearn something, can’t wipe that discovery from your brain the way you can delete a file from your computer, however much you might want to.

After Alison Kennedy left, at a few minutes before 6 p.m., Lorna hurriedly opened her laptop on the kitchen table and stared once more at the loved-up couple in the photograph in front of her. Stared in numb disbelief, her eyes misted with tears of hurt and anger. Anger that was turning to fury.