Take a look at your happiest friend. The one who is always bloody smiling. All the goddamned time. The one who always seems so pleased to see you, even though she saw you on the school run in the morning and has just bumped into you at the supermarket. You know the one, she’s got the most friends on social media. There are pictures of her kids and her baking and her crazy nights out. She goes on holiday and takes selfies of her and her husband kissing on the beach. She gets on with her mother. She is sociable, always out having coffee in the day and prosecco at night. She finds time to work out and hashtag her ‘fitfam’ with a picture of her new leggings.

You think she is blessed. That she leads a charmed life. That she is lucky.

Luckier than you.

You accept it because it is written down. The camera doesn’t lie, right?

What if you didn’t just accept it as true? What if you dug a little deeper? Maybe you’d see that loads of friends means they are all surface relationships, that the happiest person in the world has nobody to share their deeper emotions with. Perhaps you’d notice something in the family pictures that suggests they are more content with their children than they are with their partner. Or you’d work out that going out so much means the children are often neglected – she’s not taking pictures of them fighting or shouting at her and not doing as they’re told.

Your happiest friend is lying and you are buying it.

So who’s fault is it that you don’t understand her guilt at having an affair? Is it her for not telling the truth to the world, or is it yours for not taking the time to notice and dig a little deeper?

How are you to know what the Doctor feels like when she loses a patient or how one lover deals with his wife’s one-time indiscretion? How do we get to the bottom of the Poet’s Oedipal complex?

How can we help anyone when so many people are lying?

To themselves.

About themselves.

And now everybody is lying about those nine people who jumped off that bridge. For the same reason they lie about their own life. They don’t want you to see the worst in them.

Seeing the worst can mean seeing the truth, seeing the beauty.

It’s the only way this is getting cleared up.

61

Detective Sergeant Pace is at his third session.

Detective Sergeant Pace has started to talk.

‘And your relationship began to develop into something more personal?’

‘That’s what they want you to find out, right? Whether I ended up fucking the wife of a suspected murderer? See if I’ve compromised myself somehow and can’t be trusted to do my job properly.’