Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone

CHAPTER 16

People – husbands mostly, sent on errands – were running to their cars amid the vicious slanted ice that had just started coming down in sheets. I could barely see the car park through the chaos, but they were all doing the same kind of half-hop, half-lurch that comes with shielding your elbow over your brow. The wind was whipping powder up off the ground too, adding a swirling mist below knee height that looked like sea foam on crashing waves. It was level ground, but all of them fought the wind like they were hiking uphill. I saw occasional flares of orange – cars unlocking – as they made it further into the grey. Like some kind of relay, the next batch to brave it huddled under the awning, blowing into hands while surveying the storm. I can only assume they were discussing among themselves whether what was in the car was really necessary after all, and figuring out how best to frame this icy quest as possibly shag-worthy heroism.

I was sitting in the bar – which could sort you out a coffee – with Sofia. We were perched on high stools, pulled up to the front window, and had been watching the storm increase in ferocity. Marcelo was somewhere deeper inside the building, arguing with Juliette over how to get a room in the guesthouse. My mother would have either been with him, or independently arguing with Crawford. I hadn’t quite figured out what it meant to be Michael’s lawyer yet, so I was fuelling up on caffeine before approaching the Drying Room, which, because Michael wasn’t ready to see anyone yet, Crawford had locked before taking up sentry duty in a chair outside. Lucy was sitting on her own across the room. She had a lunch-time pint, but she was simply spinning the glass in its own condensation. Erin wasn’t there, having made the move to her chalet before the storm hit. Katherine had a pot of tea and was looking at a plastic-sleeved binder. I wondered how many murders it would take for her to crack and have a pint, too. I suspected at least a couple more. I assumed her binder had her itinerary. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d printed out the weather forecast and was trying to figure out how she’d misread it. I’ll give you two guesses where Andy was.

The group of husbands on the porch decided there was a break in the sleet and made a run for it. I tapped the glass and said, ‘And they’re off,’ as if calling a horse race. ‘I Should Have Gone Earlier is in the back, just shy of I’d Rather Freeze To Death Than Admit I’m Wrong, who’s a few lengths behind I’m Only Out Here Because Of Outdated Relationship Archetypes and out by a nose is Are You Sure You Couldn’t Live Without It Babe.’

In strode Andy, shaking ice from his beard as he pulled off his coat and hung it on the hooks beside the doorway. He flopped into a seat across from Katherine, put a small purse on the table and said, ‘Are you sure you couldn’t have got on without this, babe?’

Sofia laughed, too loudly, and, when Katherine snapped her a look, quickly pivoted her attention back to the window in mock fascination at the storm.

‘What’s with you guys?’ I asked. I didn’t have to point for Sofia to know who I was talking about, but Sofia still shrugged like she didn’t understand me. ‘Come on. Katherine. She was really on your case this morning. I didn’t even know you two were close enough to have those kinds of arguments.’

‘Was she? I didn’t notice,’ Sofia deflected. I wasn’t convinced. Katherine’s scorn was like your mother’s eye; you knew when it was on you. But she clearly didn’t want to talk about it. ‘So, you’re a lawyer now?’

‘I guess so.’

‘Don’t you have, like, ten steps for solving crime or whatever? Just do’—she wriggled her hands in the air like she was performing a magic trick—‘a bit of all that.’

‘They’re rules, not steps. And they’re not mine. Plus,’ I leaned over and whispered conspiratorially, ‘I don’t even like legal thrillers.’

‘What are you going to do next, then?’

‘Well, I figure if I go to law school, do an internship and slot in my Honours somewhere, I should have Michael out of that closet in, oh . . . about eight years.’

‘Can he even do that? Nominate you, I mean.’ She took a huge gulp from her mug. It rattled as she placed it back on the saucer. ‘And why you?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, which was the truth to both her questions, but what Michael had said to me outside – I have some things to say that I think I owe you – lingered. ‘A person can represent themselves in court without being qualified, right? Maybe this is just an extension of that. Or it’s not legal at all. But Crawford’s not really playing by the rules here, either. I’m not sure he even understands them, and maybe Michael’s using that to his advantage. If he plays along, he gets what he wants. Marcelo seems to think it’s a good idea to get Michael to talk to me, so I’m playing along for now.’

‘How could being locked up in a sweat box be what he wants?’

‘At the moment, I’m guessing it’s one of two things: if I’m technically his lawyer, he gets to speak to me as much as he likes, in private, right? Crawford has to let him. He said he wanted to talk to me outside. So maybe Michael wants me there.’

‘And your second guess?’

‘It’s the same as the first. If he wants me in the room, then maybe he’s trying to keep someone else out of it.’

‘He’s scared?’

I shrugged. Those were all the theories I had. Sofia rubbed her eyes, yawned and settled her gaze out the window again. Before, I hadn’t been able to see uphill to the makeshift mortuary, or downhill to the lake, but now I couldn’t even see the car park. Everything was completely greyed out within a few metres. The dance of ice in the air against that blank slate was reminiscent of looking under a microscope – these little grey cells – and for a second I imagined the mountain on a molecular level. After the storm passed, the ground would be a different shape: the snow would be a knee-high mass of pure white cover, as if it had been laid down in one thick blanket. I realised we were watching the mountain rebuild itself, atom by atom.

‘You look like you’ve barely slept,’ I ventured. Outside, I’d thought her paleness was just the cold, the shock of seeing the dead body, but inside, she looked properly frail. I could see it in her drawn face, and hear it in the rattle of her coffee cup, giving away her shaking hands. I thought of Andy’s glug-glug gesture, of Katherine’s sharp tongue.

‘Really?’ Sofia raised an eyebrow, onto me immediately. ‘We’re doing it this way?’

‘Just talk me through last night. I dunno, for your alibi, or whatever. I don’t really know where else to start,’ I said, trying to sound casual instead of curious.

She sighed, drew her finger across the coffee foam and licked it, not answering.

I resorted to begging. ‘At least help me practise.’

‘Here’s a timeline: Dad called to tell me dinner was cancelled because Audrey wasn’t feeling well, so I ate bar snacks in here because I couldn’t stomach the dining room and, to be honest, I was building up a bit of liquid courage to come and talk to you. And then, after I saw you, I went back to mine. You want some excuses? It’s been a hell of a morning, which is why I look like shit. Thank you, by the way, for the implication that if a woman looks slightly bedraggled, she must be a murderess. Can I remind you that I’m also the only one here, including Officer Crawford, who cried murder in the first place? And, most importantly, you know I went straight back to my room, because you called me pretty much as soon as I walked in the door. You’re my alibi, dummy.’

‘I guess,’ I said, thinking it over. Unless you skipped the recap, you’ll know it was about to occur to me that someone might be after the money, and it just did. ‘Just tell me who you owe money to?’

She sat bolt upright at that and glanced around the room. ‘Stop talking so loudly about it,’ she hissed. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean, anyway?’

‘The money you asked for. I think you might owe it to someone.’

‘Ernie, listen, I don’t want it anymore. Not if you’re going to humiliate me like this. I never should have asked. I’ll survive.’

‘Why do you need fifty thousand dollars if you’re not paying someone off?’

‘I don’t owe it to anybody.’ Her tone was clear; that was the last time she’d say it. ‘Can we talk about something else?’

‘Someone was in your chalet last night,’ I said.

She squinted, scrunching her cheeks up like she’d eaten something foul. I’d surprised her. I couldn’t tell if she was surprised that someone was in her room, or surprised that I knew about it.

‘While you were in mine,’ I explained. ‘Remember how my phone rang? It was from your room – I know that because when I called back, you picked up. I figure someone was looking for something, and they must have knocked the speed dial.’

‘By someone, you mean Green Boots? You think he was in my room? Looking for money?’

‘It’s occurred to me.’

‘That I killed a debt collector to protect myself?’

‘Or someone killed him to protect you.’

She thought about that for a second. Not being a detective, I had a difficult time distinguishing whether this pause was out of offence or calculation. She tilted her head slightly and said, ‘Before I respond to that salacious accusation: have you decided yet?’

‘You mean about the mo—’ I remembered her hiss to keep it down. ‘I haven’t really had the—’

‘So you haven’t decided?’

‘I haven’t decided.’

‘Will it help your decision if my life’s in danger?’ She drummed her fingers on the table.

I reached across and put my hand on hers, stilling her. With as much gravitas as I could manage, which, for me, is not much, I said, ‘Is it?’

I looked up and noticed she was holding in a grin. She let it split her face. ‘Come on! Listen to yourself. Debt collectors? What, like for the mob? Do we even have a mafia in Australia? I think you’re racially profiling me because I’m South American.’ She wrinkled her nose comically.

‘That’s more the cartel than the mob,’ I said. ‘It’d be a drug mule, not a debt collector. If we’re typecasting you, that is.’

‘Oh, well, in that case. Chain me up.’ She held out her wrists in mock compliance.

‘I’m sorry. I’m tired. It’s no excuse, but it’s hard to think straight out here.’

‘I put you on the spot. I get it – it looks pretty suss that I’m asking you for money one minute and then Green Boots shows up frozen solid the next day. Listen, I asked you for the money because there’s a bag full of it, and I don’t think Michael deserves it, and, yeah, it would help me out with something. But it’s personal. Can we please talk about something else?’

‘You might not like the other topics of conversation I have in mind.’ That got a chuckle out of her. Friends again. ‘So, do you want to pretend to be interested in how I slept or if I enjoyed a podcast I listened to on the way up, to both of which the answer is “fitfully”, or do you want to choose between the Black Tongue or the Other Thing?’

‘Honestly, it’s not that big a deal.’ She tapped her spoon against the side of her mug as she talked; perhaps the rhythm of it was taking her mind off the memory. It seemed more like an action designed to look casual than a natural tic. ‘I’ve lost patients before.’

So, the Other Thing.

‘And don’t think that I mean that lightly, because I don’t. It sucks. Every single time. But surgery has complications. We’ve got amazing technology, and even better medicine, but there’re still risks in even the smallest procedures. You can get an embolism from a broken arm – you know that?’

‘Is that what happened?’

‘Look, I’m human. I’m doing a job. Some days are your best days, and some days not so good.’

‘Are you saying you made a mistake? You’re a fantastic surgeon, Sofia. Marcelo trusted you with his shoulder, and he needs that for slamming his fist on the table dramatically in court. That’s like operating on Beyoncé’s voice box.’

‘You’re overstating it somewhat, I think. And Dad’s – well, you know he likes to control things.’ The spoon tinked again. ‘I’ve replayed it in my head enough. I can honestly say that no, I didn’t make a mistake. I made the right choices in the moment. If I had to do it again today, I’d do it the same. The review will clear me. It’s just that the people involved are, well, a bit more in with the hospital administrators, so it’s dragging out. And that has set some tongues wagging.’

Her eyes darted to Katherine. I couldn’t tell if I was imagining it, but Katherine’s eyes seemed to flick away from us, as if Sofia’s gaze was a white snooker ball, ricocheting into Katherine’s black. Katherine wasn’t in the medical field, and she certainly could never be described as having influence. I scanned everyone else. Andy had found a deck of cards somewhere (or maybe he just had them on him at all times for amateur magic tricks, I wouldn’t put it past him) and was dealing himself a hand of solitaire. Across the room, Lucy perched a cigarette between her lips. Before you call me a liar about her last cigarette, a waiter came over and told her she’d have to go outside. She looked longingly out the snow-battered window, which was groaning in its frame, and pocketed it.

My mind lingered on Katherine. ‘When they review something like that, is alcohol one of the things they look at?’ I asked.

‘Why jump to that?’

‘Well, you know how Katherine feels about alcohol. And she’s called you out a few times. At first, I thought she was annoyed at you ruining the weekend with your murder theories, but now I see she’s painting you as some unreliable, swaggering drunk, which we both know you’re not. It seems she’s taking it personally.’ Sofia took a breath to answer, but I changed my mind. ‘No, sorry. Look, I’ve clearly got to figure out how to interview people without accusing them at every turn. All I’m saying is, you know she’s entrenched with AA since the accident – she’s well respected, knows it inside out. She’d actually be a good ally. If anything like that were the case. We’re here for you.’

Sofia snorted. ‘She’s high and mighty, isn’t she? You don’t remember very well if you think that’s when she got cleaned up. Oh, sure, for a couple of weeks maybe. She was wild, man. Dad and Audrey had to cut her off completely for her to turn it around. I’ll take my advice elsewhere.’

Katherine’s accident and the consequences and rehabilitation all rolled together for me. It was a surprise to hear they were spread out. ‘You didn’t answer my question though.’

‘I had one glass of wine,’ Sofia said, putting the spoon down at last. ‘Eight hours before, at least. With food. But when something like this happens, they start turning over every stone. And if some intern says they saw you at a bar – which was a restaurant, by the way – the night before, and they can’t be sure, but it looked like you were really putting it away, that doesn’t help. Maybe the intern didn’t see it right, or maybe they’ve got a grudge, or maybe someone’s gently encouraged them’—she rubbed her thumb against her fingertips—‘to embellish things . . . People have things to gain from this. It’s all political. The lesson is, don’t go for dinner at the spot all the med students use as a boozer. Saying you’re there for the food, which I was, is the same as saying you read Playboy for the articles.’

‘Ian Fleming’s been published in Playboy,’ I said, not sure it helped her point. I thought for a second, plucked something from my memory. ‘So’s Atwood, actually.’

‘Exactly! Like I said, I had a meal. I wasn’t impaired. It wasn’t a mistake. And, look, they don’t test doctors like they test athletes. So, what are they going to say? An intern saw me having a glass of wine? Any death goes to the coroner within thirty days, sure, but that’s standard practice to review it. They’re not basing it on anything. They’ll find nothing untoward.’

That sounded to me like the flurry of justifications a person gives when they’ve thought about defending themselves, but I let it slide. ‘Why isn’t Marcelo representing you?’ I asked. ‘Sure, the hospital has lawyers. But he’s a cut above.’

‘Like I said: it’s political. Besides, you’re a lawyer now – you doing anything next week?’

I snorted at that. ‘Why’s Katherine taking it so personally?’

‘Katherine’s pissed . . . well, because that’s her natural state of being, but specifically because she heard the rumours and came to me with the same questions you did. She offered me help, and when I explained what I’ve just explained to you, she didn’t take it well. She probably thinks I’m past saving. I don’t want to be her little project anyway.’

I nodded. That did sound like Katherine.

‘Now, believe it or not, I have some questions for you.’

‘Only fair.’

‘Why are you doing this? There’s a policeman here; let him do the investigating.’

‘We both know if it’s not his first day, it’s his second. And’— I rapped the window with my knuckle—‘I wouldn’t be relying on his back-up to make it up here.’

‘That still doesn’t mean it’s up to you to solve this.’

‘Michael’s asking for my help. And I think I owe him that.’

‘Owe, owe, owe. You use that word so much. A family is not a credit card.’

Heads up: I know this is basically the ‘Why Don’t You Just Walk Away’ scene, perhaps with some healthy lashings of ‘This Doesn’t Concern You’. I’m aware, as I was at the time, that this is often a tactic to stop a nosy investigator (me) from uncovering something about the person asking them to back off (in this case, Sofia). This is not to be confused with a ‘You’re Off The Case’ scene, which would be Crawford’s problem, not mine. But Sofia’s motives were clear to me. If I walked away and Michael left this resort in cuffs, the money would stay with me. And I wouldn’t hang on to it for another three years, let alone another twenty-five; I’d spend it. Or give it away. I didn’t read her attempt as trying to divert attention away from herself, but rather to remove Michael’s piece from the board, leaving the money up for grabs. And if she was trying to frame him, she’d be trying harder, goading me instead of warning me off. I was convinced that she had a selfish motive, but not a murderous one.

‘Ernest?’ A voice came from the doorway. I turned to see Juliette peering into the bar. ‘Officer Crawford says it’s okay now.’

I waved my agreement, stood and said almost apologetically to Sofia, ‘I should hear him out. Figure out his alibi for last night, at least.’

‘Oh, I get it now.’ She punched me playfully on the arm. ‘Ernie, you jealous sod.’

‘I’m not—’

‘But you are. You don’t care about Green Boots. You just want to find out where Michael and Erin really were last night.’

You know what scene we’re in now. It’s called ‘Sex Is Always A Motive’.

‘He lied to me. Us,’ I admitted. ‘I’m curious.’

‘Twice actually.’

‘Huh?’

‘He lied to you twice. Furniture? Storage units? Seriously? That thing’s a monstrosity. I bet all his stuff’s at Lucy’s place anyway, just as he left it. They were still together when he went to jail, remember?’ She shook her head like she was stating the obvious.

‘I’m not following.’

‘Ask him what’s really in the damn truck, Ernie.’

CHAPTER 17

Juliette was waiting for me in the corridor. At first I thought maybe she’d taken my lack of mechanical aptitude as a sign that I was too dim to follow the arrows pointing to the Drying Room, until I realised she was leading me against the arrows. I had no idea where we were going. Sometimes books like these have maps behind the front cover, and the resort layout might have come in handy at this point.

‘We haven’t met properly,’ I said, as she threaded me through housekeeping carts vomiting fluffy white towels. ‘People call me Ern.’

‘As in, cremated?’

‘It’s short for Ernest.’

‘Well, that’s what people should call you then, isn’t it?’ she said bluntly.

‘You’d get along with my mother.’ I sidestepped a room-service tray with a crime scene of two crumpled energy drink cans and a chocolate bar wrapper on it. ‘She also finds me tiresome.’

She stopped at a door without a number – so, not a guest room, I deduced – at the end of the corridor and slid a key into the lock. She turned back to me before she opened it. ‘I know you’re anxious to see your brother. This’ll be quick.’ I noticed that her lips were wind-chapped in the way mountaineer’s lips often are, peeling and crevassed, like you could stick an ice-pick in and climb them. ‘Oh, I’m Juliette, by the way.’ Finally, an introduction. My editor has just breathed a sigh of relief. ‘I helped you fix your chains.’

She said it like it was new information, so I said, ‘I remember,’ to correct her but it came out throatier than I intended. In retrospect, more than a little lecherous. She examined me for a second longer.

‘Clearly I’ve made an impression. You’ve already invited me to meet your mother. And stop staring at my lips.’

I didn’t tell her I was thinking of peeling them, not kissing them, but either way, I felt myself blush.

She opened the door, revealing a cluttered office with two desks nudged up against one another in the centre. The filing system could only be labelled as cyclonic; mountains and valleys of paper covered the floor. The walls were ringed with bookshelves, which at least had papers filed into bright orange binders, but those binders, the small semblance of organisation, were stacked horizontally. I thought it was a bit rich for someone who didn’t know how to stack a bookshelf to judge my vehicular ineptitude, but I let it slide because I was still chastened from being called out on the lips thing. In the middle of each desk was a blocky computer you could do weights with, wired to keyboards that were the pasty, discoloured white usually reserved for outdated plastic computer accessories or teenagers’ bedsheets.

Juliette took a seat on a black leather chair and started clacking the stiff keys with one hand, beckoning me over with the other.

‘How long have you been here?’ I asked, half to know more about her and half to discover which century her computer was from.

‘I grew up between here and boarding school in Jindabyne,’ she said in a drone, more focused on pulling the grime-fossilised mouse off the desk with a pop. ‘It’s a family business. Grandad and some buddies built it after the war – they wanted to be away from people, I think. I moved to Queensland in my twenties, only because I picked the warmest place possible. Mum and Dad took over, and then they died, and, well, there’s a certain inevitability around family stuff, because I came back to sell it six years ago and I guess I got snowed in.’

‘Family is gravity,’ I said.

‘Something like that.’

‘Which war did your grandfather fight in? I saw his medal in the library.’

‘Second. And, ha! No. That’s Frank’s medal.’

‘Frank?’

‘F-287 actually, but Grandad just called him Frank. The bird.’

‘The stuffed pigeon?’ I snorted. ‘You’re shitting me.’

‘It’s called a Dickin Medal. They give it to animals.’

I thought of the engraved words – WE ALSO SERVE – and it made sense. The slip of paper was presumably the coded message, flown through enemy lines, wrapped around the bird’s leg. It was an adventure ripe for a Disney film.

Juliette continued. ‘My favourite is the ship’s cat who got one for boosting morale and eating a rat infestation. No joke. Pops loved that bird – he trained a whole flock of them, but Frank was special. He carried a map with all of the machine gun locations, lists of troop numbers, names, co-ordinates, and he saved a lot of lives. Grandad had him stuffed when he came home. It’s a bit weird to put on display, but I like it.’ She tapped the computer screen. ‘Ah. Here it is.’

She was pointing to a green-tinged security camera video playing on screen, which she had paused. I figured the camera must have been somewhere above the front door of the guesthouse, because the angle was tilted up the hill, and the frame included the parking lot, a good chunk of the driveway and the pyramid shadows of a couple of the chalets on the very edge, just out of focus. It didn’t reach far enough to show where the body had been found. There was a time stamp in the bottom left, a few minutes shy of 10 pm. The green tinge was some kind of night-vision filter, I guessed.

‘Which rooms are those?’ I pointed at the chalets.

‘This is the even side: two, four, six and eight.’

Marcelo and Audrey were in Five, so theirs wasn’t on screen. Sofia was in Two, right on the edge of the screen, only a sliver of roof visible. I was supposed to be in Six, but Katherine and Andy had taken it when their room wasn’t ready a day early. I didn’t know which room Lucy was in. ‘Four’s mine,’ I said.

‘I know, Mr Cunningham.’

‘Stalking the guests. That’s an invasion of privacy.’

‘Is it now?’ she said. You might think she’s flirting, but at this point I’m not so sure. You won’t hear about us locking lips until Chapter 27, when I’m naked, if you’re wondering.

‘Is there anyone else in the chalets?’ I asked.

‘Just your group booking. Half are empty.’

‘Okay. And this camera, does it move? It’s not a great angle.’

She shook her head. ‘If we didn’t bolt it into its case, it’d snap off every time there was a storm. Besides, it’s not a security camera, it’s a snow cam. It’s just meant to show people what the resort’s like on any day, so they can plan their drives, you know . . . pack tyre chains’—she paused a second to let me digest the insult— ‘. . . and the right clothes, or see if they should book a lift pass or not. It’s also not a video feed, see – it’s snapshots.’

She clicked play, and I saw it was indeed a series of photos playing on a reel, one taken every three minutes, the timer in the bottom left jumping forward with each image. She let it play. Occasionally there was a blob of grey, which was someone walking to their chalet, but it was pretty much useless, because every person was too blurry a shadow to make out any features. The only positive was that it covered part of the driveway, but even then, the timing had to be right to nab a photo of a moving car in the three-minute window. I knew from making the trip a couple of times already that it was a slow-ish walk through the snow from the chalets to the guesthouse, so the one positive was that, unless someone was really hurrying, it would catch most people, unidentifiable as they might be.

Juliette let the tape roll. It must have been on fast-forward, because each photo was held on the screen for about twenty seconds rather than three minutes. Just before 11 pm, a person moved towards Chalet Four, which I knew was Sofia coming to visit me. A dozen or so frames later, she headed out of shot back to Chalet Two. It was hard to tell direction or intent from a loose shadow, but it lined up well enough that I was happy with my summation. I had hoped to catch a glimpse of someone else sniffing around Chalet Two between the two photos of Sofia, but I was out of luck. Whoever it was had completely missed the three-minute window, which was either an amazing fluke or very well planned. The film skipped forward through the night, uneventful, with just the occasional smoker from the guesthouse, and two shadows holding hands and looking at the stars. Noticeably, no one walked up the hill to the golf course.

Just after the clock ticked past 1 am, Juliette started gripping the mouse harder. She was watching for something. A few photos later, she found it and clicked pause. ‘I thought this was interesting,’ she said. ‘Green Boots is not on any guest or staff list, and no one over the hill has reported anybody missing. I radioed across to the other resorts, and it’s all people are talking about, but no one knows anything.’ Juliette pointed at a print-out on the desk, a list of names, which I assumed were all the guests, with small inky ticks next to each one. Accounted for, I guessed. Lucy had already told me this, but it was good to have it confirmed.

I was wondering why she was so interested, oscillating between her wanting to tell me just enough to misdirect me and the fact that nothing much happened up here and she was probably craving a bit of excitement, when I spied, underneath the list of names, a much thicker document with yellow sign here sticky tabs poking out. While most of it was obscured, I could see the top corner, which had a logo familiar to me as belonging to a well-known real estate firm. (Some words stand out in crime books, don’t they? There’s no real way to refer to things of such obvious consequence obliquely, so I may as well put it in bold: there was a property contract on her desk.) Maybe she was not so snowed in after all.

Juliette continued. ‘Which means the dead man came in the middle of the night. So maybe that’s him.’ She pointed at the screen. ‘I checked, and the car’s in the lot now. We could have Crawford run the plates and get us a name?’

Her use of ‘we’ implied some level of side-kickery that I wasn’t expecting. Namely, because it seemed out of all of us, including the policeman, Juliette had done the most investigating so far. I was reminded again that I’m only the protagonist by virtue of me writing this down, not because of aptitude. I leaned in. There were two headlights in the driveway. It was easier to tell direction with cars than people, and it was clear the vehicle was headed towards the parking lot. And while the headlights were reflecting off the night-vision filter to overexpose the image, it was obvious that the car was a four-wheel-drive Mercedes.

‘That’s my stepfather’s car,’ I said. ‘Marcelo. The one who was doing all the belligerent yelling this morning.’

‘Oh.’

‘But he didn’t arrive last night. We had lunch in the private dining room. So he must have gone somewhere and come back.’ I didn’t tell her that he’d called off dinner because my mother had been feeling unwell, because my honesty commitment is with you, reader, and not with Juliette the curious resort owner. Still, I was interested in what time he might have left, seeing as he might have lied to do it. Though he could have gone down the mountain to a pharmacy, I suppose. ‘Go back to late afternoon – you’ll see the Mercedes leaving.’

Juliette played it in reverse until she found a snapshot of the Mercedes’ tail lights, further up the hill but still in the shot, around 7 pm. That was just after he’d called me; I would have been napping at the time.

‘Damn,’ she said, clearly less interested in someone leaving for a couple of hours than in Green Boots arriving. But I was the opposite; my mind flooded with questions. Marcelo had lied to cancel dinner so he could go somewhere. For more than six hours. Doing what? And was my mother oblivious, maybe truly unwell and sleeping it off in the chalet? Or was she complicit? The windows were tinted, so I couldn’t tell if anyone was in the passenger seat, let alone who was driving.

Juliette finished my scariest thought. ‘Maybe he brought someone back with him?’

‘Can I watch the rest, through to morning?’ I asked. She started the slideshow up again. As it flickered through the three-minute intervals, I was close enough to the monitor to feel the static burr of the ancient bulbous screen on my nose. ‘If the victim was from anywhere around here, surely someone would have recognised him.’

‘I didn’t see the body, but as I said, everyone here’s accounted for, staff and guests. The phone tree’s firing with hotels all the way down to the lake, and Crawford’s checked with his station in Jindabyne: no one’s reported missing. Crawford says he doesn’t want to traumatise the guests – there’s no point flashing around a photo of a dead guy if he’s a nobody anyway. I’ve gotta say, I agree with him. These are paying customers and, look, comping breakfasts will only paper over so many TripAdvisor ratings.’ Shamefully, I made a mental note to tell Katherine the breakfast could be comped. ‘Accidents happen in the mountains – no one’s worried about it. Could be a hiker who got lost? The only people calling it a murder are you lot. And you’re juicing up that rookie cop while you’re at it.’

‘So why show me this?’

‘Because you’re asking too many questions not to believe it. And I looked your family up – it’s not like you’re squeaky clean. If it’s a murder . . . that means there’s a murderer. I have a certain obligation to the safety of our guests.’

I was a bit affronted by her allusion to my family history, and I tightened up. ‘Shouldn’t you be sharing this evidence’—that word fell out of my mouth with a clunk; even though I was thinking it was a murder, it was still just a dead man in the snow, and calling it evidence seemed to formalise it too much for my liking—‘I mean, information, with Crawford and not me?’

‘I don’t know Crawford – he was clearly sent as the errand boy for an accident. Now they know it’s serious, Martin – he’s the sergeant – will be headed up here with detectives from the city if he needs them. But my money’s on them not getting through this storm any time soon, if he’s not stuck already. And, shit, well, fine, I’ll just say it: I don’t think Crawford knows what the hell he’s doing.’

‘Neither do I,’ I admitted.

‘I’ll confess I’m hitching my cart to the best horse. You’re the lawyer.’

‘I’m not a lawyer. I’m a writer.’

‘Why’d your brother say you were, then?’

‘I don’t know. I help other people write crime books, so I guess I’m pretty good at guessing the endings? Maybe he thinks I can solve it.’ I offered this with the kind of upwards inflection that meant even I knew it sounded weak, so I turned my attention back to the video.

The playback had now passed dawn, and the night-vision filter had switched off so the screen was a dull grey instead of green. Crawford’s police car was now in frame, time-stamp around quarter to seven, heading towards the guesthouse as he arrived. It didn’t have tinted windows, so I could see Crawford had one arm stretched across the passenger seat, head tilted in a clear side-profile, yawning exuberantly. It must have been an early wake-up to get up here by that time.

‘Who found the body?’ I asked. There were no blobby shadows between Marcelo’s car returning and Crawford arriving: no victim, no killer. ‘Like, who called it in? It must have been early. No one seems traumatised.’

‘You’ll have to ask Crawford, I’m not sure.’

Now that the screen was brighter, the white glancing sharply off the lens made me squint. The photos started filling up with shadows that were more distinctly human in the unfiltered daylight. In the next couple, the shadows grouped together, trailed up the hill like lines of ants. I thought I might have seen Andy and me meeting out the front of my chalet, but couldn’t be sure. The morning flickered past: the truck arriving (it was stupidly big); the congregation in the entranceway was close enough that you could actually see people’s faces; Michael being arrested. The damn photo timing lined up with Erin embracing him, her hand in the back of his jeans. I mean, come on.

‘You said this was for people to check the conditions before they come up here? Does that mean it’s on your website?’

‘Yeah, it’s a live feed. It’s pretty obvious too – the feed’s on our homepage.’

‘So if someone had your website open, they could have timed it, and deliberately moved in the gaps between the photos, to avoid being spotted?’

‘It would never work with our reception.’

‘True. But the timing never changes – it’s every three minutes. If you set your watch to it, you wouldn’t even need to watch the feed to move between the frames.’

‘I guess so.’

‘And it takes Crawford, let’s say, an hour to get up here if he guns it? And yet there’s no panic on the screen, no one’s rushing up the hill until later, and no one’s notified the hotel staff in the full intervening hour. Someone found a dead body, called the cops, and, what, went back to bed?’

‘You think the killer called it in? They wanted the police here?’

‘Once you eliminate the impossible—’

‘—whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth,’ she finished. ‘That’s cute. Yeah, I’ve read pretty much all of Sherlock Holmes too. A holiday lodge is the Lost Sock Portal in the back of your washing machine for mouldy paperbacks: no one buys them, no one brings them, yet they’re always here. Consider me a bit of an expert. So – am I to assume your entire plan is the elimination method?’

‘I mean,’ I stammered, because that had been my entire plan, ‘I thought it was a fairly widely accepted place to start.’ I tried not to focus on a particularly long sliver of skin desperate to be plucked from her bottom lip.

‘Widely accepted.’ Her tone was incredulous, but playful. ‘It astounds me that that bloody man created the world’s most famous example of rational problem-solving, and we are all supposed to forget he was an absolute crackpot.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘And you write crime novels?’ She flung her arms up. ‘I hate the ones where the main character is a writer anyway.’

Dear Reader, while of course I’ve read Arthur Conan Doyle, he didn’t technically classify as what we know as Golden Age, so, despite me taking a Holmesian approach to my own investigation, I didn’t write about him. I explained this to Juliette.

‘I’m more interested in people like Ronald Knox. He was part of the establishment of crime writers in the thirties. Anyway, I don’t write novels, I write how-to guides. You know: Ten easy steps to your first mystery; How to be an Amazon bestseller. That kind of thing.’

‘Oh, I get it. You write books about how to write books that you’ve never written, bought by people who will never write one.’

Honestly, she had it spot on. You’d be surprised how many unfulfilled novelists are willing to shell out a buck ninety-nine for the feeling of progress. My books aren’t bad, but my business isn’t really helping writers, it’s wish fulfillment. I’m not proud of it, but neither am I ashamed.

‘It’s a living.’

‘Who’s Knox then?’ she asked.

‘He wrote a set of rules for detective fiction in 1929. In my books I compare them against modern-day murder mysteries. Pretty much all of them are disregarded, shattered into pieces, by current fiction, which tends to like to cheat. He called them his ten commandments. Conan Doyle pre-dates him. Why is he a crackpot?’

‘He believed in fairies, for Christ’s sake. Tried to hunt them down. After the death of his first wife and son, he tried to speak to them by séance. He thought his nanny was a medium. The man was so mad, he tried to convince Houdini, who openly admitted that magic wasn’t real, that Houdini himself was magic.’

‘That’s one of the commandments,’ I said, pausing to wonder whether a man who died in a fire and didn’t melt any snow qualified as other-worldly. ‘Number 2, in fact. Nothing supernatural.’

‘So these rules – that’s why you think your brother asked for you and only you? That’s a long bow.’

‘No. I think he asked for me because I’m the least Cunningham of the Cunninghams.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘I’m not one of our lot.’ I meant it to be playful – didn’t I? – but it came out laced with acid. I’d missed the mark.

‘I didn’t mean—’ Her thought fizzled halfway through. She shook her head, closed the computer window and stood up. ‘Actually, you’re right. I should share this with Crawford instead. And let’s hope to God there isn’t a real murderer out there, or our lives are in the hands of an author. I suppose we can beat them to death with one of your hardbacks.’

‘Digital only.’ It came out as a squeak. ‘I self-publish.’

‘Well’—she held her belly like it was the funniest thing in the world—‘if you’re planning to solve whatever the hell is happening up here, I hope you’ve read a bit more widely than Sherlock Holmes, because even Arthur Conan Doyle believed in ghosts.’

CHAPTER 18

Before I talk to my older brother in the Drying Room, there are a few things you should know about my younger brother. The first is that his name is Jeremy. The second is that I’m not one hundred per cent confident in my use of tense here: his name still is Jeremy, but it also was Jeremy. I guess both are right. Please don’t mistake my lack of grammatical aptitude for dishonesty. The third is that when he died, I was sitting next to him.

This is difficult to write, and not just because of the cast on my hand.

We never call Jeremy anything but his first name. It’s a thing, I’ve noticed, when someone dies young. Like they haven’t lived into the legacy of their surname. Sofia might not think so, that it’s not what’s in your blood or on your birth certificate that matters, but she still cares which way the names go around the hyphen. It’s why you can go from Ernest, as you practise the rigid capital E over and over in bright crayon; to Cunners, on the second-grade football team; to Mr Cunningham, speaking into the snake’s head of a courtroom microphone; to ‘Ernest James Cunningham’ printed inside a wreath, on a pamphlet handed out in the archway of a church. Because you get your name back when you die – all of it. I’ve noticed that too. That’s legacy. It’s why Jeremy never made it past Jeremy.

I’m not saying he’s not a Cunningham, because he is, in the truest, deepest sense of the word. But to call him Jeremy Cunningham, I think, makes him smaller than he is, tethering him to us. As a Cunningham, he is part of those dreams that wake me dry-tongued, gagging. Without our surname to anchor him, he is part of the sky, the wind, the mind.

Names are important in crime novels, too, I reckon. I’ve read many a denouement in which the detective picks apart an alias, revealing a hidden meaning (for example, Rebus means puzzle, if you didn’t know) or perhaps a baffling anagram behind the name. Mystery novels love an anagram. While most of the names in this book are real, I’ve altered some for legal reasons and others just for fun, so if you laid out the names of everyone in here and tried some deductions, you may well spoil some surprises. I don’t mind if you want to do it that way. My name is Ernest, I am truthful: there is no hidden meaning there.

Juliette Henderson (anagram: lederhosen jet unit, make of that what you will) had left me the challenge of orienteering my way to the Drying Room using the painted arrows. I think she was disappointed I hadn’t been more enthusiastic at the prospect of us forming a crime-solving duo. Based on the unsigned contract on her desk and her casual mention of TripAdvisor ratings, I’d decided her motivation for looking into the death was more than a curiosity born out of reading too many mystery novels, or even a duty of care to her guests: she wanted to protect the value of her property. Maybe she thought a murder investigation would deter her potential buyer. Especially if a sale was imminent, as it seemed to be.

Crawford – who I’ve just noticed we’ve all been referring to intuitively by his surname, as you do with police officers (which makes sense, because if Jeremy is larger than his last name, Crawford, diminutive under his badge, is smaller than his first) – stood as I approached. I shook Crawford’s hand; it felt appropriate to the façade of lawyerliness.

‘Juliette has some evidence you might be interested in. Video footage of the driveway, if it helps,’ I said. ‘It’s weird though, no one freaks out until daylight, but someone must have called you—’

‘—before dawn,’ he finished. ‘Yeah. Took me like an hour to get here. Little under.’

‘Did they leave a name?’

‘I don’t know. I was on the radar all night. So I didn’t take the call at the station.’

‘Why you? Juliette said you’re not the regular sergeant . . . Sergeant . . .’ I’d forgotten the sergeant’s name already, spun a few vowels around my tongue.

Crawford didn’t help me out, just shrugged. ‘I was closest.’

‘And when you got here, were there other people near the body?’ I already knew the answer to that one, but I wanted confirmation.

‘I was kind of expecting a circus when I got here, but I can’t tell you something that didn’t happen.’ I thought again of the three sets of tracks: only enough for one victim, one police officer and one killer. This supported the theory that no one had found the body at all; the killer must have called it in themselves.

‘And we still don’t even know who the dead man is.’ I said it in a dejected way that I thought might compel Crawford to leap in with some information to appease me. ‘Can I have a copy of the victim’s photo?’ I paused, before adding, ‘As the lawyer.’ I thought it sounded like a plausibly serious request that a lawyer might make.

‘I heard that you aren’t, though?’ Crawford said. ‘Your dad told me.’

‘Stepdad,’ I snapped, aware that it made me sound like a teenager. Marcelo, despite trying to get me on his side, must have told him I wasn’t qualified in the hopes of supplanting me. If I was right about Michael wanting to keep people out of a locked room, it didn’t escape me that Marcelo was trying awfully hard to get into it. ‘I’m doing my best. I didn’t pick me.’

‘There are kids staying here. I can’t risk the photo getting out. You understand?’

I nodded, decided on a compromise. ‘I may not be a lawyer, but you know you can’t keep him in there. Just because he’s cooperating doesn’t mean he doesn’t have rights.’ I raised my hands in what I hoped was endearing uselessness. ‘And, look, I don’t really know what those rights are supposed to be, but I know it’s not this.’ I pointed at the heavy wooden door, slightly warped from moisture, which had a white plastic sign with a cartoon pair of boots on it.

‘He said he was okay with it.’

‘That’s not really my point,’ I said. ‘If your suspicion of him is predicated on his being released from jail earlier than he admitted to, well, Erin’s alibi is also tied to his whereabouts, and I don’t see her locked up.’

‘Are you calling me sexist?’

‘I’m calling you blind.’

‘Well, she’s not a Cunningham, is she?’

‘I see. I’m glad we’re clear.’ Names, it seemed, were important to Crawford too. ‘Now I’m calling you incompetent. Let me in so I can keep pretending to be a lawyer and you can keep pretending to be a detective.’

‘You really care about him, don’t you? Even though you testified.’ Crawford cocked his head slightly. I bit my tongue, but I was annoyed he knew so much more about me than he had that morning. Damn Marcelo. The lock on the door was a single slide bolt, no padlock. Crawford flicked it loose with a fingertip – high security – but stepped away from it, inviting me to open it. ‘I didn’t really have brothers growing up, so I can’t say I understand it. That’s family, I guess.’

‘If I can confirm where he was last night, and that it wasn’t here, you have to let him go – or at least move him to an actual room. Okay?’ I meant it, but it also sounded semi-lawyerly and I wanted to have the last word.

Crawford gave a hesitant, nearly imperceptible, dip of the chin.

I thought of one last thing. ‘Oh, and, um, don’t talk to him again without me present. Or whatever lawyers usually say.’

I pushed open the door.

If the foyer had the lingering smell of damp expected of a ski lodge, the Drying Room had that of a shipwreck. The room was for people to peel off their sweaty, wet snow gear and dump it overnight to pick up, semi-dried, in the morning, so it was airtight to keep the heat and the smell from escaping: the rubber-lined door had opened with a phuck as the seal broke. I needed gills to breathe the dank, thick air. I could almost feel the mould spores in my nose. To say it smelled like feet would be a disservice to feet.

The room was narrow and long. Along both sides there were rectangular foot lockers, lids open, filled with dozens of unlaced ski boots. The inner soles of many of the boots had been pulled out, like loose tongues, or removed entirely and leaned against the wall, emitting most of the smell. Above the lockers were racks of ski jackets, raincoats and more boot innards pegged to coat hangers. In front of a small water heater was a flimsy clothes horse laden with socks. The strangest thing was that the room was carpeted, which soaked up all the moisture. It had a spongy spring to it, a slight ooze as I walked. The room was lit by a glowing red heating element at the far end, above a single unopenable window. A drift of snow pressed against it from outside, blocking any natural light.

Underneath the window sat Michael. He was perched on a foot locker, this one closed, adorned with hastily flung pillows for the pretence of comfort. He had a room service tray with a can of Coke and sandwich crusts on it. His cuffs were off, as was his jacket, and his sleeves were rolled up. The Cunninghams’ reputation for civil disobedience somewhat outweighed that of our reedy frames. That is to say, no one had ever mistaken us for a football team. Without his puffy jacket on, Michael broke type.

‘You’ve got shoulders,’ I said. ‘Is that a prison thing?’

Michael gestured to the chair in front of him. The orange heat lamp gave off a droning buzz.

‘I’d close this’—I propped the door at three quarters—‘but I think we both might suffocate.’ Which was true, but not the only reason I kept it open. I rattled on, hunting for sound to fill the room, still hanging back near the door. If you haven’t figured out by now that I use humour as a defence mechanism, I don’t really know what to tell you. ‘You know, Marcelo does this kind of thing for a living. In case you weren’t aware.’

‘Sit down, Ern.’

I took a deep breath of soupy air for courage and walked over to the chair. Sat down. Our knees touched. I shuffled the chair back. Michael sized me up. At first I thought his eyes were thoughtful, curious, as they ran over the new lines on my face, looking at what three years did to someone. Then I had a second thought: that he was sizing up a meal.

‘I’ve been thinking about Jeremy,’ he said. ‘I know you might be too young to remember exactly. Do you?’

That seemed an obscure place to start, but I figured it was best to go along with it. ‘Kind of,’ I said. ‘I mean . . . well, sometimes I wonder if I actually remember it, or if I’ve just absorbed enough descriptions that my brain has stitched something together. There’s a point where I lose which parts are real and which parts are gaps I’ve filled in myself.’ I had been only six, and I knew that I hadn’t been awake for most of that day, so a lot of it had to be a construction. ‘I have dreams, and it’s weird, because sometimes it’s like I’m dreaming someone else’s memories. Sometimes he, well – sometimes he doesn’t . . .’ I trail off.

‘I know what you mean.’ Michael rubbed his forehead, in a strange mimicry of how he’d rubbed it the night he’d shown up at my house with Alan Holton in his car, that small dent from the steering wheel. ‘I know Mum’s been hard on you. I think you were too young to realise how hard it was. Because it went from the five of us together to three, so quickly. Like that.’ He clicked his fingers.

I nodded, remembering the foster parents we’d shared when we’d been removed from Audrey’s care.

‘And when she finally got us back – well, it’s not that she didn’t want to lose us, it’s that she doesn’t want us to lose each other. You ever think about that?’

All the time, I didn’t say. You did this, I didn’t say. A family is not a credit card, I didn’t say.

‘I think about Jeremy a lot,’ I said instead, noncommittal.

‘And the three of us – you and Mum and me – in a year, we’d lost a father and a brother. There’s a reason she waited so long to have Jeremy’s funeral. You remember that, don’t you? I thought she just couldn’t stomach two funerals back-to-back.’

‘Seven years is a long time to wait though,’ I said. I’d been a teenager when we’d had a small ceremony for Jeremy. We did it on his birthday.

‘I was glad at the time, I felt I was old enough to understand, to appreciate it. Didn’t it, sort of, bring us closer? My point is: nothing’—he was speaking to the ground, shaking his head with each word—‘not a crowbar, not a war, not a goddamn alien invasion, could split us Cunninghams up. And then’—he lifted his gaze, pointed at my chest—‘you did.’

I flinched, looking down to break eye contact, and noticed there was a fork on the room service tray but no knife. I had a split second to decide if he hadn’t been provided one for safety, or if he’d secreted it and it might suddenly emerge from his sleeve. ‘If I’m just here so you can tell me that you didn’t do it, just get it over with.’

‘I did kill Alan Holton.’ His words were slow. Deliberate.

I wanted to put my fingers in my ears and stick out my tongue like a child. My mind was racing through the possibilities. I didn’t want to hear how he’d picked a random victim and murdered him in the snow, how he was happy to be locked in the fetid room, just to get me alone. How he’d planned it with Lucy, who’d suggested the Drying Room. I didn’t want the last thing I heard to be him gloating that he’d got to me. That he’d slept with my wife. (Okay, so I did care. A little.) I wanted to flick the chair over and bolt for the door, but I had the disadvantage of having to stand up and turn around first; he’d be on me before I took a proper step. And if he had a knife . . .

I would have to try to bargain, I realised. ‘I have the mone—’

‘I did it on purpose.’ Michael silenced me with a hand in the air. ‘I put my hands around his neck until he stopped moving. And then you – you, my brother – sent me to prison.’

Then he lunged, rattlesnake quick.

Suddenly everything I was thinking just became white, like my mind was in a blizzard of its own or I was already dead and didn’t know it, and Michael’s arms were around my . . .

. . . back.

My back. Not my neck. And there was no knife. He was hugging me. I gingerly reciprocated, holding his shoulders. There was a lot to hang on to.

‘Thank you,’ he murmured into my shoulder. I sat stunned, still not sure if I’d actually died, and trying to decide if responding with ‘You’re welcome’ was polite or ridiculous in the circumstances. He sniffed. ‘I’m sure no one in this family has told you that you did the right thing, and I’m the last one you’d be expecting to hear it from.’

‘Something like that.’

‘Lucy thought this place was punishment, but it’s perfect,’ he said, looking around the room. ‘Because it’s safe in here.’

‘Safe from what?’

‘I don’t trust a single one of them. You’re the only person I can talk to because you’re the only one who was willing to stand up in that courtroom and condemn me. That means I know you’ll help me do what’s right. I know it’s hot and airless, but I really think you might want to consider closing the door. Because I already told you I killed Alan on purpose, but now it’s time I told you why.’

CHAPTER 19

‘I’ve had three years to try to figure out how to tell you this,’ Michael said, after I’d closed the door. He clearly hadn’t, despite the time, rehearsed an opening line. ‘Prison is good for perspective, it feels like everything stays still while the world spins around you. Lets you look at things. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t develop a certain spiritual understanding.’

I must have raised my eyebrows, because he went on the defensive.

‘I don’t want to get too deep into the meaning-of-life crap, but when you’ve killed someone – sorry, when you’ve made the decision to kill someone – you’ve got to weigh it up. You know?’

‘I don’t,’ I said, because I didn’t. Even though, writing this now, I have a somewhat better idea.

‘I don’t know how to explain how it felt when I hurt Alan. I was in this kind of haze where everything I did was mechanical. Like I wasn’t really in control . . .’ He put a hand out apologetically. ‘I know how it sounds, but I’m not making excuses. I’m trying to tell you that I don’t know what I would have done next. The damage I might have caused. Who else I might have hurt. I’ve spent three years in prison with killers, Ern. And I thought I was killing for . . . well, something. Something bigger than me. And then I’m in there with people who are congratulating each other over what they’ve done and, shit, some of the stuff they’ve killed over is so damn small.’ He shook his head; he was getting lost, making himself upset. He blinked a few times, and breathed, to get himself back on track. ‘I’m sorry. I’m trying to talk about what a life is worth. You know? Take Sofia’s lawsuit. That family is suing the hospital for millions . . . I can’t remember the figure Erin mentioned. Point is, they’ve sat around a table with a bunch of lawyers and shuffled papers until they landed on a figure. They’ve decided “Our son is worth this much”.’

‘This isn’t about Sofia.’ I surprised myself with how firmly I stuck up for her, seeing as she was hiding something worth fifty thousand dollars, after all.

‘It’s not. But I’m just trying to explain something. I held Alan’s life in my hands and I weighed up what it was worth. And what it was worth for me to put an end to it.’

‘You decided your own life was more important than Alan’s.’ I’d figured out Michael wasn’t telling me some big secret, he was only telling me what he’d told himself enough times so he could live with it. He was trying to tell me that Alan’s death was worth it. There was nothing new here. I made up my mind, shook my head. I gave up. ‘You can have the money. I brought the bag.’

‘No. Not, like, money, or anything, but the cost. It’s a strange feeling to know what a life is worth. That’s all I’m saying.’ He looked pensive for a second, realising he hadn’t won me over. His eyes reflected the glow of the heat lamp in a kind of wicked glint. It sort of sounded like a threat. Like he was telling me he’d weighed one life against the bag of money already, and he’d have no hesitation in valuing my life against it too. I don’t know if it was my imagination or not, but the grey wall of snow against the window suddenly felt very oppressive. I pictured the building storm outside, the weight of it pressing harder against the glass, like it might at any moment spew into the room and bury us. Then he said, ‘It’s an even stranger thing to realise that you got it wrong.’

I wasn’t sure if he was trying to tell me he was unhappy with the price he’d received, or the price he’d paid and I told him that, though, admittedly, less eloquently than I’ve made it sound here.

‘I’m trying to tell you I’ve learned from my mistakes, that I’ll never choose violence again. And you still think this is about the money?’ Michael said.

‘Isn’t it?’

‘The money’s not . . . Look, it should have been our money in the first place, okay? We died for it. It’s right for them to pay.’

Our money. There it was again. But who was the other part of we? A Cunningham? I opened my mouth to ask another question, but the roulette wheel in my head stopped spinning on a thought.

Michael had told me it was our money on the night Alan died. I’d thought he meant he had deserved the money, that he’d earned it, by stealing or killing, and that I was welcome to be a part of it. Erin had whispered in my ear only hours before: It’s family money. I’d thought she meant the same thing: staking a claim, inviting me in. Michael and Erin had been telling me the plain truth the whole time and I’d missed it. They were talking about literal ownership.

I could picture the spider-web-riddled clearing now, Michael hunched over a gasping man. Weighing up his decision. Valuing a life. Everything made sense, including how Michael had known the amount in the bag without counting it: $267,000.

Well, fuck me. I’ve finally solved something.

‘The money’s not stolen,’ I surmised. ‘It’s yours. You didn’t blunder into this. You knew Alan. Was he selling you something?’

Michael’s eyes lit up as he realised I was ready to hear, if not yet believe, his story. I know eyes lighting up is a cliché, but it’s true: though it could have been an electrical surge in the old hotel wiring making the heaters flare. ‘I guess I should tell you about Alan Holton, then. And how he knew Dad.’

That caught me off guard. I was glad I’d closed the door.

‘Dad knew Alan?’

Michael nodded sincerely. ‘What I’m about to tell you is going to sound . . . well, it’s going to sound out there. Hear me out, okay?’ He took my silence as agreement and continued. ‘Holton was a cop.’

‘A cop?’ I felt the need to physically lever my eyebrows down from my forehead with my fingertips, but I resisted.

‘Former.’

‘Obviously. He’s former everything, isn’t he?’ I knew my comment was juvenile; it just spurted out while I processed everything. ‘That doesn’t make sense. You can’t have only got three years for killing a cop?’

‘No. I mean, he wasn’t a cop when I . . . that night. He used to be one. Had a’—he twirled his fingers—‘shall we say, fall from grace. Landed hard. That’s how he wound up bouncing from petty job to petty job and eventually scraping it together selling second-hand trinkets. He was a part-time drug dealer; part-time thief; part-time homeless. And a full-time liability. Marcelo was able to characterise him as a petty criminal because Alan’s time in the police . . . it was not a shining example of a noble force. In fact, that’s why the prosecution accepted the three-year deal, because if Marcelo had had to pull that history out in court – well, there are some people who would prefer it didn’t get aired.’ That made sense. ‘Marcelo dangled Alan’s past at the judge behind closed doors, and the prosecution took my deal. Three years. Are you following?’

‘Sort of. Except for what this has to do with Dad?’

‘I’m getting there.’

‘Snow’s melting. I hear I’m allowed to charge every six minutes, seeing as I’m a lawyer now.’

‘I think I’ve paid in advance, Ern.’

I had nothing to say back to that. Witty repartee is not well serviced by truth.

Michael took a swig of his Coke, grimaced, assumedly at the absorbed foot taste inside the open can, and continued. ‘So Alan contacts me. Out of the blue, you understand – I wasn’t seeking trouble. He says he has something I want. That he’ll sell it to me. He says he’s talked to you as well, actually. That’s why I brought him to your door that night. I thought if he’d told you what he told me, you might . . . understand what had happened.’

‘Maybe he said that to make you believe him.’ I leaned back in my chair. ‘But I’m not a part of this. I’ve never met him.’

‘Yes and no.’ Michael shrugged, like my awareness of who I did and didn’t know was a matter of opinion. Before I could argue, he kept going. ‘I figured out he hadn’t contacted you, of course I did. Your shock and confusion that morning, not to mention that you didn’t change your testimony after you knew his name, gave that away. But you have met him.’

I went to rebut this, but then he leaned forward and, with a single finger, pressed it into three parts of my body: my belly, my hip and the centre of my chest. He did it slowly, rhythmically, each poke a beat. I could hear the cadence of remembered words in my head, matching his movements, without him having to say them.

I’ll show you where I shot him. Here, here and here.

CHAPTER 20

‘I spent most of my life trying to forget about Dad,’ I breathed. I was rapidly trying to put everything Michael was telling me in order and sift through it for the truth at the same time. I’d been wilfully ignorant of the circumstances around Dad’s death; I never felt he deserved my attention after what he’d done and how he’d died. There’s no blaze of glory in dying in a gunfight with police. It wasn’t a brave death, a death to be proud of. It was a death to be forgotten. That was why Alan’s name hadn’t lit up a flashing sign in my brain during Michael’s trial. And with Marcelo persuading the court to accept an early plea and therefore suppress Alan’s sordid history, I might have never known differently. I pushed at my memory to see the man standing in front of my mother, smearing cream across her dress. Did I see a gold-plated lapel that read HOLTON? Or was that flash of memory constructed by the information Michael had just told me? Was this, as I’d told him earlier, one of those moments where I was losing which parts were real and which parts I was filling in myself? I apologise; that’s not something a reliable narrator does. Did police officers even wear nameplates?

I pushed all these thoughts aside and said, to Michael’s surprise, ‘This doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t mean you get the right to do what you did to Alan. And it doesn’t make it right what Alan did to Dad. But’—I was aware that I was choosing a very un-Cunningham side here, sympathising with the enemy—‘Dad was a criminal, he was caught in a robbery and he’d just shot Alan’s partner in the neck. If Holton’s who you say he is, he was just fighting back.’

‘I’m not denying that,’ Michael said. ‘But think about it. Did we grow up rich? Did Dad drive a flash car? Did Mum wear expensive jewellery? We didn’t revel in a life of crime. Dad broke the law to feed us, to care for us. I’m not saying that’s right, but he didn’t do it to line his own pockets. He wouldn’t have.’

‘That’s a very favourable view of our father,’ I said.

‘Just listen to the way Holton told it. And I know it’s true because who lies with their last breath?’ I could tell Michael was frustrated I hadn’t patted him on the back after learning it was Alan who had pulled the trigger on our father. He knew he still had to win me over. He went for his drink, remembered the taste, put the can down un-sipped and instead worked his jaw around to swallow some saliva, clear his throat. ‘Dad found himself in with a group. Gang’s not quite the right word. Colleagues?’ He laughed. ‘They called themselves the Sabres. As in tooth, you know? That group started to grow a bit, and priorities changed. They moved from robbers who occasionally dealt to dealers who occasionally stole. Harder stuff, too. And with that came more violence, more enforcement. And someone decided ransoms paid better than robberies or drugs. Dad drew a line he wouldn’t cross, and when the Sabres started to cross it . . .’

As he said this, something my mother had told me in the library resurfaced: But a bad person who thinks they’re a good one – now, that’s what got him into trouble.

‘Dad flipped?’ I interrupted. If only we’d been in the library, a much more appropriate setting for grand deductions.

Michael nodded. ‘He cut a deal to feed along information, and in return they’d go easy on him when the rest of his mates went down. He saw it as a chance to get out. You know how that kind of thing is done – they skip over the worker bees to take care of the queen. Dad was small fry. He was helping them get the ringleaders. But, most of all, they wanted the dirty cops.’ He paused to let it sink in. ‘Dad’s death wasn’t a stick-up gone wrong. They were coming for him.’

I remembered Audrey telling me my father wasn’t a junkie. Maybe Holton had planted the syringe, to help make the robbery more convincing. A strung-out junkie, after all, is more likely to open fire on a squad car without provocation. If my father had been about to spill the beans on Holton and his partner, it made sense.

‘It’s a shame no one pegged Holton for something as big as murder, but his dealings caught him eventually. He used to steal cocaine from the evidence locker, take bribes. There’re only so many blind eyes one man can ask for.’ That seemed pointed, but I let him have it. ‘He served some jail time, and then everything about who he was before then became hush hush, because it’s not a good look for the police force, you understand?’

To be honest, I was tempted to believe him. Not because of Dad’s vindication, either, but because it seemed to explain a lot about my mother. If this was true, it meant Audrey didn’t only mistrust the police because she thought the bad ones had killed her husband. She thought the good ones, the ones who’d promised my father a way out, had got him killed. My betrayal was laid bare: I’d chosen to side with the law, the same as my father, and it had failed to protect us.

Then again, it also sounded like a story where the pieces fit together too neatly. A story that had taken Michael three years to craft especially for me.

‘Holton told you all this?’ I couldn’t keep the scepticism from my voice. It was quite the incriminating confession. ‘That’s a lot of gas for someone who’s been shot in the lung.’

‘He was tight-lipped before he got shot, loose-lipped after. Besides, he didn’t tell me all of it. Most of what I know about Alan I found out from others in jail. They all knew him. Half of them had been ripped off by his pawn shop, which was pretty well known for selling stolen goods, by the way – you wanted to move something hot in Sydney, I guarantee it found its way to Alan. And he owed money to the other half. They shook my hand, Ern. Like I’d done them a favour.’ He grimaced, and it was obvious that this act of solidarity among the other inmates was what haunted him. More, perhaps, than the killing itself.

I closed my eyes, picturing the scene in the bone-white, webbed clearing. I’ll go check on him. Michael’s back to me, his hunched shoulders, outstretched arms disappearing into the webs. We can bury him now.

‘When Alan woke up in the clearing, and you went to check if he was okay. That was when you made up your mind, wasn’t it?’

Michael stayed in the memory, talking as if he were in a trance. ‘I spent a lot of time blaming him, would you believe it? Because I felt like, in that moment, I was waking up. And maybe if he hadn’t said anything, I would have put him in the car. Maybe I would have listened to you. There was blood on his lips, I remember that. It stuck between them as he spoke, little red bridges. I don’t know why Holton told me about shooting Dad then. Maybe he wanted one last insult before he died. Maybe he was testing me, to see if I would do it. Maybe he wanted me to do it.’ Then he wrinkled his nose. ‘Sorry. That’s what the prison shrink calls “deferred responsibility”. I shouldn’t be doing that.’

‘So when he told you he shot Dad, you snapped and finished the job?’

Michael nodded solemnly. He was looking at his hands, perhaps imagining them around Alan’s neck. ‘I didn’t go there to kill him. I didn’t know any of that until the end. He was selling me what Dad died for. Selling someone else out.’

I thought again about the money. We died for it. “We” was a Cunningham after all: our father, Robert. ‘But once you found out Dad had died because of Alan, you felt that whatever he had, whatever it was worth, was owed to you. An inheritance. So you shot him and took it. And you took your money back.’

‘That’s not how it happened. It was about the money, yes, but not like that. I brought what I could, but it was less than he wanted. I fucked up. I thought he wouldn’t notice.’ He shook his head sadly, the way people do in hospital waiting rooms. It’s a shake that says ‘if’ to the left and ‘only’ to the right. ‘He pulled the gun on me. I don’t own one – I mean, come on. We struggled with it. It went off. He was holding it; I don’t really know how. I’ve never fired a gun before. And then he was sitting down and there was blood pouring from his side. I just . . . well, I left him there. Threw the gun into a storm drain. But by the time I’d got back to my car and calmed down enough to start it up, he’d managed to sort of get moving again. I can’t remember if I meant to hit him or if he just kind of jumped in the way, but he went under the bonnet. And then he wasn’t moving anymore. That’s when I called you.’

Two-hundred-and-sixty-seven had always seemed like such an odd number. The fact that it didn’t add up suddenly added up.

‘Alan wanted three hundred?’

‘It was the best I could do. Lucy . . .’ He hesitated, embarrassed. ‘I messed it up, all right? I didn’t bring enough.’

‘How did Lucy not notice?’ Something he’d said on that night echoed: Lucy will know. I thought he’d been hiding his drinking, but maybe he’d been hiding something bigger.

‘Lucy’s not . . .’ His eyes flickered, happy to be honest about the night in question, but not to plunge too deep into his personal life. ‘Lucy’s not great with money. Her, um, business, I guess – it became a bit of a problem. A sieve. Katherine told me one of the kindest things you can do to someone is to cut them off. I tried it, but it just made things worse. I thought I could help her.’

‘Does Lucy know now?’

‘I don’t think so. You’ve got the bag. But she could know, I guess. If she does, she’s keeping mum.’

‘What could possibly be worth that much money?’

‘I told you – information. And it’s worth a whole lot more than that, now I’ve had time to think about it.’

‘The same information that was worth killing Dad over decades ago? The reason you think you’re safer in here than out there? If it’s so dangerous, why did you want it?’

‘I told you, Lucy got us in a hole. Alan couldn’t sell what he had directly, so he wanted someone to do it for him; I got in the middle.’ I remember wondering to myself if anyone in my family was solvent. Michael started to get agitated, rummaging through each of his pockets, muttering as he did. ‘To be honest I didn’t realise I was doing something all that dangerous. All I knew was that Holton got them from Dad. I didn’t know that he was, like, involved. Then again, I don’t think he thought I was much of a risk either, so we all made mistakes.’

‘What do you mean “them” plural? And who were you selling to?’

‘It’s easier if I show you . . .’ He rummaged around in his pockets and patted his jeans. He produced a contact lens case (I hadn’t known Michael needed glasses, but perhaps with the walls so close in prison, he’d become near-sighted), a few balls of lint, a chocolate wrapper, a pen and a set of keys. No knife. Whatever he was looking for wasn’t there. ‘Shit. Where’s the damn thing?’ He couldn’t hide his disappointment. ‘I’ll have to show you later.’

‘You’d been drinking. That night.’ It had been on my mind, but it just kind of popped out. I said it too quickly. My doubts were too obvious. Michael’s head snapped up, and I saw something in his eyes that terrified me. I wondered if that was the last thing Holton had seen.

‘Just a bit of courage – I had my wits.’ He chuckled, but it was sad and slow. ‘I knew you wouldn’t believe me.’

‘Believe you?’ I tried to keep my voice level. ‘I sat in the car because I believed you. I’m an accessory because I believed you.’

‘Listen—’

‘I don’t know. These stories about Dad . . . whatever you were buying or stealing from Alan, and you’ve got nothing to show for it—’

‘—listen—’

‘—he lied to you about talking to me, whatever he made you think—’

‘LISTEN TO ME!’ Michael’s voice was so loud in the small room I almost toppled off the chair.

I stood. Walked backwards towards the door. Michael registered that I was afraid of him and his eyes changed from furious to baleful, like a chastised dog. He stood too, putting a hand out in an attempt to stop me.

‘He must have known what I would do. After the things he said.’ His voice was calmer, but I could tell it was taking a lot of effort. Each word was like skidding a car in the wet, grappling with the wheel. ‘Dying men don’t lie, Ern, they air their souls. I wish I could show you—’ He cut himself off mid-sentence, reconsidered, and then picked up the set of keys he’d drawn from his pocket. ‘This is getting us nowhere. If you don’t believe my words, see for yourself. Then I’ll tell you the rest.’

He tossed me the keys. I caught them against my chest. Ask him what’s really in the damn truck. As I was thinking about her words, Sofia’s actual voice came through the door. She sounded desperate, though I couldn’t make out the words. The door shuddered: it was unnecessarily dramatic knocking for a door we couldn’t lock, but maybe she was trying to be polite. Whatever Sofia had to tell me could wait – I wasn’t through with Michael. I ignored the knocking.

‘Just tell me. Do you know anything about what’s going on out there? Do the names Mark and Janine Williams, or Alison Humphreys mean anything to you?’

‘Humphreys . . .’ He shook his head. ‘No. But Williams . . . depends if they’re from Brisbane.’ I leaned forward with such interest I almost fell off my chair. Michael relished my attention. ‘Early on in my sentence I got a letter from someone called M&J Williams, with the return address a PO box in Brisbane. By then I’d realised that what I had, like I said, was worth a bit more than I’d thought it was. A lot of people wanted it. And whoever wrote me that letter – well, they get credit for being the most creative. I guess they were trying to threaten me.’

‘How?’

‘They signed off with a clearly fake name.’ He said it as a half chuckle. ‘But, like I said, they were just trying to push my buttons – scare me. I never wrote back. Why?’

‘I think Mark and Janine Williams may have been killed by the same person who killed our frozen corpse. It looks like a similar method, but I need to check with Sofia. It’s too much of a coincidence for a man to die this weekend when we’re all here—’

‘—and when I’m coming up here with what I’ve brought. I agree. It has to be connected. Just look in the truck, you’ll see.’

I stood up. ‘Where were you last night?’ I couldn’t leave without asking.

‘Open the truck – it’ll answer that too.’

‘There better be something crazy like a spaceship in there,’ I said.

The knocking shook the door again. I glanced at it. Michael nodded, and I hated myself when I realised I’d paused, waiting for his permission to leave.

‘You dropped something.’ He looked at the floor, next to my chair, where a small square of paper had fallen from my pocket. My cheeks flamed with embarrassment. Michael picked up the paper, read it and smirked.

‘Sofia?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘You’ve missed one.’

Michael picked up his pen, looked at me for a second as if deciding whether he should vandalise the card or not. Then he placed the paper flat on the bench, leaned over it and made a few dashes. I couldn’t see what he was writing, his body blocked my view, but it took a while. He was either writing a lot or thinking hard about very little. I fidgeted, looking back towards the door. I could hear two voices outside now.

When Michael finished, he righted himself and blew on the paper, pressing it with his thumb to check if the ink was dry. I realised what had taken so long: his contacts case was now open on the bench; he must have slid them in to write better. Then he crossed the room (I’m ashamed to admit my pulse thundered in my neck as he did so) and handed me the bingo card. I snatched it out of his hand and examined it. I felt strangely possessive of my bingo boxes, that he’d somehow invaded mine and Sofia’s private game, so I wanted to assess the damage. He’d taken so long I was sure he’d have done more, but it was just the one change. He’d crossed through Someone Dies.

‘Don’t lose that. I’m trusting you. I’m not asking you to believe me, I’m just asking you to look closely.’ I looked at the keys in my other hand, wondering what I’d see in the truck. Look closely. Then I realised he was standing near enough now to give in to a husky, intimate confession, the one I wanted most to avoid. He swallowed. ‘And, listen, with Erin . . .’

‘Don’t—’ I tried to stop him.

He trampled my words. ‘We didn’t plan for it to happen or anything.’

Temptation got the better of me. I have a problem with peering into other people’s hotel rooms, after all. ‘Did she tell you we were trying to start a family? Did she tell you about the doctors, the clinics? What it was that broke us? Tell me it’s not just about that. I could have given her what she wanted. Tell me it’s about more than that.’

‘Ern—’

Sanity arrived. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to know. Besides, I spent quite a bit of your money.’ (I hadn’t spent that much. And I wasn’t proud of it. I just wanted to have the last venomous word.) ‘I guess I didn’t plan that either.’

On the other side of the door, Crawford and Sofia weren’t quite holding water glasses up to the wood, but they were crowded in anxious curiosity around it. I was thankful for the rubber seal, which would have helped the soundproofing, and meant they probably hadn’t heard much at all. Except maybe Michael’s yelling. Maybe that’s why they started knocking.

Sofia made a face that meant finally and yanked my arm in the direction of the guesthouse entrance, telling me she’d explain on the way. She took off, expecting me to follow. Crawford slid the bolt back into place and took his seat by the door, clearly unalarmed by or uninformed of Sofia’s emergency.

Before I set off after her, I took a second to breathe clean air. Beads of sweat on my neck that had bred in the Drying Room chilled my skin. Michael had said a lot, and I didn’t know what to believe of it, but I had started to accept that he might not be the danger. Of course, now I suspected he’d brought the danger with him. But nothing made sense yet. My next step was simple. If, as he promised, whatever was in the back of his truck could clear up his whereabouts last night, he shouldn’t have to stay in the Drying Room too much longer. Now that I’d spent half an hour in there, I was even more keen to rescue him from it. Then we could handle the rest together.

I followed Sofia, folding the bingo card to better hide it in my jacket as I walked. I figured Katherine wouldn’t find it so endearing if I accidentally dropped it in front of her next time. Firming the crease, I noticed that there was another scribble. Ink fresh and glistening. Michael had crossed out a word in one of the squares, replacing it with another. My editor will be pleased that he also added punctuation. It now read:

Ernest ruins fixes something.

CHAPTER 21

Looking at Michael’s edit to my bingo card, I was filled with a rush of fraternal affection, just as I am now, writing it out. Taken as I am by this feeling, I hope you’ll allow me a small diversion to give you a bit more background on our mother. I honestly would have included this earlier, but I thought if one more anecdote delayed my reunion with Michael in the Drying Room, you might have thrown the book at the wall. And fair enough.

To tell it properly, I’m going to need to relate this next part using events I haven’t seen and people’s perspectives I can only guess at. I’m going to tell you these things as truths. Even if I have to rebuild the colour of people’s coats or their small talk about the weather (I remember the weather, actually, so I don’t need to fictionalise that: it was a baking summer day), it’s a worthwhile compromise. My version of events won’t be nearly as useful, not least because of patchy childhood memories, but also because I was geographically limited on the day. And I fear that if I just tell my side, you’ll be too quick to judge my mother.

So: the Day. It’s an important day. There is a death. It is the day my mother shot somebody. It’s the day she got the scar above her right eye. The day she earned her Cunningham stripes, so to speak.

It’s months after Dad died. But you wouldn’t know it.

My mother does not take shit. Not from her children, not from the universe. I mentioned before that I measured my father by the spaces he left. Now he’d left the largest one yet, but we didn’t have time to notice. Our mother sought to keep us busy: our extracurriculars tripled as if we were applying to Harvard. Any gap in the schedule was closed. I once got a haircut two days in a row.

We had to join sport teams (in which there was more frolicking with various implements than actual sport, given our ages) as if we were potential prodigies. I swam. Jeremy played tennis. Michael settled on piano instead of sport (and now he’s the one with shoulders). All three of us would go to the others’ practices: sit on the umpire’s chair, doodle on the blackboard, dangle our feet in the pool. We moved around town together, eight-armed. This served the dual purpose of saving on babysitting and keeping us busy. Mum was trying to force us to feel normal. We didn’t talk about Dad, we never stopped to acknowledge that life might be different, we just powered on. Few friends dared drop by with a casserole or a lasagne after the first attempts were fed to the cat. A boy in my class, Nathan, had had a few weeks off school when his dad died of cancer. I brought it up once and had to join Joey Scouts.

As questionable a parenting technique as forcing your children to repress trauma is, it kind of worked. But I suspect that our mother also found comfort in our new, hectic routine. She’d strap us into the car, our three Disney-channel-sitcom-perfect car seats side by side, and drop us at school, head to work, then pick us up, click us in and take us to one of our activities. We were never at home. We were outrunning our grief.

Looking back, having been through trauma again as an adult (Go wait in the car), I can see another side to my mother’s actions back then. Because now I know that in the months after something so devastating, everything feels like sleepwalking. Life becomes a stuporous fulfillment of routine where even walking to the supermarket feels like you’re dragging your limbs through air as heavy as the Drying Room’s. Every basic task starts to feel like a decision, and that becomes so draining that you end up unable to make any of them. It’s winding up in the kitchen without knowing why you went in there. It’s taking us to swim school on a Tuesday instead of tennis. It’s getting two haircuts, not because you’re busy, but because you forgot we went yesterday. Our routine was intended to keep us busy, sure, but the repetition was a comfort against the burden of decision-making. A burden that, I know now, our mother wore heavily.

Everything is routine on the day in question. Breakfast is an uneventful one. Audrey straps us into the car, makes every green light on the trip and even arrives at the bank five minutes early, allowing her to make a coffee and have a quick chat with her boss, who, I’ll embellish, is wearing a blue coat and a green tie and wants to talk about the weather.

My mother has moved around roles in the banking sector since, retiring from a senior position, but on this day she was a teller. This was the 90s, when banks had a full army of neckerchief-wearing young women behind perspex windows instead of one besuited university graduate with an iPad and the audacity to make you do things yourself. The bank was very good to Mum, I’ve since learned. They were lenient about Dad’s infamy; usually it would have meant she couldn’t work there, but she was allowed to hang on to the job she had after his death made his actions public. They were also sympathetic about a couple of costly (sleepwalking) errors she made in the months after Dad died. They even offered her additional leave, but I’ll let you figure out whether she took it or not. Her first day back at work was three days after Dad’s funeral, and the only reason for that gap was because the funeral was on a Friday.

At ten past nine, just when she’s getting started, my mother is told that she has a call on the phone in the manager’s office, but she’s too busy to take it. At nine-thirty, the phone rings again, but this time no message is brought to my mother. The phone just keeps on with its shrill echo, usually quite a racket in the hush of the bank and even more so with the manager’s door open, the front door locked, and the tellers sitting quietly, cross-legged on the floor with their hands behind their heads.

There are two men. I don’t need to invent what they’re wearing, because I know it is trench coats, sunglasses and caps. One is ransacking the tills, while the other stalks down the line of staff, barking at people to be quiet. He carries a bulky black shotgun-looking thing by the barrel instead of the handle, swinging it by his side as he walks. It’s the way you’d hold a baseball bat if you weren’t actually playing.

There is no alarm. No one managed to get to it. Little League decides to beat access to the safe out of the manager. The phone rings again, and Till Ransacker, swearing, goes into the office and takes it off the hook.

My mother does not take shit from her boys or the universe, and she certainly doesn’t take shit from petty crooks. It does not escape me that what happens next could have been rebellion against the crime that robbed her of her husband, the stupidity of the burglary. Or it could have been rebellion against Little League’s very existence; behind those sunglasses maybe she saw my dad, and everything he’d left her to deal with, when she pulled the trigger. Or maybe she just thought Little League wasn’t holding the shotgun well enough to get off a shot. I can’t settle on which is the most likely.

What I can say is that whatever she felt was enough to make her stand up. What I can say is that thirty seconds later, she has a broken nose and a shotgun in her hands. That Little League is on the floor, scurrying backwards. That my mother brings the gun around. That it’s very close range for a shotgun, close enough to rip someone in half. That Till Ransacker has put his hands up in the air and is telling her to chill out. That she levels the gun at Little League’s chest and – I can’t hazard a guess as to whether she hesitates or not, but I imagine the stupor is gone and she’s as clear-headed as she’s been in a long time – pulls the trigger.

She hits him square in the chest.

A beanbag round is a shotgun cartridge that, instead of exploding with skin-tearing pellets, contains them in a small fabric pillow. These are often used by riot police and are designed to immobilise rather than kill. Technically they are classed as ‘less lethal’ rather than ‘non-lethal’; they can, for example, break a rib and drive it into the heart, but the most common cause of death from a beanbag gun is, of all things, accidentally loading it with real ammunition.

Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those books where I describe the velocity in metres per second of every bullet fired, the make and model and factory of commission of the gun in question, and the relative humidity or wind conditions that may affect trajectory. I have a point to make.

The point is, while Little League would still have been plenty scared to have the gun pointed at him, and my mother obliged him with four broken ribs, she didn’t kill him.

It has occurred to me that my mother can’t have known the gun she was holding was ‘less lethal’ when she made the choice to pull the trigger, but that’s for a different time. The point is, my mother’s scar is above her right eye, and the bank-heist hopeful had only given her a broken nose. The point is, once the police and the paramedics had cleared the building and stuffed cotton buds in my mother’s nostrils, it was mid-afternoon by the time someone finally put the phone back on the hook, where it started ringing immediately. The point is, I remember the temperature of the day: it was baking hot. The point is, the call was from my school, to let my mother know that none of the three Cunningham boys had arrived that morning. The point is, my mother had been, ahead of her usually very tight schedule, five minutes early to work.

The point is, my mother shot someone but didn’t kill them.

The point is, there is a death.

The stupor. The sleepwalking. The distracted errors.

Three boys in a rooftop car park on a scorching summer day, forgotten to be dropped off at school, still clicked into their seats. I don’t remember the window breaking, the blood pouring off Audrey’s forehead as she sliced it on the glass, deep enough to scar. The first thing I know as concrete is the hospital; I was told about the rest later. To this day I wake from nightmares, choking. But, to be honest, I don’t really remember the day at all. I have huge black patches.

All I know is that when Jeremy died, I was sitting next to him.