After she’d put his shoes back on to his feet, she started to clean everything up. And I bet at this point you’re laughing a little bitterly and thinking, Of course she cleaned. But it was absolutely needed. It turns out both versions of me were born for this.

Cleaning everything took us until twenty to six, a good hour and a half after I’d first woken up and found him. Getting up early is clearly the first habit of successful justice perverters.

The final and biggest problem we both had was the mattress, which was still steeped in blood. She was equal to this, though. She used my hair dryer on a cool setting to blow-dry it. By the time she’d finished, it left only a smudge on her hand if she pressed it hard. None of it showed once she’d got the spare duvet and pillows out and made it up again.

That other version of me stayed right up until the police arrived. She was there with me, telling me what to say. Guiding me. Stopping me from messing everything up.

And I know you’re going to be certain, now, that there’s something wrong with me. That this constant dissociation with myself shows that I’m deeply damaged. But I’m starting to understand that these parts of me come into being out of necessity. That life, and the people in it, sometimes just push me too hard.

So whatever you think of my other personas, I’ll tell you this: I miss them intensely now that they’ve left me. Each of them did, in their way, what I so badly wanted you to do, Niall. They made me feel like everything would be OK.

19

With Lightman volunteering to check up on Niall Reakes’s trip to Geneva, and O’Malley on coffee duty, Hanson was free to investigate what she chose. She needed to take her mind off that black car in the car park and, more particularly, off her own adrenaline-filled reaction to it. Off the way it was all getting to her.

Alex Plaskitt’s tower computer was still on O’Malley’s desk, sitting at an angle on top of some paperwork. She had his laptop case perched on her own. Between the two machines, they had all of Alex’s videos to work through, and she might as well get on with them.

She hesitated over which to start with and chose the laptop. This was, presumably, where any more recent, unedited footage would be found. She knew finding something significant was a long shot, but at the very least she hoped to understand more about the man and his frame of mind. Something to tell her whether he might have wanted to sleep with Louise Reakes, and whether he could ever have been violent.