‘Can’t you try to—’ Sellers began hopefully.
‘Nope,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a huge heap of my own admin that I’ve been neglecting, and I need to follow up on this weird non-confession, in case Simon doesn’t. Looks like I’ll be the one tracking down Marianne Upton, making sure she hasn’t been killed recently. Lucky me.’
‘Are you winding us up?’ Sellers looked ready to laugh if it turned out to be a joke. ‘Marianne Upton?’
‘Don’t tell me you know her?’ said Charlie.
‘That’s our vic’s name,’ Gibbs said. ‘The woman who’s just been murdered in Sleatham St Andrew – she’s called Marianne Upton.’
2nd June 2006
I hate her. I HATE HER.
I’ve got a new nickname for her, which is how I’m going to think of her from now on: ‘Mai Tai’. It’s her favourite cocktail. (She ordered one when we were out for dinner last night, which is what made me think of it.) In my version, though, it’s spelled differently: MyTy, short for ‘My Tyrant’. She won’t be able to hear the spelling in my head when I jokingly call her it. All it will mean to her is the drink.
Anyway, that’s what she is: a fucking tyrant, however much our mutual nearest and dearest would passionately defend her and deny it. I know exactly what his reaction would be:
‘Oh, come on, that’s not true.’
Yes, it is.
‘She’s just trying to make sure …’
I don’t give a shit.
Here’s how I know she’s a tyrant: I allowed her to have a complete and total victory over me and it still wasn’t good enough for her. When she told me that was it, no more Ollie, I didn’t argue. I nodded meekly and said all the right things – everything she wanted to hear. Since there was no way for me to change anything – nothing I could think of immediately, at any rate – I accepted it all without question and did my absolute best to act as if I was happy with her decision. And guess what? My total compliance wasn’t enough for her. Eversince I said, ‘Of course, whatever you want,’ as deferentially as I could, she has secretly suspected me of Having My Own Thoughts About Ollie That Aren’t The Same As Hers – a heinous crime in the eyes of a dictator. Still, what could she do? She had no proof. I’ve deliberately kept all my thoughts and my sadness to myself. Actually, let’s call it heartbreak, because it goes way beyond sadness – I don’t think I’ve felt as desolate ever before in my life as I do about this. And she knows I’ll only deny it if she attacks me for thoughts she can’t prove I’m having, so instead she’s waging a pro-Paddy, anti-Ollie propaganda campaign.
I didn’t notice until she made her second not-so-subtle attempt to brainwash me. The first was so pathetic, I didn’t register it as anything more than a pinprick of pain: she told a story about the one time Paddy and Ollie met. According to her, Ollie criticised Paddy ‘unfairly’ afterwards, in a way that demonstrated that ‘there was something not right about him, because who would say that?’. All Ollie had done was ask if Paddy was maybe a bit selfish, after seeing him stretch his legs out and take up nearly all of a sofa, apparently not noticing that I was squished into a corner at the end of it. Ollie didn’t think it was right that Paddy let me perch uncomfortably like that for twenty minutes, on my own sofa in my own house, while he extended his legs and hogged most of the space, and God bless him for that. I fully agreed. I’ve often wondered what went wrong with Paddy’s upbringing that he actually thought behaviour like that was acceptable. I should never have let Ollie and Paddy be in the house at the same time – that was wrong, and I shouldn’t have let my curiosity get the better of me. I’d wondered for some time if seeing the two of them together might clarify the pecking order even further in my mind, and boy did it do that.
As for the idea that there’s something seriously wrong with Ollie because he dared to criticise Paddy … I resisted the temptation to say, ‘Anyone who meets Paddy Stelling and instantly thinks, “Hm,he seems a bit shit in some quite important ways”, and then points out some of those ways, is a perceptive and helpful person, if you ask me – the kind of person who ought to be listened to.’
I didn’t realise that the Tyrant’s apparently offhand observation was part one in a carefully planned programme of character assassination, so I didn’t think much more about it. It was only when part two of the anti-Ollie brainwashing initiative was delivered over the breakfast table this morning that I twigged what was going on. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘There was always just something off about Ollie. I should have seen it sooner. That whole palaver on the way to the Cotswolds should have woken me up.’
I gritted my teeth as she explained why something so minor – a well-intentioned and harmless request Ollie had made months ago that was completely understandable if you were anything but a monster – proved that he was somehow terrible and dangerous. Small explosions of hurt ripped through me as she spoke and I realised that, if she chose to, she could subject me to this unobtrusive form of torture whenever she felt like it, forever: endless negative jibes at Ollie, all delivered in an ‘Isn’t this a fascinating observation?’ tone.
I know what she’s trying to do: goad me into defending Ollie. She reckons if she keeps the accusations coming, I’ll eventually go wild and scream, ‘How fucking dare you? I love Ollie! He’s amazing! You’re so wrong about him!’ That’s why ‘tyrant’ is an accurate description. Stalin and other political dictators tried to find out who secretly disagreed with them so that they could have them killed. Luckily, the Tyrant doesn’t have a secret police service working for her. Anyway, she’s wasting her time. I’ll never give in, never give up my love for Ollie. And I won’t be provoked into declaring it, either. I’m no masochist, but I think I might be the world’s biggest … something. I’m not sure what yet. Darer – maybe that’s the right word. Plotter.
Interestingly, the more I nod my acceptance and allow her victory to stand, the more anxious and jumpy she seems. I’ve definitely unsettled her by seeming so compliant. She’s wondering more and more every day: am I trying to lull her into a false sense of security so that she’ll be caught off guard when I finally … what? She must be racking her brains for the answer.
I’d better start doing the same because, whatever she might suspect, the truth is that I don’t have anything brilliant planned.
Yet.
That’s something that needs to change.
4
Monday 30 October 2023, 5.45 p.m.
JEMMA
‘Killing Marianne was an obsession from the second it occurred to me,’ I tell DC Waterhouse. ‘But it had nothing attached to it at first, nothing practical that linked it to the real world. It was like this … sinister backing track to my life that I couldn’t switch off, always playing beneath the surface. I could handle it, though. Hoped it’d go away. It didn’t. And then I thought of how exactly I’d do it. And one word kept popping up in my mind: “foolproof”. I know nothing ever is, really, but … even if I’d been suspected, there would have been no evidence, given the solid-seeming alibis involved.’
Waterhouse says nothing. I get it: why add to the barrage of words, when it’s all pouring out anyway? I haven’t stopped talking since we sat down, and he’s barely looked in my direction. It’s lucky I came here ready to tell the whole story. These conditions would discourage all but the most determined from saying anything at all.
I wonder if Interview Rooms One, Two or Three are any more plush or welcoming. Probably not. Or maybe they ran out of comfortable furniture and paint that wasn’t a hideous bright blue before they got round to doing up number Four. Ithought I liked the colour blue until I walked in here. There are no armchairs, rugs or pictures, nothing to soften the hard edges – only shouty signs about various things we all need to beware of or report, as if reminders of all the bad things that aren’t in the room might distract from what is: this dead-eyed detective, the horrid, pock-marked table between us, the long, high window that must have been positioned to make it as hard as possible for anyone to see anything. My only view is of a slice of beige brick wall.
‘It’s not matricide,’ I say. That’s got to be the worst of all crimes: killing your own mother. ‘I mean, it wouldn’t be, if I did it. Marianne and I aren’t blood relations. Though any mention of that was banned from the word go. I was instructed to call her “Mum”. First time Dad introduced her to me, she told me she was my mother from now on. I was seven years old. My mum had died less than three months earlier. Dad knew how devastated I was by her death, yet he nodded along enthusiastically as if Marianne was saying something welcoming and lovely. I remember thinking, “No, you’re not my mum. I don’t have a mum any more. You’re a stranger, telling me lies.” It all just felt so wrong, especially because Dad didn’t seem remotely bothered by any of what she was saying.
