Charlie’s leafing through it, and I can’t help seeing it through her eyes: just some dull old tome. She’s in Liam’s camp, not mine. It means nothing to her. Why should it?

  I lunge forward and pull it out of her hands. Feeling as if someone’s taken a serrated blade to my heart, I start to tear out pages. ‘It’s a fucking pile of shit and I’m sick of carrying it to every fucking … every …’

  What have I done? What have I done?

  I sink to the floor, sobbing, clutching what’s left of the book against my chest, trying at the same time to scoop up the scattered pages.

  I thought I was ready to live realistically – without a pointless symbol of my fleeting belief in love. I’m not. Too late, though: I’ve ruined it, like I ruin everything I care about.

  ‘Kim? It’s okay. Those pages can be glued back in, I think.’

  Charlie’s voice seems to come from miles away.

  ‘Even if they can’t, you haven’t ripped out any of the bits that matter. The dedication’s still in there, and the signature.’

  I can’t get myself together to check if she’s right. What if she’s wrong? She can’t know. I’ve got the book pressed against my stomach. She can’t see what I have or haven’t torn out. I lie on my side, howling as if I’ve lost everything, though I know I haven’t. I’ve never lost anything because I’ve never had anything, not the way most people do.

  ‘Kim, take deep breaths.’

  ‘I … I can’t …’

  Charlie kneels down beside me. I clutch at her sleeve.

  ‘You can. Shall I get you some water?’

  ‘No.’ If she moves away, I don’t know what I’ll do.

  I didn’t expect this to happen at a random hotel that has nothing to do with anything. I was afraid I’d have a bad reaction to the room at the Narrow Bed Hotel, but not this bad.

  This can’t be me. I don’t cry. I’m scared I won’t survive this, and even more scared I will and I’ll die of shame. At the moment, I feel nothing but a need to cling on.

  ‘I think water would be a good idea,’ says Charlie quietly. ‘Why don’t you try to get up and come with me to the bathroom?’

  ‘No. I can’t move.’ My heart’s beating too fast but the beats are wrong: each one hurts, like a big ball being forced through a hole that’s too small. ‘Tell me … something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Anything. A story. An old case. Anything.’ Something I can concentrate on that isn’t sad. The tears have stopped and I’ve started to shake. It makes it difficult to speak.

  ‘How about a mystery?’

  ‘Yes,’ I whisper.

  ‘Okay,’ says Charlie. ‘I’m going to tell you a story about my sister Olivia.’

  ‘You’ve got to find out,’ I say once we’re back on track after a wrong turn on the way out of St Albans. Next stop is Watford Colosseum. ‘If it was my brother, or even an acquaintance, I’d have to know.’

  ‘Simon thinks I should stop obsessing,’ she says. ‘Advice I’ve never heard him give before. I think I’ve finally made him realise how boring someone else’s obsession can be.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it obsession, I’d call it due process.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘If someone significantly deceives you and they’re not clever enough to conceal their lie, you’re entitled to go after them with the full force of your snooping capacity.’

  ‘Yes! Exactly. That’s how I feel.’

  ‘Snoop and be proud.’ As I say this, the driver of a car we’re overtaking turns and stares long and hard at me, as if encouraged by my words, though he couldn’t possibly have heard them. He grins and waves. I turn away pointedly. ‘I think I just saw Kim Tribbeck,’ he’ll be saying to his passengers now, and they’ll be asking him if he’s sure, or saying, ‘So what?’ or ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘The one thing I can’t see a way to do is get into Liv’s Gmail account,’ says Charlie. ‘That’s really all I’d need. Whatever’s going on, she’ll be corresponding with someone about it – Nikhil and Natalie, probably. I can’t risk it, though. It’s unambiguously illegal. I’d need to enlist someone at work to help me, and then we’re talking criminal conspiracy.’

  ‘You can’t guess her password?’

  ‘I’ve tried more than a hundred guesses.’

  ‘So you only mind the illegal part if there’s a witness? It’s okay, I get it. I’d be the same.’

  ‘Shit. I shouldn’t have told you that.’ Charlie looks at me out of the corner of her eye. ‘If Simon knew I’d even tried … He’s not Liv’s greatest fan, but Gibbs is the closest thing he has to a best friend.’

  ‘I need to tell you something I haven’t told Gibbs or Simon,’ I say. ‘About the night the man gave me the white book.’

  I don’t need to, though, do I? It’ll make no difference to anything. That means I must want to. I hadn’t planned to confess this part but now that I’ve started, I’d better see it through. ‘I told Gibbs that my husband Gabe was with me on the night that I was given the white book – that he came to my gig, then drove back home afterwards because he had an early start at work the next day.’

  ‘And it’s not true?’

  ‘True about work but not about the specially early start. If I’d wanted Gabe to stay over, he’d have stayed. I lied to him: told him I wasn’t staying overnight in that town, wherever it was. Sometimes I have a driver when I’m on tour: Dmitri. He often picks me up after a gig and drives me on to the next town. That’s what I told Gabe was happening that night. It’s why he drove home. Otherwise he’d have stayed with me at the Narrow Bed Hotel, got up at 5 or 6 a.m. and driven back to Rawndesley then.’

  ‘You didn’t want him with you overnight?’ says Charlie.

  ‘No.’ I take a deep breath. ‘Also in the audience that night was Liam Sturridge, the man I was seeing behind Gabe’s back.’

  ‘I see – and Liam was the one you wanted to take to the hotel?’

  I nod. ‘By pure chance, Liam was in the area for a work away-day. He wanted to come along. I warned him Gabe would be there. Any normal man would have said, “No problem, I’ll stay away,” but Liam had already decided he and I would be having sex in my hotel that night.’

  ‘You remember Liam saying he was going to be in the area but not which area?’

  ‘I remember everything visually – the feel and the look of the hotel, our room, what we did that night, how I felt … but the town? No. Names of towns are pretty much interchangeable at this point in my touring career. There are some places on the list that I’m almost certain it wasn’t – though even there I’m not positive. And I had a policy of instant deletion when it came to emails and texts from Liam, so I’ve got no record of where it was.’

  ‘Hang on – surely Liam would remember where the two of you stayed in a hotel? He doesn’t spend every night in a different city, does he?’

  ‘No, he doesn’t. And yes, I’m absolutely convinced he remembers and even more convinced he’ll never part with the information. Soon as I made the connection between the book I was given at a gig and the murder investigation on the news, I rang Liam – from my car, on my way to get the other white book, the one I’d seen on the hospital noticeboard. I asked him where we spent our one and only night in a hotel together. He said, “Don’t you remember?” I told him I wouldn’t have needed to ask him if I remembered, would I? He said, “I see. In that case, I don’t remember either.” Bastard went out of his way to be unhelpful. I told him why I needed to know, but he said Billy and the murders had nothing to do with him.’

  I was supposed to provide Liam with hassle-free sex, not involve him in a murder investigation. Having screwed up in this respect, I was stupid to give him the chance to punish me for it. When I told DC Gibbs my secret – a lover who visited at night, while my husband was asleep upstairs – I made it sound daring, maybe even glamorous. I was too ashamed to add, ‘Oh, by the way: my ex-lover’s now refusing to tell me where it was that we spent that night together – he’d rather make me search the entire country for the hotel room we shared.’ Even thinking about saying it makes me shudder. I don’t mind people thinking of me as immoral but I’d rather no one knew I’d been made a fool of.

  So why tell Charlie all this? You didn’t have to.

  ‘You didn’t suggest to your husband that he miss that gig and come to the next one instead?’ asks Charlie. ‘It must have been stressful having them both in the same room.’

  ‘It wasn’t great. I hoped Gabe’d change his mind about coming with me that night, but … we were trying to save our marriage at the time. Well, Gabe was trying. I’m not sure what I was doing. Gabe’s got a drug … issue. I call it a problem, he doesn’t. He’s a committed weed-head. I’d been telling him for years that I’d leave if he didn’t give it up, and he’d tried to wriggle out of it a million different ways. His latest line was, “Well, you’re away all the time on tour – what am I supposed to do when I’m bored and lonely?” So I said, “Okay then, come on the road with me.” I didn’t really want him there, moaning about having to watch the same set over and over, but if the only way to stop him smoking that crap was not letting him out of my sight …’ I sigh. ‘It didn’t work. Nothing worked apart from leaving him. Now I don’t give a shit how much he smokes. It’s his problem. Non-problem, I should say, since it’s now his alone to define.’

  Charlie’s signalling to come off the motorway.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘I’m stopping to ring Simon. He needs to know this. Liam didn’t mind coming along to an event where you were with your husband?’

  ‘God, no. Liam knew he was getting laid that night, knew Gabe was going home after the gig. That was all he cared about.’

  ‘I bet he was pleased to be the chosen one,’ Charlie says.

  ‘I wouldn’t count on it. I’m not sure Liam’s ever happy, sad, angry, guilty. He doesn’t show any emotion at all. I called him the sex robot.’

  Charlie smiles as we pull into the car park of a disused Little Chef with boarded-up windows and part of its sign missing.

  She says a quick hello to Simon when he picks up, then passes her phone to me. ‘Tell him exactly what you’ve just told me.’

  I assume she doesn’t want me to include the sex robot part, so I stick to the facts.

  ‘You’re saying Liam Sturridge was with you the night you were given a white book by a man you didn’t recognise?’ Simon asks.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The night you told Gibbs about – the room you described, but didn’t remember where it was. You’re saying that as well as your husband, Liam Sturridge, your … boyfriend at the time, was in that room?’

  Haven’t I just answered that question? ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Your husband went home after the gig, correct?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve already told you that.’

  ‘I’m asking again. Your story’s changed, so I need to start from scratch.’

  ‘No, you don’t. Everything I told you before still stands. Just make one addition: Liam Sturridge, there that night.’

  ‘Who left the venue first, Liam or your husband?’

  ‘Gabe, obviously. Liam stayed there because he knew he and I would be going on to the hotel.’

  ‘Which hotel?’

  ‘I don’t know its name. Or where it was. You know this! That’s why I told Charlie about Liam, so that you could ask him. He remembers, and he wouldn’t tell me, but he might tell you.’

  ‘Can you tell me anything about the hotel at all?’

  ‘Are you serious? I’ve already—’

  ‘What can you tell me about that hotel?’

  ‘The bed in my room was too narrow! Not a proper double. As you already know.’

  ‘Did Liam Sturridge share that narrow bed with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Until what time in the morning?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe … eight, eight thirty?’

  ‘Didn’t he have work the next morning?’

  ‘I don’t remember. He’d been at a work team-building thing that day … I’m not sure about the day after. Why don’t you ask him?’

  ‘I will.’

  Beside me, Charlie lights a cigarette.

  ‘The white book you’d been given – where was it at this point?’ Waterhouse continues with his grilling. ‘In your bag at the hotel?’

  ‘No. I’ve told you, and I’ve told Gibbs: I either left it at the venue on the table or I chucked it in a bin there.’

  ‘So it wasn’t among your possessions at the hotel?’

  ‘I’ve just answered that question.’

  ‘Could it have been among Liam’s possessions? What if he picked it up at the gig after you discarded it? Is that possible?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  Charlie takes the phone from my hand. ‘Enough, Simon,’ she says. ‘Calm down. We’ll ring you from the hotel in a bit.’

  I watch her press the end-call button. Thank God for that.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘It’s the buzz of an influx of new information. There’s been a lot today. He gets like that, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Please don’t say I have to speak to him again today. Please.’

  She laughs.

  Let me say upfront that I approve of Simon Waterhouse. He’s a frighteningly intelligent force for good, and I’m glad he exists. I’ve also never had such a powerful feeling of escape successfully achieved as I did when he declared our second telephone conversation of the day – much longer and more laborious than the first – to be over. There was a catch, however: what had struggled free from his sustained interrogation was not the richly complex person I’d been beforehand but a squinting husk whose brain matter had largely been sucked out through an invisible straw.

  I lay down on the bed in my room at the Bradley Park Hotel in Milton Keynes – a place with nice big beds and therefore not The One but simply the one for tonight – and stared at the ceiling, allowing myself to drift into a welcome trance state. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t close my eyes. I needed an urgent transfusion of everything it was possible to transfuse.

  Charlie laughed as if it were the funniest thing ever, and told me that conversations with Simon were often like that and I shouldn’t take it personally. Other times, she said, he clammed up and could hardly be persuaded to say a word. It depended on how close he was to an answer: very close and he’d go quiet, too busy thinking. Endlessly browbeating people with questions was what he did when he was angry about getting closer but still not being close enough.

  As I lay there listening to this, I thought to myself, ‘This is the man who called his wife obsessive for wanting to know what her sister’s lying about, who says it’s none of their business and they should be content to remain blissfully ignorant.’

  If that’s what he thinks, then why wasn’t it his attitude from the start? Why had he agreed to follow Liv and Gibbs to Cambridge? Charlie said he seemed to want to solve the mystery as much as she did at that stage. And then he changed his mind, for no apparent reason?

  I didn’t believe it. The man I’d just been grilled by on the phone would never decide he didn’t want to know the answer. Never. Whether it was a professional matter or a personal one.

  The most likely explanation for his change of heart seemed so obvious to me, I couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to Charlie: whatever was going on with Liv and Gibbs and this other couple, Simon already knew.

  He knew, and he’d decided it was best if Charlie never found out.

  Loyalty

  from Stories of Enlightenment

  There were three friends who lived on the same street: Amelia, Pearl and Jasmine. They met for coffee every morning, jogged around the local park together every weekend and went out for cocktails together on Friday nights.

  One morning, Amelia arrived at Pearl’s house for coffee (they took turns to host and it was Pearl’s turn) and was shocked to find both Pearl and Jasmine in tears. ‘What on earth is wrong?’ Amelia asked.

  Pearl and Jasmine told Amelia that a new neighbor, Tara, had sent them each a poison pen letter full of horrible insults.

  ‘Why did she do that?’ asked Amelia. ‘And how do you know the letters were from her?’

  Apparently another neighbor had seen Tara putting the notes in Pearl and Jasmine’s mail boxes.

  ‘She thought no one was looking,’ said Pearl.

  ‘She did it because she’s jealous,’ said Jasmine. ‘She’s got a thing about you, Amelia. She knows we’re your best friends, which is what she wants to be. She hasn’t got any friends at all.’

  ‘Oh dear! How awful,’ said Amelia. Then she said, ‘Wait! I’ve got a fantastic idea.’ She ran back to her house and made a few secret phone calls.

  The next morning, when Jasmine and Pearl arrived at Amelia’s house for coffee, Amelia presented each of them with a gorgeous puppy. Pearl’s was a miniature English bull terrier: white with a black circle around one eye, and one black ear. Jasmine’s was a lilac horse-coat shar pei. Both women squealed with delight and rushed over to give Amelia a hug. They forgot all about the poison pen letters Tara had sent them and cheered up immediately.

  Later that day, Amelia took a bassett hound puppy round to Tara’s house. ‘You’re obviously feeling miserable if you’re sending poison pen letters,’ she said. ‘Here’s a gift for you: a lovely dog. He will give you lots of love and cheer you up!’

  Tara was incredibly touched. ‘Thank you,’ she said, cuddling the puppy against her body. Amelia left feeling happy. She was sure that Tara would never again send a poison pen letter. The basset hound would be her new best friend, and he’d enable her to make other friends too while she was out walking him.

  The next day, over coffee, Amelia told Pearl and Jasmine about Tara and the bassett hound. Their reactions could not have been more different. ‘That’s such a neat idea,’ said Pearl. ‘I know how much I already love my puppy after only one day. No one with this much love inside them could sit down and write a vicious letter. Let’s hope you’ve solved all Tara’s problems, and all of ours too.’