me to take care of it. Said the house didn’t feel like hers any more. I could see where she was coming from – I’d have felt the same way in her shoes, to be honest. She said, ‘‘If that woman got in once, she might have got in a hundred times. I can’t live here knowing she’s violated my space. She might have slept in my bed, spent nights here while I’ve been away.” I told her I couldn’t deal with it, I was off on holiday, and I’d ask Lorraine to ring her. She was okay with that – she knew Lorraine, from when she bought the house – it was Lorraine that sold it to her. Lorraine went round, took new photos . . .’
‘Hold on,’ Sam stopped her. ‘When I spoke to Lorraine Turner, she said nothing about anyone impersonating Selina Gane and putting her house up for sale without her knowledge.’
‘I didn’t tell her,’ said Jackie. ‘Dr Gane asked me not to.’
‘She didn’t want anyone to know what had happened who didn’t need to,’ Grint told Sam. ‘She found it distressing and embarrassing, didn’t want people asking her about it.’
Sam was still thinking about Lorraine Turner, whose relationship with 11 Bentley Grove went further back than Selina’s, Jackie’s, Connie’s. Lorraine had sold 11 Bentley Grove to Selina on behalf of the Christmas tree couple, Mr and Mrs Beater. Did she also sell the house to the Beaters, when it was first built, or had the developers done that themselves?
‘I told Lorraine she’d have to meet Dr Gane at Addenbrooke’s or at her hotel to collect the key,’ Jackie went on. ‘I was thinking, “Don’t bother asking her to meet you at Bentley Grove – she won’t go near the place.” She said to me she wasn’t going back to that house ever again.’
Grint was moving towards the door of the interview room. ‘Let’s go and meet Selina Gane’s stalker, shall we?’ he said. Jackie rose to her feet. A more sensitive person might have been nervous, Sam thought; he certainly was. He tried to imagine Connie Bowskill admitting it, and couldn’t. Couldn’t imagine her denying it either – how could she, if Jackie pointed the finger in no uncertain terms? As Connie had said herself, it was difficult to maintain a state of denial when what you were trying to deny was laid out before you and you were forced to confront it head-on.
If it was denial. It occurred to Sam that Connie might be cannier than she seemed. How good an actress was she? Her painful-to-watch attack on her husband had been inconsistent, lurching from one accusation to another; Sam had put this down to confusion and panic at the time, but now he wasn’t so sure. At first Connie had seemed convinced that Kit thought she was a killer, and terrified that he might be right. She’d wanted Grint to say that for her to have killed a woman and then repressed the memory was impossible – she’d virtually put the words in his mouth. Then she’d changed tack: Kit didn’t really think she’d killed anybody, but he wanted her to think that was what he believed – wanted to plant in her mind the fear that she might have committed a murder of which she now had no memory.
Listening, Sam had wondered how she could harbour these two suspicions simultaneously. He’d concluded that she was most afraid of not being in control of her own behaviour; she preferred to think that her husband was a monster.
After talking to Jackie Napier, Sam had a different theory. It was no accident that he’d been left wondering which of the two it was: Kit the liar, Kit the killer, messing with his wife’s head in the hope that he could make her collude in his framing of her for a crime she didn’t commit – or Connie the unfortunate victim of a mental breakdown whose psychological disintegration was so severe that she couldn’t be held responsible for her actions. It was no accident that a choice had been set up between these two possibilities and no other. Sam’s attention, and Grint’s, had been skilfully diverted away from a third possibility: that Connie had knowingly and deliberately killed a woman. That the anguished on-the-edge persona she presented to the world was a carefully constructed lie.
Sam was torn. Part of him would have liked to take Grint to one side and ask him what was happening on