‘Yup. You married?’
I nod.
‘Also to a dick?’
I’m startled by this and don’t know what to say.
‘Is it your husband you’ve killed? What’s his name?’
Why the hell would she think I’ve killed Paddy? ‘He’s called Paddy Stelling, but … I haven’t done anything to him. He’s alive. Why would you think …?’
‘Women who look like you don’t kill people, unless it’s their violent boyfriends or husbands, in self-defence,’ she says.
‘Paddy’s never been violent.’
‘Can you tell me the name of the victim? Speaking of names, I’m Sergeant Charlotte Zailer, but you can call me Charlie.’
‘The victim?’
‘The murder victim. You’re here to talk about a murder, right? Though I’m fairly sure you haven’t killed anyone. Am I right? If I believed for one second that you’d actually killed someone, you wouldn’t still be sitting in reception.’
‘Marianne Upton is her name.’ I hear the words first, like something I’ve hurled at myself, then feel them inside me, tumbling down and down. I scrunch my hands into fists to stop them from reaching for something that isn’t there.
I can’t undo this now. Everyone will find out. There will be a knock on the door of Marianne and Dad’s house. That’s how it will start … because Marianne will need to be warned …
‘I’d … Please, can we just wait for DC Waterhouse?’ I say, because I’m really not sure about this woman at all.
She looks as if she’s about to argue with me, but thankfully decides against it. With a disapproving twist of her red-lipsticked mouth, she turns and heads back to the other side of the reception area.
Once she’s left me alone and it’s safe, I pull my laptop out of my bag and open it. I try to put on the face I’d be wearing if I were about to open something work related – next term’s budget spreadsheet or something like that. I like my job because it’s completely stress-free and no one ever complains about medoing things the way I want, but I can’t pretend that being the bursar for a tiny independent school is the most thrilling career in the world. Still, I have a boss who’s happy to be in charge only in theory while leaving me to my own devices, so I regard myself as lucky. I’m not good with authority figures, thanks to Marianne. It’s ridiculous, but when anyone suggests I might like to consider doing something that wasn’t my idea in the first place, my immediate thought is always: ‘Here comes tyranny’.
I open the diary folder on my laptop, knowing exactly which entry I need to read before I speak to any detective. I’m so nervous, it’s hard to think straight, and I could do with reminding myself of why I’m here – of what I both desperately want to do, and can’t allow myself to do.
Here it is: July 7, the entry that feels like the most important of all the ones I’ve written since I started writing this … journal or book, or whatever it is, on my laptop. The first word is ‘Marianne’… It makes me feel sick, the way everything has to be about her.
If she didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be a killer right now. I wouldn’t need to tell the police a story about murder.
As I read, I start to have the feeling that something’s not right – something about my own words. It’s almost as if …
No, that’s ridiculous. These are mywords. No one else wrote them. I remember writing them. Starting with the word ‘Marianne’ …
JULY 7, 2023
Marianne pushes open the door of her study with a ‘Ta-daaa!’. She’s put on a special dress for the occasion, a long black kaftan I’ve never seen before with a silver brocade pattern around its square neck and lines of sequins down its sides: glistening slug-trails on dark ground. On her feet are shiny black sandals with matt black soles as thick as bricks and elaborately bumpy arrangements near the toes: white lace bows and pale pink pearls. She has painted her toenails the same pink; same shade of lipstick too.
Marianne hardly ever bothers with dresses or make-up. I’ve known her for nearly thirty years and I’ve seen her done up like this no more than five times. Normally she wears a floppy white or pale blue shirt, dark blue jeans and the plainest, flattest flip-flops on her always-bare feet. She boasts about her good circulation – how she never feels the cold – and about how she doesn’t need to look smart because she knows she is smart intellectually. Only last week she boasted, ‘I’m the scruffiest nearly-seventy-year-old I know, and I’ll still be dressing the way I did in my early twenties when I’m a hundred and ten.’
Arm still outstretched, she stands back to give me an unbroken view. I look, but there’s nothing.
Her study – or rather, the room that used to be her study – has been stripped of all its contents. She has dressed up like this – her ‘glad rags’, she calls them – to show me emptiness. A destroyed room.
The three windows have marks around them, suggesting the presence of curtains and blinds at some point, but they’re all gone. The walls are patchy pink-beige plaster, like skin that has suffered one trauma after another. Shelves have been torn down, light fittings pulled out. None of it has been done with care. Covering the floor is a fuzzy grey substance, unevenly distributed; there are thicker clumps and sparse patches.
I haven’t seen the inside of this room for seventeen years, but the three windows are just as they have been all this time in my memory. One, large and rectangular, overlooks the black wooden barn and the thin gravel path that separates it from the house. The second is tiny and square and offers a glimpse of what Marianne calls her ‘show-piece’, the formal, walled section of the front garden. The third is the size and shape of a large car wheel and faces the wildflower meadow at the back and the lodes and fens beyond.
Dad took an instant dislike to this room when we came to look round the house in 1998. He said it jutted out from the side of the house in a way that was jarring, and thought the odd assortment of clashing window styles made it look untidy.
‘Oh, Gareth, don’t be so unimaginative.’ Marianne laughed at him, delighting in his wrongness as she always did. In her eyes, Dad has never been someone whose thoughts needed to be taken seriously. ‘Things don’t have to be identical to belong together,’ she said, providing him with his new opinion, to be learned by heart. ‘Thesewindows are the perfect trio. Think of an orchestral trio. You’d want violin, cello and double bass, wouldn’t you? Not three boring old identical violins.’ This winning argument was perfectly calibrated to silence all opposition. She’s a master at those.
