Land of the Living by Nicci French

words before. So now I took the plunge in a gabble.
    ‘Actually, the last few months haven’t been exactly brilliant. Well, they’ve been awful in many ways. I was working too hard and he was working too hard—and when he works hard, he drinks hard. I don’t think he’s an alcoholic or anything, he just drinks when he wants to unwind. But the trouble is, he doesn’t unwind, or not for long. He gets weepy or he gets angry.’
    ‘Angry about what?’
    ‘I don’t know, really. Everything. Life. Me. He gets angry with me, because I’m there, I think. And he, well, he—’ I stopped abruptly. This was very hard to say.
    ‘Is he violent?’ Irene Beddoes asked.
    I felt I was slipping down a slope towards things I had never properly told anyone.
    ‘Sometimes,’ I muttered.
    ‘Does he hit you?’
    ‘He’s lashed out a couple of times. Yes. I always thought I was the kind of woman who would never let myself be hit more than once. If you’d asked me a few months ago, I’d have said that I would just walk if a man hit me. But I didn’t. I don’t know why. He was always so very sorry, and I guess I felt sorry for him. Does that sound stupid? I felt he was doing something that hurt him much more than it hurt me. When I talk about it—well, I’ve never really talked about it before now, actually, but now, I feel that this isn’t me I’m describing. I’m not like the woman who stays with a man who treats her badly. I’m more—well, more the kind of woman who escaped from a cellar and now just wants to get on with life.’
    ‘And you did terrifically,’ she said warmly.
    ‘I don’t think of it like that. Really. I just did the best I could.’
    ‘By the sound of it, that was very good indeed. I’ve made something of a study of these sort of psychopaths …’
    ‘You didn’t tell me that,’ I said. ‘You said you were a psychiatrist and that you weren’t interested in all that side of it.’
    ‘The way you handled yourself was first amazingly resilient, just to survive at all. Then there was your remarkable escape. That is almost unprecedented.’
    ‘You’ve only heard my version. Maybe I exaggerated it to make myself seem more heroic.’
    ‘I don’t see how that’s possible,’ she said. ‘After all, you’re here. You’re alive.’
    ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘Anyway, now you know all about me.’
    ‘I wouldn’t say that. Maybe over the next day or two we can meet again.’
    ‘I’d like that,’ I said.
    ‘I’m going to get us lunch in a minute. You must be starving. First I’d like to ask a favour.’
    ‘What?’
    She didn’t answer. Instead she started rummaging in her shoulder bag. While she did this I thought about her. I had to make an effort to prevent myself feeling that she was the sort of mother I would have invented for myself: warm where my mother was detached, assured where my mother was nervous, intelligent where my mother was, well, not exactly Einstein, and just sort of deep and complicated and interesting.
    She pulled a file out of the bag. She put it on the table and removed a piece of paper, a printed form, which she put in front of me.
    ‘What’s this?’ I asked. ‘Are you trying to sell me insurance?’
    She didn’t smile. ‘I want to help you,’ she said, ‘and I want to make a proper assessment and in order to do that I want to build up as complete a picture as I possibly can. I’d like to have access to your medical records, and for that I need your permission. I need you to sign this.’
    ‘Are you serious?’ I said. ‘It’s just bundles of stuff about injections for going on holiday and antibiotics when I had a chest infection.’
    ‘It would be useful,’ she said, offering a pen.
    I shrugged and signed. ‘I don’t envy you,’ I said. ‘So, what do we do now?’
    ‘I’d like to talk,’ she said. ‘Or, rather, I’d like you to talk. Just talk and see where it takes you.’
    And I did. I gave myself up to it. Irene Beddoes went into