Free Like This, for Ever by Sharon Bolton Page A

questions she’d reached. ‘Are you ashamed of what happened?’ she asked.
    The counsellor’s eyes were grey, like her hair and her clothes. She was a grey lady, but her skin was too pink to belong to a ghost. ‘I’m not sure I understand,’ said Lacey, although she understood perfectly.
    ‘Do you feel embarrassed? Weak? As though your colleagues are judging you?’
    ‘
Are
they judging me? Is that in the file too?’
    It was a game they played, twice each week. The counsellor asked questions and Lacey dealt with them, just occasionally, when she judged the moment was right, giving a little bit more away. She’d played the game before, years earlier, trying to convince police counsellors she was fit to be a police officer. Strange that it should be so much harder, convincing them that she wasn’t.
    ‘You were sent in to investigate, you became one of the victims. Some people might consider they’d failed.’
    The woman was trying to get a rise out of her. Did she really imagine it would be that easy?
    ‘I’m still alive. Most of the other girls aren’t. I’d say that makes me a survivor, wouldn’t you?’
    The counsellor pulled one of her rare smiles out of the ration-book. She wasn’t unfriendly, Lacey had decided at one of their earlier sessions, just one of those people who didn’t smile easily.
    ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I would. And you caught the people responsible. From what I understand, they’re all going to prison for a very long time. Not that you can always prejudge these things, of course.’
    Time to give a little. Lacey gave a deep sigh, dropped her eyes to the carpet. ‘I never think about it,’ she said in a low voice. ‘About what they did to me that last night. If I catch myself on the verge I have to push it right away, because if I let all those thoughts in, I think my head might explode.’
    The other woman was leaning forward in her seat, the way she always did when she felt she was getting somewhere. ‘Go on, Lacey,’ she said.
    ‘I have to keep active,’ Lacey went on. ‘I wake up and go running, two hours every morning. In the afternoons I go to the local pool or out for a bike ride. I have a gym at home and I use it most days. In the evenings I walk, sometimes for miles, and when I get in, even though I’m exhausted, I stay up till about two in the morning watching romantic comedies and sitcoms. Nothing dark, because if I think about anything even remotely unsavoury then I can feel it, everything that happened, hammering on the door. I’m living in a La-La land of my own making, wearing out my body and flooding my brain with fluffy pink crap.’
    ‘Because you can’t allow yourself to think about anything real?’
    Lacey dropped her head forward into her hands. Between her fingers she saw the counsellor’s hand stretch out and leave a box of tissues within reach on the carpet. Lacey pressed one to her face. A second later, she crumpled it to hide the fact that it was bone dry.
    When she looked up, the counsellor’s face had softened. Christ, it was almost too easy. Come in edgy, difficult, have a bit of a sparring match and then let something get to you. Break down and give a bit of information. It never failed because, luckily, counsellors employed by the Met just weren’t bright enough to spot what you were up to.
    ‘Tell me more about Mark Joesbury,’ she asked Lacey.
    On the other hand, maybe this one was brighter than she looked.
    ‘He was my senior officer on the Cambridge case,’ said Lacey, knowing she wasn’t going to get away with that. ‘And I worked with him last autumn, on the Ripper murders. Do you remember?’
    ‘Who doesn’t?’ replied the counsellor. ‘And you became close?’
    Not by choice, they hadn’t. And yet there was no denying Mark Joesbury had got a lot closer to Lacey Flint than she’d allowed anyone in a long time. He was the one who, albeit for just a second, had seen through the mask …
    ‘DI Joesbury was suspicious of me