Tom

That was the question that came first to him.

What was she doing?

There was a why, too, but that could wait. For now he needed to know what she was trying to accomplish.

‘What am I doing?’ she said. ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? I’m arranging your suicide.’

Through his brain fog one word registered above all the others.

‘Suicide?’

‘Yes. Poor Tom, too many sleepless nights, the stress of fatherhood, the worry about his wife’s involvement with the serial killer: he’s been behaving erratically. Aggressive, some days. Depressed, others. Hurting his baby. Bruising her. And now – well, now he’s – tragically – taken his own life.’

‘No one will believe it,’ Tom said. ‘No one will believe I did any of that.’

‘Really? That’s not what Kay thinks. Or Nadia. I’ve been explaining to them for a while how worried I am. When you finally go through with it, they won’t be surprised at all. All the evidence will be there, in plain sight.’

‘What evidence? I didn’t do anything!’

‘As I said. I’ve been telling them the opposite. How you’ve been threatening me – that message you sent saying you’d do whatever it took to protect Joanna was perfect, by the way, I managed to make that look like a threat, and I told them how scared I was that you were falling apart, that you wanted to hurt me and Jo. That there was a new bruise, since we arrived here. Who else could it be?’

‘I’d never hurt Jo.’

‘I know that,’ she said. ‘But no one else does. The picture I painted told the opposite story. And the picture is what people see. Whether it is real or not is irrelevant.’

‘But I didn’t do anything.’

‘This isn’t sinking in, is it Tom? I know you didn’t, but so what? It was me, but no one will ever know that.’

His head spun. He couldn’t get a grasp on what she was saying. None of it made sense. ‘It was you? You hurt our baby?’

‘Yes. I wanted a way to show how you’d been gradually losing it, got frustrated at her for not letting you sleep, until you lost control and started pinching her. So I gave her the bruises and started to make it look like you were the guilty one.’ She paused, her head tilted as though she was deep in thought. ‘I must say, I enjoyed it.’

‘How? How could you enjoy hurting a baby?’

‘It was interesting.’

‘Interesting?’

‘Yes. Seeing whether they feel pain.’

‘Of course babies feel pain!’

‘In the way animals do, yes. But do they really understand it?’

‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with you?’