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‘ J ean? ’ Emily said in surprise.

The name had come out of her mouth spontaneously, before she’d had a chance to remember that she wasn’t supposed to know it. The name should be meaningless to her. She shouldn’t have reacted at all.

‘Yeah, why?’ He frowned. ‘Is that all right? I just picked that name at random. This part is made up, remember?’

If this was made up, why choose the name of the woman who said that she was really at the house that night?

But then, he didn’t know that Emily knew there was a Jean in real life.

Or did he? Had he forced Ben to reveal all last night and now he was toying with Emily, trying to scare her, or were they somehow in this together? Was Jean in on it too?

‘Right.’ Emily added bottom of stairs , new message and Jean to her notes. ‘So why is Jean texting him?’

‘She’s not. It’s not his phone. He realizes he’s picked up Kate’s by mistake, when he was up in the bedroom. So he turns and starts back up the stairs, but then he stops and thinks, Jean ? Kate doesn’t know any Jean, does she? But you see, he knows a Jean. From when he was cycling. And that Jean’ – he met Emily’s eye and glared at her with a new, unprecedented coldness – ‘was a lying little bitch .’

Emily wanted to look away. She wanted to run away. But she didn’t want to do anything that would make Jack stop, because she was recording this.

Which, now, was starting to feel like a dangerous act.

She scribbled something else on the pad, something illegible, a faint tremor in her hand.

‘So,’ Jack said, ‘if it’s the same one, the same Jean, contacting his wife … Well, he wants to know what’s going on. And he can read the start of the message, you see. The preview or whatever they call it. The first few words. And it says, Is Jack gone? Ben said they … Ben, his friend. Who he’s heading out the door to meet. He knows her passcode, so he opens up the rest. And that’s when he gets really mad.’

Ben .

Not a name chosen at random for this made-up story, but Ben – who Jack knew Emily knew he was meeting in the real story of this night.

When she said, ‘We’re, ah—’ the words came out sounding like the croak of a dying man burning alive in the desert. Emily cleared her throat, moistened her lips, tried again. ‘We’re going to need some more text there, Jack. The full message. What might it have said?’

He chewed on his lip, making a show of thinking. ‘Actually, you know what? Let’s just go with him not having her passcode. That way we don’t have to come up with the whole thing.’

We , again. But she wanted no part in this.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘So what’s next?’

‘He goes back upstairs and confronts her with it.’

He stopped there, offering no more, and she realized that he was toying with her. Forcing her to ask questions, to draw the horror out of him, agonizingly slowly, bit by terrible bit.

To him, this was all a game.

What was it Jean had said? Something about how the only sport that Jack had ever truly loved was torment?

But she was recording, so she had to play too.

‘How does he do that?’ she asked. ‘Does he show it to her? Read it out to her?’

‘He throws the phone at her head.’

‘Which phone?’

Something like a smirk flitted briefly across Jack’s face.

‘Her phone,’ he said.

‘Does it hit her?’

‘It caught her a little’ – he pointed at his right temple – ‘on the side of her head.’

Caught .

In the pause that followed, Emily strained to listen for evidence that there were other beating hearts in this house.

Because now she was sure she was in a room with a murderer.

Alone in a room with him, secretly recording him.

And now she began to doubt herself. Had she actually silenced her phone? Was it really on Airplane mode? Could it still buzz? Any vibration at all would be amplified by the drawer. Jack would definitely hear it.

‘And then what?’ she asked. ‘Why don’t you just try to keep going, for as long as you can, without me prompting you?’

This won her what she could only describe as a look of pure hatred.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Whatever you want. Well … I think he probably says to her, What the fuck is going on? and they start arguing. They’ve argued before, it’s nothing new. But the arguments always end very quickly, because she’s afraid of him. Because he doesn’t put up with it, normally. But there’s something different about this one. She’s not cowering, or shouting. She’s very calm. She doesn’t raise her voice. She tells him that she’s been talking to Jean. That Jean approached her in a car park, at the beach. And that at first she was confused, because she thought the things Jean were saying were about Ben, because they were the same things that he’s always been saying about him. But she’s realized that it was her husband this woman was talking about. At first, she thought it couldn’t possibly be true, the things this woman was saying he did, the things she was accusing him of, but when she started to actually think about it …’ He paused here. ‘Kate said there was a wall, and Jean had made a crack, and that that was all Kate needed to see through to what was on the other side. To open her eyes and really look.’ His own eyes were unfocused now, staring at something that wasn’t there. This memory, perhaps. ‘She says she’s going to leave him. That she doesn’t want to be with a man like him. She was planning on doing it when he was away – he’s due to go away for a few days, a work thing, the following week. She was planning on being gone when he got back. Because she believes the lying little bitch.’

He didn’t immediately carry on, and Emily didn’t want to encourage him. Recording or no, she wasn’t sure she could listen to any more.

‘It’s not really him,’ Jack said then. ‘It’s like the thing that lives inside of him. In the core. He tries to control it, tries to keep it there, but sometimes there’s nothing he can do. It gets out. He grabs her by the hair. He’s holding her with one hand.’ Jack mimes holding Kate’s imaginary hair with his left hand, curls his right into a fist. ‘And he just starts, you know …’ The fist starts pummelling an invisible object, over and over and over again, harder and harder, as grunts of exertion escape Jack’s mouth. He’s not just acting this out , Emily thinks. He’s reliving it. He wants to. ‘And then he lets go and she falls and he leans over and he … He keeps going.’

Emily couldn’t speak. All her words were trapped in her throat, held down there by the horror of this.

‘And her arms stop,’ Jack went on. ‘At first they were coming up, trying to defend herself.’ He raised his arms, miming this too. ‘But now they’re just lying out beside her on the floor – and that’s when he wakes up. The outside man, the one the rest of the world sees. The man he is most of the time, or tries to be. He comes back and he sees what he’s done. And he just can’t …’ Jack shook his head a little. ‘He can’t believe it. He doesn’t understand. He wants to go back, to when he found his own phone on the table in the hall. He wants to put Kate’s down and walk out, leave, to not even look at it. But he can’t. This has happened. There’s no going back. So now, he has to take steps to hide what he’s done.’

Emily remembered then that she was supposed to be taking notes, even though surely this charade was over. For the sake of appearances, she scribbled a few more nonsensical words on the legal pad.

‘She’s lying on a rug,’ Jack said, ‘so he rolls it up, rolls her up into it. Carries her out into the hall and to the top of the stairs, and then he releases her. He does it sort of over the banister and onto the stairs, so the fall doesn’t look how he’s expecting. It doesn’t look the way you’d imagine someone falling down the stairs. She goes down more like a pinball. It’s like bang ’ – he shifted his body weight to the left – ‘ bang ’ – and then back to the right – ‘ bang ’ – and then slammed it back to the left. ‘There are smears on the wall afterwards. Blood, all over the place. And he thinks, no one is going to believe this. I’m good, but I’m not this good. No matter how convincing I can be, this isn’t going to work. Not like this. So, he has to destroy as much evidence as he can. And then he thinks, fire .’

With a shaking hand, Emily wrote what she intended to be the word rug .

‘He calls Ben,’ Jack went on, ‘and says he’s going to be an hour late. Ben says that’s fine. Later, he’ll deny this – he’ll say he actually called Ben to say he was going to be early and that Ben picked him up wrong. But it’ll be fine. Ben will fall in line. He always does. Always has. Then he wonders, how can he start a fire? And he remembers something that happened once, at a race in Barcelona, when he was away with his cycling club, when he was just fifteen or sixteen.’

Emily wrote Barcelona , drew a line under it.

‘One of the older guys in another room – I think it was an older brother, actually, who’d come along as a chaperone – had lit a candle to try and mask the smell of whatever substance he was smoking. But he’d put it on a window sill, left the room, and it had set the curtains on fire. On a delay, though. So I thought, I can do that. I can light a candle under the blind in our bedroom, put it halfway up, set the candle underneath it, light it and walk away. So I did.’

If Jack had noticed that he’d slipped into the first person, he didn’t let on.

She suspected it wasn’t a slip.

‘You know what’s weird?’ Jack asked her then. ‘The doorbell rang while I was looking for a lighter. Twice. I went to the window in my office to have a look outside, but I couldn’t see any car.’

The doorbell. Not just ringing, but ringing twice – and with no stranger’s car parked outside. That had been Jean, hoping to find Kate home alone.

If Emily had had any lingering doubt by this point, that would’ve finally disappeared it.

‘But the biggest problem,’ Jack said, ‘was my hands.’

She knew what was coming, what he was going to say.

He’d already said it. She just hadn’t understood what he’d been telling her at the time. All that talk about pain and how much he’d always been able to take, how good he was at suffering …

He’d been telling her what he’d done. How he’d really got his burns. He’d needed them to hide his injuries, the bruising and the cuts and the scratches and whatever else he’d sustained when he was ferociously pummelling his wife to death.

‘I’d managed to hide them,’ he said. ‘At the River Inn. Kept them in my pockets, sat at a table by the window with my back to everyone else. There’d be no one to say, “Oh, I saw his hands and they looked like he’d been bare-knuckle fighting.”’ I kept an eye on the time, to make sure I left before Ben arrived – he’d be an hour late, of course, at least. My plan was to ring Kate’s phone, supposedly to tell her Ben hadn’t showed, and when she didn’t answer, head on home out of concern. I wanted to get there before anyone else arrived. I needed to, so I could get inside. I wasn’t counting on Jim Mullins, but luckily it all worked out in the end. Trickier to hide my hands from him in the car, but it was dark outside, and he was panicked.’

Emily stayed statue-still.

She felt as if she wasn’t even breathing anymore.

‘When we got to the house, there were a few neighbours there,’ Jack said. ‘They all tried to stop me going in, but I wouldn’t be held back. I had to get in. I knew I only had a couple of minutes before the cavalry arrived. I had my key. I opened the front door. I walked over Kate – maybe on her, a little – and ran up the stairs and along the hall until I got to our bedroom. The flames were coming out the door, like a solid wall of fire. I’d never seen anything like it. Fire, when it’s like that, it’s alive , you know? It moves and it roars and it feels like it’s coming for you. Like it’s conscious. I held my hands out and I pushed them into it.’

Emily closed her eyes.

‘I can’t describe the pain. Whatever I’d felt on the bike, even with the accident, this was … This was something else. Like someone was ripping me apart. But I did it. I held them in the fire. I watched it burning away my skin. I waited while it did, because that meant it was also burning away the evidence.’ Jack exhaled. ‘What I didn’t plan on was that, on the way back downstairs, a beam or a joist or something came down from the ceiling and almost knocked me out. I didn’t even realize it had burned me until later. I picked Kate up, held her to me, making sure to get her blood all over me, and I carried her outside.’ Jack raised his eyes, met Emily’s. ‘I mean … That’s what I would’ve done.’

Silence.

Neither of them moved. Neither of them looked away. Every cell in Emily’s body was screaming at her to run, but she had to pretend. Even though she knew, and he knew that she knew, she couldn’t show it.

She still had to get out of this room, and with her phone.

‘Right,’ she said, swallowing. ‘Well, I think that’s more than enough.’ She reached for the voice-recorder. ‘Are you ready to do it for real?’

In a flash, Jack had jumped up and reached for it too, trapping her hand under his. His fingers grabbed at her flesh, his weight pressed down.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

She hadn’t seen his injuries this close before. She stared at the melted skin, the angry redness, the bloody scabs on his thumb, the missing nails.

He did that to himself , she thought. He did that to himself.

Sympathy was the ink Jack wrote his lies with, Jean had said.

Suddenly he released her, straightened up, stepped back. When Emily dared look up at him, she saw that the man who’d just told her that horrific story had disappeared and Other Jack was back, looking fragile, spent, diminished.

‘Maybe later,’ he said. ‘But I need a break.’

And then he turned his back to her and walked out of the room.

Emily held her breath, tracking his footsteps down the stairs, into the hall, across what might have been the tiles in the kitchen. Only then did she open the drawer and with shaking, fumbling hands, stop the recording.

She let out the sob in her throat, put her head in her hands and cried.