“According to the case notes in Hannah Blundy’s office, he knows she hates traveling by train and avoids it when she can, but not the real reason why. Apparently if he’s with her on the train, or plane, she doesn’t get quite so frightened. On Tuesday, she’d have had to take the train to London alone. I’ll tell you something else about Nicki Clements, and this I really can’t prove, but I know I’m right,” Simon added recklessly. “Subconsciously, she wants to get in trouble for things associated with her car. She smashes off her side mirror, tells us she’s been driving around without one when it’s not true and we can prove it easily with CCTV. Why doesn’t this occur to her? She takes topless photos of herself in her car, and lets herself get caught. Why does she take that risk? She might be phobic about being driven, but deep down she doesn’t trust herself to drive either. Chronically low self-esteem. She fears she’s not fit to take charge, to make decisions—”

Proust laid his head down on the table in front of him with a bang. He left it there.

“She fears being punished for wrongdoing involving her car, but she invites such punishments with her behavior,” Simon went on. “Like a lightning rod, she attracts the trouble that she dreads. It sounds contradictory, but it isn’t. There’s not much space between what we fear and what we fantasize about.”

“All right, so Hannah Blundy was Nicki Clements’s therapist, and Nicki’s got low self-esteem,” said Sellers. “So what?”

Simon nodded. He too was eager to get to the point. “King Edward—Reuben Tasker—murdered Damon Blundy in the way he did because of something Nicki said to him. The only people who know about that thing are Nicki, Tasker and Hannah Blundy—because, as her patient, in the process of telling her the whole sorry tale, Nicki told her. From Nicki’s point of view, since Hannah lived with Blundy and had easy access to him, and in theory could have found out that her patient ‘Melissa’ was screwing her husband, even though she wasn’t, it looks as if Hannah might be a suspect. Though Nicki was clever enough to nominate King Edward as her prime suspect.”

“So . . . what was this thing Nicki said that inspired a murder?” Gibbs asked.

“No, what Nicki said didn’t inspire the murder itself,” Simon clarified. “King—Sorry, Reuben Tasker killed Damon Blundy for the reasons Nicki outlines in her reply to Charlie’s ‘Woman with a Secret’ ad—jealousy, mainly. Having presented himself to Nicki as Damon-Blundy-the-love-object, Tasker then couldn’t forgive the real Damon Blundy for being the illegitimate beneficiary of Nicki’s love.”

“But you said—”