a group more supportive of authors – every one of you rocks. I do have to say a special thanks to Teresa Nikolic who has possibly championed my work more than my own mother (and that is saying something).
The crime scene is a wonderful community to be part of and I feel so lucky to have been welcomed in. Thank you to every single one of you crazy people for your help and support, you have genuinely kept me going over the last twelve months. Special thanks to Susi Holliday for guiding me into the fold.
Now for the gushy bit. I’m lucky enough to have amazing friends and family by my side always. Thank you never seems enough to say to Mum and Dad for their immense love, support and babysitting skills – I love you both. Thank you to my mother-in-law for always being there to help out even though the last year has been the toughest one of our lives; the kids couldn’t ask for better grandparents and will never forget grandad Ken.
To my gorgeous ginger twosome, Connor and Finlay – without you this book would have been written in half the time but I wouldn’t swap you for the world, you make it worth being in.
And finally, always my last thank you but always the most important. To the man who has to live with me while the words aren’t coming, who has to do all the housework when they are and who knows exactly when edits are due just by the tone of my voice. To Ash for still being my everything.
Part One
1
Now
Where would you like to start?
Hmm.
Is something funny?
That’s what I always used to say to my patients. It gives them a sense of control over the session. Except we both know I’m not in control here, don’t we?
Is it important for you to believe that?
I know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to put me at ease so I open up and confess my darkest fears and then you can tell them I’m crazy. I feel crazy. You can write that down.
Why don’t you start at the beginning, Karen? When you first met Jessica Hamilton.
That’s not the beginning. It’s where all this started, I suppose, but it’s not really the beginning. It started way before all that, before I met Bea and Eleanor, Michael. It started with what happened when I was four years old.
Would you like to talk about that? What happened to you when you were a child?
No. I don’t want to talk about that, and they don’t want to hear about it. They want to know about how she died.
Go on.
You can’t fix me.
Pardon?
Those were some of the first words Jessica Hamilton ever said to me, the words I still hear on a loop in my mind. I remember thinking she was wrong: I fixed people all the time, it was my job. What I didn’t realise then was that she never wanted to be fixed in the first place; that was never her intention. I didn’t know it yet, but she was there to fix me.
2
Karen
25th October
A standard session at the Cecil Baxter Institute was three thousand seconds long. Some patients spent the entire time in silence, a fact that often confused most of the junior psychiatrists – why spend £150 to sit mute for fifty minutes? Not Dr Karen Browning, though, she understood. She understood it in the same way as she understood professional men who visited prostitutes; it wasn’t about the money or the silence, it was about the control.
The soft click of heels on wooden flooring alerted Karen to the presence of her secretary, Molly, just outside her office door. Our secretary, she reminded herself – Molly worked for all six of the junior psychiatrists on the second floor; only the directors on the top floor had personal assistants. There was a light tap on the door. Karen ran some gloss over her lips, slipped the tube back into the top drawer and waited for Molly to come in. All the offices were set like a stage and Karen was particularly proud of hers, a symbol of everything she had achieved.
And don’t they say pride comes before a fall.
She’d spent an hour before work that morning reading over her case notes for this session, making sure she knew as much about Jessica Hamilton as possible before she even walked through the door. Miss Hamilton was her only new client that week – all the others were