Page 15 of A Murder is Going Down

The main bedroom is tidier than it is downstairs. The bed is made, the curtains drawn and there’s only one pair of shoes on the floor, half-kicked under the bed. It doesn’t take me long to pack Elena a bag of clothes. (How many Breton t-shirts and elasticated skirts can one woman own?)

By the time I get back downstairs, Patrick is gone.

‘Hello?’ I call. Nothing. I walk through the house, wondering if washing the dishes constitutes interfering with a crime scene, given the case is not yet closed. There’s no police tape, and Elena said she was allowed back in the house, so I open the dishwasher and start stacking.

Ten minutes later I find Patrick out on the balcony, head craned to look back up towards the house and at the path that snakes around one side, cutting a zig-zag trail through the scrub.

‘What was Felix doing up there?’ he asks.

‘It’s pretty.’

‘At night?’

‘Peaceful, then?’

‘Going outside in the middle of a party for a nature walk – that’s weird,’ Patrick says.

‘Not if he was thinking about killing himself.’

He looks at me. ‘You’re not what you’d call a sentimental person, huh?’

‘I have my moments.’

‘Me neither,’ Patrick says. ‘I don’t think my family does sentiment.’

‘Elena literally works with special needs kids. She’sallsentiment.’

‘Maybe it skips a generation.’

‘You’re thesamegeneration,’ I point out.

‘You’re very argumentative today.’

‘Not just today.’

Patrick grins and we’re back stuffing ourselves with profiteroles under that table, wiping custard off our fancy wedding clothes. You couldn’t waterboard it out of me in front of Patrick, but it feels nice to hang out with someonewho a) is not speaking French at me, and b) hasn’t recently hooked up with either my boyfriend or my best friend (to the best of my knowledge anyway: Benisbi and Patrick is … I have no idea where Patrick’s interests lie).

‘Do you want to come up the path with me?’ Patrick asks.

‘Sure.’ Whether Felix fell or jumped or was pushed, I want to see where it happened.

I’ve only done the walk once before. The week after the house settled, Felix and Elena invited me and Aunty Sam over for what would prove to be a rare visit. All I remember from that day was Felix going on about how expensive it all was and Aunty Sam giving him some stick about hisproperty portfolio, as she called it. ‘Portfolio’ seemed like a stretch to describe a single house, but I think Aunty Sam disapproved of Felix’s finance bro lifestyle, which seemed to be all about buying the best house, car and clothes you could (almost) afford and worrying about the cost later.

Back then, I hadn’t been conscious of any dangers walking on the path that snakes up the cliff next to the house. Now, I’m aware of how easily a person could lose their footing and their balance. Every time my foot skids in the dirt, my stomach lurches in fear. At one point, I embarrass myself by grabbing at Patrick’s t-shirt, which he politely ignores.

When we get to the place where a scrap of torn policetape flutters from one of the bushes, I stop. ‘I guess this is where the police think he fell,’ I say.

‘Or jumped or was pushed.’

We both look down at the path we’ve come up, surrounded by overgrown scrub and a couple of trees hunched into absurd angles by years of Perth winds. Patrick snaps photos of the view with his phone, including closeups of bushes where branches have been snapped off.

‘If you fell from here, don’t you think you could hold on to a bush or something and slow yourself down enough not to fall?’ Patrick says.

‘You’d really have to throw yourself into the air to make it all the way down to the water,’ I say.

‘Or someone could throw you,’ Patrick says.

Felix was not a huge guy, but I can’t imagine him calmly allowing himself to be picked up and thrown to his death. If it happened that way, his attacker must have been big. Marvel Cinematic Universe big.