The Cruellest Game

Seventeen

A couple of days later Robert called to say that he was returning to the North Sea. He might as well go and earn some money, he said, as I obviously wanted nothing to do with him.

He told me he was calling from Aberdeen airport, and I could clearly hear airport noises and announcements, even the odd Scottish accent, in the background, which I am sure had been his intention. Just in case I thought he was lying again, I suppose. I didn’t ask him where he had been for the three days since I’d turned him away from Highrise. That was irrelevant now. I politely thanked him for telling me. I wanted no more quarrels. They were irrelevant now too.

I had to concentrate on building my strength and learning to deal with all that was happening. I had various plans in my head, but I had to proceed with care. I was already on police bail after all.

I suppose it was almost masochistic of me to buy the newspapers, local and national, every day but I could not resist. In any case I needed to know what was going on and what was being said.

In spite of the dawn offensive on my home by Mrs Macintyre and her insistent press escort, the story of which ran in only one newspaper, presumably the one that had stage-managed the operation, there was not as much coverage of my case as I would have expected. Certainly not as much as there would probably have been before the debacle which had followed the death of Joanna Yeates. But there was enough to upset me quite badly on most days.

I found nothing, however, anything like as sensational as, six days after my release on police bail, a front-page report in the local evening paper, the Express & Echo, which was not actually directly connected with my case.

A Mrs Brenda Anderton, aged forty-four, had been killed in a tragic motor accident. Her vehicle, a Toyota Corolla, had been in a head-on collision with a milk tanker on the A377 near Mrs Anderton’s Bridge Estate home. An eyewitness said that the car had been travelling at speed before appearing to fly out of control and hurtle onto the wrong side of the road. The police were currently investigating the possibility of mechanical failure. Corollas were among the models recently recalled worldwide by Toyota due to a much-publicized problem with sticking accelerators. The driver of the milk tanker had escaped with minor injuries.

A picture of the dead woman was spread across two columns. And I recognized her at once.

Indeed, I knew her quite well. But I knew her as Mrs Bella Clooney.

There was no doubt about it, even though the report described the woman as having two daughters aged twenty-seven and eleven, rather than a son and daughter aged eleven and twelve, and named her dog, which had apparently died with her in the accident, as Splash, not Flash.

I read the piece through two or three times to make sure of it all. Then I decided to contact Robert at once, while still parked in the car park of the supermarket where I’d bought the newspaper. He had even more explaining to do.

My hands were trembling so much that I had difficulty in punching his number into my new mobile. He might have been out of range in the North Sea, of course, but I suspected not. I was right. He answered his phone straight away. He sounded upset and rather peculiar, which was probably only to be expected under the circumstances, even without the added element of Brenda Anderton’s sudden death. But there was another note in his voice too — the glum resignation, perhaps, of someone who suspected that the extraordinary game he had played for so long was finally at an end.

‘You’ve heard the news, I presume?’ I began flatly.

‘What news?’ he responded. Perhaps I had underestimated him. Could he really still be trying to play his cruel game? I reckoned it was more likely that his disingenuousness was just an automatic reaction. The habit of sixteen years must be hard to break.

‘I have a copy of the Express & Echo here and I’ve just read the front-page story of a woman called Brenda Anderton who has died suddenly in a motor accident,’ I recited as calmly as I could. ‘I recognized her picture, of course, but then, you would expect me to, wouldn’t you?’

There was a brief silence.

‘I see,’ he said eventually.

‘You’d better come to Highrise as soon as you can, hadn’t you?’ I continued. ‘I think we have rather a lot to talk about.’

‘Yes, I know,’ he replied. And this time he did sound beaten.

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m in Exeter. They told me...’ He paused. ‘I, uh, heard last night,’ he continued rather obliquely. ‘I just got back.’

I was pretty sure he was telling the truth for once. Not just because of that somewhat contrived airport call, but also, as I’d already turned him out of our home, there was little point, surely, in him lying to me now.

‘Right. So it won’t take you long, will it?’

He mumbled his agreement. I started the engine of the little Ford, which this time obliged at the first attempt, and drove straight back to Highrise where I unpacked the small amount of shopping I’d picked up and fed Florrie her favourite treat — a couple of the disgusting-smelling tripe sticks I’d bought for her. Then I made myself a coffee and sat down at the kitchen table to drink it, with the newspaper spread out in front of me.

I’d confided in the woman I’d known as Bella Clooney, in as much as I’d ever confided in anyone other than, ironically, Robert. She had been the one I had turned to on the night my son died. She had helped me to take a bath. She had seen me naked. The very thought of it turned the blood in my veins to ice.

Robert arrived less than an hour later. I remained sitting at the kitchen table as I heard a vehicle pull up then drive away again. Another taxi, I supposed. It seemed to take him an inordinately long time to reach the front door, perhaps he was trying to think of what he was going to say. I’d put so much of the story together now that in some ways it didn’t matter a great deal any more. But that wouldn’t be the way he would regard it, and numb though I was, I did have a need to hear his version of events.

Somewhat to my surprise — technically this was still his home too — he knocked on the front door.

‘It’s not locked,’ I called out.

I heard the door open and shut, listened as he made his way along the hallway, and watched wordlessly as he stepped into the kitchen. His face was ashen. Again, his long black hair was unkempt and he needed a shave. There was despair in his eyes. He really didn’t look like my Robert at all. But then, he wasn’t my Robert any more.

It struck me suddenly that not only did I no longer love him — he had destroyed that in me — but I now hated him. I actually hated him.

I gestured for him to sit down opposite me. I didn’t offer him tea or coffee. I didn’t say anything, just waited for him to speak.

‘I don’t know where to begin,’ he said. His voice was trembling. So were his hands which he laid flat on the table before him.

‘Just tell me the truth, for God’s sake,’ I said, rather more sharply than I had meant to. After all, I didn’t want to put him off his stride. I didn’t want to say or do anything to stop him telling me everything. At last.

‘I presume that Mrs Brenda Anderton was your wife,’ I said. ‘And I presume that you were married to her before you married me. No long-lost wife in Australia. Instead, a current second wife, or should I say first, just up the A30 in Exeter.’

He nodded.

‘Well, don’t you think this might be the time to tell me about it?’ I suggested.

He nodded again.

‘But where, where do I...’ He seemed unable to finish formulating the question I knew he was trying to ask.

‘Where do you start? At the beginning would be good.’

‘Yes.’ Robert just stared at me. I could see tears welling up in eyes that full of pleading.

‘Please don’t try to play the sympathy card,’ I snapped at him. ‘It’s far too late for that. Just get on with it.’

‘Yes,’ he said again.

I waited. Eventually he did get on with it. Or after a fashion.

‘What I told you when you found out I was really Rob Anderton was all true,’ he began.

I raised an eyebrow.

‘Well, mostly. From the moment I met you I just knew I had to be with you. You were all I wanted in the world. I wanted to be with you and leave everything else behind. I should have told you about Brenda, of course. I should have explained. But I just couldn’t. It seemed easier to pretend I was a free agent. To carry on as if neither Brenda, nor our daughters, existed. Then I could be with you, in your world. That was the world I wanted. Your calm, middle-class world; a beautiful home, peace, warmth. Not the crazy place I inhabited with Brenda.’

He spat the last words out, bitterness oozing from every pore of him.

‘Brenda is dead, Robert,’ I said. ‘You seem so bitter. I mean, how do you feel about that? You have a twenty-seven-year-old daughter, it seems. You’d been together that long, far longer than we had. Are you not shocked? Are you not grieving for Brenda?’

‘Of course I am, yes. But the whole thing between us had become so dreadful, you see—’

‘Other people face up to bad marriages, and to new loves, to changes in their lives,’ I interrupted. ‘Other people separate and get divorced. They don’t just carry on with two families. Two lives. How on earth did you think you could get away with it?’

He shook his head. I spoke again before giving him the chance to.

‘But you did get away with it, didn’t you, Robert? For sixteen years. And you had a second child with Brenda years after our so-called wedding, years after our son was born. You bastard. My God, you’re a piece of work. I want to know how you did it, and why. All of it.’

I knew I was talking too much. I wanted him to do the talking. But I couldn’t stop myself.

‘It was the job,’ he said obscurely. ‘Working on the rigs. I realized it might be possible to juggle two families. I became sure I could do it. I told you I worked three weeks on and two weeks off. Actually, after getting my lottery money, I arranged to work two weeks on and three weeks off. That gave me one week out of five to spend with Brenda. I told her I had to work longer than average stints away because we needed the money, for the children, you see. And she accepted that. I didn’t think I would be able to pull it off for ever. Definitely not for anything like as long as I did. In the beginning, you see, I had a plan. When Laura was older, I was going to come clean. To get divorced. To tell you both. You and Brenda. Well, that’s what I intended, anyway.’

He let the sentence tail off lamely.

‘That’s a pretty familiar story, isn’t it?’ I said sarcastically. ‘The married man who plans to leave the missus when the children get older. Oh please, Robert.’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ he said. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘Make me,’ I snapped.

‘You don’t realize what a lovely little girl Laura was,’ he continued, a faraway look in his eyes. ‘Janey is too. Pretty as a picture. Just such a sweet child—’

‘Spare me,’ I said.

He seemed to pull himself together with a great effort of will.

‘I couldn’t leave Brenda when Laura was a little girl because of what I knew was going to happen to our child,’ he said. ‘Laura had juvenile Huntington’s. She was diagnosed at eleven. It’s rare but certainly not unknown for it to develop that young. You can have no idea what it was like to watch that lovely normal little girl turn into...’

He paused, brought his hands up to his face and fleetingly closed his eyes as if shutting out some unwanted picture. I’d half expected some sort of sob story, and been determined to remain unmoved by anything he might tell me. After all, with his track record, how would I even know if he was telling the truth? But surely even Robert would not lie about something like this. I was shocked in spite of myself, and did not trust myself to speak. Instead I waited for him to continue.

‘I don’t know what you know about Huntington’s,’ he carried on eventually. ‘It’s degenerative and incurable. It destroys muscle coordination and ultimately leads to the most serious mental disorder. Worst of all, perhaps, the younger someone gets it, the faster it progresses. It used to be called Huntington’s chorea, because... well, Laura very quickly began to lose control of her limbs. After a bit she couldn’t even feed herself properly. She started to slur her words. And then there was the mental deterioration. My sweet little girl became aggressive and disorientated. She couldn’t remember things. I will never forget the first time I went home and she didn’t know who I was...’

He paused and glanced at me. I guessed that even in the middle of this surely genuinely harrowing part of his story he was wondering if I had picked up on his use of the word ‘home’. I had. But I made no comment.

‘We’d only learned what was wrong with her a few weeks before I met you,’ he went on. ‘I will never be able to explain how I felt. I couldn’t cope at all. I thought maybe I would just take off somewhere, disappear, never come back. That was one half of me. But I suppose I knew I couldn’t just walk out on Laura. Nor on Brenda for that matter. Though God knows she deserved it.’

‘What do you mean, deserved it?’

‘She never told me there was Huntington’s in her family. Even when we found out what was wrong with Laura, she carried on lying to me. She said she hadn’t known—’

‘So lying is something else that runs in the family,’ I interrupted sharply. I knew it was small of me, particularly in view of the story he was finally sharing with me, but I couldn’t help myself.

Robert winced.

‘Didn’t you ever meet Brenda’s parents, or any other relatives?’ I asked.

He shook his head.

‘She always told me that she never even knew who her father was. Her mother brought her up on her own. But she died when Brenda was thirteen and Brenda was put into foster care. She was still with her foster parents when I met her. She was just sixteen and I was nineteen. She was about to start training as a nurse, but all she really wanted to do was get married and have a family. I sort of got carried along with it. She fell pregnant damned near the first time we slept together and that was that really. Before I knew it we were wed.’ He paused.

‘I seem to have the knack of getting women pregnant straight away,’ he said.

‘And your son was the same apparently,’ I blurted out. ‘His girlfriend was pregnant, even though she claims they only had unprotected sex once. He’d only found out the day he... he died. I thought at first that was why... why he did what he did.’

‘B-but we didn’t even know he had a girlfriend,’ Robert stumbled.

He was looking deep into my eyes. For a fleeting moment I even longed for the old closeness. But that was long gone.

‘At the funeral, remember? Sue Shaw. I knew that he’d written about her in his diary, but I still thought it was probably innocent. How wrong can you be? Both the men in my life were keeping big secrets from me, it seems.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Robert.

‘Save it,’ I replied. ‘I just want to hear the rest of the story.’

Robert sighed.

‘When I met you it really was the way I told you before, Marion,’ he said. ‘And the bit about the lottery win was true too. The terrible news about my daughter and winning all that money came more or less together. It was enough to drive any man half mad, surely?’

He looked at me pleadingly. I did not respond. He sighed again.

‘That day in Exeter, I was just walking around, thinking, trying to work out what to do,’ he said. ‘What I wanted was to give all the money to Brenda and then just leave. But I don’t think I’d ever have been able to bring myself to carry that through. Then along you came. Suddenly I saw this way of having the life I wanted, with you, and still looking after Brenda and Laura. Because Laura had developed the disease so young we knew it was going to be particularly severe, and we also knew that she would end up in care eventually, although Brenda and I decided straight away to keep her at home as long as we could. Well, Brenda did really. She was the one who had to do the caring. I admired her for that if for nothing else... she would have made a good nurse, Brenda. She seemed to have a natural talent for it...’

Yes, I thought. Didn’t she though? I’d experienced that the night of Robbie’s death, when, rather chillingly I now thought, Brenda had provided such proficient help and support. Or so it had seemed. I’d believed she actually had been a nurse. And I’d really believed she was my friend. That was why I’d wanted to see her after I was released from jail. Thinking about it made me feel physically sick.

‘And where is Laura now?’ I asked. ‘I mean, is she still alive? It sounds as if she is from the newspaper report.’ I gestured at the Express & Echo on the table.

Robert nodded. ‘Just about, that’s all you can say. She’s in a specialist care home, the other side of Exeter. She went there when she was sixteen. And, well, we always felt guilty, felt it was because we put her there that she deteriorated fast, even faster than we’d expected.’

‘Do you see her?’ I asked.

‘I used to. Not any more. She can barely function, and she doesn’t know us at all now. I just can’t.’

He paused.

‘Brenda does, though.’ Another pause. ‘I mean, did.’

‘But you had a second child, for God’s sake.’ I tapped the newspaper again. ‘You and your wife...’ I put emphasis on the ‘w’ word. ‘... conceived another child even though you both knew she was a Huntington’s carrier. And even though you claim that I was the love of your life, you were patently still having sex with the woman who was really your wife. And, knowing you, rather a lot of it.’

Robert winced again. ‘It just seemed to happen,’ he said. ‘But it wasn’t the way it was with you. I mean, how could it be? Sex with you has always been so special. But with Brenda, well, it was kind of automatic really, what we’d always done—’

‘Spare me,’ I interrupted more forcefully. ‘I really don’t want to hear the gruesome details of your sex life with another woman.’

He nodded apologetically again.

‘But never mind that, and never mind the wicked double life you were leading, wicked to both of us. What about the risks? You and Brenda conceived another child even though you knew he or she would probably develop this awful disease. That’s really thoughtless and cruel. I can’t believe it.’

This time Robert shook his head.

‘I thought Brenda had been sterilized. After we found out about Laura we agreed that’s what she’d do. And she told me she’d had the op one time while I was away working.’ He glanced at me. I decided not to interrupt again, not to point out that he may have been working, or he may, of course, have been with his other wife. With me.

‘But she hadn’t had it. She’d been taking the pill. Apart from anything else nobody could possibly have coped with a second child with poor Laura at home the way she was. However, as soon as we accepted that Laura had to go into professional care Brenda stopped taking the pill. I never really understood why. She said she just wanted another child who was normal. But there was little chance of that. When she told me she was pregnant I was horrified. Not only because of what she had done, and the kind of life we might be bringing into the world, but because of you too, of course, and our life.’

‘It’s not definite, though, is it?’ I asked. ‘It’s not a hundred per cent that the disease is inherited, surely. Mightn’t your other daughter be OK?’

‘That’s what Brenda said. She said there was a fifty per cent chance that Janey would be OK. And it was a chance she’d just had to take.’

‘Well, presumably that’s still the case. Where is she now, by the way? This eleven-year-old child you never bothered to mention to me.’

‘She’s with a neighbour. And no, it’s not the case actually. Janey will get Huntington’s. It’s just a matter of when. It might not be until she’s into her forties — that’s the most common time — or she might get the juvenile variety like her sister. But one thing is certain, she will get it.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

He wiped a hand across his eyes, wearily.

‘When Janey was born I made Brenda have all the tests. She didn’t when we’d found out about Laura. In any case predictive tests for Huntington’s were pretty new then — they were only developed in 1993 — and Brenda said she wasn’t convinced of their accuracy. That we could end up being worried sick for nothing. But after Janey I insisted. She didn’t want to, not even then. She said there was no point. That we knew the risks. But I made her, and this time I went to the hospital with her, for the tests and the results. I just had to know exactly what we were facing. The disease is caused by the mutation of the gene called Huntington’s. Everyone has two copies. So more often than not a child has a fifty per cent chance of inheriting it. Just like Brenda told me. The only thing is, it turned out that both Brenda’s Huntington genes were mutated. That made it a hundred per cent certain that any child she had would develop the disease.’

I thought about what he was saying. ‘But Brenda didn’t know?’

He shook his head. ‘Not until she had the tests, no. I do believe that. You would have to be quite mad to bring a child into the world knowing for sure it was going to get that disease. And she wasn’t that. Not then, anyway.’

‘What do you mean? Not then?’

‘I’d recently been beginning to notice things about Brenda, things other people probably wouldn’t, that made me think she was now developing Huntington’s. And that her mind was beginning to be affected. Her behaviour was erratic. She could be shaky too, physically, although perhaps again not noticeable to anybody else. Not yet.’

I remembered her shaking and, more specifically, the smashed wine glass and the difficulty she’d had that day on the beach attaching the lead to her dog’s collar.

‘I suppose I saw things,’ I said. ‘But only occasionally.’

He nodded. ‘That’s how it is to begin with.’

I stared at him. I really hadn’t expected this.

‘Did she know?’ I asked. ‘Did she know she was getting it?’

‘She knew she was going to get it, of course,’ he said. ‘After the tests showed the double mutation she knew it was inevitable. And she’d reached the optimum age. But sometimes the disease doesn’t develop until people are in old age. Sometimes people die before they get it. I did feel guilty about that side of making her have the tests, that she then knew there was no chance at all of her avoiding the damned thing. But she seemed to cope with it extraordinarily well, really. Brenda was very good at going into denial, I think. Very good indeed.’

Wasn’t she just? I thought, reflecting on all the times we had spent together. Brenda knowing full well who I was and my relationship with her husband. Me totally unaware of who she really was.

What had she been hoping to achieve? And had she achieved it with Robbie’s death? It was my belief that she had.

I’d thought I had guessed most of Robert’s story. But I hadn’t dreamed of anything like this. For a fleeting second I felt a wave of sympathy towards the man I’d once so loved. I quickly cast it aside.

He had deceived me to a devastating degree. He deserved no sympathy at all. Not from me or from anyone.

‘You could have told me,’ I said. ‘You should have told me. We could have worked something out together. That’s what people do.’

He shook his head quite violently.

‘No. Don’t you see? I wanted another life. I needed another life. I loved my daughters but couldn’t cope with them being all there was for me. I couldn’t cope with just watching Laura deteriorate and then waiting for little Janey to develop this terrible illness. Just watching and waiting. I was afraid I would end up as mad as them. And I suppose in a way I did.’

‘But you brought it on yourself,’ I said. ‘I mean, what did you think, for God’s sake, when you came back the night Robbie died and there was Brenda, your wife, in our kitchen? What did you think, Robert?’

‘I didn’t know what to think. But it was obvious that you didn’t know who she was, and all I wanted was to keep things that way for as long as I could. That’s why I had to leave you the next day. I had to go and see Brenda. To find out what was going on. To try, somehow, to square things with her. Don’t you see?’

‘Oh, I see all manner of things now, Robert. All manner of things. But what did you say to each other? What did she tell you, and what load of rubbish did you tell her?’

‘I told her more or less the truth,’ he said. I almost smiled at the use of the phrase ‘more or less’. I feared that was probably the best he would ever be able to do with the truth.

‘She told me about meeting you on Exmouth beach by chance, seeing Robbie, and being struck at once by how like me he was. Then how she talked to you and found out about your husband Robert and so on. She said she pretended to be someone else simply so that she could get close to you, see how you lived, find out more about our life together.’

‘And did she tell you how she felt when she found out about me?’

‘She said she was devastated, of course. But she decided not to confront me at least until she’d found out more. And she still didn’t want to risk losing me altogether, it seemed.’

‘But can’t you imagine the effect it must have had on her seeing the near-perfect life we had together?’ I asked. ‘Imagine comparing the life you had with me, here at Highrise, with her life, her hellish life surely, looking after a dying daughter, knowing both she and her second child would go the same awful way, and living in that dreadful house I assume you shared...’

I stopped abruptly.

He shook his head very slightly as if trying to clear it. ‘You went to the house? To Riverview Avenue?’

‘Not exactly,’ I said, and I told him about my aborted visit to the home of the woman I knew as Bella Clooney.

Robert did a kind of double take. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘You only told me she was called Bella. I’m sure of it. If you’d ever mentioned that the surname of the woman you met on the beach was Clooney, I don’t know, but I may just have wondered—’

‘What are you talking about?’ I interrupted, irritated that he seemed to be going off at some sort of a tangent.

‘Brenda was crazy about George Clooney. Obsessed almost. She had DVDs of all his movies, the complete boxed set of ER, and she played them all the time—’

‘Can we get back to what we were talking about, please?’ I interrupted again.

He nodded. Then did another double take. ‘My God, what would have happened if you had knocked on the door, I wonder, gone into the house...’

His voice tailed off.

‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘It was the day after I was released by the police. And you were there then, with Brenda, weren’t you? I presume you went to her after I kicked you out. You might have answered the door to me. Wouldn’t that have been interesting?’

He looked startled. ‘Yes. I didn’t think of that. Yes, I suppose I was staying there then.’

‘And, even if you hadn’t been in the house, I could easily have noticed signs of your presence, seen photos of you about the place,’ I continued. ‘Or did you do your best to prevent there being any of you with her too?’

He looked down at his hands.

‘You’d certainly have seen more pictures of George Clooney,’ he muttered.

I ignored that.

‘I didn’t have to wait long to see Brenda’s picture in the paper, though, did I?’ I went on. ‘To see her name in print.’

He made no comment.

‘So, getting back to your story, how did you attempt to “square things with her” as you put it?’ I asked.

‘Well, I just promised her I wouldn’t change anything, I wouldn’t leave her, I would always look after her and the girls, as long as...’

He broke off.

‘As long as what?’

‘As long as she let my life with you continue. As long as she never attempted to tell you the truth. We could all carry on just as we had done. All she had to do was accept it and not tell anyone. Particularly not you.’

‘And you thought she was prepared to go along with that?’

‘She told me she would. She told me she’d been more afraid of my leaving her, abandoning her, as she put it, than anything else. She was angry, of course. But she said she realized she had been partly responsible for everything because she hadn’t been honest with me from the start about the Huntington’s. So she said yes, she would go along with it.’

I studied him carefully.

‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ I asked.

‘Get what?’ he replied.

‘Don’t you see? Bella or Brenda has been responsible for everything. Breaking in here so mysteriously in the middle of the night, with keys I assume she somehow stole or copied from you; wrecking the place; snatching little Luke Macintyre specifically for the purpose, I don’t doubt, of trying to incriminate me. I’m sure she was responsible for Robbie’s death too. Quite sure of it. It was her revenge, on you, on all three of us in this family. And she’d been planning it, or something like it, for months... all that time I thought she was my new best friend, she was...’ I paused, searching for the right word. ‘She was grooming us, me and Robbie. And she was guilty of incitement to suicide at the very least. She had to be.’

Robert’s eyes closed, then opened again, rapidly, several times. His head rocked on his shoulders. He looked as if he might pass out. I knew this must all have occurred to him. How could it not have? But from his reaction I wondered if he honestly still didn’t believe it.

‘No,’ he said forcefully.

I was right. Obviously the man was capable of remaining just as much in denial as his wife had been.

‘No. Don’t blame Brenda. She wouldn’t have done that. She was not a bad woman. She was a good woman. A Christian. A churchgoer...’

Of course she had been, I thought. And neither had there been anything wrong with Gladys Ponsonby Smythe’s memory.

‘You too, it seems, you hypocrite,’ I interrupted. ‘You did sing in that church choir, obviously.’

He shot me a trapped look. I didn’t push the point. It was irrelevant anyway.

‘Since when did you believe going to church prevents people committing evil?’ I asked. ‘Or maybe your opinions about religion were lies too. Brenda did it, Robert, how can you doubt it? One way or another, she killed our boy.’

‘No, no!’ he cried, his voice high pitched, verging on the hysterical. ‘She couldn’t have done that. I’m to blame. It’s all my stupid greedy arrogant fault. How could I have thought that I would get away with my idiotic double life without some terrible disaster sooner or later?’

His lower lip dropped, leaving his mouth gaping half open. His eyes, staring at me now, were full of tears. His hands were trembling. And still he was kidding himself about so much.

I wondered again how I could have lived with Robert for so long without realizing how intrinsically weak he was.

‘You fool,’ I said. ‘You pathetic bloody fool.’

His eyes remained fixed on me, pleading again, though I wasn’t sure for what. Sympathy? Understanding? Or just for me to still love him. That would be it, of course. He was desperate for me to still love him. It was all he had left.

I didn’t, though. I really didn’t love him at all now. I had already admitted to myself how I felt about him. Now I just wanted to tell him, to hurt him as much as I could. I didn’t think I would ever be able to hurt him as much as he had hurt me, but I could try.

‘Yes, Robert,’ I said. ‘It is all your fault. You are to blame for our son’s death. And I hate you for it. I hate you with all my heart.’

He recoiled from me, leaning back in his chair as if I had hit him.

I could see what a terrible blow I had delivered with those words. And I’m afraid I felt the nearest sensation to real pleasure that I’d experienced since the nightmare began.