Too Close For Comfort by Eleanor Moran Page A

sting, the sense of competing with someone impossibly perfect. An anarchic saint. Maybe dying young was the only way to square some of those impossible contradictions of
being a woman.
    ‘But it sounds like he did have problems,’ I added. I was desperate to ask her about the complaint that Krall had alluded to, but I didn’t want her to think I was poking around
for gossip.
    There was an edge to her. ‘Look at you, with the inside track.’
    ‘Lys, if you don’t want me to do this . . .’
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s not that. I’m really glad you’re here.’
    It doesn’t always feel that way, I thought, but then I looked down at the chaos around us, her living-room floor a sea of garish plastic toys. Saffron had made me some plastic fried eggs
earlier: I should’ve cleared them away, rather than behaving like room service would come and do it for me.
    ‘I’m not part of the investigation. I’m just here to offer people a bit of support. Be someone to talk to.’
    ‘I want you to be someone for me to talk to.’
    ‘I’ll always be that,’ I promised.
    Promises can be foxing – how often do we make them in a lifetime and really know they’ll hold fast?
    *
    Ian’s door was firmly shut when we got there, and Kimberley made sure that she was the one to knock. She opened it before there was a response, pushing her blonde head
through the gap.
    ‘Ian, Mia Cosgrove’s here.’ It felt odd to hear my whole name come out of her mouth. How had she learnt it?
    ‘Come on in,’ said a stressed-sounding voice. ‘We’re wrapping up.’
    The office was small and poky, with a view of the round-about in the playground and the fields that ringed the school. Ian Gardener was wedged behind his desk like it was a barricade; a man and
a woman sat on the other side on boxy armchairs that looked too brown and synthetic to be comfortable – I guessed immediately that they were plain-clothes detectives. Ian probably
wasn’t much older than me, but he was pasty and well padded, his hair thinning at the crown, plastic glasses perched high on his sweaty nose.
    Once the detectives had made their exit, Ian turned his focus onto me.
    ‘So you managed to cross enemy lines?’ he said, attempting a weak smile.
    ‘The photographers? God, they’re like swarming rats, aren’t they?’
    ‘I feel like that’s unfair to rats,’ he said. His voice sounded nasal to my ears, each word delivered at a similar flat pitch. ‘We’ve got a couple of white ones in
Owl class, they actually make very good pets.’
    We sat there for a few seconds in silence. I like to let a first session unfold without me forcing it. Where the client instinctively wants to lead us tells me far more than I’ll glean
from their answer to some question I’ve cleverly constructed.
    ‘Thanks for coming,’ he said eventually.
    ‘I’m glad you asked,’ I said. ‘I’m not arrogant enough to think I can do a great deal in three weeks, but if I can be any support to you, I’d like to
try.’
    He grabbed a ballpoint pen from the pen pot on his desk, started clicking the mechanism in and out. He was wearing a wedding ring that gripped the skin of his fleshy finger like it was too small
for it.
    ‘That’s all we can really do, isn’t it?’ he said, looking up, his gaze intense. His eyes were almond-shaped, brown, too small for his wide face. ‘Try?’
    ‘In this instance?’
    ‘More life in general,’ he said, voice leaden. The next silence that came felt more loaded. I waited it out. ‘These sessions are confidential, aren’t they?’
    ‘Unless you tell me something that’s critical to the police investigation.’ I looked at the way his shoulders hunched inwards under his bog-standard black crew neck, his
fingers still fiddling obsessively with the chewed plastic pen. All I wanted – all I ever want with clients, apart from the odd one I want to drown – was to make him feel that he
wasn’t completely alone. ‘And I know so