Page 64 of The Therapist
‘I actually…’ he begins as he tries to figure out how to explain to the doctor that he doesn’t have a sister, that the call obviously came from his wife, who has been planning to kill him.
The door swings open and a nurse pokes her head in. ‘Are you done here? Mr Winston has bled through his bandages.’
‘Yes, right,’ says the doctor and Mike never gets to finish his sentence. He doesn’t know if she would have believed him anyway. It sounds insane.
When the doctor leaves, he closes his eyes, his head throbbing. Will they give him some pain relief soon? He hopes so but at the same time he thinks that he needs to be alert. Because Sandy wanted him dead – he is sure of that. And he’s not dead. So what is Sandy going to do now? What is she going to do about that?
THIRTY-THREE
Lana
Detective Grafton stares at me, a frown on his face.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ he says and I shrug.
‘Maybe but…we just needed to know the truth, Mike and I, we needed to know.’ What I don’t say is how humiliated I felt. My intelligence is the one thing that I have been able to hold onto throughout my life, especially in high school, and now it had proved lacking, because I had been fooled. And I had been made a fool of by those I considered to be less intelligent than I am. It infuriated me and I wanted to be the one to solve the problem. I didn’t want the police to do it for me so that I remained the victim.
‘Explain it again,’ he says.
I finish the last of my cold, bitter coffee, grateful that Oliver has Iggy and even grateful to Oliver for his one lapse that signalled the end of our marriage, the lapse that led me to find William.
‘I once used a private detective named William Owens a few years ago when I believed my husband was cheating on me, which he was. When Ben gave me the gun recently, hisexplanation sounded right but I’m not an idiot. He told me the gun was filled with blanks, that it was only to scare Mike. But when I opened it…’
I see myself now, just yesterday, googling how to check the bullets in the gun Ben had given me.
Once I had worked out how to check the bullets, I poured them onto my desk, taking a picture and googling that.
I think what I felt most was profound shock. I toyed with the idea that Ben had made a mistake, that he had somehow mixed up the bullets, but I dismissed that quickly. Ben would not have made a mistake. Blank bullets look very different to real bullets. I looked at as many pictures as I could find.
‘He put real bullets in the gun,’ I say.
‘Yes,’ agrees the detective, nodding his head so I will go on.
I wanted it to not be true. I wanted it to be a mistake but then I began to go over everything that had happened since Ben asked me to take on Sandy as a patient. And I began to get a shadow of an understanding, but I didn’t know what the whole picture was, not yet.
‘I didn’t know who to talk to or who to ask. Detective Franks thought I was the problem because Sandy had called him, saying that I was bothering her. So I called the only person who I knew could help me. William.’
I swallow after I have said the words because I remember the feeling of humiliation that washed over me as I asked him to look into Ben and into Sandy and Mike. I sent him images of the gun and the bullets, and the picture I had taken of Ben talking to Kirsty – something that I did without understanding why I was doing it. I had no other pictures of Ben, and when I googled him, as I should have done when he started working for me, his image didn’t come up anywhere at all. My own stupidity had amazed me. Why hadn’t I googled him the first time I met him? I had taken his résumé and simply accepted it as the truth.
‘I asked him to look into Ben. I showed him the gun and the bullets and he did some research and then he was able to confirm what I was beginning to suspect.’
‘And that was…?’ says Detective Grafton.
‘May I?’ I hold out my hand so he can give me back my phone, and when he does, I search out the article that William sent me after only a few hours of searching, and hand it to the detective to read. I think I must have read it ten times that evening as I waited for Ben to arrive. I was unable to believe what I was reading and embarrassed for myself because I had believed everything Ben had told me. It made me question every single instinct I thought I had as a therapist and as a woman.
UK police are searching for a man named Simon Black for fraud. Mr Black masqueraded as a therapist for over a year, befriending a woman named Carla Swan. Ms Swan was a widow and was encouraged by Mr Black to lend him money, support his practice and invest in shares with him.
‘I’m a complete idiot,’ Ms Swan told this reporter. ‘I thought he loved me and all along he was simply using me for my money. Once he had access to my accounts, he emptied them almost overnight and I have been left with nothing.
‘I have tried to contact him and I currently have a private detective looking for him. I will not let him get away with this.’
Mr Black, pictured below, is thought to have left the country. Police have been unable to trace him.
‘And this is Ben?’ asks the detective.
I take my phone back and pull up the image of Ben and Kirsty together. Ben didn’t delete it because he didn’t know it was there. ‘It’s Ben,’ I say, showing the detectives.
‘Sandy told me about the insurance policy that Mike took out on her but William found out about a second one she took out on Mike.’
