Page 34 of Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests
Two days after Janet’s wake, Vivienne popped into the corner shop and picked up a pile of the tabloid newspapers.
Of course, most of the news is online now, but she’d never gotten out of the habit of buying papers by the armful, enjoying the smell of the ink, how her fingers turned black after flicking through them.
When she opened the middle pages of one paper, an image made her inhale sharply.
It was Gordon, blue eyes peering out from under his white hood and over the scarf wrapped tightly around his mouth.
He must have been caught unawares, as his expression was one of fear, like a hunted white rabbit.
The headline screamed “TV Doctor’s Devastating Decline,” showing this image alongside a freeze-frame of Gordon sitting on the burnt-orange Morning Show sofa, his navy-blue suit perfectly skimming his slim frame, a look of confidence verging on arrogance on his face.
Vivienne imagined he was explaining to the host in his typically patronizing fashion exactly why the baby-food diet was not to be recommended.
The article went on to talk about a “worrying” (who was worried, Vivienne wondered; certainly not the journalist writing the article) TV appearance before he disappeared from the spotlight and left his wife to live a “hermit’s existence” in his small studio flat near the university where he worked.
An unnamed student was quoted as saying, “We are all worried about Dr. MacMillan. He looks ill lately; there are rumors going around that he’s been doing weird experiments on himself.
” A small note at the end stated that Gordon had refused to comment.
Although Vivienne wasn’t convinced by the content of the article, it did explain Gordon’s strange behavior on the day of Janet’s wake.
Then, last week, Dr. Gordon’s name had been splashed across the same newspaper:
“Dr. Gordon Dead from Allergic Reaction”
The article had listed all the important work he’d done in the field of nutrition, his “insightful” TV appearances, and just a line referring to his “controversial new research.” How he’d ended up eating something containing sesame seeds was unclear; the article just stated that he’d been found dead in his flat, and early reports had shown it was a result of his allergy.
With a heavy heart, Vivienne opened her hummingbird notebook once again.
She scoured the articles about Gordon’s death, making notes as she went.
He’d eaten an apple pie containing sesame seeds, but she could find no further details about where the pie had come from.
An online search showed that sesame seed wasn’t a usual ingredient for apple pie.
So Vivienne made her way to Gordon’s street, walked past the block of brand-new flats where Gordon had lived, past scores of baggy-trousered students.
She wasn’t sure what she was looking for until she spotted one student carrying a cardboard box bearing the name Happy Day Bakery.
She walked in the direction he’d come from and found a row of shops, including the bakery.
The articles reporting Gordon’s death didn’t name the bakery where the pie had come from, but on a hunch, Vivienne stepped inside the busy shop.
She got short shrift from the woman who worked there, who snapped that she’d “told the police already” that her apple pies contained no sesame seeds, so “God knows why it was inside one of my boxes.”
On the train home, Vivienne pondered the woman’s words.
Tristan’s self-fulfilling prophecy theory didn’t work in this case.
Presumably, Gordon hadn’t known the pie contained sesame seeds, as surely there would have been a better way to go if that had been his intention.
The only explanation was that someone who knew about Gordon’s allergy had baked the pie with the intent to kill him and then put it in the bakery box.
She typed out a message to Melvin, asking if what the woman had said was true.
She went to press Send, then stopped. She hadn’t heard from him since Janet’s memorial.
Vivienne then flicked through her notes, from beginning to end.
Her scribbled words, interspersed with drawings, told their own story.
Following Stella’s death, she’d been sure that a trolling victim was responsible.
After Matthew’s death, she’d accused Janet.
Then her mind had spun off on the notion of this eighth character, this watchful devil who was somehow connected to them all.
Even her handwriting told a tale, starting neat at first, proper sentences and punctuation, but gradually becoming messier, with crossings-out and random words.
Vivienne’s desperation clear to see. Her desperation to live.
That’s when she noticed something for the first time.
A series of clues pointing to a killer. And to one person in particular.
***
Walking toward the black cast-iron gates of the university, Vivienne takes in Tristan’s stooped frame. She’d made a few phone calls and found out that the university was holding a commemorative lecture in honor of Dr. Gordon.
“I always wondered if my life would have been different if I’d gone to university,” she says to Tristan as they walk past students with giant headphones and even bigger trainers.
“It isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be,” Tristan mutters, eyeing the students warily, as if they might pounce on him at any moment and demand he hand over his wallet.
“You didn’t enjoy it?” she asks. “But you made some good friends here.”
Tristan just shrugs. He’s told Vivienne he’s been meeting up with his old university pals once a month for almost a year now. They’ve even been talking about embarking on a rail trip around Europe, as they’d done as teenagers. Tristan beamed when he told her about this, yet today his mood is dark.
“I’m sure you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that I wasn’t exactly the most popular kid on campus,” he says, stuffing his hands in his pockets and marching ahead of her. It took some persuading to get him to come along today.
“He treated us all like idiots,” Tristan snapped when she suggested attending the commemorative lecture.
“I know, but we saw him at his worst, and it sounds like he’d done some important work before all of this. It’s only right we go.”
Vivienne has another reason for attending the lecture but decided not to confide in Tristan about it.
Eventually, he agreed to go along with her. Vivienne has been wondering if his own number is playing on his mind. His fortieth birthday isn’t far away. After that, he has five short years.
As they approach the wide marble staircase at the front of the building, Vivienne sees Melvin reclining on the stairs, smoking a cigarette, apparently oblivious to the glares of several students who are forced to step around his large frame.
“Melvin, I didn’t know you smoked,” Vivienne says.
“A new habit I’ve taken up.” He stands and puts his cigarette out under his shoe. “So it looks like the great doctor’s formula didn’t quite work out for him.”
“At least he tried,” mutters Tristan, marching past Melvin and up the stairs.
Vivienne shrugs at Melvin and they follow Tristan inside.
Tristan
You can do it, you can do it…
Tristan looks down at his old, scuffed trainers and wills them to keep going, keep putting one in front of the other until he gets there.
His head is bowed down, trying not to see the familiar curving staircase, the chipped pigeonholes and dusty portraits of long-dead lecturers.
But the smell of the place cannot be avoided, that mixture of teenage hormones, pencil shavings, and lemony wood polish.
The last few weeks have been bad enough without having to come back here , but once again, he’d given in to Vivienne’s nagging.
He follows the paper signs taped to the walls for Dr. Gordon’s memorial lecture.
Behind him, he can hear Vivienne and Melvin chatting amiably.
He arrives at the lecture hall, where a young student hands him a piece of paper, instructing him to “Sit anywhere.” He chooses a spot three rows from the back, shuffles along to the end, and then slips off his denim jacket, places it on his knees, and ducks his head to read the piece of paper.
He doesn’t look up but is aware of Vivienne and Melvin settling down next to him.
“OK, Tristan?” Vivienne asks, taking off her own jacket and placing it carefully over her knees. Had he copied that gesture from her, or vice versa? He couldn’t remember and tries to ignore the irritation that scuttles through him.
“Just didn’t want to be late,” he whispers, pretending to be absorbed in the leaflet.
As Vivienne turns to Melvin to ask about his upcoming retirement from the force, Tristan looks down into the well of the lecture hall, where an image of Dr. Gordon is projected onto the whiteboard. He is beaming into the camera, a patronizing expression on his smug face.
“Good thing we got here on time; the place is filling up,” Vivienne says, and Tristan finally looks up.
She’s right, all the seats in the lecture hall are now filled, and there’s a line of students standing at the back of the hall with more still streaming in.
Tristan does a quick scan of the room and estimates there are five hundred students, around 73 percent are men, maybe 43 percent are wearing glasses, and the average age would be twenty-one.
“Who’d have thought he was this popular?” says Melvin, breathing whiskey fumes across Vivienne to Tristan, who wrinkles his nose and turns away.
“Maybe it’s more to do with his recent fame,” says Vivienne, making quote marks with her two forefingers, causing Tristan to think of a song his mother sang to him: “Peter Pointer, Peter Pointer, where are you? Here I am, here I am, how do you do?”