The Next to Die, page 32
“Kim! No one told me you were coming in.”
I turn. It’s Charlie.
“What kind of shit-show are you guys running here?”
“You seem angry. Did the servants forget your pickled onion Monster Munch this morning?”
This makes me laugh, though I don’t want to. I describe my brush with her unhelpful colleague, and she groans. “That’s Iain Chanter. He doesn’t do a stroke of work—just obsessively applies for other jobs all day long. I think he’s got an actual problem. As well as being an actual problem. They’re trying to give him the boot, I think, but it’s hard. Anyway: you wanted me, and here I am!” She smiles. “What’s up?”
“You’ve driven me around. I thought I could drive you around for a change.”
“Kim, why are you here—really?”
You can hardly blame liars; so often the truth is mocked or rejected as unacceptable.
“You said you’d ring me with any news,” I say.
“I will. There’s none yet, I’m afraid.”
“Who’s Faith Kendell? Whoever she is, is she Billy?”
Charlie frowns. “I don’t have a definite answer to that question yet. Sorry. They’re still waiting for DNA test results, and Simon’s at the refusing-to-tell-me-what-he’s-thinking stage of the case. I have a special hitting pillow that he knows nothing about. At the moment I’m beating the moldy feathers out of it several times a day.”
“Isobel Sturridge is Faith,” I say. “Even if she isn’t Billy, she’s Faith Kendell.”
Charlie nods. “That’s . . . yes.”
Of course she was never going to tell me. Why should she?
“I did a bit of digging around online,” I say. “I think I’ve got something on the Liv and Gibbs front.”
Charlie grabs my wrist. “You’d better not be joking.”
“I’m not. I’ve found Natalie—Nikhil’s girlfriend. Her surname’s Burge. She has a long job title: Director of Science and Plants for Schools at Cambridge University’s Botanic Garden. She’s on Twitter—not as herself; as Science and Plants or some such—and she’s going for a wedding dress fitting tomorrow afternoon in Cambridge city center at a place called the Tailor’s Cat. It’s a bridal boutique. Guess who’s also going?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Charlie. You used to be a detective.”
“Liv’s going too? How do you know?”
“From Natalie’s tweet last night: ‘So excited about wedding dress fitting on Tuesday at the Tailor’s Cat’ followed by Liv’s Twitter handle. They hadn’t been tweeting each other, there was no conversation—just that one tweet with Liv included. And—I think this is strange, I don’t know if you will—they don’t follow each other on Twitter. They’ve never communicated there before. Natalie’s tweets, all apart from that one, are ‘Picture of rare monkey puzzle tree’ and stuff like that.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Liv didn’t reply to the tweet about the wedding dress, but she did favorite it. Then, next time I looked, the tweet was gone. Vanished.”
Charlie nods. “Typical of Liv. She favorites to suck up, then DMs to say, ‘Actually, would you mind deleting that?’ How did you find Natalie on Twitter with no surname to go on?”
“I searched for ‘Natalie’ and ‘McElwee’ together—Nikhil’s wine company. There was something from a years-old McElwee Christmas party . . . Look, it doesn’t matter. What’s more interesting is: Why did Liv want that tweet deleted?”
Charlie looks at me oddly. “She didn’t want anything online linking her and Natalie. I agree, it’s interesting—to me. I just can’t see why it matters to you.”
“It’s my mystery, too,” I say. “You gave it to me in that godawful hotel in . . . wherever it was, and I’m keeping it until I’ve solved it.”
I can’t tell if Charlie’s impressed or annoyed.
“So Natalie and Nikhil are getting married,” she says, eyes darting back and forth as she processes the new information. “Liv and Gibbs must be their . . . best man and matron of honor, witnesses, whatever. But so what? Why does that have to stay secret? Why has my sister never mentioned the name Natalie Burge in my presence?”
“Maybe the wedding’s tied up with the surrogacy plan. Something like ‘We pay for your wedding and honeymoon—you then have a baby for us and allow us to buy it from you.’ It sounds far-fetched, but why else would Nikhil and Natalie choose witnesses they’ve known such a short time? Let’s face it: if they’d been part of your sister’s social circle for ages, or Chris Gibbs’s, you and Simon would have heard their names.”
“True. But there’s no surrogacy plan that we know of. We made that up, remember?”
“There might or might not be a surrogacy plan. If there isn’t, there’s something else. I want to find out what it is, tomorrow. Do you?”
Lifeworld online, January 19, 2015
OPEN LETTER TO BILLY DEAD WOMEN
by Sondra Halliday
Dear Billy Dead Women,
I’ve decided to use this week’s column to write to you directly. You’ve been writing to me and sending me presents, and I don’t believe you’d have done that if you didn’t want a reply. The trouble is, I don’t know who you are or where you live. I don’t know your email address. If I’m going to communicate with you at all, it has to be in public.
I am proud to say that, although I am no kind of detective, I know more about you than those whose job it is to investigate your crimes. They’re still clinging to the overwhelmingly unlikely possibility that you might be a woman. It’s victim blaming at its most flagrant, masquerading as open-mindedness. All but one of the murder victims are women, so the killer must be a woman too, or else how can it turn out that all female suffering has a female cause that conveniently absolves the lethal bulldozer that is patriarchy, the one we’re not allowed to notice even as it crushes the life out of us?
If you’re wondering what you’ve just read, Billy, let me explain: it’s called a radical feminist rant. Don’t pretend you didn’t know that’s what I am. Every journalist in the country is writing about you, yet I’m the only one you’ve chosen to bombard with books and stories and letters. Why me, Billy? It’s because I’m not keeping my head down like a good girl, isn’t it? I’ve looked up and seen the hostile pattern all around me—a pattern of woman-hating—and I’ve correctly identified how you fit into it.
You target me, Billy, for the same reason I target you: you would annihilate my kind as irreversibly as I would annihilate yours if I had the chance. What I’m trying to say is: I understand why you feel as if you know me. It works both ways.
The detectives pursuing your bloody trail don’t know who you are, but I do. Your name starts to seem more and more irrelevant when I know the rotten core of you so well. Unlike the police, I know you’re one of the millions of men on this planet who don’t believe the lives of women and girls are worth anything. Unlike them, I know it’s going to be almost impossible to find you or stop you because you are not an aberration; rather, you’re the logical extension of male socialization in our repugnant society.
The truth is, Billy, you could be any or all of the men I’ve encountered throughout my life, with the exception of my husband, Oliver. You share your attitude to women with the majority of males. To you, and to them, we females are not people in our own right, with hopes and dreams and inherent value; we’re whatever you need us to be at any given time—receptacles, muses, caterers, heir producers—or else we’re obstacles, impediments, witches, lunatics. That’s when you decide it might be simplest to murder us.
And when you do, once you have, the next step is to control the story: “I did it because I was drunk,” “I only smashed her head against the fireplace because I loved her and she broke my heart.” You tried to tell a story about pairs of best friends, didn’t you, Billy? Except you couldn’t stick to it. Your fifth victim didn’t have a best friend. Never mind, eh? At least she was a woman—you got the important part right, and you and I know that, in the true version of the story, not much else matters.
You like stories, don’t you, Billy? This Lane person you’re so fond of: she teaches through stories—you wrote that in the first letter you sent me. She’s your mentor and your inspiration, so you’re mimicking her methods. In an attempt to teach me how wrong I am to call you a misogynist even though you’ve murdered five women, you’ve sent me two novels—Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy and Beloved by Toni Morrison. I’ve been too busy to read either, but you’ll be pleased to hear that I’ve read the shorter pieces you sent me: “The Two Sisters,” “Loyalty” and “The Dress.” All three are sanctimonious New-Age drivel, and I felt physically ill when I read them.
Credit where credit’s due, though. “The Dress” deserves full marks for ingenuity. It contains the following line: “Know this: whatever happens to the body, the true Self—who we really are—cannot be destroyed. We are Awareness, not flesh.” When I read that, I laughed out loud. I had thought that men, collaborator-women and all the enemies of feminism in between might have run out of ways to invalidate and erase the lived experience of female-bodied humans by now. It seems I was wrong. You’ve broken new ground, Billy, in approaching it from a spiritual angle. If all that matters about women is our spirituality in the form of cosmic Awareness (which you coyly capitalize), if our bodies are neither here nor there, then of course it’s no big deal if we’re shot, stabbed, raped or mutilated—and who better to tell us so than self-proclaimed enlightened men whose souls still comfortably inhabit their highly privileged but allegedly irrelevant physical shells long after they’ve destroyed ours?
Don’t bother sending me any more stories, Billy. I won’t read them. I didn’t sign up to attend your Spirituality for Misogynists class, and I won’t let you inflict it on me. And let’s face it, you’re no deity. You’re not even the guru you seem to think you are. You’re just another run-of-the-mill man whose idea of metaphysics is woman as disposable body, man as essential soul. And there was you, thinking you were special. Bless.
19
1/19/2015
“He-ey, Simon.”
Simon hated speaking to Dr. Kerensa Moore on the phone. Her greeting never varied, which told him that at some point she must have decided always to answer the phone in that way. Simon wished she’d amend her “He-ey” to a more palatable “Hello.”
“What can I do for you?” she said. “I’m just rushing out to a dinner.”
“Can they manage without you for ten minutes?” Simon couldn’t help feeling superior because he was having his evening meal cooked for him at home by someone who thought cooking was a waste of time. Like many of his feelings, it made no sense. “This is important,” he told Moore.
“All right. I’m all ears.”
In the kitchen, Charlie was singing along to her current favorite song on her iPod: “No water in the water fountain, no phone in the phone booth . . .” What a stupid racket. Simon imagined she was dancing around with her headphones on. That’s why she took so long to cook when it was her turn. All she ever did was open a jar of something and pour it over pasta; she made sure it took an hour and a half so that she could stage a kitchen disco.
Simon kicked the lounge door shut so that he could concentrate, then sat down on the sofa. “I’ve been thinking about what you said about serial killers whose targets aren’t individuals,” he told Moore. “Billy’s unusual not so much because he chose pairs as his victims but because he didn’t kill them together. Do you stand by that?”
“Absolutely. Any serial killer who’s ever gone for groups or pairs as opposed to lone victims has attacked the victim unit together, whether that’s two people, three, five . . .”
“And Billy’s not doing that.” Simon confirmed what he already knew. It helped to say it out loud. “He’s eliminating them individually.”
“And I’m afraid to say that Marion Hopwood’s murder really throws a spanner in the works,” said Moore. “She had no best friend; she wasn’t shot. Billy’s now atypical of a serial killer in more ways than he was when I last spoke to you.”
“I’m not worried about the not-shot part,” said Simon. “Shoot someone on a crowded hospital ward and you’re going to get caught. Billy doesn’t want to get caught, so it makes sense for him to vary his method.”
“And the no-best-friend thing?”
Simon chewed the inside of his lip. “Yeah. That would be a problem if killing pairs of best friends was what Billy thought he was about. We all assumed it was at first, understandably. Marion Hopwood’s changed that—now we know it’s not about friends.”
“And we have no clue what it is about.” Moore sighed.
Simon pitied her. He knew what it was about. It was becoming rather obvious. No one else seemed to see it, though.
“Let me ask you something,” he said. “Linzi and Rhian were best friends, and so were Angela and Josh. But let’s imagine that’s not why Billy wants them dead. He wants them dead because of something they’ve done. In his mind, they all need to be punished.”
“Okay. Carry on.”
“I’m going to narrow it down to one pair, though I could use the other just as easily: Linzi and Rhian. Billy wants to kill them both because of something they’ve done. If that thing was, for example, that they got drunk one night and made prank phone calls to Billy’s sister, teasing her and driving her to suicide—if the thing they’d done wrong, in other words, was something they’d done together, then maybe Billy would have murdered them together.”
Simon didn’t generally allow himself to think about the time two of his classmates had spent a whole evening telephonically harassing his mother, and the trauma his family suffered as a result. Kathleen Waterhouse had taken months to recover from the upset, and it was nearly a year before she was prepared to answer her telephone again.
Kerensa Moore laughed. “I love the idea of prank phone calls. It sounds so lovely and innocent.”
Simon scowled. Innocent? When, seconds ago, he’d described a scenario, albeit fictional, in which prank calls led to suicide? He added Moore’s tone-deaf response to his ever-growing list of evidence that so-called psychology experts knew fuck all. “Let’s now look at a different hypothetical situation,” he went on. “Linzi and Rhian each did something wrong that Billy deems worthy of punishment by death, but they didn’t do the same thing.”
“So Linzi drives Billy’s sister to suicide with prank phone calls, and Rhian . . . runs over his pet dog on her Vespa?”
“In the case of two separate crimes, might Billy decide separate executions were appropriate—to do full justice to both? Might he kill the two halves of the pair separately because, in his mind, they’d committed two distinct offenses rather than jointly colluding in a shared one?”
Why bother asking? Simon knew it was not only possible but likely. He knew Kerensa Moore wasn’t as clever as he was. This was a pointless conversation, a box-ticking exercise.
There was a long silence from Moore. Then: “You know what? I want to say yes. Yes! It makes absolute, perfect sense that he’d do that if everything you’ve outlined were to turn out to be the case. But then that wouldn’t work for the second pair, would it? Angela and Josh. Or for Marion Hopwood.”
The lounge door opened. Charlie mouthed “Food” from the doorway.
“Yes, it would,” Simon told Moore. “It’d work for Kim Tribbeck, too, though she’s still alive. This is about pairs, just not pairs of best friends. And all three pairs work in exactly the same way. Thanks for the chat. It’s been useful. Got to go.” Simon put down the phone.
“That was better,” Charlie said uncertainly. “You thanked her and explained you had to end the call.”
Simon was about to roll his eyes, then stopped himself as he remembered that was James Wing’s tick. He was Wing’s favorite person at the moment, even more than usual. Strangely, he found he didn’t mind so much now that real progress was being made. Simon had decided there was no point in him driving to Poole when Wing was already there and would welcome the chance to be a long-distance conspirator. It had worked like a dream, and Simon had agreed to go for some beers with Wing next time they were in the same place, even though he wasn’t overly keen on beer.
“One small suggestion,” said Charlie. “Stay on the phone for three seconds longer so that whoever you’re talking to has the chance to say, ‘Okay, bye, see you soon’—so they don’t feel they’ve had the phone slammed down on them. But overall? Definitely a move in the right direction.”
“It’s almost mathematical,” Simon muttered. “Three twos. But also . . . two threes.”
“Any chance you could relocate your cryptic pondering to the kitchen? For once, a meal I’ve produced looks quite tempting. I must have taken the lid off the pesto jar differently.”
Simon stayed where he was.
“Okay, well, I’m going to the kitchen to eat. See you when I see you.” Halfway there, Charlie stopped and turned back. “What threes?” she asked.
“Linzi Birrell, Josh Norbury and Kim Tribbeck. Billy’s punished them all—or wants to punish, in the case of Kim—for the same crime.”
“And his other three victims: Rhian, Angela, Marion?”
“Same. Rhian Douglas, Angela McCabe and Marion Hopwood—those three also committed the same crime as one another, different from the one committed by Linzi, Josh and Kim.” Simon looked at Charlie properly for the first time since she’d entered the room.
“Okay, so . . . hang on. Group One—Linzi, Josh and Kim—all committed the same crime as one another, but not together, right?”
“No. Separately and at different times.”
“And the other three also? They committed the same crime on different occasions?”
Simon nodded. “Want to know the worst thing? None of these people did anything wrong at all. Billy’s idea of a capital offense . . .” He finished his sentence nonverbally, with a small shake of his head. He looked utterly defeated, Charlie thought. For a second, she felt afraid.
