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Simon. David Fancourt wasn't anywhere near Spilling the night Laura Cryer was killed.'
    `He wasn't? Where was he, then?'
    `In London, with his fiancee.'
    `You mean ... ?' Simon felt heat under his skin. Charlie had been
sitting on Fancourt's alibi all this time, saving her trump card. Phase
fucking disclosure.
    `Yes. Alice was his alibi, although no-one really thought he needed
one because-did I mention this?-the evidence against Darryl Beer
was beyond doubt.' Charlie leaned her elbows on the table and rested
her chin on her hands. `So, if Alice Fancourt told you her husband
killed Laura Cryer, she's lying. Or else she was lying then. Either way,
I'd say there's quite a lot pointing to her being untrustworthy. If you
remember, I said she was unhinged right from the start.' Charlie's
expression darkened. `A mad bitch, I think was how I put it.'
    Simon knew that if he spoke now, he'd say something that would be
difficult, later, to take back. He grabbed his jacket and got the hell
away from Charlie as quickly as he could.

     

5

    Friday, September 26, 2003
    THE WORST THINGS in life only strike once. I say this to my patients
to help them move forward with their lives, to enable them to process
the disasters that have befallen them. As soon as it is over, whatever it
is, you can begin to console yourself with the thought that it will never
happen again.
    It worked for me when my parents died in a car crash eight years
ago. I stood at their funeral, feeling as if the stitches that had held my
soul together all these years were now slowly, painfully coming
undone. I was a twenty-eight-year-old orphan. I didn't have any siblings to turn to. I had friends, but friendship felt thin and inadequate,
like a summer jacket in winter. I needed, craved, family. I carried my
lost, beloved parents around with me like a hole in my heart.
    My friends and colleagues were surprised by how badly I was
affected. People seemed to think that, having had twenty-eight years
of love and security, I would be well-equipped to deal with my sudden loss. I quickly learned that I was expected to be somehow insulated against what might otherwise have been extreme pain by having
had a secure, happy childhood. Everyone waited for me to bounce
back, to start to focus on the good times, the fond memories. Their
complacent assumptions were an insult to my grief and pushed me
from a state of mourning into one of severe depression. I got the
impression my friends were itching to say, `Oh, well, they had a good innings, didn't they?' But my parents were only in their early
fifties when they died.

    I kept in touch with nobody when I left London. The company of
my friends, when I'd really needed them, had made me feel lonelier
than any amount of solitude ever could. It wasn't their fault, of course.
They tried their best to jolly me along. They weren't to know that their
forced and ever-so-slightly impatient cheerfulness was suffocating me
like poison gas.
    I survived in the only way I could-by allowing myself to feel the
worst feelings for as long as they needed to be felt. At my lowest point,
I had only one consolation. I was able to say to myself, plausibly, that
at least this would never happen to me again. I could not lose my parents twice. Whatever else my future might contain, there would be no
lorry that would skid on a patch of ice and plough on to the wrong side
of the Al near Newark, straight into my parents' car, the new Audi
they'd bought when they passed the trusty old Volvo on to me. That
had already happened. It was over.
    But this nightmare, the one I'm living now, is not over. It is only just
beginning. I see now that trouble doesn't always strike, in a clean,
wham-bam-thank-you-Ma'am kind of way. Sometimes it drifts into
your vicinity like bad weather, creeps up on you and lingers, deepening with every day that goes by. I cannot see any way out of this despair
because I still do not know how much worse