to his senses, so that they wouldn’t say anything to their parents or teachers about who’d injured them.’
‘He terrified the life out of all those who came within his orbit,’ said Nigel.
Barbara smiled. ‘In his absence, we’ve put together a psychological profile of him, the way you lot do with criminals. At the time, he had us completely fooled. Deliberately or not, he played on our egos. Nigel and I were happy, prosperous – we had a successful business. Of course we believed that our son was this blessed golden boy who never suffered a set-back, never got upset or angry, never admitted to having a problem.’
‘His act was watertight.’ The regret in Nigel’s voice was laced with admiration, Simon thought. ‘He couldn’t bear for anybody to see that he was an ordinary human being who sometimes made a fool of himself – with highs and lows, just like the rest of us. Kit had to appear to be above all that – always in control, happy all the time . . .’
‘Which meant that no one was allowed to know what mattered to him, or that he sometimes got upset, that he sometimes failed or wasn’t the best at something.’ Barbara’s frenzied delivery made it hard to listen to her. Her eagerness to speak made her sound unbalanced. She seemed to find it unbearable when it was her husband’s turn and she had to wait. ‘All his life, Kit’s worked on an image of perfection. That’s the real reason he can’t forgive us – for a few hours in 2003, the mask slipped and we saw him agitated and unhappy, having cocked up something that really mattered to him. It’s himself he won’t forgive, for allowing things to reach the point where he needed to come to us for help – nothing to do with us not giving him the fifty grand.’
‘Fifty thousand pounds?’ Simon asked. Was that what Kit had meant when he’d said his parents had failed to ‘rally round’?
Nigel nodded. ‘He needed it to buy a house.’
‘I’ve still got the brochure somewhere, I think,’ said Barbara. ‘Kit brought it round to show us. When we wouldn’t cooperate, he told us he didn’t want the brochure, not if he couldn’t have the house. “Why don’t you tear it up, or burn it?” he said. “I expect you’d enjoy that.” I think he thought that as soon as we looked at the pictures and saw how stunning it was, we’d hand over the money. And it was stunning, but . . . it wasn’t worth the amount the vendor was asking Kit to pay on top, and we didn’t think it would be fair on the people who thought they were buying it if Kit and Connie were to pull the rug out from under them all of a sudden. What kind of charlatan behaviour is that?’
‘It was no way to treat them, and no way to treat us.’ Nigel threw this out as a challenge, daring someone to disagree. He was gearing up to have the fight all over again, as if Kit were sitting here opposite him instead of Simon. ‘Connie and Kit could easily have afforded a house in Cambridge that was more than adequate for their needs – there’ll have been any number of places they could have bought. Why did they have to have this particular house, which was effectively already sold?
Because Kit was too proud to compromise, determined to hold out for the ideal?
‘Kit saw no need to tell us why,’ said Barbara. ‘He behaved as though it was his God-given right to have that house, at whatever cost.’
‘He had a damn nerve, telling us he wanted to waste fifty thousand pounds doing something immoral and expecting us to foot the bill. He didn’t even ask for a loan, that was what got to me. Said nothing about paying the money back, just expected us to give it to him. When we said no, he turned vicious.’
Simon wanted to ask Nigel what he’d meant about the house already being sold, but he didn’t want to interrupt. He could get the details later. ‘Vicious how?’ he asked instead.
‘Oh, it all came out. Barbara and I had no standards – we didn’t know the difference between a good thing and a bad thing, didn’t know a beautiful house when we saw one, didn’t understand the importance of beauty, didn’t notice it when it was staring us in the face. Oh, and we didn’t notice