It occurs to me, having written this all out, that I understand you better tonight than I have ever understood you. I understand why you’ve been so angry with me for so long, and that it hasn’t really been about my drinking, or my desperation for a child. It’s had nothing to do with the times I couldn’t help tidying when you just wanted to relax.

It explains not only your anger, but also your swift belief that I’d cheated. That I’d killed. Because if you could be angry with me, it exonerated you, didn’t it, Niall? Nothing that you’d done could ever be as bad as that, and that left you free from guilt.

But anyway, back to that phone call. The bit I kept forgetting about was the start of it, when I waited for five rings for you to pick up. Waited with a dial tone in my ear that was not the long, irritating beep of an international call, but which was instead the standard double-chirrup of a bloody UK one. Long before you should have even boarded a plane home, you were back in this country, and had probably been back before any of this shit even happened.

You lied, and it took a police interrogation to make me realise the truth. I wonder how I can have been so slow.

23

Louise hadn’t even tried to hold out on them. When Jonah asked her, sharply, what it was that she’d realised, she had looked at him, her eyes large and unfocused, and said flatly, ‘Niall wasn’t in Geneva.’

They’d got a few more words out of her before Patrick Moorcroft had intervened and demanded a private conversation with his client. But they had heard enough.

‘We need to get confirmation from the airline,’ Jonah said to Lightman, as they walked rapidly back to CID. ‘Find out when he did actually arrive back, and see if we can trace him to Southampton on Friday night. Get O’Malley on to it.’

‘Of course,’ Lightman answered, a little awkwardly. ‘Sorry. I’ve dropped the ball. I should have pushed the airline earlier …’

‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing,’ Jonah said. ‘We’d already taken steps to prove he was at the conference and it seemed to tie in. He went to great efforts to cover his tracks. The big question is why.’

‘Given his immediate assumption of an affair,’ Lightman commented, ‘could he have been trying to catch Louise out?’