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Hoping he couldn’t smell my anxiety, I hovered just inside the bedroom doorway, not helped by the alcohol fuelling my bloodstream. I’d had more vodka than I wanted just to make a point and had felt sick before I even realised he was awake. Art flicked his half-smoked roll-up out on to the courtyard below and pulled the shutters to, extinguishing what little light the moon provided. The heat of the day had vanished with the sun and the room was as cold as his rage. An icy controlled fury. If I’d been able to see them, I knew his lips would be set in a tight white line, his eyes flat. For a moment, I was glad I couldn’t.

I took a tentative step forward. Instinct shrieking at me to step back.

‘Answer me,’ he breathed.

I tried not to jump. He was close, so close.

Close enough for me to feel his breath on my face. I had neither heard nor felt him move. He didn’t touch me, and I didn’t reach out to touch him. It wouldn’t calm him. He didn’t want to be calmed. ‘Well? Tell me, the great Helen Lawrence, what is a team? Or is that something else they didn’t teach you at school?’

So much malice in one sentence, my head spun. I was drunk. Very drunk. My head already starting to pound. Art was utterly sober.

‘A team?’ he repeated quietly. Hot breath in chill air.

A team, I wanted to say, is something that never wanted me in it. A team is something I never wanted to be picked for. A good job, because I never was picked. A team is something I have no interest in being any part of. But I know what you think a team is, Art. You think a team is something that has a captain and people who do what the captain tells them. And you think that captain is you.

Rage, alcohol and fear mingled inside me. It was on the edge of my tongue to say those things, to unleash the genie, to shout and scream and yell and see what happened. It was unlikely to be worse.

I didn’t. I didn’t answer him at all.

‘I’ll tell you what a team is … Helen.’

His tongue wrapped around my name and I shuddered, instinctively taking a step back. Hit wall. Or door. When had the door shut? I hadn’t heard it click to.

‘A team, Helen …’ he said, repeating my name, as if in repeating it he owned it. Owned me. ‘… is what we are meant to be. A team. Professionally and personally. In work … and in life.’ He took one more silent step, I felt the air change this time, closing what little gap I’d managed to open up between us. His body just millimetres from mine.

I stood very still. Said nothing. Waited.

In the courtyard below a raucous yell, followed by a laugh. Tomorrow was another day. Anything could happen, and would. We knew that. We’d seen it. Yesterday morning, Hélène Graham had been alive. I tried to concentrate. All I had to do was open my mouth and shout. Art hated shouting. Hated embarrassment. But what would I say? And what would anyone say who came running?

Domestic.

Drunk.

Clash of the egos.

All of the above.

Would they even be wrong?

If neither of us moved, neither of us spoke, I told myself, it might yet be all right. We could go to bed, get some sleep, or pretend to, lying side by side untouching in the dark, and in the morning it would have passed. It could happen. It had happened before. But not often.

Then he gripped my upper arms and I felt my feet leave the ground. My tendons shrieked and I knew bruises would have blossomed a livid violet on my pale freckled arms by morning. In one movement, I was face down on the bed. Half lifted, half thrown. My legs thrashed, but there was nowhere to go. A hand heavy on my neck forced my face into the mattress and I felt consciousness begin to slip, peeling away at the edges. Frantically I tried to free my arms, but they were trapped beneath my weight and his knee pinning my spine, his hand working at my jeans. Struggling for breath, I inhaled … the unmistakable taste of stale cloth choked me … and something else … acrid, sour … last night’s sweat … my own rising nausea. I heard him unbuckle himself noisily.

Just as I thought I was going to vomit, light exploded behind my eyes. Then everything bloomed black.

Morning took forever to arrive.

‘It wasn’t …’

Helen looked up, blinking as if seeing the room for the first time in many hours. The grey of pre-dawn seeped through the gap in the curtains.

‘It wasn’t the first time. He saved his fury for the bedroom. His bruises for places that didn’t show. It wasn’t even the most painful. But this was by far the worst.’

‘Why didn’t you leave before this?’ Gil asked.

Helen sighed at the inevitability of the question.

No idea
didn’t seem an adequate answer.

‘I did, remember. And he wore me down I suppose,’ she said, twisting the hem of her sweatshirt in her hands. ‘Little bits of me got cut away, until I wasn’t me any more. When I did leave, that first time, everyone said I was wrong. I didn’t have the self-belief not to go back. What he did to me in Syria … It flicked a switch in my head.

‘Next morning, I pretended to be asleep until he went out, then I packed my case and flew to London. I booked an emergency appointment with … A doctor I’d seen on and off since Iraq for migraines …’ Helen took a deep breath. ‘And other things. She knew me, was familiar with the situation. Still is. She’d seen me with injuries there before.’

Helen looked at Gil to gauge his reaction, then down at her feet.

‘I stayed here for a few days, in London, holed up in a hotel, healed, I suppose you’d say. Then I went back.’

Gil inhaled sharply.

‘No, not
back
back. I mean back to Paris. I waited for him outside his office, somewhere nice and public. Told him it was over. I’d be filing for divorce.’

‘How did he react?’

Helen snorted. ‘How d’you think? He was contemptuous, mocking. Said I was nothing without him. Worthless. He didn’t know why he’d bothered with me. Some people couldn’t be helped. Then he just turned on his heel and stalked away. Didn’t turn, didn’t look back. I know, because I stood and watched until he vanished round the corner. That’s why I chose there. I knew he’d never make a scene in the street, never.’

‘And then?’

‘What do you mean,
and then?
’

‘What happened next?’

Helen shrugged.

‘Somehow I ended up here.’

PART THREE

The Scar

‘There are boys out there who look for shining girls; they will stand next to you and say quiet things in your ear that only you can hear and that will slowly drain the joy out of your heart.’

Caitlin Moran

25

It had been a long time since Gil had done the walk of shame. Best part of forty years and even then he could have counted the times on one finger. But there was no way to reach his house other than through the centre of the village, so he fingered his last B&H, rolling loose in his pocket, for comfort, decided against, and strolled up the high street trying to affect the air of an insomniac on his way back from an innocent early morning stroll.

He had nothing to hide, after all – more’s the pity.

It was not yet six a.m. but already the village was waking. That was the trouble with old people, Gil thought, feeling Maude Peniston’s curtains twitch as he passed. They didn’t know how to lie-in. It would be a few days yet before he could consider the General Stores safe ground. He’d have to make another trip to the wretched garage on the bypass for his supplies.

With the door safely shut behind him, Gil reached for the coffee, taking the sad-bastard-cafetière-for-one Lyn had bought him from the cupboard. She’d given it to him for his birthday years ago, and been so proud of herself. All Gil had seen was that his barely twentysomething daughter never expected him to have someone to make coffee for again. Turned out she was right.

He was so far beyond sleep he wasn’t sure he’d ever sleep again. Images furled and unfurled in his head. Bombed-out buildings he’d never seen and the corpse of a small boy he felt almost sure he had … And Helen, dark-haired, watchful-eyed Helen, years younger than him, young enough to be his daughter, in bed. Her naked body was in Gil’s mind. Her body, as he imagined it. She was smart and he liked smart, and she was talented and he admired that, and she was strong, somewhere inside the ruins that life and Art Huntingdon had made of her. Assuming he believed her. Against his better judgement, Gil was starting to think he did.

You silly old sod,
he thought, as he fingered the lone cigarette in his suit pocket. The last of the twenty he’d smoked through the night. He was being ridiculous and he knew it. Instinctively liking her shouldn’t be the same as trusting her. As if she’d have given him the time of day in any other circumstances. What if all this was fabricated and he was being played for a fool by a younger woman who’d murdered one man, and might, quite possibly, murder another? Him. Because, despite everything she’d told him, she still hadn’t begun to explain what happened that night.

‘She tells a good story,’ Gil said out loud. She did too. Such a good story it had to be true, didn’t it? Only a psychopath could carry that level of detail plausibly. But then – Gil paused, inhaled and, feeling his head swim, wondered when he’d last eaten – only a psychopath could set fire to her husband and walk away …

As he smoked, Gil extracted his knackered old iPhone from his breast pocket and checked the Voice Memos: two hours forty minutes. Not bad, albeit less than half the night’s conversation. Better than nothing. He hadn’t used it in an age, so he hadn’t been sure it would work at all. He’d felt bad, flicking it on in his nearside breast pocket while she was downstairs making coffee, but only a fool would have done otherwise. He was a journalist and, like it or not, Helen Lawrence, as he was starting to think of her, was this close to being a suspect in a murder. Skimming backwards, he picked a point at random and pressed play, jumping as Helen’s cool voice echoed round his small kitchen.

‘His eyes were closed and he was curled as if in sleep, a plastic toy in his hand. There was no sign of the talking head now, but he could still be heard, explaining how I took the shot in the immediate aftermath of a car bomb. The photograph faded to be replaced by another shot. The boy from behind …’

Gil pressed stop, trying to work out what it was about her tone that bothered him. That she was calm? Almost indecently so? Her voice steady even as he’d watched tears coat her cheeks as she described the boy. For most of the night he might as well not have been there. It was only when she remembered he was, and smiled – suddenly, incongruously – that he had to remind himself this was someone used to war zones, who’d heard bullets fired in anger rather than on film, who’d seen buildings broken that were places where people lived rather than sets designed with the sole purpose of being destroyed. He’d seen his share of bodies. Children killed in car crashes. Murder victims. Suicides. He didn’t doubt for one minute she’d seen more.

Face it, Gil, he told himself, if she can recount horror so calmly, with no tremor in her voice, what else is she capable of? If she’d been through even a fraction of what she claimed, she was strong. Very strong. She had to be; she was alive and Art Huntingdon was dead.

And whatever she said, whatever she claimed not to remember, she’d had the presence of mind to get herself here. And she was hiding from something.

Gil knew he shouldn’t be thinking like that. He should be telephoning the police. If not them, telephoning a paper. Not the
Post
, a national. He’d been turning the idea over and over, ever since he’d worked out who she was. A scoop like this … it could give his career a whole new lease of life. Put him back on the radar. He wasn’t ready for retirement.

He’d do no such thing though. Not yet, anyway. Not until he was sure she was lying. People did lie. Of course they did. Women lied to men as readily as men lied to women. Lying to journalists was almost as great a tradition as lying to the police. The truth was subjective. Endlessly elastic. God knows, Gil’s life through his own eyes bore little resemblance to the version seen by his ex-wife; quite possibly no relationship at all to his life seen through the eyes of his children.

Proof. That was what he needed. Taking his coffee through to the sitting room, Gil turned on breakfast news low in the background for company, flipped open his laptop and put ‘Art Huntingdon’ and Death into Google News.

Six hours of talking. And in all that time she hadn’t even mentioned the fire that killed her husband, had made it clear she had no intention of doing so. Not a single mention. Call himself a journalist?

If she wouldn’t tell him, he’d have to dig for himself. He’d start there and work back through Huntingdon’s life, see if what he found matched Helen’s description. He hoped it would; but then, if it did, there was another problem. If Huntingdon was as vile and controlling as she said, why had someone like her, a grown woman, successful in her own right, stayed with him that long?

Gil understood the reasons in theory.

He’d sat through enough rape trials, usually involving people known to each other, as most rapes did. He’d sat through child custody cases. Restraining orders being issued and appealed against. Injunctions applied for and then applications withdrawn by women too scared of the repercussions to fight. As a student, he’d heard his elder daughter talk with fury about how unsafe the streets were, how bad things could happen to anybody, even someone like her, and there was a thought Gil didn’t want to follow.

But he didn’t
understand
. He’d never understood, not really.

Right back when he began, when he was office boy, not even old enough to be a copy taker, one of the girls in the office got engaged to a clerk in the classifieds team. The man was tall, charming, played football for the paper on Sundays. One of the secretaries was overheard saying the girl was terrified of him, and the chief sub, a man as old as Gil was now, said, ‘You don’t marry a man you’re afraid of …’