2 Thursday 14 April You bastard. You lying bloody rat. Lorna balled her fists, lunging at the air, imagining she was punching his smug face, his smug smile, his phony sincerity. Punching his bloody lights out. Eighteen months into their affair, Lorna had suddenly, unhappily, found out the truth about him. Discovered that the man she was besotted with, and with whom she had been planning to spend the rest of her life, had been lying to her. Not just lying. Living a total second life with her. Everything he had told her about himself was a lie. She was gutted. And angry at herself. What a bloody fool she had been, again. She had trusted him totally. Believed his endless promises that he was just waiting for the right moment to tell his wife. He’d given Lorna one excuse after another for delaying: Belinda was ill; Belinda was close to a breakdown; Belinda’s father was terminally ill and he had to support her through it until he died; Belinda’s brother was in a coma following a motorcycle accident. Poor sodding Belinda. And now Lorna had found out she wasn’t even called Belinda. ‘Greg’ had recently come back from a holiday with ‘Belinda’ in the Maldives. The doctors had told him his wife needed a break to recover her mental health. Before he went, he’d promised Lorna that he was going to leave Belinda just as soon as he could after their return. They’d even been planning a date. His escape from ‘Belinda’. Her escape from her bastard of a husband, Corin. Yeah? How stupid did ‘Greg’ think she was? Until just a few days ago, Lorna had been feeling really happy and secure. Believing that the soulmate she thought she had finally found in life, who had for the past year and a half made the nightmare of her abusive marriage just about tolerable, would rescue her from her living hell. Then her first client today, Kerrie Taberner, who she had squeezed in at the last minute, had come in looking more beautiful than ever, with a glorious tan from a holiday in the Maldives. She’d shown Lorna some of her pictures of the island of Kuramathi on her phone and there, totally by chance, was one of a couple she and her husband had met in a bar one night. A totally loved-up couple, Kerrie had said. She had wittered on about how nice it was to meet a couple who clearly really loved each other, when so many couples who’d been married a long time just seemed to end up bickering constantly. The man in the photograph was, unmistakably, ‘Greg’. ‘Greg’ and ‘Belinda’. Arms round each other, laughing, looking into each other’s eyes. Except those weren’t the names that they’d given to Kerrie. They’d given quite different names. Their real names. What a bastard. What a stupid bastard. Didn’t it occur to him that it might show up on Facebook or somewhere like that? ‘Belinda’! Belinda and Greg. And what hurt most of all was that she had believed him. Trusted him. Trusted ‘Greg’. He’d lied about his name. He wasn’t bloody ‘Greg’ at all. And she wasn’t ‘Belinda’. Once she had his real name it had only taken her moments on Google to find out who he really was. But now she knew, in her confused, angry state, she wasn’t sure whether she was glad to know the truth or not. Her dream was shattered. Her dream of a life with this man – this two-timing love-rat bastard. Everything he had told her was a lie. Everything they had done together was just a bloody lie. She sat at the kitchen table of the house – the home – she had shared with Corin for the past seven years, and stared bleakly at the huge glass fish tank that took up almost an entire wall. Brightly coloured tropical fish swam or drifted through the water, some gulping bits of food from the surface. Corin was obsessed with them, knew all the breeds. Gobies, Darters, Guppies, Rainbow fish, Gars, and all the rest. He doted on them. Several of them had mournful expressions, reminding her of her own life. Just as they were imprisoned in this tank, which was all of the world they would ever know, she was imprisoned here in this house in Hollingbury, on the outskirts of Brighton, with a man she despised, scared this might be all the world she would ever know. And now that seemed even more likely. God, it had all been so different when she had met Corin. The handsome, dashing, charming computer sales manager, who’d swept her off her feet and taken her to St Lucia, where they’d spent wonderful, happy days, snorkelling, sunbathing, making love and eating. They’d married a few months later, and it was soon after then that it had all started to go south. Maybe she should have recognized the signs of a control freak when they’d been on that idyllic holiday; by the obsessive way he had laid out his clothing, applied his suntan lotion through measuring applicators and chided her for squeezing the toothpaste tube in the middle, instead of rolling it from the end. From the way he planned out every hour of every day, and had been unhappy when they’d gone off schedule, even by a few minutes. But she hadn’t, because she’d been crazy for him. She had paid for that, increasingly, day by day, ever since. The first time she had become pregnant with the child she so much wanted, she had lost the baby after Corin punched her in the stomach in a drunken rage. The second baby she’d lost when he had pushed her down the stairs in another rage. Afterwards he would cry, pleading forgiveness or try to make her think it had never happened, that she had imagined it. And each time she had, dumbly, forgiven him, because she felt trapped and could see no way out of the relationship. ‘Gaslighting’, her friend Roxy had told her was the expression for what Corin was doing to her. Things had become so bad with him that she’d secretly started to record on her computer all the times he hit her, and her thoughts. Then she had met Greg in Sainsbury’s in West Hove, when their trolleys had collided coming round the end of an aisle. It had been an instant attraction and they’d become lovers a week later. They’d rented a tiny flat – their love nest, Greg had called it – on the seafront. They’d met there whenever they could, twice or even three times some weeks, and when his wife was away, flying for British Airways long-haul. They’d had the best sex of her life. It was like a drug they both craved. Driving home afterwards she sustained herself by thinking about the next time, and how to pass the days before they met again – and survive Corin’s endless bullying. It was a relationship founded totally and utterly on lust. Yet she had sensed something far, far deeper was going on between them. Then, one afternoon, lying in each other’s arms, ‘Greg’ had said, almost apologetically, ‘I’m in love with you.’ She’d felt closer than she ever had to any human being, and told him she was in love with him, too. She’d read somewhere, once, that good sex is just one per cent of a relationship. Bad sex – the kind she’d been having for years with Corin – is ninety-nine per cent. One per cent. Great. Do you have any idea how it feels to be just one per cent of someone you love’s life? she thought. I’ll tell you. It feels pretty shit. Everything about this sodding bastard had been a total lie, she realized. Except for the orgasms. They were real enough. Hers and his. Mr One Per Cent. God, I’m a fool. She felt so much anger inside her. Anger that she had been so stupid. Such a fool to believe him. Anger that her entire dream had been shattered. Anger that her husband was such a loser. She sat back down and stared at the photograph on her screen. You know what I’m going to do, Mr One Per Cent? I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to ruin your life.