There was nothing quite as unnervingly silent as the silence of a therapy room, thought Cassie, trying not to fidget under the kind but unrelenting gaze of Pauline Martinez.
She had considered quietly cancelling her second session with the shrink, blaming workload, but Doug had asked her how it was going only the previous day so she’d decided better to grin and bear it.
After some small talk about work, followed by one of Pauline’s trademark yawning silences, Cassie found herself offloading about how she’d poisoned her father with zinc, and how bad it had left her feeling.
‘Killing him with kindness,’ said Pauline with a rueful look.
‘Almost literally. I mean how stupid was I?! I know how crap Callum is at reading instructions, and how dangerous mineral supplements can be in excess.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve got to be more on the ball with him. He’s not a healthy man.’
‘Do you always call him Callum?’
Only when I’m feeling conflicted about him.
‘I guess I’m still getting used to having a father,’ she said instead. ‘And I’ve been stressing about my boyfriend. He wants us to live together and I’m not sure it would work out. It never has before.’
‘Why do you think that is?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Cassie impatiently, having turned it over in her mind a thousand times. ‘I like my own space, I guess. Maybe I just don’t need other people? I’ll probably end up one of those old ladies who picks up other people’s rubbish in the street.’
She didn’t mention the dead magpie she’d rescued from the towpath after her first Pauline session. Unable to leave him there amid the discarded fried-chicken boxes and fag ends, she’d taken him home and stowed him in the freezer compartment of her fridge for now.
‘What are you worried will happen if you move in with your boyfriend?’
‘That he’ll end up leaving.’ She spoke without thinking, but it was the truth.
‘That you’ll lose him.’
‘. . . I suppose so, yes. I mean why can’t we just keep things as they are?’
She remembered something her grandmother had said to her when she was a teenager: ‘Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’ It had made her quietly furious: it was patently obvious that you’d be better off never exposing yourself to loss in the first place.
‘The risk is too great?’ Pauline asked.
‘Yes! I mean I see it every day in my job, what people go through losing the ones they love.’
Pauline nodded, considering this. ‘And do you think they would be better off never having loved the person who died?’
Cassie blew out a breath. If you put it like that . . . Would Acantha and Seffy have been better off if their mother had died when they were babies? Would Becka Bennett’s grieving husband Dan be wishing right now that he’d never met her?
‘You’ve known a lot of loss in your life,’ said Pauline. ‘It’s only natural you should respond by trying to protect yourself from any more – by not letting your father, your boyfriend, get too close. All relationships involve risk but perhaps you need to consider what you stand to lose by closing off what they offer.’
For some reason, what came into Cassie’s mind wasn’t Archie or her dad, but the severely beautiful geometry of Phyllida Flyte’s face.
*
Cassie made her way back to the mortuary, taking the longer route along the canal. The sun was making an effort to break through and the occasional peep and squawk of the waterbirds, the shhh of the water lapping against the canal-side soothed her.
Then her phone rang. No name, but the number didn’t look like spam so she answered, warily.
‘It’s Bethany Locke. You said I could call you.’
Interesting.
‘Absolutely. How are you doing?’
‘I don’t know why I’m calling,’ Bethany said. ‘I barely know you but it feels like apart from me you’re . . . closer to Sean than anyone? Probably sounds daft.’
‘Not daft at all,’ said Cassie. The bereaved did sometimes felt an instant intimacy with the person who’d last handled the person they’d loved. ‘Sometimes a stranger is the best kind of sounding board.’
‘I think I’m in trouble.’ A hoarse sigh. ‘The cops, they think I was involved in Sean’s death.’
‘Really?’ Sensing something performative in Bethany’s emotion, Cassie repressed the urge to say, And were you?
‘Yes. You don’t have any idea why they would think that?’ she went on.
So that was it. Bethany had called to pick her brain about what the cops knew.
‘I’m sorry but I have no idea,’ said Cassie. ‘They’re hardly gonna tell me something like that.’
‘They must have questioned you though, since you were the one who found Sean?’
A detail that hadn’t been made public. Probably Bethany had played grieving fiancée and batted her falsies at one of the cops – probably that tool Willets – and he’d let slip about Cassie having found the body. Was Bethany the figure she’d glimpsed on the bridge that time? Might she even have been the intruder who’d left a citrusy scent in the cabin?
‘Yep, they did,’ said Cassie, keeping her voice unconcerned. ‘They wanted to know if I’d seen or heard anything.’
‘And you hadn’t?’
‘Uh-uh . . . So what is it that makes you think they suspect you?’
‘I knew he was selling steroids at his gym but I told the cops I had nothing to do with it.’ Sounding vehement. A pause before she added, ‘I think he got in too deep, pissed off some drug gang and got himself killed. But I suppose I’m an easier target. You hear of innocent people going down for stuff all the time, don’t you?’
Thinking of the seventeen years Callum spent inside for something he didn’t do, Cassie couldn’t disagree. But at the same time she wasn’t convinced that Bethany was an entirely innocent person.