As a therapist Tom Wittingsall was paid to assess personalities and he was pretty damned good at it. It was this skill, coupled with a long list of wealthy clients that afforded him the luxuries of an apartment in Belgravia, a rather nice Jag and a regular table at the Ivy. 

However, despite 20 successful years treating the mental malaise of the rich and famous, it was, Tom thought, an awful shame that very few people actually intrigued him.  Generally speaking Tom could categorise his clients with ease; the bored wealthy housewife with a life that lacked meaning; the rock star with a drug habit and a distorted sense of self worth; the it girl with low self esteem and an eating disorder.  It was getting to the point where he was beginning to switch off as his clients began offloading their fears, psychoses and obsessions on the black leather couch in his Harley Street clinic.  And whilst he was glad that he didn't have to deal with the dreadful monotony of the average joe-public's depressions, he was beginning to question his own direction in life.  So when Samantha Knightsbridge turned up on a Wednesday afternoon in November 1993 for her first appointment, he was expecting what he called 'the usual'. 

Samantha was a tall, well-groomed forty something.  She was, he thought, attractive in a cold, predatory sort of way.  A successful lawyer, with a perfect manicure and expensive shoes he was certain that she had men for breakfast in the courtroom as well as the bedroom.  His initial assessment was that she was all dictaphone and no depth.  She talked with ease about her career, her family, the usual failed relationships and the debilitating insomnia from which she was suffering.  She put this down to the pressures of work and her hectic social life, neither of which she wanted to give up.  But whilst she talked, Tom began to feel that there was something about this woman that didn't quite add up.  He couldn't put his finger on it, but her soliloquy seemed rehearsed.  It was as if she were trying to weigh him up, deciding whether or not to tell him the real reason that she was there.  And so it transpired that insomnia was the least of her problems and only the beginning of his.