The Other Half Lives

10

‘It isn’t a relationship,’ Olivia said indignantly. ‘I’m not sure you’ve noticed, but I don’t have those. That suits you fine, doesn’t it? Me having no one, being on tap whenever you want me.’

‘Don’t twist this! I don’t want you to be lonely, or…’

‘Terrified of telling any man I fall for that I lost my womb and ovaries to cancer and can’t have children?’

‘You always fucking do this! You throw the c-word at me for the sympathy vote and expect me to back down!’ Charlie wished her sister would stand up to argue. Olivia sat curled on the sofa in her tiny, designer-fabric-swathed Fulham flat, still in her cream satin pyjamas and dressing-gown though it was getting on for early evening. She wasn’t fond of physical exertion. Apart from sex with Dominic Lund, as it turned out.

Charlie felt like a bully shouting down at her. She also knew she had no plans to stop shouting any time soon. ‘How do you think I felt? After I’ve poured my heart out to him, begged him for help, and had to sit there like an idiot with him telling me what a loser I am. Enjoying trashing my confidence, revelling in his wisdom and my helplessness. Do you know what he called me? A psychopath’s ex-girlfriend. Quite a gentleman you’ve got there. When I told him to fuck off, he dropped his bombshell: “By the way, not only am I not going to lift a finger for you, but I’m fucking your sister and we’re both laughing at you behind your back.” It didn’t occur to you that I might have appreciated having that information in advance?’

‘Your self-absorption knows no bounds,’ said Olivia, her face pink with outrage. ‘I’ll throw another c-word at you in a minute. Will you listen to yourself?’

Charlie was in no state to listen. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I don’t see what the problem is. You needed legal advice, I recommended Dommie. It wasn’t as if-’

‘Dommie? This is a bad dream,’ Charlie muttered. ‘I’ll wake up in a minute.’

‘I didn’t tell you because you’ve got a long history of thinking every decision I make is-’

‘Is he the best you can do? A semi-autistic cheapskate who can’t even look at people when he speaks to them and forgets his wallet on purpose when he goes out to lunch, who plays with his BlackBerry compulsively the way teenage boys play with their dicks, who looks like a buzzard…’

‘A buzzard?’

‘He looks like a big bird of prey-don’t tell me you hadn’t noticed! Acts like one too.’

‘All right!’ Olivia held up her hands. ‘Yes, he’s the best I can do. Is that what you want me to say? Somehow he’s managed to upset you, so you decided to come here and upset me, and you’ve succeeded. Job done. Happy now?’

‘Go on,’ Charlie taunted her. ‘Use that word you threatened me with.’

‘It’s only a casual thing, Char. It hasn’t been going on for very long. I wanted to-’

‘How long’s not very long?’

‘I don’t know, about six months.’

‘Six months! I told you Simon and I were engaged three fucking seconds after I knew myself! Since when you’ve been prancing around sanctimoniously, exuding disapproval, loudly dooming us to failure at every opportunity…’

‘Prance? I don’t prance.’

‘All I’m doing’s trying to be happy for a change. You keep saying you’ve said your piece and from now on you’ll keep your mouth shut, but it never works, does it? You can’t restrain yourself from pointing out that Simon’s weird and frigid and socially inept, and he’s never said he loves me…’ Charlie had to pause as a tide of rage swept through her, pushing all coherent thought aside.

In its wake, she found her voice again. ‘Socially inept,’ she repeated quietly. ‘And all the time, you’re bedding Dominic Lund? Coward-that’s another word that begins with “c”. Fucking hypocrite-that begins with “f”. You sneak around in secret to protect yourself, at the same time as showering me with condemnation. All those times you’ve laid into Simon…’

‘I’ve got nothing against Simon! I like him. All right, I think you’re mad to-’

‘And I think you’re mad. Insane. Off your trolley!’

‘Dominic’s got a brilliant mind. He’s a brilliant-’

‘Please, call him Dommie if that’s your special name for him. Don’t let me stop you.’ Charlie was starting to enjoy herself. Sometimes the only way to get rid of your own pain was to cause someone else’s. ‘Now you know how it feels when someone rips the man you love to shreds,’ she said.

‘I’m not sure if I love him. It’s a complicated…’

‘You know what else he said to me? That I never listen to anyone. This is a man who’s met me all of once.’

‘Perceptive of him,’ said Olivia.

‘He was quoting you!’

‘He’s got an amazing memory. He’s cleverer than Simon.’

‘Oh, grow up!’

‘I didn’t mean it like that. I only meant… you of all people should understand the appeal of a clever man.’

The part of Charlie that was capable of feeling normal human emotions had shut down. At moments like this, she usually tried to make things worse because that was something she knew she could do and do well. ‘Let’s make a pact, okay? You don’t come to my wedding and I won’t come to yours. As for Mum and Dad, they can choose. One or the other, whichever of us they think has made the least shit choice of partner. They’ll pick you, of course, because you put in the hours pandering to them and I don’t. Come to think of it, I can’t see Dad missing a day’s golf to come to either of our weddings.’

‘Say it to his face if you’ve got a problem! You’d never dare, would you? You try to turn me against them hoping I’ll start trouble with them so that, if and when I do, you can stand back and look all innocent-you’re the coward, not me! And I don’t pander to them, I consider their feelings-it’s not the same thing.’ Olivia wiped her eyes with one hand and sighed. With the flat of her other hand, she slammed shut the lid of the laptop that was sitting beside her on the sofa. ‘I guess that’s my working day over,’ she said, each syllable dripping with sacrifice.

‘Work? You mean writing airhead shit for the bits of the papers that everyone chucks in the bin? Still in your pyjamas at nearly six o’clock-you call that work?’

Olivia didn’t stand up, but she swung her legs round and straightened her back. ‘I’m a journalist,’ she said in a jagged voice. ‘I write about books. Books are not airhead shit. My work is worth as much as yours.’

Like hell it is.

‘Once or twice, it’s true, I’ve written articles about fashion or shopping, and you’ve stored that up to use against me in your campaign to prove that everything I do is a load of frivolous crap.’ Olivia wiped her eyes.

‘Diversionary tactics,’ Charlie said flatly. ‘Don’t think I don’t know them when I see them. I see them a lot.’ She’d always thought Liv was proud to be frivolous, believed frivolity to be a good worth striving for.

‘You know what? I don’t even mind you thinking that my life’s work is a huge waste of time. Maybe if I did what you did, I’d feel the same about anyone who didn’t have to deal with dead bodies and psychopaths every day. I’m sure I would.’

‘I’m not in CID any more, not that anyone seems to notice.’ Charlie sighed. ‘These days all I see is questionnaires and evaluation forms.’

‘What I object to is that you don’t even bother to pretend!’ Liv was determined to have her say. ‘You constantly put forward this view of the world in which you’re essential and I’m completely worthless and useless, and you expect me to… to subscribe to it!’

‘Oh, please. When do I put forward-?’

‘All the time! With your every word and action, with every face you pull. Did you know I’m writing a book?’

‘Yeah, yeah. Neither am I.’

‘I am!’

‘You used to say that all the time when we were teenagers. You never wrote more than a paragraph.’

‘Okay, fine, that’s true!’ Finally, Olivia stood up. ‘What Dom said’s also true. How come it’s okay for you to be as blunt as you like but not for anyone else? He told you there was no case to make and you’re blaming him because it wasn’t what you wanted to hear.’

‘ “No case to make,” ’ Charlie sneered. ‘I see you’re fluent in legal bullshit-speak.’

‘Dom called you a pyschopath’s ex-girlfriend because that’s what you are! You always will be. Fucking deal with it. Doesn’t mean it’s all you are. He didn’t say it to be vicious, and he wasn’t revelling in your powerlessness or rubbing anything in-that’s bollocks. He’s just… unusually straightforward. You don’t know him like I do.’

‘No, I’d need to open my legs a bit wider to achieve that, wouldn’t I?’ Charlie wasn’t ready to be mature and sensible about anything. Not yet. That she could see she would eventually have to be infuriated her, created the need to do more damage.

‘Shouldn’t be too hard for you,’ Liv retaliated. ‘Think back to before you got engaged to Simon. You had your legs spread so wide most of the time, I’m surprised you managed to walk. You were the human equivalent of a T-junction.’

Charlie tried not to show her shock. Could Liv have thought that up on the spot, or had she formulated the insult long ago and been waiting ever since for the perfect opportunity to deliver it? Had she shared it with Lund? Had they laughed about it together?

‘Any bloke who fancied it could have taken a run at you from a distance and got a hole in one,’ Liv added for good measure.

‘Golf slang,’ said Charlie. ‘Mum and Dad would be so proud. Dommie told me you’ve been trying to turn them against Simon and me.’

‘That’s rubbish. He can’t have said that-it’s not true and he doesn’t lie.’

‘Saint Dommie!’

‘He might have said I’m surprised they haven’t expressed concern about your marriage plans. I am surprised.’

‘And I had to hear that, and more, from someone I’d gone to for help, a lawyer who, as far as I knew, had no other connection to my life! If I’d known you and he were an item, do you think I’d have let him…?’ The question hung in the air, incomplete.

‘Let him what?’

See my desperation. Charlie couldn’t say it. She’d told Olivia about Ruth Bussey’s bedroom wall, but she’d taken care to present herself as far less bothered than she was. She’d made flippant jokes-‘Crazy bitch. Do you think she fancies me or something?’-to hide the depth of her distress, and thrown in the Ruth-Aidan-Mary Trelease story as a distraction, to direct the focus away from herself. Now that she’d demeaned herself in front of Dominic Lund, he was in a position to tell Liv exactly how wretched and messed up Charlie was, if he hadn’t already, and there was nothing she could do about it.

‘Why are you so upset about this Ruth Bussey woman, Char? I don’t get it. Okay, it’s weird, I agree, but she’s probably harmless. ’

‘Covering an entire wall with articles about someone and pictures of them is stalker behaviour,’ Charlie recited in a monotone. ‘Stalkers can flip and they can attack. Sometimes they kill. Don’t fucking tell me this woman’s harmless-you know nothing.’

‘You’re right,’ Liv snapped. ‘She’s probably waiting outside with a Kalashnikov pointed at the front door.’ Seeing Charlie’s murderous expression, she shrugged and said, ‘See? Whatever I say, it’s the wrong thing. I’m sick of being your punch-bag. This isn’t about me-it isn’t about Dominic. It’s Simon you’re angry with, Simon who’s making you miserable…’

‘Here we go again!’

‘You’re jealous because I’m getting laid and you, despite being engaged, aren’t!’

Charlie’s vision narrowed to a slit. A shimmering red tunnel opened in front of her and she allowed it to suck her in. She lunged for Olivia’s computer, held it over her head and threw it at the wall. The crash it made when it hit was painful to listen to-the sound of irrevocable damage. Charlie closed her eyes, remembering too late the other reason she’d come to Olivia’s. ‘Shit,’ she whispered. ‘I needed that computer. Can you try to boot it up for me while I get a drink? What have you got that’s strong and alcoholic?’

‘I haven’t backed up my work,’ said Olivia shakily. ‘That’s three days’ worth of-’

‘I’m sorry,’ Charlie interrupted her martyr speech. ‘You’re a saint, Dominic Lund is a saint and I’m a sack of shit, okay? And I mean that from the bottom of my heart.’ She headed to the kitchen in search of vodka, calling over her shoulder, ‘Just get that fucking machine to work.’

There was no vodka. Absinthe would have to do. Charlie poured the pale green liquid into a tumbler and took two big gulps, hoping it would work fast. Not fast enough. She downed the rest of the glass, then poured another. She took her phone out of her pocket and switched it on. Five missed calls from callers who’d withheld their numbers. Unusual. There was one message, from Simon. ‘Where the fuck are you? Ring me as soon as you get this.’ Charlie listened to it again, trepidation making her stomach churn. Something was wrong. He knew where she was; she’d told him she was going to London to see Lund.

She rang him, got his voicemail, left a message saying she was worried, that she was at her sister’s now and he should ring her as soon as he got the chance. Then she glugged more absinthe, jabbed ‘118118’ with her thumb and got the number for Villiers girls’ boarding school in Wrecclesham, Surrey. Might as well ring now, put off facing Liv for a few more minutes.

The voice that answered the phone sounded as if it belonged to a woman who had been put on earth to do nothing but answer telephones with perfect politeness. Though all it said was, ‘Villiers, good afternoon,’ it conveyed a sense of delight in anticipation of being able to help anyone with anything, and made Charlie feel less awkward about posing her question.

‘This is going to sound strange,’ she began.

‘That’s perfectly all right. I can do strange. Frequently have to,’ said the woman. A secretary, Charlie assumed. ‘You should hear some of the calls we get.’

‘I’m after the name of an ex-pupil of yours who went on to become a writer. Does anyone spring to mind who fits that description? ’

‘A fair few,’ said the woman proudly. ‘You should come and look at our boasting gallery some time.’

‘Can you give me some names?’ Charlie reached for the pad of A4 paper and pen that Olivia kept near the phone; though, irritatingly, not so near that you didn’t have to lean to reach it and risk pulling the phone’s base off the shelf. As the woman name-dropped women writers, Charlie made a list. She’d heard of only one of the six the secretary mentioned, and put a cross beside her name. She hadn’t committed suicide; Charlie had seen her on Question Time last week.

How to ask if any of them were dead without sounding crass, or making the secretary clam up? ‘Are… as far as you know, are all these women still writing?’

A gasp of alarm came from behind Charlie, followed by the sound of the absinthe bottle and her glass being pulled along the worktop, away from her. She turned to find Olivia glaring at her, miming surprise at how little was left in the bottle. She waved the list of women writers in front of her sister’s face.

‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure I can help you there. We try to keep up with our old girls’ careers as best we can, but there are so many of them. Let me think…’

‘I’ll put it another way,’ said Charlie. ‘Do you know if any of these women definitely aren’t still writing?’

Olivia snatched the pen from her hand. Next to each name she wrote something, rolling her eyes as if Charlie ought to have known: ‘Still writing poetry about muddy puddles that no one buys.’ ‘Depends what you mean by “still writing”. She puts her name to about four books a year, but they’re all “co-written”, i.e. written by unknown skivvies.’ ‘Yes-she’s good-I tried to lend you one of hers but you vetoed it because it was set abroad and in the past.’

‘May I ask what your interest is?’ A note of caution had infused the impeccable voice, enough to convince Charlie that she and the woman on the other end of the phone were thinking, at that moment, of the same person: the woman Mary Trelease had painted dead. Charlie closed her eyes. The absinthe was starting to make its presence felt; her veins were buzzing.

‘It’s sort of personal,’ she said. ‘I can promise you that anything you tell me will go no further.’ Recklessly, she added, ‘I think you know which of these women I’m asking about, don’t you?’

‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to help you.’ Shrill and defensive. Was it something I said?

Beside the name of the woman Charlie had seen on Question Time recently, Liv had written, ‘Ideas above her station-thinks writing formulaic thrillers qualifies her to interfere in politics.’ Every name on the list had one of Liv’s mini-essays beside it apart from one: Martha Wyers. Charlie pointed to it. Liv shrugged, then, in case that wasn’t clear enough, drew a big question mark next to it.

‘Martha Wyers,’ said Charlie. ‘She’s not writing any more, is she?’

‘I cannot help you,’ the woman repeated firmly. ‘If you care about Martha or this school at all, please don’t pursue it. There’s been enough suffering already without journalists digging for dirt and causing even more.’

‘I’m not a journalist. Really, I’m not going to-’

‘I should never have given you her name.’ The words were breathy and indistinct, as if she’d pressed her mouth too close to the mouthpiece. She hung up.

‘Any luck with the computer?’ Charlie asked Liv.

‘You’re slurring your words. Of course not. That’s nine hundred quid you owe me, plus a two-thousand-word article about why endings are as important as beginnings in fiction.’

‘Instalments do you? Tiny ones? Where’s the nearest internet café?’ Charlie was already heading for the front door.

‘Right here,’ said Olivia drily. ‘I’ve set up my other laptop. You can use that. One condition: would you mind not hurling it at the wall?’

‘You’ve got two laptops?’

‘It’s handy-you never know when one’s going to be smashed up by a vandal.’

‘I’ve said I’m sorry…’

‘Sarcastically, yes. I don’t suppose it’ll matter to you, but I bought the second laptop to write my book, and that’s all I’ve ever used it for. I didn’t want it to be used for anything else.’

Charlie stopped at the entrance to the lounge. ‘I can go to an internet café,’ she said. ‘Make up your mind. Do you want to help me or not? Only in exchange for praise, presumably.’

‘Use it. I’ve set it up,’ said Liv wearily. ‘What’s going on, Char? Any chance you’re going to tell me?’

Charlie clicked on the Internet Explorer icon. When the Google screen appeared, she typed ‘Martha Wyers, Villiers, suicide’ into the search box. Nothing came up that looked right. The first page of results yielded a selection of science journal articles by a Dr Martha Wyers of Yale University. ‘Don’t give me this shit,’ Charlie moaned at the computer.

‘Are you sure it’s not the same person?’ Liv asked, peering over her shoulder.

‘I doubt it.’

‘Check,’ Liv advised.

‘Thanks for that tip. Of course I’m going to check,’ said the part of Charlie that, in the presence of her sister, was permanently frozen at the age of fourteen.

Google was bursting at the seams with Dr Wyers’ details and achievements. It didn’t take long to find a CV. ‘Born in 1947 in Buffalo. Never lived in the UK, never attended Villiers school…’

‘It’s not her,’ said Liv.

‘No.’

Charlie tried ‘Martha Wyers, British writer, suicide’ and ‘Martha Wyers, British writer, Villiers, murder’ with no success. Yale’s Dr Wyers wasn’t letting anyone else get a look-in.

‘You can find out, can’t you?’ she asked Liv. ‘Martha Wyers was a writer, you know everything there is to know about books…’

‘Was Martha Wyers killed by a stalker?’

‘What?’ Seeing her sister trying so hard, looking so helpful and enthusiastic and making completely the wrong connection made Charlie want to hit her. She ought to ring Simon again. Why had he sounded so riled? He was the one she needed to talk to. Would he pursue the Martha Wyers angle?

He’d tell you you’re crazy, that’s what he’d do. Aidan Seed says he killed Mary Trelease. Mary Trelease painted Martha Wyers, who killed herself. No reason to think Martha Wyers was murdered by Seed or anyone else. Except that Jan Garner had talked about murder, Mary mentioning murder in connection with the dead woman writer. ‘No, Martha Wyers wasn’t murdered by a stalker,’ Charlie told Liv impatiently. ‘Not as far as I know, anyway.’

‘You don’t know if she was murdered or if she killed herself, so why don’t you search for Martha Wyers, writer-keep it simple? ’

It wasn’t a bad suggestion, except that Charlie was unwilling to let her sister see her following instructions and infer from that that she’d made a good point. As luck would have it, Liv’s phone started to ring and she went to the kitchen to answer it.

Charlie typed ‘Martha Wyers, writer’ into the search box and was about to press ‘enter’ when Olivia reappeared, red in the face, agitated. ‘That was Simon.’

Automatically, Charlie stood up, holding out her hand for the phone. Why hadn’t he rung her on her mobile? When she saw the expression on Liv’s face, her arm fell to her side.

‘What?’ she whispered.

‘I’m sorry, Char,’ said her sister. ‘It’s bad news.’

Dear Mary 4 March 2008

This is something I never thought I’d do. Like you, I saw a therapist for a while, and like you I found that it didn’t achieve much. Unlike your therapist, mine recommended letter-writing, but I suppose it amounts to the same thing. You want my story-this is it.

In my old life, I was a garden designer-before I moved to Spilling I had nothing to do with art or artists. I had a thriving business and won awards for my work. In 1999 I won the principal BALI (British Association of Landscaping Industries) award for the third time in three consecutive years. There was a six-page feature about me in Good Housekeeping magazine, with pictures of my gardens that had won prizes, and interviews with the people I’d designed them for. As a result of this publicity, my services were in demand. I had a sudden influx of new clients and a waiting list three years long. Some people got impatient and decided to go elsewhere. Others were happy to wait their turn. Only one woman fell into neither of the above categories.

She phoned me and left a message, saying she needed to speak to me urgently. When I rang her back, she told me she was sick, and asked if there was any way I could fit her in sooner. She didn’t specify what was wrong with her, but said she didn’t know how long she had left to enjoy her garden, and as things stood there was, she said, ‘little about it to enjoy’. I considered telling her I had made prior commitments to other people and didn’t want to let them down, but decided in the end that, in such an unusual case, it was better to be flexible. None of my other clients or prospective clients was terminally ill.

She was a primary school teacher, in her early thirties, married with no children, and lived in a village close to the Leicestershire-Lincolnshire border, on Woodmansterne Lane, a narrow road with detached fake stone cottages, modern but trying to look old, hidden behind hedges as solid as concrete walls and thick-trunked trees that seemed to stand guard on both sides. I thought as soon as I heard the street name that it was unusual and a little bit sinister. It made me think of a stern woodman, whatever one of those was. My reaction was too mild to be called a premonition-the most I can say is that I felt something I didn’t normally feel when I noted down clients’ addresses.

Woodmansterne Lane was the perfect place to live if you wanted privacy, she told me the first time I went to the house. She was obsessed with privacy, mentioned it constantly, whenever we met. On the wall by the front door there was an oval-shaped plaque with the words ‘Cherub Cottage’ painted on it. The name was her invention. For our first meeting, she wore a smart grey suit-the sort no primary school teacher needs to wear to work-with sheer black tights and enormous dog’s-head slippers that made her look utterly ridiculous.

I can still picture those dogs’ faces, as vividly as if they were in front of me. Each one had a red cloth tongue dangling diagonally from its mouth.

On my first visit to Cherub Cottage, I also met her partner. He was a pharmacist who said very little, but when she spoke, which she did ceaselessly, I could see him trying to gauge my reaction to her. He was better looking, better dressed and younger than she was. When I first met him he was twenty-six. He seemed to have no quirks of his own, though he tolerated hers without complaint. As I saw more of her, I realised how much he had to put up with: she would not allow any food to cross her threshold that didn’t come from Marks & Spencer; she forced him to redecorate their house from top to bottom every year, and new curtains and carpets every three years; she sent a tedious, self-aggrandising round robin letter to everyone they knew at Christmas, full of exclamation marks. Reading the one she sent me, I could hardly believe it wasn’t a parody. Some of her household appliances had names. The microwave was called ‘Ding’, the doorbell ‘Dong’.

During that first discussion the three of us had, I kept trying to include her partner and find out what he wanted Cherub Cottage’s garden to be, but whenever I succeeded in coaxing an opinion out of him, she automatically said, ‘No,’ and corrected him. From what I managed to glean from him, in between her negations, it seemed he was happy with things pretty much as they were. The front and back gardens they’d inherited from the previous owners of Cherub Cottage (or number 8, as it had been in those days) couldn’t have been more traditional: lush green lawns surrounded by flower beds on all sides. He said he wouldn’t mind if I filled the gaps in the beds, that he thought they ought to be fuller-that was the only adjective he could think of to describe what he wanted-but when I started to talk about a riotous, voluptuous planting plan, he nodded eagerly. ‘A cottage ought to have a ramshackle garden,’ he said, before she leaped in with one of her ‘no’s.

‘I don’t want it messy,’ she said. ‘Any flowers, I want them colour-coordinated and in rows, not sticking out all over the place. Can you pick up a pink and purple theme? Pink roses, and purple slate in the beds instead of dirt? I saw that in a magazine.’ She always said ‘dirt’ when she meant ‘earth’.

I was used to working with clients who valued my opinion, who looked to me for guidance, and I would have felt like a criminal if I’d taken her money in exchange for making her garden uglier. As tactfully as I could, I explained that I didn’t think purple slate would work. ‘That’s more suitable for very contemporary-looking houses,’ I said. ‘I know your house isn’t old, but it’s a country cottage first and foremost. I’m not sure we want to depart too much from the traditional-’

‘It’s not about what you want, it’s about what I want!’ she said, putting me in my place. ‘It’s my inheritance from my Auntie Eileen that’s paying for it, so it’s my opinion that counts.’ Even knowing she was ill, it was difficult to feel sorry for her. I suggested to her that perhaps she ought to look for another garden designer; I took pride in my work, and could see already that the garden she was going to force me to create for her was one that would embarrass me. There would be no BALI award for Cherub Cottage’s new garden, that was for sure, not if I gave her what she wanted: something pretentious and out of keeping with its surroundings.

‘I chose you because you won that prize,’ she said. Then, pointedly, ‘I haven’t got time to find another designer. I don’t want to get stuck in a sourcing loop.’

This last phrase baffled me at first, until I realised it had to be some sort of business-speak for being unable to find something. I caught her boyfriend’s eye and saw the trace of a smirk on his face, as much of one as he was confident of being able to get away with.

‘What about bark?’ he said, looking at me. ‘I heard someone on telly say bark’s a good alternative to slate. For beds. Just as neat, but less showy.’ I think that’s the longest speech I ever heard him make in all the time I knew him.

I nodded. ‘Bark might work,’ I said, though I still favoured traditional earth flower beds. But I found myself wanting to say yes to him, if only because she never did. I wanted to compensate.

‘Purple slate,’ she said flatly, as if neither he nor I had spoken. ‘And one of those plastic borders round the lawns, so we don’t have to keep trimming the edges. And at the back, I want a gravel crossroads-I’ve got a picture of one that I cut out of a magazine, I’ll show you-with a fountain or something in the middle. Maybe a statue. Something eastern to pick up a multicultural theme.’

The picture turned out to be of the Prince of Wales’ garden at Highgrove, which was more than big enough for the ‘gravel crossroads’ she described not to look ridiculous. If I gave her what she claimed to want, four tiny green squares would be all that was left of her lawn at the back. It would look absurd.

I was about to tell her this when I saw him shake his head as if to say there was no point. I should have left then and never gone back, and not only because of what happened later. It was clear she would be a nightmare client. I reminded myself that she was ill, and that I was there for his sake as well as hers. I sensed that he wanted me around. I have no idea, now, whether he did or not, whether he was indifferent to me and I blindly chose to believe otherwise, but at the time I thought he was silently pleading with me not to leave him alone to deal with her and her ludicrous unfulfilled wishes.

I suppose I was drawn to him because I knew how it felt to be unable to speak freely in your own home. He reminded me of how I used to be before I left home. My parents are evangelical Christian control freaks, expert emotional blackmailers, and I spent my childhood and adolescence pretending I was who they wanted me to be, stifling the person I really was because all my life I’d had this never-quite-articulated but very real threat hanging over my head: go against them on anything, however minor, and I’d do unimaginable damage to us all.

There’s no doubt that, on that day at Cherub Cottage, he and I entered into a conspiracy: us against her. Yes, we would give her what she wanted, but we both knew it would be awful, and, more importantly, we knew we were the clever ones and she was the dimwit. Not only did we know it but we enjoyed the knowledge. Despite what happened subsequently, I know I didn’t imagine it: he was as conscious of our secret, shared superiority as I was.

I agreed to redesign their gardens, and gave them my questionnaire to fill in. I gave it to all my clients, not caring if it seemed unnecessarily formal when mostly they had already described to me exactly what they wanted. Time and time again I found that being made to answer the questions helped people to form a clearer idea of what they were looking for, and it certainly made life easier for me.

She handed the questionnaire to him, didn’t even look at it. I arranged another appointment with them in a few days’ time, telling them I’d take measurements then. As the day approached, I found I was looking forward to seeing him again. When I arrived at the house, she wasn’t there. He was alone, apologetic and far more awkward than he had been last time. It was as if, without her there to keep us both in check, he was afraid to talk to me. When I asked where she was, he shrugged. ‘You can still measure,’ he said. He didn’t give me back the questionnaire, but instead handed me a few crumpled sheets of paper I didn’t recognise, covered in large sloping handwriting that leaned to the left.

I was surprised to see he had transcribed all my questions, as well as writing down his answers to them. ‘Why didn’t you write on the form I gave you?’ I asked him. He shrugged. His answers-and it was clear they were his, not hers-were short. In response to the question, ‘Who will use the garden?’ he had written, ‘Us’. To ‘What will they use it for?’ he had replied, ‘Sitting’. I nearly laughed when I saw his one-word answer to my longest, most expansive question: ‘Do you want to develop your garden all in one go or gradually year by year? How “instant” do you need your garden to be? How long are you prepared to wait for it to mature?’ Underneath his handwritten reproduction of my words, he had added just one of his own: ‘Quick’.

I measured up, as instructed, and when I came back inside he was waiting for me with a drink, a glass of red wine. He’d poured one for himself, too. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I had to drive home, and thought it odd that he’d assumed without bothering to ask that I would want wine.

He led me into a lounge I hadn’t seen before. It had a horrible artificial look of ‘best’ about it. The carpet was mustard-yellow and the walls were gleaming white, as were the three leather sofas arranged in square-bracket formation in front of an obscenely large television set that seemed to devour all the space and energy in the room. Beside one of the sofas was a cube of a coffee table with mirrored surfaces, and beside another her dog slippers with their wretched red tongues, neatly aligned. Almost as big as the TV screen were three framed photographs, the lounge walls’ only decoration. ‘Not my doing,’ he said, seeing me staring at the pictures. I tried to disguise my distaste but I probably didn’t do a very good job. All three pictures were of him and her, barefoot, looking idyllically happy together against a background of unblemished white. Each had been blown up so that it covered most of a wall. In one, it looked as if the photographer had asked them to run towards the camera from a distance and then fall over: they were both laughing, their limbs entangled. In another her expression was solemn, her head coyly tilted, and his face was in profile, his lips on her cheek-a supposedly profound private moment, captured for ever, to be enlarged and stuck on the lounge wall to show off to guests: look how happy we are.

I was so busy staring at the photographs that I didn’t notice him approach me from the side, and when he tried to kiss me I sprang away from him, spilling some of my wine on the carpet. He ran to get stain remover. I recognised that run. It was me, thirteen years earlier, hearing my parents’ car an hour before I’d expected to, racing to my bedroom to hide the book I’d been reading: Riders by Jilly Cooper. I made it. By the time my father walked into the living room, I was back in my chair with Thomas Cranmer: A Life propped up in front of my face, my heart a bouncing boulder in my chest.

The stain remover did the job. Within seconds the drops of red were gone, but he kept spraying white foam on the carpet. He must have used nearly a whole can. I wasn’t close enough to him to hear it, but I knew what his heartbeat was doing.

He took his wine glass and mine through to the kitchen-a safe place, lino instead of carpet. His eyes were suddenly wary; perhaps he’d finally taken in what his state of high alert hadn’t allowed him to register sooner: he’d tried to kiss me and I’d rejected him.

‘Why do you stay with her?’ I asked. I knew it was an inappropriate question, but the atmosphere was so strained by that point that normal protocol no longer seemed to apply.

‘The pictures aren’t too bad,’ he said, as if they were all that had made me ask.

‘Is it because she’s ill?’

‘Ill?’

Something cold clutched at my throat. ‘She told me she was dying.’

He nodded. ‘She does that sometimes.’

That decided me. ‘I can’t work for you,’ I said. ‘For her.’ I wanted him to try to kiss me again.

‘You can’t pull out now. She wants you.’

‘I don’t care…’ I started to say.

‘I want you. I want to show you something.’

In a sort of trance, I followed him out of the room and upstairs, thinking that I would look at whatever it was and then leave. He took me into a box room with a skylight that wouldn’t have been big enough to fit a bed in. In the middle of the carpet there was a red and blue-painted model of a train with three carriages. Next to this was a chair and, around it, piles of what looked like superhero comics: Spiderman, The Incredible Hulk. Lined up against one wall were several pairs of Chelsea boots, black and brown.

A ghetto blaster stood on the windowsill, surrounded by towers of CD cases. ‘This room’s my den,’ he said. ‘That’s mine.’ He pointed to a picture on the wall. It was long and rectangular, the size and shape of a full-length mirror, and made me think of Soviet propaganda, though the words on it were French-‘Etat’ at the top and ‘Exactitude ’ at the bottom-printed in chunky masculine letters over the red, black and grey image of an enormous train emerging at speed from a tunnel.

‘It’s nice,’ I said, not sure how I was meant to respond. But when I said that, he smiled, and I was glad I’d lied. I thought the picture was awful-harsh, almost fascistic.

I did leave shortly afterwards, as I’d promised myself I would, but he and I both knew I would work on their garden as agreed. When I went back to the kitchen to retrieve my handbag, I noticed my questionnaire-the typed version I’d given them at our first meeting-under a pile of house and garden magazines. I could see it had been written on, that the handwriting was small and rounded, not large and left-leaning. He saw that I’d spotted it, and stuffed his hands in his pockets as I pulled it out and started to read. It wasn’t hard to work out what had happened: he’d been understandably appalled by her answers, so he’d copied the questions out again in order to be able to present me with a less offensive document. His thoughtfulness touched me. I think that was the moment I fell for him, when I saw what she’d written and realised how much effort he’d put into sparing my feelings.

To the question ‘How long will you be living in the house? Should I plan for five, ten, twenty years?’, she had answered, ‘I’m not psychic.’ Underneath ‘Do you need privacy? Any particular part of the garden?’ she had written, ‘We’ve got privacy. No part of our garden is overlooked. Surely this sort of generic questionnaire is bad for your business? Why don’t you tailor your questions to individual clients’ needs?’

In person she’d been rude, but this was worse. These were words she’d had a chance to think about, ones she’d committed to paper. She had saved her most cutting response for last. The final question was about the pH and texture of the soil, any micro-climates there might be in the garden, frost pockets, shelter, prevailing winds. Many of my clients didn’t have a clue about this sort of thing and wrote ‘Not sure’ or ‘Don’t know’, but I still felt the question was worth including, because sometimes people knew more than you expected them to, and it could be a big help to have this kind of information upfront.

Beneath my last question, she had written, ‘Get a life!’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t mean it.’

‘Is she always like this?’ I asked. Not at all inappropriate, I felt, under the circumstances.

‘You will come back, won’t you?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

‘Please. I… I promise, I won’t touch you again.’ He blushed.

I thought about his ‘den’, the ghetto she’d confined him to in a house that was otherwise hers, and about my bedroom as a child, the tapestry slogans on the walls, stitched by my mother: ‘Jesus is the silent listener to every conversation’, ‘Seven days without prayer makes one weak’. I suppose I was looking for someone whose pain matched mine. I was doing the same thing years later when I met Aidan, when I had even more pain to find a match for.

Against my better judgement, I kept them on as clients. The next few times I went to Cherub Cottage, she was there, and he was as he had been the first time I’d met him-full of confident knowing smiles at her expense. I tried not to meet his eyes but it was hard. I couldn’t believe he was the same man who, in her absence, had behaved like a gauche schoolboy. I’d started to have sexual fantasies about him by then, ones that involved far more than sex. In my idealised version of our story, fate had given me a clear mission: I was the only person who could save him from her. If I let him down, he’d never escape her clutches or the confines of his petty, constrained life with her.

Over the next few weeks, I worked on designs for their garden. She’d said at our first meeting that she wanted ‘something eastern’, which turned out to mean a large granite Buddha on a plinth that she’d seen in a catalogue. I didn’t try to talk her out of it. If she wanted the centre-piece of her small Lincolnshire garden to be a fat stone man sitting on a pillar, that was her choice.

Work started in March 2000 and took a month. I got landscapers in to help me, which at first she protested about. ‘I thought you were going to do it all yourself,’ she said, and I had to remind her that I’d told her I did only the design and the planting. I never challenged her about her lie, and she didn’t refer again to her made-up terminal illness.

Whenever I had a moment alone with him, I badgered him about leaving her. I told him I’d wanted to respond when he’d tried to kiss me, but I couldn’t, because he wasn’t available. Sometimes he said he understood, other times he lunged at me, saying, ‘Come here,’ and trying to grab me, but I wouldn’t let him touch me. I told him if he stayed with her he’d be a prisoner for the rest of his life, whereas if he left her he could have me. He couldn’t leave her, he said, which only made me more determined. I was convinced no one besides me would ever be able to liberate him; I had to try harder. I started wearing revealing clothes to work, making sure he caught glimpses of my cleavage, wearing short skirts and bending over when he was standing behind me so that he could see my underwear. I wanted him to know what he was missing.

By this point, I was too involved to see the difference between love and an unhealthy obsession. It was a battle between good and evil as far as I was concerned: I was good and she was evil, and I had to win if I wanted to save him. I played dirty without giving it a second thought, trying to bribe him, bringing money into it. I told him how much I earned-more than a primary school teacher-and that financially he’d be better off with me than with her, all the while congratulating myself on my virtue for refusing to have sex with him. Guessing that she either couldn’t have children or didn’t want them in case they disturbed her perfect white living room, I told him I wanted to have his children. That didn’t make him leave her but it made him cry. ‘I can’t,’ he kept saying. ‘I just can’t.’

The garden was finished one day while they were both at work. It looked dreadful, but it was exactly what she’d ordered: regimented pink flowers, purple slate, gravel crossroads, eastern deity. They owed me twenty-three thousand pounds, give or take some small change. She got back from work first, saw it and burst into tears. ‘I hate it,’ she said. ‘It’s disgusting.’

That I had not been expecting. When I asked her what the problem was, she said, ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t look like I imagined it would. I hope you don’t think I’m paying for this!’ She started weeping, got back into her car and drove away. I had no choice but to wait for him. When I told him what had happened, he raised his eyebrows, as if at a minor inconvenience, and said, ‘She’ll come round. Don’t worry, you’ll get your money.’

‘Damn right I will,’ I said. ‘You signed the contract.’

‘What will I do when you’ve gone?’ he said. He took me in his arms and clamped his lips on mine.

I pulled away and said, ‘We need to talk. Properly.’ Finally, I thought, he’s realised he needs to leave her.

He was the blushing boy again. I hadn’t mentioned my religious upbringing to him so far; now I was going to use it to my advantage. I’d suffered eighteen years of it, so the least it could do was help me now, I thought. I told him I was a Christian, that I was gagging to go to bed with him, but I couldn’t persuade myself it was all right to go to bed with someone who had a partner. I wittered on about marriage being sacrosanct, adultery an unforgivable sin, all the things I’d heard my parents say. He wasn’t married to her, but they lived together as man and wife-I told him that from my point of view it amounted to the same thing.

I didn’t mean a word of it. I was using sex, or rather the promise of sex, as leverage to make him leave her for me.

‘Are you saying you want to marry me?’ he asked, looking as if the idea was hurting him, scorching his brain. I hadn’t been, but only because it hadn’t occurred to me. I read the truth in his eyes and I knew I was right: he’d proposed to her, perhaps several times, and she’d said no.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I want to marry you.’

He gritted his teeth, grabbed his hair with his hands and closed his eyes. ‘I can’t leave her,’ he said.

I went home, defeated. Three days later a cheque arrived for the money they owed me. Two weeks after that he rang me. I said, ‘Hello?’ and heard only silence, but I knew it was him. I said his name-a common, popular name, one that gives me a jolt of shock every time I hear it, even all these years later.

He asked me to come round. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Please.’

‘Have you left her? Are you going to leave her?’ I asked.

He said yes.

I didn’t believe him, but I got into my car and drove to Cherub Cottage because I wanted it to be true. He was alone when I arrived. He gave me a glass of red wine. It tasted funny but I drank it anyway. He told me she had gone, that she wouldn’t be back, and tried to persuade me to go upstairs with him. I refused. Her possessions were still all over the house-her dog slippers, her magazines, her diary. I knew he was lying to me. ‘Give me a cuddle, then,’ he said. It seemed like a harmless request, and my desire to touch him after not having seen him for a fortnight was stronger than ever before. We lay down on one of the white sofas in the lounge. I didn’t care, as I fell asleep with his arms around me, that he hadn’t told me the truth. I could well understand why he wanted to pretend, and I assumed he knew she wouldn’t be back any time soon. Perhaps she’d gone to stay with a friend, I thought. I kidded myself that he might still leave her, that he’d obviously found he couldn’t go on without me, since he’d summoned me so urgently.

I didn’t resist the sleepy feeling when it came. If I thought about it at all, I probably put it down to the wine, or to feeling happy and relaxed with him. I didn’t find out until later that he’d drugged me-crushed four two-milligramme Clonazepam pills and put them in my wine.

When I woke up, or came round, I was tied to the stone plinth in the back garden. My arms were tied against my sides so that I couldn’t move them, and there was something in my mouth, which had been taped shut with the thing inside it. I know now that it was a pink bath sponge. A lot of the detail I only found out later from the police, or in court.

I couldn’t scream or move, or understand what had happened to me or why, which was the worst thing of all. At first I was alone in the garden, alone with my terror. Then she came out of the house. She laughed when she saw me, and told me she’d take the gag out of my mouth if I promised not to scream or cry out. I nodded, because I’d been crying and my nose was starting to block up-I was afraid I’d suffocate.

She took the sponge out of my mouth. ‘You’ve been fucking my partner, and thinking you could get away with it,’ she said.

I told her it wasn’t true.

‘Yes, you have. Don’t lie.’

I swore to her that I hadn’t, begged her to untie me.

‘You told him to leave me, didn’t you?’

That I couldn’t deny. She stuffed the sponge back in my mouth, taped it shut again and went back into the house.

The next time she came outside, it was almost dark. She reached down and picked up a handful of gravel from one of the new paths. She threw a small pebble at me from a distance of about a metre, and it hit my cheek. It hurt more than I’d have thought a tiny stone could. ‘In some parts of the world, they stone you to death for fucking another woman’s man,’ she said. That was when it got worse. I couldn’t speak to defend myself. She kept throwing the stones, some from further away, some from right in front of my face-at my head, my chest, my arms and legs. It went on for hours. After a while, the pain became unbearable.

She brought a table and chair out into the garden, then a bottle of wine, a corkscrew and a glass. All night she drank wine-two more bottles after the first one-and threw stones at me, stones I’d ordered for her. I’d brought samples in two sizes for her to look at, and she’d chosen the smaller ones, thank goodness. If they’d been any larger I’d have died-that’s what I was told later. She didn’t throw them constantly. Sometimes she stopped and sat down, drank, lectured me. She said I was lucky I lived in England and not lots of other places, because this was nothing compared to what would happen to me in some countries.

The next morning it got worse. She took the sponge out of my mouth and pushed in a handful of gravel. She told me to eat it. I spat it out but she forced more in and tried to push it down my throat. In the end I swallowed and she did it again, kept doing it. She preferred making me eat the stones to throwing them at me, once she’d tried it.

After that, my memories are blurred. I started to pass out and come round, so that I was never sure how long I’d been there, whether this night was the same night or a new one. I found out later that I spent seventy-two hours tied to the stone plinth. At one point she ripped the tape off my mouth and I vomited blood all over her. That made her angry, and she slapped me across the face.

After a while my chest and stomach filled with a burning pain that seemed to radiate through to my back. I felt unbearably thirsty. Sometimes when she took the tape off, I asked for a drink, and she laughed at me. I expected to die of thirst if I didn’t suffocate. I began to vomit clear liquid-it seeped out around the tape. She sneered, ‘You say you’re thirsty, but you’re puking water. Swallow it instead and you won’t be thirsty any more.’

I lost my grip on my mind, became incoherent, and when she let me speak, it didn’t make sense. I was aware of what she was saying, but couldn’t think straight. Everything seemed remote apart from the pain. Waves of it started to pour through me: powerful, uncontrollable spasms in my stomach, which were worse even than the thirst. Then I started to pass the stones I’d eaten. I couldn’t help it. That was the worst agony of all.

Later, the doctors told me the names of all the injuries I’d suffered. My throat and oesophagus were badly cut, which had caused something called mediastinitis. I needed surgery to sew up the cuts, an endoscopy to inject the lacerations that couldn’t be sewn with adrenalin. I had rectal fissures, a perforated bowel, peritonitis, a paralytic ileus. These are words most people will never hear, but I heard them endlessly in the hospital and in court. They went round and round in my head, what she’d done to me. I had to have a laparotomy, which was what caused the scar.

I was in hospital for three weeks. It’s easier to race ahead to that part, to after I was free and in the hands of people who were trying as hard to help me as she had to harm me. The strange thing was that she must have decided, at a certain point, to let me go. She could have killed me-all she needed to do was leave me where I was-but instead she called the police, in tears, and told them to come to the house. They played the recording in court. She said, ‘Come quickly, there’s a woman in trouble, I think she’s dying.’ The police had found her hysterical, drunk, claiming not to know how a half-dead person had ended up tied to a stone column in her back garden.

He pleaded guilty to false imprisonment and GBH. He admitted to drugging me with Clonazepam and tying me up, but would say nothing about his reasons for doing either. Though she was the one who’d done the damage, he was still guilty of GBH by law because he was ‘more than ancillary’ to her attack on me. He admitted to knowing in advance what she’d planned to do, though her plan had contained only the throwing of the stones, in accordance with the punishment, under Sharia law, for adultery. Making me eat the gravel had been an improvisation on her part.

After that one moment of weakness in which she saved my life with her phone call to the police, she became herself again. She pleaded not guilty, against the advice of her legal team, claiming he had done it all and she’d had nothing to do with it, hadn’t even known about it.

Once I’d recovered and was let out of hospital, all I wanted was to put it behind me insofar as that was possible. I can’t remember at what point I realised that the people who were supposedly on my side were trying to force a whole new ordeal upon me, one I didn’t have the stamina for: a court case, publicity. I was told I wouldn’t be able to stop the papers printing my name because there had been no sexual element to the attack. I refused to talk to the press, so they presented her version of the story as fact: I had been sleeping with her boyfriend and she’d stoned me as a punishment. In court, under cross-examination, she emphasised more than once that I was an adulteress and had deserved it, even though she stuck to her story that it was he who had done the stoning, not her. The jury didn’t believe her. Everyone could see she was proud of what she’d done.

I don’t know what he told her. I can’t see why he’d say we’d had sex when we hadn’t-what good would that do him? My guess is that he told her the truth but she didn’t believe him, or she believed him but chose to pretend she didn’t. After all, the more grave my offence, the more justified her response. I can’t prove it, obviously, but I don’t think she was punishing me for sleeping with her boyfriend, whatever she said in court. She was punishing me for the terror she’d experienced when she found out I was waging a campaign to split them up. Maybe they had a fight and he told her he was leaving her for me, and in a moment of ragged, uncontrollable horror, she saw herself disintegrating without him. A person can lose everything that makes them who they are in a moment like that.

Having my name and a distorted version of the story continually in the papers condemned me to a living hell. I knew that everyone knew, or thought they did, and that I would never be able to escape the rumours. One night I heard, on a local radio station, a caller expressing the opinion that I had ‘probably deserved it’, that ‘women should keep their hands off other women’s property’. Then came the next blow: the police told me I would have to appear in court and give evidence against her. I collapsed-actually physically collapsed-when they told me. Of course I didn’t want her to get away with it, but I also didn’t want to be anywhere near her ever again, no matter what protection I had. I didn’t want to have to sit in court and listen to PC James Escritt describe the state I was in when he found me in the garden of Cherub Cottage.

My medical records were needed to secure a conviction, and I had to authorise the hospital to make a statement about my condition when I arrived. I begged to be spared a court appearance in exchange for agreeing to the medical statement, but that wasn’t possible. I was told that without me as a witness, the CPS would drop the case, because the chance of getting a guilty verdict would be less than fifty-one per cent. James Escritt, who had been my main point of contact throughout, even after CID got involved, did his best to arrange for me to deliver my testimony from behind a screen, or from another room in the building by video-link, but the judge refused. I’d had bad luck, apparently-more bad luck-in being assigned a judge who was known for his inflexibility.

I was a mess in court: shaking, dribbling, unable to move my limbs in the way I wanted to, feeling as if the various bits of my body weren’t properly fitted together and might fall apart at any moment. I held up proceedings by fainting twice during cross-examination. My parents had wanted to come to court with me, but I’d managed to persuade them not to. Ever since I was a child, their presence has made me feel worse in times of trouble, not better. Fortunately, I was able to put them off without saying anything so tactless or honest. I distrusted those of my friends who claimed to want to come and give me ‘moral support’, suspecting them of wanting nothing more than proximity to a juicy story that they’d be able to dine out on for years.

He testified against her, endorsing my version of events. There was no need for him to stand trial, because he’d admitted his guilt. She was found guilty, and burst into tears when it was announced. ‘It’s not fair!’ she screamed. ‘Why does the system always punish the victim?’ He also cried on hearing the verdict, even though he’d helped to convict her. I watched him mouth, ‘I’m sorry’-at her, not at me.

That was the last time I saw them. I didn’t go to hear sentencing, but I was informed of their sentences: seven years for him, ten for her, because she’d pleaded not guilty. Via the family liaison officer who had been assigned to me, I made it clear that I didn’t want the CPS to send me any more information about either of them. It sickened me to think that one day a letter might arrive saying one or other of them had been released early for good behaviour. I didn’t want to know.

I stuck it out in Lincoln for another three years after the trial, feeling as if I was in prison too. Everyone I met either asked prying questions or appeared mortified to have to speak to me. No one wanted me to design a garden for them; even if they had, I’d have found it impossible, unthinkable. Still, it didn’t occur to me to move and start a new life, not until one day in 2004.

I had gone to my parents’ house for dinner, and, for once, decided to risk a little honesty when they asked me how I was feeling. ‘Bad,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever feel anything but bad again.’

They started to talk about prayer, as I had known they would, about asking Jesus for help. And then my mother said, ‘He would forgive you, you know. We forgave you straight away, the minute we heard what had happened. Jesus is loving and merciful-’

I interrupted her and asked, ‘Forgave me for what?’, because I knew what they meant. They could only mean one thing. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that my parents didn’t believe my story. They believed her lies, the newspapers’ lies, the late-night radio phone-in lies; they thought I’d been having sex with him. After all the lying and pretending I’d done over the years for their sake, they didn’t believe me against the woman who had nearly killed me.

‘I don’t believe in God,’ I told them. ‘But if he exists, I hope he doesn’t forgive you. I hope he lights a match under both your souls.’ All those years of trying so hard not to upset them-I suddenly found I was aching to devastate their sad little fantasy world, to say things that would torture them, that they’d never be able to forget. I didn’t hold back. I inflicted as much pain as I could using only words, then walked out of their house, leaving them ravaged and howling.

I moved to Spilling shortly afterwards. Things were better in Spilling. No one seemed to know anything about me-I could say my name without getting the looks I was so sick of getting in Lincoln. I sent my parents a PO box address, but they’ve never used it. I ought to feel terrible about this, probably, but I don’t. I feel free. I found a house in Blantyre Park, the opposite of an enclosed, private garden. There was nowhere where I could be tied up and tortured. How sick to think that was what first attracted me to the place. But life is sick. It was sick when it sent you, Mary, into the gallery where I’d been working happily with Saul to ruin things for me all over again. It was sick when I went to see Charlie Zailer at the police station and a stone got into my shoe and cut my foot so badly I could hardly walk. I couldn’t take it out, couldn’t bear to see or touch a stone that had been pressed against my skin. I can’t even say the word ‘stone’. I’m surprised I can write it.

I went to see Charlie Zailer last Friday. Did she tell you that? I know she’s been here and spoken to you about Aidan. I went to her because Aidan told me he’d killed you and I was frightened and didn’t know what to do. He believes he strangled you, or says he does. He told the police that you were naked when it happened, in a double bed in the front bedroom of your house. It wasn’t long after he made his ‘confession’ that I discovered who you were: the woman who had attacked me at Saul’s gallery. Why would my boyfriend say he had murdered someone who was still alive? I know you know something about this, Mary. You must do. I don’t care how bad the truth is. All I want is to understand.

Ruth