Page 77 of A Murder is Going Down

‘It’s probably nothing, Lilia,’ I say. ‘If it was anything important, the cops would have taken it away as evidence.’

‘Assuming they looked this far off the path,’ Michael says, accepting the note back and pocketing it. ‘But I agree, it’s probably nothing.’ His face suggests the opposite.

I pull out my phone and snap half a dozen photos of the ground, the Coke can and the window above us on the side of the house. Just in case.

We push through the shrubs with the house on our left and the river behind us, all the way to the road behind the house. At the edge of the bitumen, caught in one of those spiky shrubs Australia specialises in, the ones designed to shred your skin, I find a golden thread.

When I show it to Michael, he holds it up to the light, then slides it into his pocket along with the probably-not-a-suicide-note.

‘Good work,’ he says, but I’m not sure he means it.

‘Do you think it’s from someone’s clothes?’ I ask.

‘Why would anyone come up this far from the house?’ Michael says.

‘Maybe it was the person Haruto saw,’ Lilia says.

Michael looks sceptical. ‘How well do you reckon he could even see through that window?’

We look back down the slope and I see his point: the bedroom window Haruto was looking out of is half-obscured by trees, trunks doubled over from the wind.

I look glumly at the scene, as if a perfectly preserved bloody handprint might materialise if I think about it hard enough.

‘What do you think?’ I ask Michael as we walk back down the hill. ‘Be honest.’

‘Do you mean, what do I think happened to Felix?’

‘Yeah.’

Michael sighs. ‘Honestly, the drama queen in mewants to say that he was murdered and there’s a suspect at large.’

‘Seriously?’

‘I’m an actor, we’re inclined towards the dramatic.’

‘You could play Felix in the mini-series,’ I joke, and he sputters a laugh. ‘But?’ Because there’s very clearly abuthovering over his sentence.

‘But the pragmatist in me says the simplest explanation is probably the right one. I reckon Felix slipped and fell. Or maybe he did it to himself. Sorry.’

Lilia’s hand rests, for the briefest of moments, on my shoulder but I shrug it off under the pretence of pushing a branch out of my way.

We make it back to the path, then pick up the pace down to the house. Michael goes inside to collect the items that Elena has requested, and I reset the alarm before we all get back in the car.

Michael tells us about the play he’s going to be in soon, then asks us polite questions about what we want to do after school. Lilia claims to want to be a volcanologist, which is the same answer she’s been giving to this question since she was ten. When I say I’m thinking about studying psychology, Michael’s grin seems sincere.

‘I can see it,’ he says. ‘You’re interested in people. Patrick’s the same. I’d never say it to his face, but he would be good at helping people.’

‘You think?’

‘Yeah.’ Michael’s face softens a little. ‘I know he likes to come off as this bitchy arsehole, but he’s actually a sweetheart.’

‘He said he wants to study electrical engineering?’

‘A future STEM graduate in our family, such a disappointment,’ Michael says. Then he gets serious and I’m sure he’s thinking about our conversation in the car earlier. ‘But Patrick is a good egg, Heidi.’

I think about what it’s been like to spend all my spare time with Patrick since he moved in with us. He dragged me into this thing, but I let him because it felt good to be around him. And that’s not only because he’s been a distraction from the aftermath of Felix’s death, but because he’sPatrick: funny, rude and sometimes just a bit too much. None of that negates the fact that he lied to me about when he got to Perth.

We pull up outside Aunty Sam’s house to see a man in a suit hammering aFor Salesign outside next door. ‘Looks like you’re going to have new neighbours,’ Michael says. ‘Unless your aunt is still planning to sell?’