Why, yes, it had.
Lady Muck’s audience applauded fanatically whenever she produced her punchline: Marianne must have set her sights on this father and soon-to-be-spare husband long before Lady Muck’s mum had died.
I open my diary file and start to scroll down, looking for where the last section finished so that I can start writing a new one about the events of today. I’m nearly there when something stops me in my tracks. At first I think it’s just a typo, but there it is again. I was right: something wronghadsnagged in my mind when I’d looked at it before.
I scroll up a bit, then down. It’s everywhere: the same mistake over and over. I feel light-headed and force myself to take three deep breaths. It can’t have been the computer that did this. And I know it wasn’t me …
Ollie’s name is spelled wrong. I’ve now seen four of them: ‘Olly’ instead of ‘Ollie’, in three separate diary entries.
No one would spell his name like that except for …
A memory comes back to me: 2006, Ollie sitting in the kitchen at Devey House, fending off the attack on his name more charmingly than I’d have thought possible if I hadn’t witnessed it with my own eyes:You’re right,he told Marianne.It probably does work better spelled with a ‘y’. Certainly looks better written down, and I can see the argument for fewer letters. Haha! Why add unnecessary clutter? If I were starting from scratch, I think I’d opt to be Olly-with-a-y for sure, but the trouble is, I’m just so used to the way I’ve spelled it all my life.
I had cut in at that point. Told him there was absolutely no need or reason for him to justify the spelling of his name, which was his business, and none of my stepmother’s.
I grip the edges of the table in front of me. How many ‘Olly-with-a-y’s am I going to find? Is it just these four, or …
In my panic, unable to focus on how to get back up to the top of the document, I decide the fastest way is to close it, then open it again.
There it is in the very first entry: ‘Olly’. Spelled the wrong way.
This is my diary, mine and mine alone, that no one else even knows exists.
Or do they?
I didn’t do this. It wasn’t me. I spelled it right every single time. I’d never get Ollie’s name wrong.
Someone’s done it, though. Someone has broken into my diary file and left their snide, taunting calling card.
There’s only one person I know who’d do that.
8
Monday 30 October 2023, 6.35 p.m.
GIBBS / SELLERS
‘Wordle,’ said Suzanne Lacy. She and Gibbs hadn’t moved from their spot just past the turning circle in front of Devey House. Gibbs fought back the urge to say the rudest thing he could think of: something to make her shrivel up and feel shame forever. She’d led him on, if only very briefly – allowed him to believe he was on the verge of an important discovery in the case. Her mention of a twisted game that Oliver Mayo and Marianne Upton had been playing together had raised his hopes, which plunged right back down, like a lift that reaches the top floor and then has its cables cut, at the mention of something as anodyne as the world’s favourite online word game.
‘Ask Jemma when she gets here,’ said Suzanne. ‘It was the first thing Marianne did when she woke up every morning: solved that day’s Wordle puzzle. She kept trying to get Jemma to play it, but Jemma wasn’t interested. And … I think Ollie must have been, though I can’t prove it.’
‘So, you’re saying Marianne and Oliver Mayo … what, had some kind of Wordle thing going on? Is that what you meant by a twisted game they were playing?’
‘I think that was an element of it, yeah,’ Suzanne said. ‘A harmless game within the twisted game.’ She looked at her right wrist, which had a pale watch-shaped mark on the skin, but no watch. ‘I’d better go and check the lasagne isn’t burning.’
‘I don’t get it.’ Gibbs stood in front of her, stopping her leaving. ‘You need to explain.’
‘I need to get back to the kitchen.’
‘I’ll come with you, then,’ he said. Together, they started to walk towards the house. There was no sign of Paddy Stelling when Gibbs turned to look. He must have gone back in.
‘All I’ve got is a theory, and absolutely no evidence that it’s the truth,’ Suzanne warned him.
‘Go on.’
‘One night last year, I stayed over at Jemma’s after we’d had a bit of a boozy night,’ Suzanne said. ‘Next morning we’re having breakfast and Jemma’s phone buzzes. Marianne. And she’s sent her Wordle result for that day, the grid. I don’t suppose you know …?’
‘Know it well, unfortunately,’ said Gibbs. ‘My wife does it religiously every night before bed, then sends that stupid box thing to everyone she’s ever met since the day she was born.’
