It took three glasses of wine to stop me worrying about that bank statement. And then another three to make me calm enough to be normal when you got home. To make you dinner and to listen with a smile as you told me about the rheumatologist you’d converted into a champion for your drugs. I did my job well, I think, because you came over to me as I was clearing away, and smoothed my hair back out of my face. Your eyes studied me, and you said, ‘Love you, Lou,’ for the first time since our honeymoon.

And then, instead of having a difficult conversation, we made love, then put crap comedy on the upstairs TV and lay next to each other. It felt like a dangerous corner that I’d managed to swing into and out of. It felt like I’d made the right decision.

Perhaps I was wrong to hide it. Perhaps you had actually been waiting for a chance to talk about it. It might have been a massive relief for you, and it would have become our problem instead of yours. You might have thanked me for forcing it out into the open, instead of telling me I shouldn’t have been looking at your mail.

But I feel that your behaviour since Alex Plaskitt’s death has proved all my fears justified. Don’t you?

13

O’Malley agreed to take April Dumont’s information over the phone. What the DCI wanted from her now was a simple account of what Louise Reakes had done the night before.

‘Ask me anything you want,’ she said, firmly. ‘I can tell you she has no earthly thing to do with some poor guy’s death.’

Anyone, O’Malley thought, who described Southern US accents as soft or lilting needed to talk to April Dumont. This Tennessee twang was all hard edges and rapid rhythms. There was nothing remotely lilting about it.

‘What makes you say that? Has Louise told you she feels under suspicion?’

‘She messaged to say you’d dragged her into the station again,’ April said. ‘So I guess there’s something going on.’

‘Not so much that,’ O’Malley said in a soothing tone. ‘We just need to check things. That’s all. Due diligence and all that. Could you tell me if you’d arranged to meet someone at the club?’

‘No, we didn’t,’ she said. There was a momentary pause and a murmur. O’Malley caught the words ‘whisky sour’, and realised she must be in a bar somewhere. ‘That’s never what we do. It’s always just the two of us. And Louise wasn’t even that keen at first. I insisted we had to go out. I thought she needed cheering up, and, to be honest, I did, too.’

‘Why would Louise need cheering up?’