How fragile we are, I thought. How simple to rip something apart.

A marriage, a skull.

It all comes apart so easily. It is all so simple to destroy.

‘We have you on CCTV at the hotel,’ DI Ure said, gently retrieving the photograph of the dead man, as if saving it for later. ‘You were at the Langham on the day that James Caine died. Isn’t that true, Mr Carver?’

I licked my lips.

‘We know it’s true, son,’ the old sergeant smiled. ‘The CCTV doesn’t lie. Sometimes it misses the odd thing, but it never lies. You went up there to have a word with him, didn’t you?’

‘Is that right, Mr Carver?’ DI Ure said. ‘Do you have a short fuse?’

It was time to tell them the truth.

‘Only when someone threatens my family,’ I said. ‘Are you going to turn on your tape?’

The young detective exchanged a quick look with the old sergeant.

‘My boss is about to get here,’ she said. ‘We’ll wait for him.’

And that is when I understood.

DI Ure was the warm-up act.

The police were just getting started on me.

18

Tara

‘I’ve seen you before,’ James Caine’s wife said in my office.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I’ve seen you sleeping. On Jim’s phone.’

Jim. He was Jim, was he? Not to me, never to me.

‘Jim wasn’t one of these men who attempted to hide his affairs,’ his wife – his widow – said. ‘They are not all men, of course! I think he was proud that he could get so many women to spread their legs for him after knowing him for five minutes. Or bend over the minibar. Excuse my vulgarity. I have been up all night. I had to identify the body, you see. And my daughter has not gone to school today. She has exams that will shape her life coming up. But she can’t leave her bedroom. And she can’t stop crying.’

We stared at each other. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ I said at last.

There was a kind of deep-frozen politeness about her. ‘Oh no you’re not, if you don’t mind me saying. You must be glad Jim’s dead. If you are anything like the rest of them. The ones who turned up at the house – always shocked – so shocked! – to discover that they were not the first whore to turn up ranting and raving on our doorstep! That we get it all the time! Always so pathetically surprised to learn that there was nothing remotely special about them, that we’d had Jim’s whores at the door before.’

We can threaten to go to his home, Ginger had said, as if no one had ever thought of that move before, as if it would solve everything.

‘My daughter grew up with the whores at the door,’ Sandy Caine said.

‘I’m not a whore, Mrs Caine.’

‘Sorry. It’s just a figure of speech. You have to understand – Jim was an addict. Not addicted to the sex. I always thought that it wasn’t much to do with the sex. He could take it or leave the sex. But the romance! The newness of it all! And the control. He loved the control. Perhaps you noticed the way he enjoyed taking over some unsuspecting woman’s life. And falling in love again. Or kidding himself he was in love, even if he didn’t know the woman. And he didn’t, did he, dear?’ She made a noise, somewhere between a laugh and a snort of incredulous disbelief. ‘He didn’t even fucking know you.’