'Thank you. It wasn't exactly planned.'
Jenny didn't respond. Desperate as she had been to escape from David at the end of their marriage, part of her still resented the presence of another woman in his life. The fact that Deborah was still in her twenties, attractive and sweetly compliant made it all the more galling.
'I didn't mean to surprise you with that today,' he said with a trace of apology.
'No need to feel guilty on my account.'
But he did. She could see it in the heaviness that had settled around his eyes.
In the brief silence that followed Ross's footsteps moved across the creaking boards in the room above. Drawers opened and closed, the wardrobe door slammed: the sounds of hasty packing.
'I assume you would prefer me to be honest?' David said.
She resisted further sarcasm. How would dishonesty ever be preferable? It was always his way to make the wounds he inflicted feel self-imposed. She presumed it was a technique he had learned in his practice, his instinctive method of distancing himself from his patients' suffering and not infrequent deaths.
David braced himself. 'He doesn't think you can cope, Jenny. He's not being selfish, it makes him feel a burden. And if he stays and sees you struggling, it makes him feel even guiltier.'
'What makes him think I'm struggling? I love having him here ... I thought we were getting on fine.'
'There's never any food in the house.'
'That's not true—'
'It's not a judgement. I wouldn't do any better by myself.'
'Why isn't he telling me this? We'll get a delivery.'
David sighed and drew a hand around his sinewy neck. 'Christ, Jenny, you're not well enough to be looking after someone else.'
'What do you know? I'm fine.'
'He told me about the other night, the state you came home in.'
'I was just tired.'
'He had to help you into bed. You don't even remember, do you? What happened? Did you take too many pills?'
The feeling retreated from her hands and feet. Each breath became a conscious effort as her nervous system began a systematic shutdown.
'It was late, that's all.'
'What are you doing, Jenny? Are you getting help? You may not believe it, but I do worry about you.'
'I see someone.'
'Good. These things can be overcome. I've colleagues who assure me — '
'You discuss me with your colleagues?'
'In the past. . .'
Her look arrested his lie.
'Only in the strictest confidence. Of course I want to know what more can be done for you.'
'To hear you talk, you wouldn't think I held down a responsible job, conducted inquests, consoled grieving families—'
'I know you do. But just holding it down isn't enough, is it? You've nothing to prove to me, Jenny, and money isn't an issue. I just want you to be right. So does Ross.'
'And this is your way of helping me along?'
'Sorting out other people's problems won't fix your own.'
Above them a door closed. Ross's footsteps sounded on the stairs.
'Give up my career as well as everything else, is that what you're suggesting?'
'Please don't be like that. You know what's right, I know you do. And our son has problems of his own to work through. He needs security.'
Ross reached the bottom of the stairs.
'We're in here,' Jenny said, as brightly as she could manage without sounding hysterical.
The latch lifted. He looked in, pale and awkward.
'Hi, Mum.' He glanced to his father.
'It's OK, Ross. We've had a chat.'
Jenny forced a smile. Words wouldn't come.
'We'll sort something out with weekends and what have you,' David said, more to Ross than Jenny. He got to his feet. 'We ought to hit the road. I'm sure you've got work to do.'
Ross looked at the floor. 'I'll see you.'
'Soon, I hope,' Jenny said.
He nodded, hair flopping over his eyes.
David moved towards the door placing a fatherly hand on Ross's shoulder. 'We can see ourselves out.'
Their footsteps retreated swiftly down the path. The boot clunked, the engine fired and David sped off down the hill, leaving a silence as absolute as the blackness of the night.
Jenny lowered herself into an upright chair and sat quite still, wishing she could feel the shame that should have accompanied the images playing through her mind: waking in her clothes, the pills spilled across the floor, the incoherent scrawl in her journal lying open at the foot of the bed. He would have read it, of course, if only for a clue as to why his mother had arrived home staggering, unable even to make it to her own bed. He would know about a man called McAvoy, her guilt, her lust, her ghosts. He wouldn't tell his father of course; that would only double his confusion at having a semi-lunatic for a mother. He would keep it to himself.
And the worst of it was David was right. She wasn't fit to nurture an adolescent with troubles of his own. She'd deluded herself into thinking that Ross had straightened himself out under her roof, when in fact his relative calm was due to her drama constantly upstaging his own. She hadn't given him space, she had stifled him.
It felt indecent to think in terms of irony, but she remembered what her late mother, who had abandoned her own family while Jenny was still at school, had once said when she had first talked of divorcing David - that children fared better with unhappy parents together than happy ones apart. How she had railed against that thought. How she had resented the notion that a woman oppressed and miserable could do better for her child. Another of her mother's axioms forged from bitter experience: a woman who leaves home, leaves everything. Perhaps she was right after all. She had experienced nothing to disprove it, nor for that matter had Mrs Jamal.
The telephone rang with a suddenness that jarred her nerves. She answered with a clipped hello but was met with an electronic voice informing her that she had messages on her answer service. Dumbly, she obeyed its request to play them.
There were eight. DI Pironi had called twice, first to stress that events at Mrs Jamal's flat were strictly a police matter, and second to emphasize that the investigation into the source of the radiation was secret. The press had been told that the white-suited operatives who had descended on the apartment block were searching for further forensic evidence. There were two calls from local journalists fishing for information, one from Gillian Golder asking abruptly for Jenny to call at her earliest convenience, and two from Simon Moreton, the senior official at the Ministry of Justice with responsibility for coroners. In the polite, faux-friendly manner he adopted with his wayward charges, he asked her to call 'on a matter of importance', leaving his home number. The last message was from Steve, asking how she was, and saying he'd like to come over if she was around.
With blunt fingers she punched in his number, not sure why, or what she would say to him. He answered on the second ring.
'It's me. You left a message,' she said.
'Yeah. Look, I ... I shouldn't have left it like that the other night.' There was a quiet urgency in his voice, as if he had been on tenterhooks waiting for her call.
'Right,' she said distantly.
'I've been going through some things myself, you know . . .'
'Uh huh.'
A pause. He sighed, impatient with himself. 'What I was saying to you - about choices - it cuts both ways. I've been hiding away for ten years trying to avoid the issue.'
She knew she was meant to say something meaningful, meant to react to the subtext, but she couldn't
