‘No one here is holding you accountable for anything, Jeffrey. We’ve read through your report so we know their relationship was unstable. As a practising Relationship Responder myself, if I’d been in your shoes, I don’t think there is anything else I’d have done differently to you. You had no choice but to recommend to the courts they divorce.’
‘Thank you,’ Jeffrey said. ‘It means a lot to hear that.’
Adrian picked up his phone when it flashed. ‘I’m so sorry, I need to take this. Can you give me a moment?’ A plus-sized man, Adrian grasped his desk to pull himself up and left the room, closing the door.
Alone, Jeffrey replayed his final moments in Harry and Tanya’s home. He’d had little choice but to start that fire and he’d known that, if staged correctly, it would lead investigators to believe it was the scene of a murder-suicide. On hearing that the flames had destroyed much of the evidence leading to this police report, his decision had been the correct one.
Before he met them, and based on Audite recordings of their drawn-out arguments and passive-aggressive behaviour, they had fascinated Jeffrey enough for him to want to try and salvage their marriage. They’d repeatedly assured him with utmost sincerity that they still loved each other and had begged him to help them get back on track and pass Level Two. However, they hadn’t counted on him listening in to their private conversations through the Audite. He’d heard them openly discuss Jeffrey’s gullibility and their marital affairs. They were only a couple for the financial benefits a Smart Marriage brought.
Naturally, they’d reacted bitterly when he’d announced he was recommending to a Family Court that they should be divorced. Once they had finished hurling insults at him, they’d threatened to report him for attempting to sexually assault Tanya. The incident had been nothing of the sort: she had been the one who had offered him favours in return for a clean bill of marital health. Jeffrey hadn’t laid a finger on her. At least not until she was breathing her last in the bath. He had held her firmly in his grip as the taps had poured and the diagonal slashes he’d inflicted up and down her wrists and forearms muddied the bathwater. He’d remained with her for fifteen minutes until she’d finally bled out, then he’d watched as her lifeless form had disappeared under the surface.
Moments later, her husband Harry’s life had taken less time to end. Harry had been making his way into the kitchen when Jeffrey had silently approached him from behind. Using an electroshock weapon, he’d fired two sharp darts into Harry’s neck, rendering him immobile. Then he’d thrust a screwdriver into the lower portion of his torso half a dozen times, shredding his kidneys, intestines and liver before his victim could even realize he was being attacked. Jeffrey assumed the autopsy had not found the electrocution marks on his charred corpse.
According to the report he’d sent to Adrian shortly before burning their house to the ground, Tanya had been frequently physically and verbally violent towards her husband. Jeffrey had detailed how he had moved in with them to defuse fraught situations and had offered her anger-management strategies. But, he’d claimed, the toxicity had spread too deeply for his assistance to be effective.
‘Sorry about that,’ Adrian said as he returned to the room and his chair. He continued to discuss the Knoxes and referenced other Relationship Responders who had experienced traumatic outcomes with their clients. But Jeffrey wasn’t really listening. Instead, he wondered if there were any others like him out there, Responders who became too deeply invested in their clients or who understood that sometimes it was necessary to take matters into your own hands.
‘So have you had any more thoughts about accepting my offer of counselling?’ asked Adrian. ‘I know you like to think you’re a tough cookie, but we all have a breaking point.’
‘I have considered it, yes,’ Jeffrey said, but he hadn’t. He didn’t want anyone poking about inside his head. ‘But, to be honest, Adrian, I’ve also considered that this might not be the right career path for me.’
Adrian raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh, please don’t say that.’
‘Look at my track record. My last clients died in a murder-suicide; before that, one of them took his own life and let’s not forget the Armitages who vanished before counselling was complete. The last time I asked, the police still haven’t found them.’
Jeffrey’s memory lingered on the latter. He’d had an inkling they were hiding something from him. But he’d only discovered they were members of Freedom for All when he’d broken into their Cloud and learned they’d been secretly filming their sessions with Jeffrey to publicly expose Relationship Responders as ‘woefully undertrained cod psychologists’. He wondered how long it had taken the husband to die without food and water, chained up in an abandoned Suffolk farmhouse with only his wife’s dead body for company.
And then there was Arjun and Mickey. He and Arjun had clicked the moment they’d met, and Jeffrey had found himself falling hard and fast for him. He’d used his full arsenal of persuasive skills to make Arjun understand that his and Mickey’s relationship was doomed to fail. But his warnings had fallen on deaf ears. In desperation, Jeffrey had removed Mickey from the picture by weighing his body down with rocks and rope and dumping it in a Welsh reservoir. Arjun, believing his husband to have left him after reading a text message typed by Jeffrey into Mickey’s phone, had been devastated and too broken for Jeffrey to repair. Jeffrey had reluctantly departed, both men pining for different lost loves.
‘But you’ve had many, many successes over the last three years,’ said Adrian. ‘You’re only focusing on the negatives. Some couples were so easy to counsel you were finished within three weeks.’
In the early days of his Responding, the job was not what Jeffrey had hoped it might be. He’d found it impossible to make a connection with most couples. Their marital issues had been so bland and tedious that he’d given them a clean bill of health so that he could make his escape as quickly as possible. To prevent history from repeating itself, he’d begun to spend more time delving deeper into potential clients before committing to helping them, listening to the recordings of their conversations and carrying out background checks. The more interesting their dynamic, the more he immersed himself in their lives. And the more frequently emotional lines blurred.
‘And as I’ve said to you before, it’s all down to the couples you choose,’ Adrian continued. ‘You care too much. You have an in-built need to get stuck into the most challenging of marriages. So you cannot take it personally when they don’t always work out. None of what happened is your fault.’
‘What about management? What do they think? They must be aware of my failure rate.’
‘Let’s just say there’s a reason why there is no official record of our involvement in inquests or police reports. It wouldn’t benefit the public to know. The people above us, well, their priority is the big picture and the success stories so they don’t trouble themselves focusing on the details. But I am sure they agree with me. We need people like you; however, your own mental health is also paramount. I can arrange to take this latest couple off your hands if you like?’ Adrian looked to his computer. ‘Noah and Luca Stanton-Gibbs, is it?’
‘No, no, it’s fine,’ he said quickly. ‘If you still trust my judgement then I’ll see this through and perhaps I’ll take a break afterwards.’
Jeffrey’s chest tightened at the thought of being separated from Luca. And the depth of his need to be around his client took him by surprise.
*
St Mary the Virgin’s church cemetery in the tiny village of Great Brington was barely a minute’s walk from where Jeffrey had parked his car.
He took in the century-old oak trees with unpruned canopies that sheltered the headstones from the sun as he read each inscription until he found the one he was searching for. After sixteen years, he was finally here. His eyes brimmed with nostalgia.
This grave had not been tended for some time. Dregs of water in the glass vase were stained by algae and the petals that were once attached to peony heads were now brown and lying upon the decorative stones.
All these years later and Jeffrey wished he’d been allowed to attend her funeral. But while he’d been recovering in his hospital bed from facial reconstruction surgery, he had been advised by police to stay away. He understood why, but it still wounded. So he’d held his own service instead in a nearby woodland weeks later, sprinkling yellow rose petals in a spot under the tree.
Even now, whenever he passed a florist or a garden and caught the scent of those flowers, he was transported back to the day he’d said his final goodbyes to her. She was the first person he had ever truly loved, and the first person to have broken his heart.
Jeffrey pulled at clumps of overgrown grass and dandelions surrounding her grave, then threw away the decaying flower stalks in the vase, replacing them with a bunch he had purchased earlier.
‘Rosie Morrison’, read the name at the top of the black granite headstone, ‘Forever Loved, Never Forgotten’.
