Page 44 of Wanting Daisy Dead

Lauren

‘No surprises – Georgie’s rage makes her capable of anything,’ I whisper to Maddie, who still looks pretty shell-shocked about being exposed as an online stripper. Not sure I can use her on my book tour now, which is a shame.

‘No, it wasn’t Georgie,’ she replies. In spite of what she does for work, Maddie lives in Disneyland – she refuses to believe the bad about anyone.

Our main course arrives, but I’m not very hungry.

When Georgie mentioned Dan’s asphyxiation fantasy in her voice note, my stomach churned because he’s asked me before if I’d like him to choke me.

I said a firm no, but now I’m wondering about Daisy’s injuries and if Georgie had a point about the ligatures round her neck.

I’m toying with my coq au vin when our phones ping, and Alex turns up the volume on his phone and places it in the middle of the table.

‘Hi again, guys, Tammy here. Hope you’re enjoying dinner – and now back to the voice notes you guys made earlier. Maddie chose not to do a voice note, so we’ll go straight to Alex.’

‘Hey guys, Alex here. I ... To be honest I’m not sure about any of this.

I’ve changed my mind so many times about who it was.

Even before this weekend, just talking to Maddie and Georgie online and on the phone, I tried to get a feel for things, see if any clues were dropped.

Maddie hadn’t kept in touch with anyone, but I learned enough from Georgie to see where Dan was at.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t inclined to call Lauren because we just never gelled, and I thought it might seem odd to her, receiving a call from me.

As we were keeping my involvement on the down-low, I didn’t want to alert anyone.

But Lauren has always had a rep for gossip, and I never thought she was a suspect – not for a second, even though she’d physically attacked Daisy.

Of course, I’d no idea then about the book, and that has, over the weekend, concerned me, and I have flip-flopped slightly over Lauren.

As Georgie put it yesterday, “There’s your motive right there.

” But, you know, we aren’t detectives, and this isn’t a courtroom, it’s a podcast. And because you guys were all good enough – or blackmailed enough – to come this weekend, we’ve had the luxury of watching and listening, and talking.

So, for me, it’s not about proof, it’s about instinct, and that’s all I have to go off, and I think it’s either Dan, or Georgie, or both.

He was jealous of David; Georgie was jealous of Daisy .

.. and they may have done it together?’

‘Wow! Thanks, Alex. Well, that’s pretty conclusive. We have two people thinking Georgie did it, one for Dan and one for both of them.’

‘I want to respond. It wasn’t me – I didn’t kill Daisy,’ Dan says.

‘I know I didn’t,’ Georgie’s saying, but she seems on the edge of tears. I actually feel sorry for her, and wonder if I chose the right person when I said I thought she was the murderer.

‘I’d like to respond too, please,’ Maddie says, and she stands up.

After everything that’s gone on tonight with her OnlyFans being broadcast, followed by her jumping on Dan’s ridiculously expensive phone, I’m surprised she’s found the courage to speak.

But she did drama, after all, and she’s quite the actress.

‘I need to say something,’ she starts. ‘Almost twenty years ago, the wrong person was jailed for a crime he didn’t commit, and at the time I couldn’t come forward.

I was grieving, and my mental health was extremely fragile, and by the time I’d realised what was happening, David Montgomery had gone to prison.

By then I felt it was too late – but of course it wasn’t, and another life was lost as a result of me keeping quiet. ’

I’m not sure where this is going. My mind’s whirling through the weekend and all the ‘suspects’.

Does quiet, slow-on-the-uptake Maddie have some real juice on someone?

Is she going to be the star of my story and accompany me on my book tour after all?

She might wow the audience with her courage, beauty and strange career. What a story she’ll have to tell.

Alex has stood up now. What’s going on? ‘Go on, Maddie,’ he says. ‘It’s okay to say what you know ...’

I’ll be disappointed if it’s Alex after all. I was just getting to like him.

‘So, tonight it’s looking like Georgie or Dan or both look guilty of being Daisy’s killers,’ she says. ‘But it’s neither of them. I can’t let the wrong person go to prison again; I can’t allow another person’s life and another family to be ruined.’

Dan chokes on his wine, and the young waitress has to come to his aid. Meanwhile, I’m looking at Maddie and I’m thinking: Is this a joke, or is it a trick to smoke someone out, or ...

Alex puts his big arms around her as she rests her head for a moment on his chest.

‘I think about the way things were, and still ask myself how it happened, and why it happened,’ she starts, gently pulling away from Alex to address us all.

‘So tell everyone what ... what happened?’ Alex says, and she takes a seat and rests her head on her arms for a while.

We’re all looking at each other, and both Georgie and Dan look terrified, but Alex urges Maddie to speak.

‘All he wanted was a pretty young girl on his arm, but she loved him, she saw him as this amazing professor who was brilliant and handsome and ... I told her David was bad news ...’ She pauses a moment.

‘He’d promise to take her out to dinner or away for the night, and she’d get all excited and plan her outfits, and talk about it non-stop.

I remember resenting the excitement in her voice, because it told me how much she trusted him, how she believed he’d be there for her.

But so many times he’d invite her for drinks or to dinner and not turn up, and when he’d done this a few times she finally told him she didn’t want to be with him.

As I pointed out, he was married, he was never going to sit in a bar or restaurant in the city with her in case someone saw them.

But then one night she called me from a posh hotel in Exeter.

He’d booked a room and said they would spend the whole night together, and she’d been so thrilled.

But now she was sobbing, saying she wanted to end her life because he’d just called to say his wife was home – and he’d let her down again.

‘She was so upset, I jumped in a taxi, and when I arrived I found her in the hotel room in bed, distraught. I sat with her and stroked her hair, and when she turned over and lifted her bed sheet for me to get in, I did. That was the beginning ...’

Maddie starts to cry.

‘After that night, I wanted nothing and no one else but her. I’d always loved her from afar, always known I was gay, but I’d kept it to myself, and I wasn’t ready to tell anyone.

But that kiss with Daisy opened up my world – I knew this was who I was, and who I wanted to be, and I even started to like myself for a while.

‘I’d found the love of my life, and I knew I’d never love anyone as much as I loved her. I remember holding her that first night, and I shared my feelings about her, and she said she’d often wondered if she might be gay too.’

I am agog. I didn’t think there was anything that could shock me about Maddie after the cam-girl revelation, but this is all starting to make a kind of sense to me.

She was never far from Daisy, always in the background of our friendship, waiting to step in if needed.

It sounds like it was the same with Daisy’s romantic relationship too – as soon as David let Daisy down, she called Maddie.

‘The thing is ...’ Maddie continues, ‘I genuinely cared about her. I didn’t want to use her, or parade her around campus like David Montgomery did. In fact, Daisy was vulnerable and in need of protection, especially from men like Dan and David Montgomery.

‘No one took any notice of me, so they didn’t realise I was watching all the time. And I was – still am – a better actress than I was a ballerina.

‘But Daisy’s pregnancy at the start of our second year was such a shock.

I helped her in those early days when she felt sick and wretched and didn’t know what to do.

By then she and I were sleeping together regularly, though no one knew; they just thought that, as her friendship had cooled with Lauren, I was spending more time with her.

“Don’t ever tell anyone about us, will you, Maddie?

” she used to say. That’s why she’d make fun of me and tease me in front of Lauren.

She didn’t want anyone to suspect anything was going on between us.

But I wanted people to know we were a couple.

I was proud of being with Daisy, and wanted to shout about it.

‘I was fully prepared to leave uni and get a job and look after the baby together ... as a couple.’ She takes a breath.

‘But then I noticed her and Dan were spending time together in the house and also around uni. It was all very discreet, probably so Georgie wouldn’t know.

But I knew. I understood Georgie’s hurt, and the two of us would sometimes talk about how painful it was to have a partner who you couldn’t trust. But Georgie thought I was talking about a boy I was seeing in my drama group.

She had no idea I was talking about Daisy.

’ She turns to Georgie. ‘Thanks for those late-night chats, and for being there. You saved me so many times.’

Georgie smiles the warmest smile I’ve ever seen from her.