I lay down on the bed in my room at the Bradley Park Hotel in Milton Keynes – a place with nice big beds and therefore not The One but simply the one for tonight – and stared at the ceiling, allowing myself to drift into a welcome trance state. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t close my eyes. I needed an urgent transfusion of everything it was possible to transfuse.

Charlie laughed as if it were the funniest thing ever, and told me that conversations with Simon were often like that and I shouldn’t take it personally. Other times, she said, he clammed up and could hardly be persuaded to say a word. It depended on how close he was to an answer: very close and he’d go quiet, too busy thinking. Endlessly browbeating people with questions was what he did when he was angry about getting closer but still not being close enough.

As I lay there listening to this, I thought to myself, ‘This is the man who called his wife obsessive for wanting to know what her sister’s lying about, who says it’s none of their business and they should be content to remain blissfully ignorant.’

If that’s what he thinks, then why wasn’t it his attitude from the start? Why had he agreed to follow Liv and Gibbs to Cambridge? Charlie said he seemed to want to solve the mystery as much as she did at that stage. And then he changed his mind, for no apparent reason?

I didn’t believe it. The man I’d just been grilled by on the phone would never decide he didn’t want to know the answer. Never. Whether it was a professional matter or a personal one.

The most likely explanation for his change of heart seemed so obvious to me, I couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to Charlie: whatever was going on with Liv and Gibbs and this other couple, Simon already knew.

He knew, and he’d decided it was best if Charlie never found out.

Loyalty

from Stories of Enlightenment

There were three friends who lived on the same street: Amelia, Pearl and Jasmine. They met for coffee every morning, jogged around the local park together every weekend and went out for cocktails together on Friday nights.

One morning, Amelia arrived at Pearl’s house for coffee (they took turns to host and it was Pearl’s turn) and was shocked to find both Pearl and Jasmine in tears. ‘What on earth is wrong?’ Amelia asked.

Pearl and Jasmine told Amelia that a new neighbor, Tara, had sent them each a poison pen letter full of horrible insults.

‘Why did she do that?’ asked Amelia. ‘And how do you know the letters were from her?’

Apparently another neighbor had seen Tara putting the notes in Pearl and Jasmine’s mail boxes.

‘She thought no one was looking,’ said Pearl.