‘Around midnight? Maybe?’
‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘No. I was in bed by midnight.’
‘And your husband?’
‘My husband?’
‘Was he also in bed? At midnight?’
She can’t remember. She cannot remember. ‘Yes,’ Cate replies firmly. ‘I’m pretty sure he was.’ She looks at the time on her phone. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m going to have to go now. I have a patient in St John’s Wood in twenty minutes.’
‘Oh, a patient. Are you a doctor?’
‘No. I’m a physiotherapist.’
‘Oh. I’m so sorry,’ says DI Currie, getting to her feet. ‘Please don’t let us keep you another minute.’
They all leave together in a slightly awkward huddle. DI Currie and PC Rodrigues stand by the front door and examine the doorbells. ‘Anyone else in?’ DI Currie asks.
‘Sorry, no idea.’ Cate smiles at them apologetically; then she says, ‘Bye, then,’ and turns and heads down the street, her heart racing painfully hard under her ribs.
Roan did have an affair once. It was in the very early days of their marriage, when they were still very young and getting used to the fact of being married when none of their friends were.
Cate had kind of guessed it was happening. Roan had been pretty bad at covering his steps. Condoms had started disappearing at a rate that was incommensurate with the amount of sex that they’d been having – still quite a lot back then, pre-babies. Cate had been responsible for picking up the condoms from the family-planning clinic so she was more aware than most women about how many condoms should be in the box.
Roan had still been a student then, that had been part of the problem, while Cate had graduated three years earlier and was working full-time at a sports rehab gym. There’d been a disconnect for a year or two; Cate was bringing in money, spending her days with people older than her, tired by ten o’clock. Roan was bringing in no money, spending his days with other students and usually in the pub at 10 p.m.
He’d been having sex with another student. Her name was Marie; she was the same age as Cate and she had very long hair. Roan ended the affair – though refused to acknowledge that it was an affair, said it was just ‘basic sex’ – the moment Cate confronted him with her suspicions. Marie came to their flat an hour later and Cate ended up holding her on the pavement outside while she cried and rocked and wailed.
When Cate went back indoors a moment later, she found one of Marie’s hairs on her cardigan. She pulled it off and stared at it for a moment before discarding it on the floor. Roan sat with his head hanging, his shoulder blades two pointed peaks of contrition, sniffing in some kind of approximation of tears.
‘Has she gone?’ he said.
She nodded and poured herself a glass of wine.
‘Are we over?’
‘Over?’ she asked facetiously. ‘We’re married. What do you mean, over?’
‘I mean, is that the end of our marriage?’
She remembers staring at Marie’s solitary hair, no longer a part of Marie, a foot and a half long, an S-shape on the carpet. S for sex. S for shame. S for slut. She remembers imagining Roan’sfist around her hair in bed while they did ‘basic sex’. She’d had to stifle a laugh. The whole thing was so pathetic.
‘I can’t live without you. You know that, don’t you? I can’t live withoutus.’
Then he’d started to cry, properly, contrite shoulder blades heaving up and down like pistons. The horror of it, she recalled now, the shock. For a moment she’d wondered if she even loved him, if she’deverloved him.
‘I’d die without you,’ he’d said as she passed him a tissue. ‘I’d literally just die.’
Roan had graduated a year later, quickly found his way to the Portman and become a serious, grown-up man, widely respected, superb at his job. They’d even been able to crack a joke about Marie eventually, about her appearing with her red-rimmed eyes that evening, ending up in Cate’s arms on the pavement. The fact they’d been able to joke about it had put a stake in its path, a definitive sign that what had happened had been an aberration, a one-off, something unconnected to them and the couple they were to become, the parents they were to become, the life they would go on to build for themselves.
Nobody knew about it.
Cate hadn’t even told her closest friends.
It was theirs and theirs alone.
So, she hadn’t been totally mad to think the worst a year ago. She’d said as much to Roan. ‘It’s not as if’, she said, ‘it hasn’t happened before.’