Chapter 7
I arrived early for my thirty-minute introductory consultation session with a therapist calling himself Alex Alexander, convinced it was going to be Aidan Ward.
I mean, the name even sounds made up. But, after I’d filled in about a thousand forms with fake personal information and was led into the consulting room by a nervous middle-aged woman with a bubble perm, I realised that this person was absolutely not Aidan Ward.
Alex was about thirty years too old, for a start.
And a woman.
‘I think I’ve made a mistake,’ I’d said when I saw Alex sitting behind her desk, all huge red Hollywood waves and lipstick bleeding into her smoker’s lines.
‘A lot of people feel like that when they first start therapy—’ she glanced at her computer screen, ‘Doris?’
It was the first name that popped into my head.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I really can’t be here.’
I can’t waste my time here when there’s another therapist I need to track down.
‘Sit down, Doris,’ Alex told me. ‘You’ve paid for the session so you might as well make the most of it. Even if you decide not to come back.’
Her voice was so nice and soothing that I guess I just sort of slipped into the cosy armchair in the office and that’s how I’m still sitting here, talking about my dad.
‘It’s often hard to find closure when no body has been found,’ Alex is saying.
And no body will ever be found.
It can’t when it’s been fed through the mincers at a meat-processing plant.
‘But you’re feeling residual guilt about the domestic violence you witnessed? Again that’s a standard trauma response when a child feels like they failed to save the parent experiencing the violence.’
A mental image of my mother, Carmella, shaving parts of Ben Pemberton’s corpse in preparation for feeding him to her pigs pops into my head.
She really doesn’t need me to save her.
‘I think you need to work on self-forgiveness, Doris,’ Alex says. ‘You put too much responsibility on yourself and then get cross at yourself when you can’t live up to your own expectations.’
I think she might have a point.
Thirty minutes later and I’m on my way back to the Chateau, ready to give Antoinette a lesson in basic fucking research. But also with an appointment for next week at the same time.
Except, when I get back, Antoinette already has a surprise for me.
I stop in my tracks when I see her sitting casually on the sofa, iPad on her lap, resting her feet on the naked torso of a man.
The dismembered naked torso of a man.
It’s not just any man.
Those ridiculous tribal tattoos … she’s using Ron Wilde’s dismembered torso as a fucking footstool.