The Next to Die, page 38
“You also questioned why Linzi had never mentioned the row to Ahmed,” Wing reminded Simon.
“Right. She’d have mentioned it, wouldn’t she? According to our three witnesses, Miff was giving Linzi a bollocking for ordering the same dish more than once—that was asking for trouble, apparently. Except any sane person knows that it’s perfectly reasonable to order whatever the hell you want in a café. It was totally unreasonable of Miff to suggest otherwise—and hilarious that she thought she was right. Would Linzi really fail to tell Ahmed such an outrageous story? I don’t think so. I never thought so.”
“We get it, Waterhouse,” said Dunning. “You’re right not just now but also since records began. Get to the point.”
“Suspecting that the murders had something to do with e-readers—unwanted ones—I remembered another detail from the Hot-n-Tasty witnesses’ accounts,” Simon said. “They all mentioned Linzi walking out without eating her lunch, but only one of them said she picked up her phone and her book and walked out. I started to wonder . . . I formulated a little theory, and when I put it to the test, I found it was bang on.
“I went to Hot-n-Tasty and I asked Miff Sheeran again: Did she and Linzi have a row or discussion about lasagna? Again, Miff said no, no way, didn’t happen. That’s when I asked her if she and Linzi had ever exchanged views about e-readers.” Simon looked around at the puzzled faces. Did no one get it, still? What was wrong with them?
“Miff told me that yes, for sure, she and Linzi had disagreed about e-readers. Linzi had come in one day with a Harry Potter book and an e-reader that was a present from her best friend—”
“Rhian Douglas,” supplied Sellers.
“Right. Rhian had given Linzi a Kobo, like Charlie’s—”
“Like mine used to be, before it got smashed,” Charlie chipped in.
“It wasn’t a phone and a book Linzi had with her on the lasagna day, it was her Kobo and a book. Miff confirmed it. The witness got that detail wrong. Linzi had gone to the café for lunch that day with Harry Potter the paper book and also with Harry Potter the e-book downloaded onto her Kobo. That was why Miff questioned her having the same thing twice—why bring two copies of the same book to read at lunch? That was Miff’s point. Why not only bring one, when they’re both the same? And Linzi had replied that no, actually, they weren’t both the same—the e-book was worse. She couldn’t say how, but it wasn’t like reading a proper book. She hated the Kobo that she’d kept and tried to use to please Rhian, and she’d ended up taking the paper book with her everywhere she went because, no matter how hard she tried to read on the Kobo, she still hated it, and she always ended up ditching it in favor of the paper version.”
“Unbelievable,” Kim Tribbeck muttered.
“Miff said, ‘If you don’t want it, I’ll have it!’ but Linzi was determined to keep it. How could she give it away? What would she say to Rhian? Miff admitted she might have tried to persuade Linzi a little too forcefully, and Linzi ended up leaving the café—no doubt annoyed to be pressured in that way—and leaving her lasagna uneaten. At which point, Miff—a very fat woman, as those of you who know her will confirm—sat down, ate the lasagna and pronounced it delicious, not as a smokescreen to cover up the café’s shameful lasagna problem but simply because she was enjoying the lasagna.
“So, there we are,” said Simon, after a quick pause for breath. “We’ve got three pairs of victims, all connected to an unwanted e-reader given as a gift, an e-reader that’s kept by the recipient even though they don’t like or want it. And then we have our story, ‘The Dress,’ and I quote again: ‘You would never have bought one for yourself, yet you bought one for Dolores here. And you accepted this gift, though you didn’t want it and would never have bought one for yourself . . . You acted against your own judgement and your own hearts . . . When our hearts are fully engaged in our actions, even the harmful ones, we are not beyond redemption. All hope is lost, however, when we are not infatuated, not helpless with desire, and yet still, from a position of clear-eyed objectivity, choose to behave in ways that promote evil.’
“You believe e-readers are evil, don’t you, Isobel? Why are bookshops closing all over the country? Because of e-books—people don’t need the paper versions anymore. And so Rudolphy’s had to close, and your mother died. And you happened to know, probably because Linzi, Josh and Marion were all regular customers of yours, and Rudolphy’s would have prided itself on chatting to its regulars and knowing them really well, I’m sure—you knew the full stories behind those three unwanted e-readers, didn’t you? You knew the three givers—Rhian, Marion and Angela—weren’t keen themselves, and you knew the three recipients—Linzi, Kim, Josh—had no time for e-books and preferred to read their paper equivalents. None of the six was seduced or impressed, yet they helped to promote what you saw as an evil thing.”
“The evil machine,” Isobel corrected him.
“You decided to punish them, didn’t you?”
“No. Not punishment. Just . . . something had to be done. To prove someone cared, that this mattered to somebody. When historians look back in hundreds of years’ time, I want them to be able to say: ‘One woman cared. One woman, Isobel Sturridge, really cared. And she did something about it.’ The people who . . . who died . . . they had no excuse. There were no mitigating circumstances, so . . .” She stopped and pressed her lips together.
“So you murdered them,” said Simon. “And now I’m the brilliant detective delivering the ingenious solution in front of a crowd. That pleases you, doesn’t it? Because you love books—proper books. This is a crime story, isn’t it, that we’re all in? And you want and need it to be a proper one. That’s why it mattered so much to you to have a denouement—here, with us all gathered together, like in a detective story, and me explaining everything.”
“Yes,” Isobel said fiercely.
“That’s why you wanted Kim and Drew here.”
“Yes, because otherwise it would have been unbalanced. It’s still unbalanced, even with them here. There are supposed to be more people who aren’t the police than who are—you need plenty of suspects.” Isobel stared at Simon, her mouth twitching. “There were lots of others you could have invited too: the families of Linzi, Rhian, Angela and Josh would have been a good start. Josh!” she spat, suddenly. “What was wrong with him? He hated his evil machine, but would he throw it away? No, he wouldn’t—because it was a present from Angela, who told me herself when she was in the shop once, when she was visiting Josh: she loathed the whole idea of e-books herself—much preferred real books. Then why buy a Kindle as a present for your best friend? Angela said, ‘I’d run out of ideas of things to get him. He had everything else.’ I mean . . . surely you can see that sort of attitude is unconscionable?”
“And murder isn’t?” said Simon. “We all think it is.”
“Rhian and Marion were the same—bought e-readers as presents, while not thinking much of them. I had it from their own mouths—all the evidence I needed. Rhian used to come into Rudolphy’s with Linzi whenever she stayed with her. She didn’t like e-readers and didn’t want one herself, but an acquaintance from work had told her that Linzi might like one if she was a book-lover—so Rhian listened to this acquaintance instead of to her own instincts. And Marion didn’t seem to care that she’d bought Kim something she herself thought was a waste of space—nor did she give two hoots that Kim had stuffed it in a drawer, unimpressed, and never once used it.” Isobel turned on Kim. “So why not throw the damn thing in the bin? Why not destroy it, instead of letting it stay and destroy everything else?”
“You need help,” Kim told her.
Isobel turned her attention back to Simon. “It has many names: Nook, Kobo, Kindle. It tries to fool us with all its aliases, and it succeeds. I couldn’t do nothing and live with myself.”
“But you also couldn’t allow yourself to kill Sondra Halliday,” said Simon. “She didn’t qualify as one of your targets, did she?”
“No—if I’d killed her it would have been murder. That’s the part you don’t foresee: that once you’ve killed four, then five, it’s not so hard to keep on and on if you allow yourself to. But I didn’t let myself touch Sondra Halliday, and I’m proud of that.”
“Why did you accuse her of bibliophobia?” asked Sellers.
Isobel looked confused for a few seconds. Then her face changed, and she said, “She kept accusing me of things that had nothing to do with me, things she’d made up. I thought I’d show her how it feels to have that done to you.”
Exactly as Simon had suspected.
“Sondra Halliday didn’t write the column I read to you this morning,” he said. “I did.”
Isobel shrugged. “I don’t care. She could easily have written it.”
“What I wrote as Sondra is true, you know. Books are the words, the stories, the facts, the knowledge, the imagination. They’re not the paper they’re printed on.”
Isobel shook her head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Yes, of course the words matter, but without the book’s embodiment as a distinct physical object, where is it? What space does it have to call its own? Where’s its soul? Where’s our soul? When books are ruined, everything is ruined. It will get worse, too. Much, much worse. When it does, everyone will be sorry but at least they’ll know I tried to do something. Me and perhaps a handful of others. Though no one has gone as far as I have.” Isobel looked embarrassed. “It sounds grandiose to call it a cause, but that’s what it is: it’s my cause.”
“My favorite novel of all time is Moby-Dick,” Simon told her. “Yesterday I chucked my old copy away. It was knackered. I’ve ordered an e-reader. A Kindle. I’m going to read Moby-Dick on that from now on.”
“No, you’re going to give it to me as soon as it arrives, to replace my broken Kobo,” Charlie’s voice came from behind him.
“Your electronic Moby-Dick will be soulless and lifeless,” Isobel said sadly. “You’ll see it one day. You’ll all see it—but it’ll be too late by then. Still, at least I’ll know I did my best. What more can I do?”
“Why did you send Sondra Halliday two novels?” Simon asked.
“I was trying to teach her. She can’t have read much fiction if she has so little imagination. If you reduce everyone to a member of a sex class, as she calls it, and drone on about it endlessly—this group being like this, and that group being like that—well, you miss all the exceptions. And, when you think about it, isn’t nearly everybody an exception? A special case of some sort?”
“I’d say so, yes,” Simon agreed. It was strange, agreeing with a murderer.
“In Beloved, a mother kills her baby daughter to save her—from life as a slave. In Jude the Obscure, one of the children kills himself and his siblings in a wrongheaded act of altruism—he believes he’s helping his parents. Sondra Halliday’s blinkered, vindictive sex war has absolutely nothing to do with the killings in either of those stories, yet that’s the lens through which she insists on seeing every single thing. I wanted to teach her that there are other possible motives, not just misogyny.”
“How did you persuade them to let you in—Linzi, Rhian, Josh and Angela?” Simon asked.
“Oh, it wasn’t hard. They were all so nice to me: making me drinks, inviting me into their homes. I’d met them all at one time or another, at Rudolphy’s, so I just did the old ‘Remember me? Here I am with free books!’ routine. I pretended I’d opened a new shop. I didn’t want to kill them, any of them. I wish I hadn’t had to. They’re not suffering anymore from what I did, at least. I am. That’s my punishment.”
“How did you know all their addresses and when they’d be at home?”
“The addresses? Linzi, Marion and Josh had all had books delivered from Rudolphy’s over the years, both to themselves and to their friends: Linzi to Rhian, Josh to Angela—so I had all the addresses apart from Kim’s—which, as it turned out, I never needed. And I didn’t know when they’d all be at home. I tried several times with a couple of them, waited till I found them in. There were a few failed visits, but we got there eventually!” Isobel smiles brightly, as if delivering a happy ending.
“Why did you give Rudolphy’s as your alibi?” Simon asked her. “You must have known we’d find out soon enough that it had been closed for more than a year.”
“I don’t know.” Isobel looked down at her lap. “I suppose I wanted to be able to say that I worked there—wanted to hear myself saying it. I was proud to work there . . . here.” She looked around at the Indian restaurant. “It was a wonderful place. The best. Now I work in a service station. There’s no point working with books anymore—I don’t want to stick around to watch them become extinct. Better to work somewhere shitty now that everything’s ruined. Sorry for swearing. I need to ask . . .”
“What?”
“I’ll be able to read books in prison, won’t I? And write? I can write a memoir, maybe.”
“Yes. Books are allowed,” Simon told her. There was a heavy feeling in his gut. He didn’t want to feel sorry for Isobel Sturridge. Why did he? Throwing away his copy of Moby-Dick had been the hardest thing he’d ever done—his attempt to prove to himself that he was nothing like her.
“Lane will visit me in prison if you ask her to. Will you ask her? I really need her now.”
Simon nodded.
“Lane’s got a book, you know—about the effect different words have on water—did I tell you? No. Ha!” Isobel laughs. “When would I have told you? But it’s fascinating. One cup of water had horrible words hissed at it day after day, and the other had only loving words spoken to it, and guess what? The water that kept hearing the hateful words turned murky and foul, while the water in the other glass stayed clear and clean.”
“Water can’t hear,” Gibbs contributed from the far corner of the room.
“You’re wrong. Lane’s got a book that proves it can. Maybe it can’t hear in the conventional sense, but . . . it can understand.”
“Why the little white books to your victims, with the poetry?” Charlie asked. Simon heard a pronounced lack of sympathy in her voice.
“They were clues,” Isobel directed her answer to Simon. “Mysteries need clues. Each little white book contained a line of poetry by an American poet whose given name began with E. My mother was an American poet whose given name began with E. Clue! Right? And . . . books! The clues were books, and my motive was a love of books. Pages that had lost most of their words—to evil machines. I feel like that sometimes, don’t you? Like a page that’s lost nearly all of its words.” She sighed.
“Do you ever feel evil?” Simon asked her.
“No! Me, evil?” Isobel laughed to cover her shock. “I played fair with you in every possible way. You can’t accuse me of not playing fair.”
“There’s nothing fair about killing five innocent people,” said Simon.
She nodded as if she were about to agree, then said, “Liam says I’m tired more than anything else. I think I’ll sleep in prison. I’ve hardly slept since my mother was murdered by the horrible machines.”
“I’m sorry. About your mother, about Rudolphy’s . . . I’ll make sure Lane knows you’d like her to keep in touch.”
Isobel didn’t seem to be listening anymore. “Little white books,” she murmured to her clasped hands. “My little white books.”
From: colin.sellers@spilling.police.org
To: zoemcguinness@endfemicide.co.uk
Cc: Sondra.Halliday@Lifeworldmag.co.uk; Sondra@sondrahalliday.com
Sent: January 26, 2015 14:28:03
Dear Ms. McGuinness,
It was good to talk on the phone just now, and hopefully we at Culver Valley Police and your organization will, in the near future, find ways to work together to bring down rates of domestic violence and male violence against women and girls. I’ve passed your contact details on to Sergeant Charlie Zailer, who will be in touch with you shortly to move things along.
Thank you so much for removing as speedily as you did the names and photographs of Linzi Birrell, Rhian Douglas and Angela McCabe from your website’s list of victims of femicide. Your site defines the term as “the killing of females by males because they are females.” As I said on the phone, we have now established beyond a doubt that the killer of Linzi, Rhian and Angela was not a male; nor were these three women murdered because of anything to do with their sex or gender.
Warmest best wishes,
DC Colin Sellers
Culver Valley Police
26
from Origami by Kim Tribbeck
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
There’s a new email from Liam in my inbox. I’ve just had a boiling-hot, lavender-scented bubble bath, and I wish I hadn’t pulled the plug. After reading Liam’s words, I know I’ll wish I could climb back in and get clean all over again.
He won’t be able to resist sticking up for his sister. He’ll say she did terrible things, yes, but she’s not a bad person. If he defends her, knowing how close she came to killing me, what’s left of my faith in humanity might break for good.
I should delete his message unread, but I open it—for Simon Waterhouse’s sake, I tell myself. There’s a chance Liam has something important to add, as the person who lived with Isobel. I might learn something useful from the email that I can pass on to the police.
There’s no “Dear Kim.” There never was, from Liam. The message reads, “Want to meet? Feeling horny. Jerking off twice a day at the moment.”
