Page 5 of A Murder is Going Down

Marianne runs a hand through her hair, and it swishes perfectly back into place. I only need to touch mine to look like I’ve been struck by lightning.

‘Can’t they force the doors to get us out?’

‘We’re between floors.’

Marianne looks at her watch. ‘Twenty minutes,’ she says, mostly to herself. ‘I can do this.’

I don’t say anything. It would be too weird to give her a pep talk – she’s old enough to be my mother.

‘The one day I forget to pack a bookandleave my beta-blockers behind,’ Marianne says.

I still don’t say anything.

‘What’s the rest of the story, then?’ she asks finally.

‘You want to hear it?’ I study her face. History shows I’m not the best at reading people (more on that later), but I think Marianne is genuinely interested. She might not want to hear it as much as she wants to get out of this lift or as much as she’d like a coffee, but she’s curious. Or maybe she just wants a distraction from thinking about what her body might look like if the lift plunged all the way down to the ground.

‘Sure,’ she says. ‘You were about to go to your brother’s funeral? Who are Lila and Ben, by the way?’

‘Liliawas my best friend,’ I say. ‘And Ben was my boyfriend.’

She gets it right away. ‘Rough. Also, how do you know the murderer was at the funeral if you don’t know who did it?’

She’s hooked. Iknewit.

‘I’ll get to that,’ I say.

Then

On a scale of my grandad’s funeral (I was two and have no memory of it or him) to my mum’s funeral (the worst day of my life), Felix’s funeral lands somewhere in the middle.

I’m sad, but I’m mostly sad because Felix was the only link to my old life with Mum and Dad. Can I really be the last person alive who remembers the time when Mum’s dressing-gown sleeve caught fire when she was cooking porridge and Dad panicked and threw his coffee on it? Is it possible that nobody else remembers the time when Dad took us to the corner shop for ice-cream, but their freezer had broken, so we went home with as many Giant Sandwiches, Frosty Fruits and Magnums as we could carry?

Still, it feels useless to pretend that Felix and I were ever close. We just didn’t get along. Blame it on the ten-year age gap, our clashing personalities or, my own theory, the fact that he was a massive arsehole. We were never friends and we barely felt like family. Probably won’t mention that at the funeral, though.

I do the reading that I picked out (‘If I Could Tell You’ by WH Auden, which I can tell you right now Felix never read in his life) and sit between Aunty Sam and Elena, Felix’s widow, in the front row. I’ll get to her in a bit because widows are always suspect number one when their husband gets bumped off, right?

Aunty Sam does the eulogy. I don’t entirely recognise the Felix she’s describing, but nobody jumps up to shout ‘I object!’ like a wedding scene in a bad rom-com.

Afterwards there’s tea, coffee and little cakes on a tray in another room, where Aunty Sam circulates and I let people shake my hand and murmur some variation ofI’m so sorry for your loss. Some of these people I know (a couple of girls from school whose parents probably made them come; my old history teacher) and others I would swear I’ve never met in my life.

After ten minutes, I hide in a corner with hot chocolate and as many biscuits as I can conceal in one hand.

‘This feels weird, right?’ It’s Elena, wheeling right past me. I swallow the biscuit in my mouth to reply, thenI realise she’s talking to the guy next to her. He’s scruffy and looks about my age. ‘Should I have had the wake at the house instead? Or would that have been worse?’

Elena is an overthinker. At least, I think she is. I don’t know her well enough to be sure. She was only twenty-two when she married Felix, which we can all agree is too young to get married unless it’s 1950 and you’re seven months pregnant. When Felix introduced us, I’d wondered if we might establish a big sister–little sister vibe; she’d seemed kind, interesting and occasionally displayed a dark sense of humour I appreciated. But Felix being Felix meant we rarely saw each other.

The teenager next to her, whose face is disconcertingly familiar now he’s up close, shrugs, dislodging a comma of dirty blond hair that falls into his eyes. Dye his hair red and gel it into a quiff and he’d look like Tintin. Or a long-lost Weasley triplet. ‘I think it’s going to feel weird whatever you do.’ He does a quick, performative scan of the room. ‘But, yeah, it’s like a dentist hygienist networking convention in here.’

Elena snorts. ‘What have you been doing for fun in Melbourne?’

It’s the voice that places him for me as Elena’s little brother, Patrick. I haven’t seen him since the wedding, and the three years have added a foot to his height and revealed the existence of cheekbones.

‘Elena, some girl is staring at you,’ Patrick says.

Clearly, I’ve changed too.

Elena twists around and her smile, when she sees me, feels genuine.