Page 41 of Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests

Vivienne looks at Mary’s pale face, and it dawns on her that, since she’s still married to Melvin, it is she who must sign the forms and agree to let her husband die.

This woman who has overcome cancer, accepted a cheating husband, and found the strength to keep him in her life and support him no matter what.

And suddenly, Vivienne is furious. Furious at this Christian character for handing Melvin the drug that killed him, furious at Melvin himself for his lackadaisical attitude toward his number, and furious at whoever—or whatever—had invited them to Serendipity’s in the first place and handed them each their death sentence.

“I’m so sorry,” is all Vivienne can think to say. And it’s so inadequate.

“I’m sorry I’ve dragged you here,” Mary says, now looking up into Vivienne’s eyes. “But I thought you might be able to answer my question.”

Vivienne holds Mary’s gaze, trying to keep her breathing even, to give nothing away. But with Melvin unlikely to survive, and after everything she has been through, surely Mary deserves an honest answer to whatever her question is.

“Something happened around three years ago that changed him,” she says.

“He went to a work dinner party and came back different. I couldn’t put my finger on it; it was so subtle at first, but it escalated and then everything unraveled.

Christian suddenly appeared in his life—in our lives—and then Melvin finally admitted he was gay.

But even after he’d left and was living with Christian, he seemed to still be losing himself.

I just didn’t think he’d ever touch drugs, at his age and after being a police officer for all those years. ”

So Melvin hadn’t told Mary about the numbers.

How much should Vivienne say? She’s only just met Mary, doesn’t know how she will react, doesn’t even know if she’ll believe her.

But she’s right: Since the dinner party, Vivienne has watched Melvin gradually lose his grip on his own life.

His betrayal of his wife, his affair with Christian, the all-night partying.

Every time Vivienne has seen him, he’s drifted farther out to sea, allowing the increasingly wild waves to throw him here and there.

The last time they spoke, at Gordon’s memorial lecture, he told her a story of “happy ever after,” and yet he still seemed unsettled, unconvinced of the words he was saying.

He tried to act like his number didn’t bother him, but Vivienne suspected that the opposite was true.

She tried to warn him, tried to give him a chance to change things, but it wasn’t enough.

He kept running from his number, and in the end, he was caught.

After taking a deep breath, Vivienne explains to Mary about the numbers, the sins, and the deaths.

“Now there are only three of us from the dinner party who are still alive,” says Vivienne. She lifts her tea and takes a sip, her mouth suddenly dry.

Mary looks down at her cup, wraps both hands around it, and shivers.

“So Melvin’s number is sixty-one?” she asks, and Vivienne nods.

“I know it sounds so far-fetched…” she says, then stops herself from saying more. Mary stays quiet, sips her tea, and looks out the window at the busy car park. It’s Saturday night, but try telling that to the people who own those cars: patients, hospital staff, visitors.

“If I didn’t know for sure that Christian is responsible for what’s happened to Melvin, I’d be wondering which guest was the murderer,” Mary says, her voice with a dreamy timbre. “The way you described the restaurant brings to mind the Agatha Christie novels I read during chemo.”

“Yes—it’s just like my favorite book, And Then There Were None ,” Vivienne says. “I had the same thought at first.”

“And what’s your number, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I lost my envelope not long after the dinner party,” Vivienne splutters, noticing the nervousness soaking her words.

Mary raises her eyebrows and blows on her tea. “That’s…strange,” she says.

“I don’t think…” Vivienne starts to reply but isn’t sure what she doesn’t think. Anyhow, Mary’s mobile goes off. She answers it, and Vivienne watches her face drain of color. It’s over.

“I’ve got to go,” she says, standing up quickly.

“Yes, of course. Ring me if you want to talk again,” Vivienne calls, but Mary is already out of earshot, her tiny, elegant feet barely making noise as she races down the corridor to her dying husband.

Vivienne knows how this will end. She breathes out and continues to sip her tea, taking in Mary’s words: which guest was the murderer …

Vivienne thinks back through her investigations, the red herrings, the dead ends.

The glove she found on Matthew’s office roof, Janet slicking on her lipstick as Vivienne accused her of murder.

Then discovering the seven deadly sins link, her list of devils, her return to Salvation Road with Tristan, the Happy Day Bakery.

Gordon’s parting words: Learn from them .

Tristan’s self-fulfilling prophecy theory.

Melvin’s refusal to help her and his laughter when she’d accused him.

Then her phone rings.

“Hello, stranger,” she says. “Where have you been hiding?”

“Sorry, I’ve just been busy with work,” Tristan says. “How’s Melvin?”

“Not good. I’ve spoken to Mary. She says he took a dodgy pill on a night out with Christian. He’s on life support and not responding.”

She hears Tristan breathe out.

“Poor Mary,” he sighs.

“And then there were two,” Vivienne says.

***

Vivienne is emptying the big black handbag to take to Melvin’s police-memorial drinks the following day.

A piece of black paper drops onto her bed, and she gasps.

For a second, she thinks she’s finally found her missing envelope, but then she sees Melvin’s name on the front and remembers taking his empty envelope following Gordon’s lecture.

At the time, she noticed a little symbol on the back, tucked away in the corner.

Now, finally, she puts on her reading glasses and takes a close look at it.

The symbol is lightly embossed and seems to show the letters EMB in decorative scrolls.

She grabs her laptop and types the letters into Google, but thousands of hits come up, everything from insurance companies to the European Milk Board.

So she adds printing to the search and London .

That narrows the list down, and she works her way through.

One catches her eye, in Central London. She clicks on the website, and her blood runs cold.

Twenty minutes later, she’s walking up the tube steps, arriving on an all-too-familiar road.

A young woman impatiently overtakes her, her large bag knocking against Vivienne’s side, leaving a loud sigh in her wake.

Vivienne remembers feeling frustrated with all the slow walkers around the city back when she was rushing around herself.

When did I become one of the slow walkers?

She stops outside the printers’ storefront, catches her breath before stepping inside.

“Vivienne! So lovely to see you!” the woman greets her.

***

Where is he? Vivienne glances around the room and looks at her watch again.

It’s not like Tristan to be late. In fact, he’s usually around six minutes early.

The tardiness of other people is one of their pet peeves.

“Since when did the whole world start running ten minutes late?” he’d say, and that would set them off for a good half hour of comparing stories of colleagues and friends who regularly turned up twelve to fifteen minutes late without an apology or explanation.

More than seven minutes deserved an apology, and more than ten minutes merited an explanation, and not just “I don’t know where the time went,” which was highly ridiculous in Vivienne’s opinion, because time is one of life’s few constants.

Every minute, every hour is always the same length; it is not a movable feast, thank God.

Tristan always agrees wholeheartedly with Vivienne about this, so why is he now running six minutes late?

He promised he’d come and support Vivienne and Mary.

Vivienne recently read an article linking panic attacks with suicide, and now she worries about Tristan whenever he doesn’t respond to her.

“Tristan will be here soon,” she says to Mary for the third time.

Mary nods and continues to watch the police officers moving around the workingmen’s club.

Every few minutes, one ambles over to offer his condolences.

These men (it is mostly men here) are professionals when it comes to speaking to the grief-stricken.

You don’t hear the go-to “I’m sorry for your loss” from them.

Oh, no, their words are considered, personalized—heartfelt, you might say.

“He was a fantastic copper, one of our best”; “He taught me everything I know”; and, somewhat unexpectedly, “I felt his presence this morning when I was shaving.” And yet Vivienne has noticed how they are keeping their distance.

There is something unsaid in this room. Perhaps it’s the unexpected manner in which Melvin died, or perhaps it’s something else. She wonders if Mary can sense it too.

“My friends were always jealous of our marriage, you know,” she suddenly says, looking down at her perfectly pink nails.