“Where are we going?” He doesn’t answer, and my chest starts to feel tight, as though the air has become hard to breathe. “Can you tell me where you are taking me? Please?” As I add the word please, I am reminded of my childhood and of Maggie. I remember how she conditioned me and rationed her love, only ever giving a little at a time. It’s as though she has come back from the dead to haunt me. I stop walking in protest to being ignored, and finally the guard turns around, sighs, then shakes his head as though I have done something far worse than ask a simple question.

“Keep. Moving.”

“Not until you explain where you are taking me.”

He smiles, a twisted shape fracturing his facial features, which were already so unpleasantly arranged. “I don’t know or care who it is you think you were on the outside. In here, you are nothing. You are nobody.”

His words have an undesirable effect on me. I used to think that I was nobody, I still do, but not in the way he means. I think we’re all nobodies, but I won’t have some jobsworth in a cheap uniform, with an overinflated sense of empowerment, and a bad case of halitosis, speak to me that way. Sometimes you have to fall hard enough for it to hurt, to know when to pick yourself up. You can’t start to put yourself back together if you don’t even know that you’re broken. I lift my head a little higher and take a step closer before giving him my reply.

“And I don’t care about you losing your job, your home, your pet porn collection—from your appearance I doubt very much you have a wife—if I have to make a formal complaint and have your arse fired from this establishment. I know people who can end you with one phone call.”

He glares at me through narrowed eyes. “You have a visitor.”

“Who?”

“I’m not a fucking secretary. See for yourself.”

He opens another door and I see her there, sitting at a desk waiting for me.

“Sit down,” says Detective Alex Croft.

I stay exactly where I am. I’m a little tired of people giving me orders.

“Please, take a seat. I’d like to talk to you.”

“I did not kill my husband,” I say, fully aware that I must sound like a broken record.

She nods, leans back in her chair, and folds her arms. “I know.”

Fifty-three

“You know?”

My words come out as a whisper in the cold prison room.

Detective Croft leans forward in her chair, no sidekick today. Her young face, as always, so completely impossible to read.

“Yes, I know you didn’t kill your husband.”

Finally. I think I could laugh, or cry, if I weren’t so exhausted and angry.

Funny how life does that sometimes—throws you a line when you’re drowning, just as your head is about to completely disappear below the surface of your darkest troubles.

“Do you know this man?” She slides her iPad across the table. It’s the same picture from the online TBN article.

“No. Who is he?”

“He’s Ben Bailey.”

“That’s not my husband.”

“No, it isn’t. But that is his name, and it was his body that was found buried in your garden. TBN have verified that this is the Ben Bailey who worked for them, land registry confirmed he owned your house for ten years before you bought it, and this man had already been dead, and buried, for over two years, albeit somewhere else. He committed suicide when he lost his job, was laid to rest in Scotland, and someone decided to dig him up and replant him beneath your decking in West London. There are things I understand about this case, but mostly there are things I don’t. I don’t understand your involvement in it for starters.”

She stares at me as though she expects me to say something, but my mind is busy processing everything she just said, trying to make sense of something that simply doesn’t make any. I feel as though this can’t possibly be real, and yet it is. A contradiction of thoughts and feelings jumble themselves up inside my head, folding into conclusions I can’t seem to iron out.

“Someone has gone to a lot of effort to set you up,” she says.

“And you fell for it.” Hate loosens my tongue. “I tried to tell you I was being framed and you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Your story was a little far-fetched.”

“You fucked up!”

I watch as she tries the idea on for size, before deciding it doesn’t fit and shrugging it off.

I turn my voice back down to its normal volume. “What happens now?”

“You’ll be released. We can’t keep you here for killing a man who was already dead.”

“Then what?”

“Well, we’re trying to find him. The man who pretended to be Ben Bailey, the man who married you using a dead man’s birth certificate and persuaded you to buy the same dead man’s house. To even try to begin to understand the who and what of this case, it would be really helpful to know the why. Why would someone go to such lengths to do this to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“If the man you were married to wasn’t really Ben Bailey, then who was he?”

“I. Don’t. Know.”

She stares at me for a little while and appears to conclude that I am telling the truth.

“How did you meet him?”

“An online dating website.”

“You were on a dating website? Using your own name?”

“Yes. It was before I got my first big role a couple of years ago. My name didn’t mean anything to anyone then.”

“Who contacted who?”

“He contacted me.”

“Then I guess maybe your name meant something to him. Whoever did this to you was planning it for some time. Maybe the dating website was how he found you. And he told you from the start that he was Ben Bailey?”

“Yes.”

“Was there a picture of the man you married on the dating website?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Good, we’ll check that out and see if it might still be there. I’m guessing now that the reason you couldn’t find any pictures of him in the house was because he deliberately removed them all. And he told you that he worked for TBN?”

“Yes, we even met outside the TBN offices, several times.”

“But you never went in? Never met any of his colleagues?”

“No.”

“What about his family?”

“He said he didn’t have any left. It was something we had in common.”

“And you didn’t meet any of his friends?”

“He said his friends were all back in Ireland. He hadn’t been in London that long, and it just sounded like he’d been too busy to make any.”

“Why would you agree to marry a practical stranger after just a couple of months?” She looks at me as though I’m the most pathetic and stupid person she’s ever come across. I share the sentiment and start to wonder if maybe I am. I should have learned to let go long before now, but I held on too tight to what I thought I wanted: a chance to start again. This is all my fault. Your past only owns you if you allow it to.

“He said we’d wasted so many years being apart before we found each other. He said there was no need to wait when you knew that you’d met the one,” I say eventually.