Maybe Susie did kill them and genuinely doesn’t remember. She often used to talk about patients who had blanked out committing their offenses because it was too painful. There’s nothing in post-traumatic stress disorder that says they can’t be responsible for the trauma; it just means that they were upset by it.

Still, possible possibles aside, I drove home happy. They announced on the radio that the remains of Donna McGovern, from Highfields in Leicester, had been found in Sutherland. I turned it off. I didn’t want to hear about that. Susie may have said terrible things about me and Yeni, but she’s not dead, she definitely wasn’t fucking Gow, and she wasn’t in love with him. I feel like I’ve been undivorced, uninsulted, uncuckolded. I’ve never felt more horny; it was like being a teenager again. Every time I passed an attractive woman on the drive home, I thought about Harry’s little blond mum. I’d think of her being a little bit pissed and out of order, giggling and pulling down the hem of her top so that her round little tits pop out. I’ve struggled all evening not to open the kitchen drawer and find the birthday party list. It’s eleven o’clock now, getting to the point where it’s much too late to phone. It would be dangerous to start anything just because I’m relieved. She could so easily go straight to the papers. I’ll leave it. I’ll leave it for a bit.

chapter twenty-eight

I DON’T WANT SUSIE EVER TO READ THIS, BUT I NEED TO WRITE about it. I’ve changed the computer password to “Marzip.” It wasn’t meant as a big symbolic gesture or a shift of loyalties or anything. It doesn’t mean anything, not at all. It’s just that wrappers from marzipan bars are lying around the desk and I’m a bit nervous today, my mind’s gone blank. I’ve slept with Yeni.

There, it’s in the file now. I slept with her and liked it. We stayed up all night having fun and being nice to each other. I know she’s young. I know she’s lonely, and she probably did it because of that, and I’m older and it’s wrong of me. But for the first time in weeks I was present in the moment, not speculating about the future or rewriting the past, and it felt like a month-long holiday.

I don’t want Susie to stumble across this file the way I did hers. I suppose it would be just as bad if she found the stuff I’ve written before, about not trusting her and how I felt during the visits. I’ll get rid of this computer. I’ll say this one’s broken and buy her a new one. I’ll pretend it’s a nice treat.

I said to Yeni this morning at five-thirty, “Yeni, we can’t have an affair, I do have a wife.”

And she said, “Hmm, Lachie, afster this day we’re not talk about it again. This… hmm.” She paused and dipped her chin to her bare knee as she tried to think of the words. “Friendly fuck, for friend.” And she stroked my face.

It sounds sordid when I write it down, but it wasn’t when she said it. It was tender and kind and sweet. Even her mustache looks kooky and sexy now. She is an amazing woman.

Before I left to drop Margie at nursery, I nipped back upstairs to her bedroom to tell her quickly that we were heading off. She was on her side, the duvet curled around her curves like a flattering strapless dress, her black hair fanned out over the white pillow. The moist air in the room was thick with pheromones and vigorous sweating. I crouched down and rolled my face into her soft hair, nuzzling her neck, and said I might come back from nursery and snuggle in beside her. She said no, she’d be asleep and now we were just friends. I love that. I keep wanting to wake her up and ask her if it’s still all right, if she still likes me, if I’m a horrible predatory old bastard. But it wasn’t me who started it.

I’d finished working up here at about eleven-thirty yesterday evening. I’d actually finished at eleven and went downstairs to get the phone. Bangor phoned to cancel our drinking session on Sunday: Evelyn’s taken Morris back and he’s not allowed out at night. She won’t even let him work evenings. I came straight back up here because I didn’t want to phone Harry’s mum. I read a bit of the book about women who marry murderers. Maybe I should have chugged off, but it didn’t occur to me. I thought Harry’s mum was the danger, not me.

When I came down, Yeni was sitting watching television, some film with Kevin Bacon in it. I sat down in the opposite chair and said, “Oh God, how much longer does this crap go on for?”

She laughed and said, “Shut up, Lachie, it’s very sad.”

I pretended to cry, covering my face (a bit like Susie had during the day) and saying oh, poor Kevin Bacon, he so brave; Holy Mother protect him from the other actors, boo hoo. It got a laugh, but she was obviously engrossed, so I shut up and went to the kitchen. I got the two hidden marzipan bars out of the fridge. When I went back into the sitting room, I sort of went “ta-da” and held them up. She beamed at me. She reached out to take one with her right hand, and then her left hand came out of nowhere and snatched the other one as well. We were wrestling down by the side of the settee when she straddled me and sat up, panting and looking down at me with such an expression of approval and affection and, well, enjoyment. She wasn’t tolerating me or being kind or keeping things going or hiding feelings from me. She genuinely enjoys me. I put my hand on her thigh and we looked at each other for an electric moment. Then Yeni toppled forward from the waist and kissed me hard on the lips.

Within minutes we were upstairs, in her room because it has a lock on the door, wrestling on the bed and giggling and eating marzipan and feeding it to each other. Before I had even touched her, she whipped off her top, yanked one of the cups of her bra down, and balanced a nugget of sweet golden paste on her tit, lying back and grinning. Her cherry nipple was the center of a swell of coffee skin, lighter than her caramel tummy, warmed in the sun for eighteen summers.

I climbed off the bed, unable to take my eyes off her breast (or indeed the marzipan- they both seemed enormously exciting to me at that moment). I stood there, bent over and panting. I asked if she was sure she wanted to do this. She seemed surprised at the question. I said that she was young and the house was mine and I didn’t want her to feel she needed to do this or that it couldn’t stop right now. She thought about it for a moment and looked at me, gasping like a man having a stroke. She laughed and made her delicious tits shudder. Looking up, looking me straight in the eye, she reached out and stroked my cock through my trousers.

Yeni is fat. She has big tits and love handles you could hang a bike on, but she doesn’t care. Her stomach creases above her thighs, and a roll of flesh hangs down over her pubes, but she doesn’t look like a second prize. She looks like a fertility goddess because she’s so proud of herself. It makes her seem unbelievably dirty and sensual, like you could fuck her all night and then eat pizza off the cheeks of her ass, and she’d still laugh and like you.

I did ask her if it was all right, I did, but I feel I’ve done something unconscionable that I’ll be held accountable for at some point in the future. The odd thing is, I feel as if I’ve done something bad to Yeni, not Susie. Susie barely comes into it. The only time I don’t feel ambivalent about what happened is when I’m with Yeni. When I’m with her I know it’s fine.

On the way to nursery all the newspapers had headlines about Donna’s body being found. I bought one on the way. It said they’d found Donna’s body, that she was from 18 North Street, Highfields, in Leicester (so she was telling the truth in the video). As a special-value bonus, there was a picture of Donna and Susie, and one of Gow, and the whole terrible tale again.