He used to say that to me too. Why didn’t I just put the phone down?

‘You’re the best,’ he said.

He hadn’t said that to me for a very long time.

‘Stop! Stop!’ he cried, and for a moment I thought perhaps his conscience had got the better of him – he was thinking of me, he couldn’t go through with it. ‘I have to fuck you!’

I know, put the phone down, right? But I couldn’t, Dr. R. Instead I listened to the muffled sounds of clothes being shed, zips being opened, snatched frenzied breaths. I’d been thrown on the floor now.

‘Oh my God, you do it for me. Oh those knickers, those white knickers, you just do it for me . . . everything about you does it for me . . .’

I stood there rigid, phone at my ear, listening to the frantic gasps, the little shrieks to the peaks, the painful pleasure at the summit, the shudders and sighs of satiation during the long trip back down.

And then I heard it: cheep cheep, cheep cheep went the cuckoo clock.

Yes, that was the shock, Dr. R. That was why my hair fell out: my husband and my best friend were fucking.

Chapter 13

That night, Emma lay in bed, Hotel du Lac in her hand. She was so tired. She’d worked a fourteen-hour day: after she’d left Connie she’d had meetings – they were expecting a statement from her soon on the Mortensen case – and a brief appearance in court on a case that had been dragging on for months, plus a mountain of paperwork. Her eyes had slipped across the same sentence for the umpteenth time before finally closing. Her current page rate was pathetic – not even a page a night before she conked out – but it helped distract her mind from the indelibility of the real plot: what pushes a loving mother to breaking point. In this slumber her mind began to free-flow: the night sky on Hungerford Bridge, that kiss, real kissing, white knickers . . .

She let the book rest on her chest for a moment, vaguely aware of the sounds of Si pottering about next door. She didn’t have the energy to think about it but something wasn’t right between them; they were distant with each other and what was worse, neither of them appeared to mind the fact. This had become the normality; when he wasn’t working he was playing squash or was at rehearsal, and she barely seemed to be at home; her work was more demanding than ever. She would put some effort into them tomorrow. They really should do something together. She would make sure they did – the cinema perhaps, or a play. What was it Connie had said about art? She couldn’t remember.