My heart was fluttering like a trapped bird. I couldn’t speak, because all I could see at that moment was myself, slouched in the underpass, blood on my hands. Blood on my hands. Mine, surely? It had to be mine. I looked up at Gaskill, saw his eyes on mine and knew that I had to say something quickly to stop him reading my mind. “I didn’t do anything.” I said. “I didn’t. I just . . . I just wanted to see my husband . . .”

“Your ex-husband,” Gaskill corrected me again. He pulled a photograph out of his jacket pocket and showed it to me. It was a picture of Megan. “Did you see this woman on Saturday night?” he asked. I stared at it for a long time. It felt so surreal having her presented to me like that, the perfect blonde I’d watched, whose life I’d constructed and deconstructed in my head. It was a close-up head shot, a professional job. Her features were a little heavier than I’d imagined, not quite so fine as those of the Jess in my head. “Ms. Watson? Did you see her?”

I didn’t know if I’d seen her. I honestly didn’t know. I still don’t.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“You don’t think so? So you might have seen her?”

“I . . . I’m not sure.”

“Had you been drinking on Saturday evening?” he asked. “Before you went to Witney, had you been drinking?”

The heat came rushing back to my face. “Yes,” I said.

“Mrs. Watson—Anna Watson—said that she thought you were drunk when she saw you outside her home. Were you drunk?”

“No,” I said, keeping my eyes firmly on the detective so that I didn’t catch Cathy’s eye. “I’d had a couple of drinks in the afternoon, but I wasn’t drunk.”

Gaskill sighed. He seemed disappointed in me. He glanced over at Neck Acne, then back at me. Slowly, deliberately, he got to his feet and pushed the chair back to its position under the table. “If you remember anything about Saturday night, anything that might be helpful to us, would you please call me?” he said, handing me a business card.

As Gaskill nodded sombrely at Cathy, preparing to leave, I slumped back into the sofa. I could feel my heart rate starting to slow, and then it raced again as I heard him ask me, “You work in public relations, is that correct? Huntingdon Whitely?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Huntingdon Whitely.”

He is going to check, and he is going to know I lied. I can’t let him find out for himself, I have to tell him.

So that’s what I’m going to do this morning. I’m going to go round to the police station to come clean. I’m going to tell him everything: that I lost my job months ago, that I was very drunk on Saturday night and I have no idea what time I came home. I’m going to say what I should have said last night: that he’s looking in the wrong direction. I’m going to tell him that I believe Megan Hipwell was having an affair.

EVENING

The police think I’m a rubbernecker. They think I’m a stalker, a nutcase, mentally unstable. I should never have gone to the police station. I’ve made my own situation worse and I don’t think I’ve helped Scott, which was the reason I went there in the first place. He needs my help, because it’s obvious the police will suspect that he’s done something to her, and I know it isn’t true, because I know him. I really feel that, crazy as it sounds. I’ve seen the way he is with her. He couldn’t hurt her.

OK, so helping Scott was not my sole reason for going to the police. There was the matter of the lie, which needed sorting out. The lie about my working for Huntingdon Whitely.

It took me ages to get up the courage to go into the station. I was on the verge of turning back and going home a dozen times, but eventually I went in. I asked the desk sergeant if I could speak to Detective Inspector Gaskill, and he showed me to a stuffy waiting room, where I sat for over an hour until someone came to get me. By that time I was sweating and trembling like a woman on her way to the scaffold. I was shown into another room, smaller and stuffier still, windowless and airless. I was left there alone for a further ten minutes before Gaskill and a woman, also in plain clothes, turned up. Gaskill greeted me politely; he didn’t seem surprised to see me. He introduced his companion as Detective Sergeant Riley. She is younger than I am, tall, slim, dark-haired, pretty in a sharp-featured, vulpine sort of way. She did not return my smile.

We all sat down and nobody said anything; they just looked at me expectantly.

“I remembered the man,” I said. “I told you there was a man at the station. I can describe him.” Riley raised her eyebrows ever so slightly and shifted in her seat. “He was about medium height, medium build, reddish hair. I slipped on the steps and he caught my arm.” Gaskill leaned forward, his elbows on the table, hands clasped together in front of his mouth. “He was wearing . . . I think he was wearing a blue shirt.”

This is not actually true. I do remember a man, and I’m pretty sure he had reddish hair, and I think that he smiled at me, or smirked at me, when I was on the train. I think that he got off at Witney, and I think he might have spoken to me. It’s possible I might have slipped on the steps. I have a memory of it, but I can’t tell whether the memory belongs to Saturday night or to another time. There have been many slips, on many staircases. I have no idea what he was wearing.

The detectives were not impressed with my tale. Riley gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head. Gaskill unclasped his hands and spread them out, palms upwards, in front of him. “OK. Is that really what you came here to tell me, Ms. Watson?” he asked. There was no anger in his tone, he sounded almost encouraging. I wished that Riley would go away. I could talk to him; I could trust him.

“I don’t work for Huntingdon Whitely any longer,” I said.

“Oh.” He leaned back in his seat, looking more interested.

“I left three months ago. My flatmate—well, she’s my landlady, really—I haven’t told her. I’m trying to find another job. I didn’t want her to know because I thought she would worry about the rent. I have some money. I can pay my rent, but . . . Anyway, I lied to you yesterday about my job and I apologize for that.”

Riley leaned forward and gave me an insincere smile. “I see. You no longer work for Huntingdon Whitely. You don’t work for anyone, is that right? You’re unemployed?” I nodded. “OK. So . . . you’re not registered to collect unemployment benefits, nothing like that?”

“No.”

“And . . . your flatmate, she hasn’t noticed that you don’t go to work every day?”

“I do. I mean, I don’t go to the office, but I go into London, the way I used to, at the same time and everything, so that she . . . so that she won’t know.” Riley glanced at Gaskill; he kept his eyes on my face, the hint of a frown between his eyes. “It sounds odd, I know . . .” I said, and I tailed off then, because it doesn’t just sound odd, it sounds insane when you say it out loud.

“Right. So, you pretend to go to work every day?” Riley asked me, her brow knitted, too, as though she were concerned about me. As though she thought I was completely deranged. I didn’t speak or nod or do anything, I kept silent. “Can I ask why you left your job, Ms. Watson?”

There was no point in lying. If they hadn’t intended to check out my employment record before this conversation, they bloody well would now. “I was fired,” I said.

“You were dismissed,” Riley said, a note of satisfaction in her voice. It was obviously the answer she’d anticipated. “Why was that?”

I gave a little sigh and appealed to Gaskill. “Is this really important? Does it matter why I left my job?”

Gaskill didn’t say anything, he was consulting some notes that Riley had pushed in front of him, but he did give the slightest shake of his head. Riley changed tack.