‘Did you feel guilty?’
‘What about?’
‘About having an affair for ten years.’
‘No.’
‘Although you’re married.’
‘I never felt guilty,’ he repeated. ‘I knew Elaine and the boys would never know. It wasn’t hurting anyone.’
‘Did Ruth feel guilty?’
‘I don’t know. She never said she did.’
‘You are certain your wife didn’t know?’
‘I’d know if she knew.’
‘And Ruth’s husband, Russell Lennox? Did he know anything or have suspicions?’
‘No.’
‘Did Ruth Lennox tell you that?’
‘She would have told me if he’d suspected, I’m sure.’ He sounded uncertain, though.
‘And that day, did she seem any different?’
‘No. She was the same as always.’
‘And how was that?’
‘Calm. Cheerful. Nice.’
‘She was always calm and always cheerful and nice? For ten years?’
‘She had ups and downs, like anyone.’
‘And was she up or down on that Wednesday?’
‘Neither.’
‘Just in the middle, you mean?’
‘I mean she was fine.’
Yvette looked at Karlsson to see if he had any further questions. ‘Mr Kerrigan,’ said Karlsson. ‘Your relationship with Ruth Lennox sounds oddly like a marriage to me, rather than an affair. Domestic, calm, safe.’ Placid, he thought, almost dull.
‘What are you saying?’ Now he looked angry. His hands curled into fists.
‘I don’t know.’ Karlsson thought of Frieda: what would she ask this man, who was sitting passively in front of them, his shoulders slumped and his big hands restless? ‘You do understand this alters everything?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You aren’t stupid. Ruth Lennox had a secret. A great big secret.’
‘But nobody knew.’
‘You knew.’
‘Yes. But I didn’t kill her! If you think that – look, I swear to you, I didn’t kill her. I loved her. We loved each other.’
‘Secrets are difficult to keep,’ said Karlsson.
‘We were careful. Nobody knew.’
Karlsson took in Kerrigan’s sad, uneasy face. ‘Is it possible that she was going to end it?’
‘No. It’s not possible.’
‘So nothing had changed.’
‘No’ His face was swollen with misery. ‘Will they have to know?’
‘You mean her husband? Your wife? We’ll see. But it may be difficult.’
‘How long?’
‘For what?’
‘How long do I have before I have to tell her?’
Karlsson didn’t answer. He looked at Paul Kerrigan for a few moments, then said musingly, ‘Everything has a consequence.’
TWENTY-FOUR
When Rajit Singh opened the door, he was wearing a heavy black jacket. ‘It’s the heating,’ he said. ‘Someone was meant to come today to fix it.’
‘I’ll only be a minute,’ said Frieda. ‘I won’t even need to take my coat off.’
He led her through to a sitting room in which every piece of furniture, the chairs, a sofa, a table, seemed to jar with everything else. On the wall was a picture of the Eiffel Tower in brightly coloured velvet. He noticed her expression.
‘When I was an undergraduate, I stayed in the residence that was right in the West End. Everything’s sorted for you, where you sleep, where you eat, who you become friends with. But once you’re doing your postgraduate work, you’re left to fend for yourself. I was lucky to get this, believe it or not. I’m sharing it with a couple of Chinese engineering students who I never see.’
‘You live all over the place,’ said Frieda.
‘Me?’ said Singh. ‘I just live here.’
‘No, I mean you and the rest of you. Seamus Dunne, the one who came to see me, he lives in Stockwell. I saw Duncan Bailey at his flat in Romford. Later I’m going to Waterloo to see Ian Yardley.’
Singh sat in the armchair and gestured at the sofa. Frieda preferred to stand up so she could move around. Even though it was sunny in the street outside, it was icy in the house.
‘We’re not a gang,’ he said. ‘We don’t exactly hang out together.’
‘You’re just Professor Bradshaw’s students.’
‘That’s right. We’re the ones who volunteered for his clever experiment. The one that seems to have got under your skin.’
‘Which therapist did you see?’
Singh’s face tightened. ‘Are you trying to trap me?’ he said. ‘Are you going to sue us?’
‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘This is all for my benefit. Let’s just say I’m curious.’
‘Look,’ said Singh, ‘we didn’t have anything to do with that stuff in the newspaper. I thought it would appear in a psychology journal that no one would read and that would be the end of it. I don’t know how that happened.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Frieda. ‘I’m not bothered with that. Just tell me about your part in it.’
‘I ended up with the therapist who passed the test. She’s a woman called Geraldine Fliess. Apparently she wrote some book about how we’re all really psychopaths, or something like that. Anyway, I went and saw her, gave the spiel about having been cruel to animals and that I had fantasies of hurting women. Later she got back in touch with me, asking me who my doctor was and other things like that.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘Professor Bradshaw told us that if anyone took us up on what we had said, if they really picked up on the danger, we should just refer them to him and he would tell them about the experiment. You know, to avoid us getting arrested.’
‘What would you have been arrested for?’ Frieda asked.
‘All right, all right,’ said Singh, irritably. ‘She got it right and you didn’t. It’s not the end of the world. Just let it go.’
‘But I’m interested in the story you all told. How was that done?’
‘There was nothing clever about it. Bradshaw gave us the things on the psychopath checklist and we just had to agree on a story, rehearse it and perform it.’
‘I don’t care about the checklist,’ said Frieda. ‘I’m more interested in the other details. Where did all the bits that had nothing to do with the checklist come from? Things like that story about cutting hair. What was that about?’
‘What does it matter?’
Frieda thought for a moment and looked around her. The room wasn’t just cold. There was a smell of damp. There didn’t seem to be a single object that hadn’t been left there by the landlord and that was the sort of stuff – abandoned, unloved – you’d pick up in car-boot sales, house clearances.
‘I think it’s difficult to pretend to be a patient,’ Frieda said. ‘For most people, the difficult bit is to ask for help in the first place. Once they’re sitting in a room with me, they’ve already made a painful decision. I think it’s just as difficult to pretend to ask for help.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘When I came in, you apologized about the house.’
‘I didn’t apologize about it. I said I was lucky to get it.’
‘You said that when you were an undergraduate everything was arranged for you, but now you were left to fend for yourself. You told me that you never see your housemates.’
‘I meant that as a good thing.’
‘You probably don’t want to hear this from me …’
‘You know, I’ve got a feeling you’re about to say something about me that isn’t complimentary.’
‘Not at all. But I wonder if when you volunteered for this experiment, the chance to go to a therapist but not really go to a therapist, it gave you an opportunity to express something. A kind of sadness, a feeling of not being cared for.’