Page 9 of A Murder is Going Down

‘I want to clarify,’ Marianne asks, pulling a water bottle from her bag and glugging it noisily, ‘youdoknow who killed your brother?’

I smile in a way that’s shooting for charming, but possibly lands short in creepy. ‘I’m getting there.’

‘You couldn’t just skip ahead?’

‘Where do you have to be, exactly?’

Marianne pauses in the act of putting the water bottle back in her bag, then offers it to me. I’m not particularly thirsty – and I have my own bottle – but I take a sip anyway. It feels like a bonding move, to willingly embrace someone else’s germs.

‘Fair point,’ she says.

‘Thanks.’

‘Maybe we should ration it?’ she says, shaking the bottle.

‘The guy said twenty minutes,’ I remind her. ‘We’ll be fine.’

Neither of us mention the lack of a handy bucket in case we have to wee. Or worse.

‘You’re not sick, are you?’

‘No.’

‘I thought I heard a sniff.’

‘Hay fever.’ I lick my suddenly dry lips. ‘Where was I?’

‘After the funeral.’

‘Right. We can skip ahead to the next day, at least. That’s when things start to get interesting.’

Then

The message I don’t want to read wakes me up. I roll over to slide my phone out from under my pillow. (Please, don’t talk to me about sleep hygiene – I haven’t slept more than six hours a night since I was eight.) Don’t ask me how I know, butI know.It’s from Lilia. Of course it is.

I’m sorry about yesterday. Can we talk?

No message from Ben, although it occurs to me in a quick gut punch that the pair of them might have composed this one together.

You’re so thoughtful, worrying about her, Ben would have said to Lilia, because he’s the kind of guy who thinks that identifying good behaviour in others bestows it upon himself.

And Lilia would have said something like—

‘What do you want for breakfast?’ The question comesnot from the Lilia in my head but from the very real Aunty Sam in my bedroom doorway. She’s wearing a red silk dressing-gown I once borrowed, which led her to give me a lecture about how silk is made that messed me up. (Nevergoogle this.)

I say something like, ‘Urgh.’

‘Did I wake you?’

‘No.’ I shove my phone back under my pillow.

Aunty Sam and I didn’t exactlytalk it outwhen Ben and Lilia simultaneously dumped me. The most she said was, ‘This too shall pass,’ then handed me a book of Sylvia Plath poetry. I haven’t got around to reading that one, mostly because I’m not sure it’ll boost my mental health to take advice from someone who died with her head in the oven.

‘Porridge?’ I say. I’m not hungry, but it’s the easiest way to make Aunty Sam leave so I can obsess over Lilia’s message without distraction.

It works, and I’m left alone to commit Lilia’s message to memory before deleting it and blocking her number in case I’m tempted to reply. I’ll be honest, in the days and weeks immediately after Ben and Lilia revealed that a secret game of musical chairs had taken place and I was the one left standing, I sent some unfortunate messages to them both. The angry ones I can live with. The pleading ones? Less so.

In those early days, I thought it was Ben I missed most. Now it’s Lilia whose absence feels like a wound.