Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone

CHAPTER 10

I suppose it’s time I told you how my dad died.

I was six. We saw it on the news before the station called to tell us. In the movies they always show up at the door and there’s a subdued type of knock – you know the one – where you know what kind of bad news is behind the door before you open it, and the policemen aren’t wearing their hats. I know it’s stupid, but I do remember the phone ringing and thinking it was a solemn ring. It was the same trill I’d heard a thousand times before, but in that moment it felt a millisecond slower, a decibel louder.

Dad was always out at night; it came with the territory. I have affectionate memories of him, I truly do, but what I think of most when I think about him is the spaces he left. It was easier to tell where my dad had been than to see where he was. The empty armchair in the living room. The plate in the oven. Stubble in the bathroom sink. Three empty holsters in a six-pack in the fridge. My father was footprints, residue.

When the phone rang, I was sitting at the kitchen table. My brothers were upstairs.

Yeah, I said ‘brothers’. We’ll get to that.

The TV was still on, but Mum had switched the sound off a while ago, saying she just couldn’t listen to the reporter anymore. There was a helicopter shining a searchlight on a petrol station – it looked like a police car had run into the big white ice freezer, with split bags of ice scattered across the crumpled bonnet – but I still didn’t know anything was wrong. Mum must have had an inkling because even though she was pretending to be uninterested, I noticed too many sideways glances to the TV. And she kept tactically invading my view of the screen by deciding she definitely did need to rummage in that particular cupboard or it was the perfect time to rub this particular spot of the bench raw with Jiff. Then that ring. The phone was wall mounted, next to the door. She picked it up. I remember the thunk of my mother’s head on the doorframe. Her whispering: ‘Goddamn it, Robert.’ I knew she wasn’t talking to him.

I don’t know exactly how it actually happened. If I’m honest, it’s something I’ve never really wanted to dig too deep into, but I’ve managed to piece it together over the years from news reports, asides from my mother, and memories of the funeral, so I’ll tell you that. In my version of events there are necessarily a few assumptions, mixed with some parts I’m pretty confident about, as well as the things I know for sure.

Let’s start with the assumptions. I assume the petrol station had one of those silent alarm buttons. I assume the attendant had a pistol in his face, but managed to scrape his quivering fingertips along the underside of the counter until he found that button. I assume that button sent a message to the police station, who wired it to the nearest patrol car.

Now for the stuff I’m pretty confident in. I’m pretty confident the shooting started before the patrol car came to a stop. I’m pretty confident getting shot in the neck is a slow and painful way to die; I’ve heard it’s like drowning. I’m pretty confident the driver was the first one hit. And I’m pretty confident the bullet in his neck was why he crashed into the ice freezer.

Here’s what I know for sure. That the passenger-side policeman got out of the car, walked into the service station and shot my dad three times.

I know that for sure because it was the same officer who came up to my mother at the state funeral with a hefty slice of cake and said, ‘I’ll show you where I shot him,’ before smearing a finger of cream across her belly and growling, ‘Here’, tracing a lingering sticky spiral on her hip, ‘Here’, and then squashing the rest of the cake in the centre of her chest: ‘and here’.

My mother didn’t flinch, but I remember hearing her let out a long-held breath through her nose, as the cop returned to a circle of his back-slapping friends.

This is one of those tricks writers use, I’m afraid. The state funeral I attended as a child was not my father’s. It was for the man he killed. My mother said we had to go because it was the right thing to do. She said there’d be TV cameras, and they’d talk about us if we went but they’d talk about us more if we didn’t. And that’s when I learned what it was like to be an outcast. I wasn’t me anymore. Not just for the funeral, at school too. And later, when I had to tell a girl I was dating about my childhood. And when I didn’t want to tell a girl about my childhood but she googled me anyway. (Erin, with her own traumas of a violent father, had been one of the first to understand me on this level.) There was that time a detective from Queensland drove the ten hours to Sydney just to accuse a Cunningham of an unsolved assault on his beat. I was sixteen at the time and had never left the state. I imagine it was a long drive back north for that bloke, sitting with the humiliation of not only his prime suspect being a teenager without a driver’s licence but also Marcelo’s telling him to shove his unreliable hair analysis up himself. My point is, our name pops up on a list, even for something as fallible as hair matching (not permitted in courtrooms since the 90s for a reason), and it may as well be highlighted. Like when Detective McMuffin had me holed up in an interview room a couple of decades later and wouldn’t believe anything I was telling him. I wasn’t Ernest Cunningham anymore. I was ‘his kid’. My mother became ‘his widow’. Our family name was an invisible tattoo: we were the family of a cop-killer.

Mum became law. She did not care for police, so neither did we. I think she only liked Marcelo at first because he was a lawyer for small-time crooks like my dad: his approach to the law was not one of respect, but one of loopholes and trickery. Corporate law is just the next evolution of skulduggery: the criminals are the same, they just drive better cars. Even now, Dad’s shadow loomed large, and if it had been a city cop and not Officer Last Resort who had to deal with the ash-faced man, I knew we’d all already be in cuffs. Prime suspects.

Now you know how my father died. Hopped up on something (they’d found a syringe by his corpse), trying to knock over a servo for a few hundred dollars. I know, I’m a jerk for burying it in Chapter 10. But I’m putting it here because it’s about to be important. And I figure you should know how we learned what it meant to be a Cunningham: to close ourselves off and protect each other. That was the door that Sofia had felt closing on her at the breakfast table. And even me, the very definition of an outcast, had only half-heartedly stuck up for her, still trying to keep one foot inside the circle. That was how we did things. Until I saw a sliver of my father in Michael’s eyes that night in a spider-web clearing, and tried to run as far away from it as I could.

Non fueris locutus . . . I forget the rest.

CHAPTER 11

The entrance to the roof was up half-a-dozen flights of groaning, threadbare carpeted stairs. I peered into the corridors as I passed each level; it seemed there were about eight rooms per floor. I had a few reasons for doing this. One: I wanted to estimate the number of guests. I figured there were about forty rooms, with a couple of empties, so maybe sixty to eighty people. Two: I wanted to see if Officer Crawford was door-knocking. He had seemed a bit squeamish around the body, and I doubted he’d ever run a murder investigation before, but I still thought he’d be able to conjure up a rudimentary line of questioning. A corpse required at least a smidgen of urgency, I thought, but he seemed determined not to give it. Considering the breakfast hall had been energetically gossip-filled instead of morose, I was still wondering if anyone here knew who the dead man was, and if anyone even cared. Three: it’s always been a habit of mine to try to sneak a peek into hotel rooms that are being made up, just because I like seeing what’s inside. I used to come back to a hotel room and tell Erin that the room across the hall had the beds on different sides of the room, the TV mounted on the wall, or different coloured curtains to ours. It sounds like such dull insight (go on, editor, take this bit out, I dare you), but ask yourself if you’ve ever walked past an open hotel door and not looked inside? It’s impossible.

Now that I think about it, that was what was bugging me so much about the mood over breakfast. It felt like everyone was walking past a door without looking inside.

Maybe I’m saying something about humanity’s innate curiosity. I’m the guy who sat in his brother’s car with a body in the back just to see what he’d do. I’m the guy who’s walking to the roof for mobile reception just to google ‘the Black Tongue’. I’m the guy who’s about to look through way too many doors. Maybe it’s important after all.

Little plaques on each level had arrows for the various sets of room numbers or facilities. The Dining Room and Bar were on the ground floor, as well as a Drying Room (important rooms are always proper nouns in mystery novels), while on various upper levels were a Laundry, a Library – which I figured must have the fireplace from the brochure, and I am therefore blaming it for getting me into this mess in the first place, so I decided it had better deliver an almost fairytale level of warmth and crackling to make up for my current situation – a Gym and an Activities Room, which had the words Pool/Darts next to it. I reminded myself to focus less on the dead body and try to enjoy the vacation part of it all, as relaxing as it had been so far. While I very much doubted Michael and I would play a social game of pool, I was sure we could find something brotherly to do together. He might like to throw darts at me.

As I continued up the stairs, the little arrow next to Roof changed from pointing up to pointing sideways, and I saw a housekeeping cart in the adjoining corridor. Score. I peeked inside: twin room, shit fridge.

There was a woman already on the roof, smoking a post-brekkie cigarette. I knew it wasn’t Sofia before they turned around, because Sofia is a lazy smoker; she’ll let a dart burn down to her fingertips if she’s not paying attention, then she’ll say, ‘Oh’ and light another one. Lucy smokes like she’s siphoning gas, so I knew it was her from the short, desperate gulps.

The cold was bracing. I nestled my hands in my pockets next to several tiny shampoo bottles I’d nicked from the housekeeping cart (I’m not above it) and walked over to her.

‘Hang on,’ she said, and sucked the soul out of the cigarette. I had a friend at university who used to chew gum, pin it to her headboard overnight and chew it again in the morning. That was how Lucy treated cigarettes: mileage. I could see that she was telling herself that it was her last. I also could see that she really believed it, as I’m sure she did every time. Turns out, this time, she was almost right. She would only have one more.

‘Internet,’ I said, taking out my phone by way of explanation (battery: 54%).

I had to be standing on the roof to get a single bar of reception, and even then it was hit and miss. Which I’m well aware is, like, a thing in these books. You’ll just have to get over it. And I know there’s a storm front coming in. And I know I glossed over the fact that there’s a freaking library with a fireplace in the building (which happens to be where I will solve the damn thing). It’s pretty much the whole How-To-Write-A-Mystery checklist at this point. If it’s any consolation, no one’s phone runs out of battery until Chapter 33. So the reception and the battery thing is a cliché. I don’t know what to tell you – we’re in the mountains. What do you expect?

‘I’m sorry about before,’ I said. Seeing as we were shoulder to shoulder, I spoke outwards, lobbing my apology into the void of the mountain. It’s the only way blokes know how to show humility, by pretending we’re at a urinal. ‘I’m still processing everything, but I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that. I just figure, you know, today, we could have each other’s back. Shared experience.’

‘How about you fix your marriage, and I’ll fix mine?’

It was a lot of bravado for someone clinging to nicotine for courage. But I didn’t want to start another argument so I just said, ‘Fair.’

We stood in silence, watching the mountain. A faint mechanical clanking came from the distant chairlift. It was still early enough for some people to be pulling on their boots, but I figured the most avid had already been up for hours, finding the freshest snow. I could see roads tracing their way through treetops like veins, a river gouging the white plateau below, and all the way downhill to where the ground turned from pure white to mottled and patchy brown. The wind howled across the roof, rippling the clamped umbrellas that were skewered through the centres of a row of wooden tables. Andy was right: there were three artificial grass squares with golf tees on them, lining one side of the roof. At the far end, a spa behind an aluminium fence, its cover half open, mist shrouding the water.

My eyes couldn’t resist darting to where the body had been found. It was a long way from anything: the nearest resort’s ski-slope on the ridge, the tree line up the hill, or even the entrance road. From up high, my perspective was clear enough to form an opinion. There was no way the dead man had stumbled to where he lay unless he was already at Sky Lodge: it was just too far.

‘You got a look at him,’ Lucy said, surprising me. She had seen my gaze settle on that specific patch of snow. I looked at her properly for the first time. She was wearing bright-pink lipstick and had kohl-lined eyes. I’m sure the look she was going for was sultry, but she was so pale from the cold that any splash of colour seemed to leap off her face and she looked like a cartoon character. She had on another pristine outfit – a yellow turtleneck that was very form-fitting for snow-gear. ‘When the cop asked you and Andy to carry the body. He kept us all too far back to see. But you got a look?’

I cleared my throat. ‘I guess. If it was Halloween, I was the donkey’s arse though.’

‘Huh?’

‘I took his feet.’

‘Well?’ she said expectantly. ‘Did he look like Michael?’

‘Oh, Lucy.’ I understood some of the desperation in her voice. She’d probably made the assumption over breakfast, otherwise our family would have had a much more sombre conversation, but still, no one had told her directly. ‘It wasn’t Michael.’

‘It looked nothing like him?’

‘I mean, it wasn’t him. And I’m probably the only one here that looks like him, and I think I’m still’—I patted myself down theatrically to assert I was still alive—‘yep, I’m still standing. Listen, Sofia’s just got us scared. Shall we find out what she’s on about?’ I held up my phone. Lucy had been the only other one at the breakfast table who hadn’t known what the Black Tongue was.

She shook her head. ‘I looked it up already. It’s a while ago, but it seems it was big news at the time, plenty of press, and so of course they had to come up with a catchy killer’s name. Someone murdered an elderly couple in Brisbane. And another woman in Sydney.’

I realised why I hadn’t heard about it. For the last couple of years I hadn’t been able to stomach the more gruesome news stories, since I became a part of one. ‘What are their names?’ I asked.

‘Ah.’ She scrolled her phone, skim-reading an article. ‘Alison Humphreys and . . . I dunno. Oh. Williams for the couple – Mark and Janine.’

‘Sofia said they suffocated? Like . . . torture?’

‘It’s a slow way to die. I’d probably just’—she made a little gun with her fingers and flicked it against the side of her head—‘rather than go through that. People are worried it’s a kind of serial killer. They’ve only done it twice. Well, I guess there was a couple, but does that count as one or two? Like, obviously it’s two victims, but in terms of making the killer a serial killer, what are the guidelines?’

‘It’s not my area of expertise.’

‘Don’t you write these things?’

‘I write about writing these things.’

‘Maybe it’s to do with theatrics. Maybe a couple of spectacular murders is worth more than a string of mundane ones. Certainly for a newspaper, anyway.’ Before I could ask her if a man burning to death in an unmelted snow field counted as a spectacular murder or not, she went on. ‘Sofia’s off her rocker. I don’t believe a serial killer is hiding out at this retreat. I just wanted to know if you recognised the body, maybe from lunch yesterday, or when you were in the bar with Andy, or just around?’

It sounded like a hurried excuse to me. ‘Why do you want to know who he is?’

‘Because nobody seems to know and it’s giving me the creeps. And no one seems to be missing.’

‘I’m sure they have a guest book. Maybe he was staying by himself.’

‘Word is, everyone who should be here is accounted for.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I talk to people. The owner. You should try it sometime.’

‘I didn’t recognise him,’ I confessed. I know I’m the narrator, but it interested me that I wasn’t the only one scratching around the death. Crime novels always look at the motives of a list of suspects, but only from the perspective of the inspired inquirer. Am I really the detective just because it’s my voice you have to listen to? I guess this whole story would be different if someone else wrote it. Maybe I’m only the Watson after all.

So what made Lucy especially curious, and up here with me grappling with an intermittent internet for clues? I caught the faintest glimmer of disappointment in the way she set her jaw, and figured something out. ‘You’re digging around because you want to get rid of Crawford,’ I said. ‘You know that the longer it takes to identify a John Doe, the more police they’ll send. And if Michael’s on edge, it will ruin your plan for the weekend.’

‘I can’t have any distractions,’ she whispered. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that, under that policy, her fluorescent lipstick would have to go. ‘Michael deserves his family back. This is my last chance to give it to him.’

I realised there was another reason for her to be on the roof. She was hunting that one bar of reception. Hoping a text would slip through.

‘Have you heard from him?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘Her?’

Lucy laughed. ‘I think she might have deleted my number. I’m the ex. You?’

‘I wasn’t expecting to.’

‘I guess we are on the same side.’ She sighed.

‘Are you worried about seeing him?’

‘I know he’ll be different. But I’m scared about how much. I couldn’t sleep last night. I kept dreaming that he wouldn’t even know who I was. I keep wondering what’ll be left of the old version of him, if there’ll be anything at all. I’m scared there might not be.’

I didn’t say my fear was the opposite: that he wouldn’t have changed at all.

It occurred to me that Lucy had never asked me about the money. She mustn’t have known about it. That’s a huge amount to keep hidden in a marriage, I thought.

She surprised me again by putting out a hand. I took it: a truce. Her hand was shaking so much I’d have had to grab her by the elbow to keep it still. ‘You shouldn’t have done that to him,’ she muttered, before letting go. So low and quiet I almost missed it. I opened my mouth to argue, but she raised a hand. ‘I’m not saying it’s your fault. I’m not that narrow-minded. But none of this would have happened if you hadn’t made that choice. He might have ended up in jail, but it would have happened a different way. I hate you for that.’ She wasn’t angry; rather, she was calm and sincere, so I knew it was true. ‘I just wanted to say it aloud to your face. Just once.’

I nodded. I’d had a feeling she wanted to say this to me – Just Once, like she liked having Just One More cigarette, but I understood. I’d been thinking a lot about the same thing the last twenty-four hours. I didn’t blame her.

A rumble echoed across the rooftop, the growl of a car’s engine really grappling with the terrain, picked up in the wind and ferried to us. I looked to the entry road and saw a pair of headlights emerge from the trees. It wasn’t a car though: it was a mid-sized box-truck. One you’d hire to move house. It was comically impractical for the conditions and started bouncing down the slope. Five, maybe ten, minutes away.

‘Here we go,’ I said.

Lucy took a deep steadying breath and fumbled out what would be her last cigarette.

CHAPTER 12

The gaggle that formed in the parking lot, uphill from the guesthouse entrance, was not unlike the one that had formed earlier on the mountain: it was the same wary semicircle, except that instead of clamouring for a glimpse at a dead man, we were all there to see one resurrected.

Lucy wasn’t the only one wondering how much Michael had changed: none of us had visited him in prison. It should be no surprise to you that my invite got lost in the mail, but, maybe out of embarrassment, maybe out of shame, Michael hadn’t wanted visits from anyone. He’d decided to treat prison like a cocoon, hiding himself away. There had been some communication with a few members of the family, but never in person. Phone calls. Emails. I’m not sure if serving divorce papers by mail counts as writing letters, but if it does, he wrote some letters too. But contact was sparse. So his arrival was indeed momentous.

There was the crunch of the handbrake being pulled on. Then the engine cut out, the truck sighing onto its suspension, and there was just the whistle of the mountain wind. A crack of thunder would have added to the mood, but I promised not to lie. I noticed Michael’s truck had perfectly applied tyre chains.

Lucy primped her hair, checked her breath in her palm. My mother folded her arms.

The passenger-side door opened, and Michael got out.

Some of you will have just figured something out. But I’m going to let it sit.

After three years and change, I’ll admit I was expecting the desert-island version of my brother: wiry hair hanging down to his shoulders, a forest of a beard, and beady, nervous eyes: so this is civilisation. Instead, we got the opposite. He had longer hair, sure, but it was styled into a wave, and it was thick and full. Maybe even dyed. He must have had time to spruce up because he was clean-shaven. And while I was expecting extra lines of hardship somewhere in his brow, he had smooth skin, rosy cheeks and bright eyes. Maybe it was the snap of cold, or maybe prison, away from the elements, was an underrated skincare regime, but I was damned if he didn’t look younger than when he went away. The last time I’d seen him he’d been sitting in the dock, hunched, wearing a suit like it was a straitjacket. But here, he seemed refreshed. Resurrected.

In a black North Face down jacket over a button-up collared shirt, he looked like someone who’d paid to climb Everest. He took a deep breath of mountain air, savoured it and let out a wild ‘Cooee’. It echoed back across the valley.

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Katherine, you’ve nailed the spot.’ He shook his head, hamming up how incredulous he was at the beauty of the place, or maybe he was genuine, I’m not sure. Then he made a beeline for my mother. I suppose I should start calling her ‘our mother’ now. Or maybe I should just call her ‘his mother’, and I should stick with ‘Audrey’.

Michael leaned in and gave our mother a hug, said a few words into her ear. She grabbed him by both shoulders and shook him, as if to check if he was real. Michael laughed and said something else that only reached me as a murmur, then turned to Marcelo, who gave him a firm handshake and a fatherly pat on the upper arm.

Michael worked his way around the semicircle. Katherine got a hug with an air kiss. Andy got a handshake while he said, ‘Nice truck,’ and commented that he hoped it had some guts to get back up the hill, in the way that uncomfortable men believe they should talk about cars. My stomach was rolling more with each person Michael greeted, shuffling along the line. Lined up like this, it felt like meeting the Queen. I could feel my heartbeat in my throat. I wrestled with my collar; too many layers. I worried I’d be a foot shorter, having melted through the snow, by the time he got to the end of the line. Sofia gave him a one-armed hug, as if reluctantly paired up at a school dance, with a perfunctory ‘Welcome back, Mike’. That stood out: my brother has had many names in his life – Mickey, Cunners, Ham, The Defendant – but no one calls him Mike. By the time he got to Lucy, she’d gnawed off half her lipstick and she fell into his arms as if she’d broken a heel. She buried her head in his neck, and whispered something. I was the only one close enough to hear his response: ‘Not here.’ She gathered herself, pulling back and taking quick, hitching breaths through her nose in an attempt to portray calm. Sofia put a hand on her back. Then Michael was at the end of the line, in front of me.

‘Ern.’ He stuck out his hand. His fingers were prison-filthy, dirt under the nails. His smile was convincingly warm. I couldn’t tell if he was glad to see me or if he’d just excelled in the prison’s amateur theatre society.

I took his hand and choked out, ‘Welcome home,’ even though I wasn’t sure if he was either.

‘I’m sure Katherine’s got lots planned, but I’m hoping we can find a quiet beer sometime,’ he said. In my head, he was asking about the money, but it didn’t match his tone. I was aware of Sofia watching us, trying to make out our words, and suspected her comforting Lucy was actually a tactic to be one step closer to our conversation. ‘I have some things to say that I think I owe you. I hope you’ll take me up on it.’

If you polish those words differently – words like ‘owe’ and ‘things to say’ – it becomes a threat, but his voice was . . . humble. That’s the only word I can think of to describe it. Everything I’d thought this encounter would be, it wasn’t. I was struggling to reconcile the man in front of me with the man I’d built in my head: one full of anger, pain and revenge. I thought it might have been a front for everyone else, and the mask could drop when we were alone, but it didn’t feel like a trick. Call it brotherhood. Call it blood. I’d brought a bag of cash in the hope that he’d hear me out. He’d brought a handshake and a smile and hoped the same.

I was nodding as quickly as Lucy was breathing. I managed to fish out ‘Yep’ from somewhere between my arse and my tongue.

That was when the driver’s-side door of the truck opened. This is the part most of you will have figured out when Michael emerged from the passenger seat.

‘That was quite a drive,’ Erin said, stretching. ‘How’s the coffee here?’

CHAPTER 13

Admittedly, this was not so big a revelation as to warrant a chapter break. We’d all known who was in the driver’s seat. Of course we had: Lucy had already arrived, and as if Katherine would leave something as important as picking Michael up to improvisation. It was not a surprise to see Erin, nor to see her with Michael.

Before you accuse me of dragging out the reveal of her exiting the truck, I’d suggest that Erin simply had an innate sense of suspense or, more likely, she hadn’t wanted to make Michael’s arrival even more awkward, so had hung back in the truck until he’d finished his royal line of greetings.

I’d found out about them six months after Michael went to prison. I think I was first, and then it trickled through the rest of the family. Though I’ve always pictured Lucy finding out at the same time as me: in her dressing gown, excitedly opening a large yellow envelope, knowing it was prison mail from the fact that it had been torn open, plundered and taped back up, just as my wife said to me over an otherwise uneventful breakfast that she was planning to spend more time with my brother Michael.

Okay, I did drag that out.

If you’re wondering about my choice of words, most of my breakfasts are uneventful; I have simply never found meals with that much milk involved to be dramatic. I have only had three eventful breakfasts in my life. You know about two of them. The other involves sperm: we have to get to know one another a bit better before we get to that.

People accuse marriages of losing their spark. Like they have a supernatural zap of energy that can be mishandled, misplaced. And perhaps the case could be made that if my wife was able to cultivate a relationship with my convicted brother exclusively by phone and email (because he didn’t have visitors) without me noticing, our marriage was already over. And don’t allow me to paint her as the bad guy here, because she isn’t and it was – over, that is. The night Michael visited, body in the back of his car, we were already in separate rooms. Otherwise she might have seen the money when I threw it on my bed. But it wasn’t the spark that was the problem. It was the lighter, the flint, the matches. And they weren’t lost, they were taken. It wasn’t that we lost our spark, it was that we didn’t have the tools to make it anymore.

‘I don’t want it to be weird,’ she’d murmured at that breakfast. She’d been spinning her wedding ring on her finger as she said it. Which I took less as a metaphor for an imploding marriage than a realisation of how much weight she’d lost. A person’s cheeks or hips give a window into short-term ups and downs, but when you see it in their hands . . . I had known we were both thinning out, but I used to have to pull that ring off her like I was starting a chainsaw. Seeing it so loose made me think about what I was doing to her. Don’t get me wrong, there was nothing cruel between us: no screaming matches or thrown plates. But we’d reached the point where, in even being together, we were doing something to each other. Maybe if she hadn’t been spinning it I would have said something different, but she was and so I didn’t.

‘You can do whatever you want,’ I said.

She gave me one of those smiles where your eyes glisten in a way that means you’re not really smiling, and told me not to tell Lucy yet.

I didn’t feel the need to ask her anything else. Breakfast was not the time. And then, well, I just never asked. I’ve thought about it, sure. Sometimes I wonder if she just liked the danger. I’ve read that it’s a thing, women falling for death row inmates, with some even having multiple wives. Or maybe someone in jail felt like a relief to her. A relationship that had literal boundaries, where she didn’t have to worry about the other stuff, the stuff that had torn us apart. Michael was incapable of having my faults, because he didn’t intersect with her life at all. I’ve gone through all the options, believe me. Maybe she’d been drinking the Cunningham Kool-Aid and, ironically, saw it as an act of loyalty. Maybe she believed him over me. Maybe he had the flint. When I was feeling spiteful, which I try not to be, I wondered if it was because they had something in common that I couldn’t match. This is called foreshadowing.

Michael was easier to figure out. I always thought he just wanted to take something from me.

Erin stepping out of the truck, while not a surprise, was indeed momentous. Because Michael had truly had no visitors in prison, and certainly no conjugal ones. This weekend was not only the first time I was seeing them together, it was the first time they were seeing each other. Their relationship was quite a mystery, and each of us had different ideas of what it actually meant. Call me fatalistic, or maybe just lazy, but I was happy to roll over: I considered them together, but always stopped short of calling them a couple. Lucy, with her tag-riddled wardrobe and emergency-beacon lipstick, clearly felt that it was something she could still weasel between. Everyone else seemed to vary on a scale between Disbelief and Acceptance, most hovering around Sceptical.

Looking back, I can’t have been as aloof as I’m writing myself here, because it did occur to me that they hadn’t spent the night together yet, with Erin only picking Michael up from the Cooma Correctional Centre, about a two-hour drive away, that morning. She would have stayed in the itchy-sheet motel I imagined her in last night. I don’t know why that’s important – who cares if they’d spent the night together or not – but I’ll admit it popped into my head. I mention that here because, I figure, if I had thought about such things, Lucy was probably clinging to them.

Erin made her way around the circle much more efficiently than Michael, partly because she had fewer people to shake hands with, as Lucy made a big show of tying up her shoelace. When she got to me, I extended my hand.

‘Nice things,’ I said. It’s a private joke we have; I was playing for a laugh.

She didn’t smile. Instead, she took my hand and brought me into a cold, one-armed hug. Her breath was warm on my ear as she whispered, ‘It’s family money, Ern.’

They were urgent, stolen words. Michael had told me the same thing the night he’d buried Alan. It’s our money. I knew what it meant. He’d earned it. He’d killed for it. He was laying claim to it, and offering me a share for my silence. I can’t say what I was expecting to hear from Erin, perhaps something apologetic or, when she leaned in close to my ear, something sultry, or a combination of the two: apologetically sultry. But I hadn’t expected her to be Michael’s messenger, while he smiled and said he owed me a cold one. It’s family money, Ern. Was there a hint of what might happen if I didn’t play along? I couldn’t be sure. The look in her eyes was earnest, not threatening. Maybe just a warning. She was gone before I could decide, and I couldn’t ask her in front of everyone anyway.

The group quickly split into factions. Lucy and Sofia closed in on Michael and me. Lucy assumedly didn’t want to let Michael out of her sight, and Sofia probably didn’t want me to blurt out anything about the money until I’d decided whether to give her any. Erin formed a cluster with my mother and Marcelo. Without seeming too interested, I tried to read my mother’s expression. It was unfamiliar to me, so I figured it must have been warm and welcoming. Katherine joined Erin’s huddle, and Andy, momentarily stranded in the middle, floated over to our group.

Michael, perhaps realising it was up to him to set the tone and that if he didn’t talk, no one would, was trying to keep things light by telling us how he’d forced Erin to stop at every petrol station on the way up so he could sample a different chocolate bar at each.

‘Best one?’ I’d made a little deal with myself to be as civil to Michael as he was to me, so I thought I’d try to join in.

‘Results are inconclusive.’ He nodded, then tapped his belly. ‘I’m going to need a lot more data.’

Lucy laughed far too loudly.

‘What’s with the truck?’ Sofia asked. ‘Did you not get the “mountain lodge” part of the invite? I’m surprised you made it up here.’

‘Hire place stuffed the booking – it was supposed to be a van. They only had this one, or else we were taking Erin’s hatchback and that just wasn’t enough for my stuff, seeing as my storage unit renews tomorrow and they’ve sucked me dry enough already. So it’s basically got my loungeroom in the back of it. We were a bit worried, but it’s got grunt.’

‘You brought an armchair to the snow?’ Andy laughed. I was still grappling with his use of the word “we”.

‘I would have just paid the extra. You brought that whole thing just to save a few dollars?’ Sofia asked.

‘I think it’s very sensible,’ Lucy muttered. ‘I thought I still had most of our—’

‘It’s what they had.’ Michael talked over her. ‘Plus, we made sure they gave it to us for a good discount, of course. And I’ll have to move my things next week, so might keep it a few days extra. Worth the risk of getting it up here.’

‘You can keep stuff at mine if you need to,’ I said, half to fill the air and half because I wasn’t entirely listening; I had one ear out for a glimmer of Erin’s conversation with Katherine. Here’s a tip: don’t whisper secrets with too many s’s in them – the hiss snaps through the air. I heard Katherine say ‘separate rooms’ but I couldn’t tell if she was asking or confirming. I wish it hadn’t caught my ear, but it did. I realised Michael and Sofia were both looking at me curiously. It took me a second to realise what I’d said, and once I did, I half expected Michael to say, I already am.

‘Might take you up on that, bro,’ he said instead.

‘I quit smoking,’ Lucy cut in.

Michael looked at her like a parent looks at a child who’s interrupted their glass of wine to show them a somersault and said, ‘Well done,’ in a way that meant ‘run along’. ‘So, what do we do for fun here? Trust me, I’m excited by the restaurant and the bar, but I’m not spending my whole weekend cooped up inside.’

Andy and I said in unison: ‘There’s a jacuzzi on the roof.’

‘Everyone!’ Marcelo called us over. Lucy did a pass on the inside of Andy worthy of Formula One to wind up next to Michael. Sofia and I trailed behind.

‘You’re blushing,’ Sofia needled quietly. ‘What’s the matter, starstruck?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m all over the place. This isn’t what I was expecting.’

‘Me neither.’ Sofia wrinkled her nose. ‘Cuidado.’ Even though I don’t speak it, sometimes Sofia threw Spanish words at me. I knew this one, having heard it a few times: be careful.

As we joined Marcelo’s group, Michael drifted over to Erin, who slid her hand into his back pocket. When we were married – sorry, we are still married; technically, I should say, when we were together – Erin hadn’t been a fan of public displays of affection. She’d had a difficult, sometimes violent childhood, raised by a single father who hit her in secret and hugged her in public. As a consequence, she struggled to see over-the-top fondness as genuine, as anything more than an act. She didn’t trust it. I mention this because we would rarely kiss in public, and certainly never indulged in any back-pocket action. A palm on the small of my back, maybe. Her show of affection towards Michael struck me as very performative. Possessive, even. I wasn’t sure if it was for me or for Lucy. Maybe I was jealously over-thinking it and my brother just had a better arse.

‘We’ve decided,’ Marcelo said, loud enough for the group but directed at Michael and Erin, ‘that we should tell you something together – otherwise you might hear it from others.’

‘I’m not sure . . .’

‘Lucy, please. Michael, the last thing we want is to give you any undue stress this weekend. But we either tell you now, together, or we wait for hearsay and rumour to kick in.’

My mother was nodding along, which, as usual, held more weight than Marcelo’s words. Michael shot a quick look towards the rest of us, but I could have sworn he was searching out my face. Perhaps he thought it had something to do with the money. Or something to do with him and Erin.

‘There’s been an incident,’ said Marcelo. ‘The body of a man was found this morning. It seems he lost his way overnight and died of exposure.’ Marcelo’s gaze swivelled across the group, but settled on Sofia, as if daring her to speak up. ‘That’s as simple as I can tell it.’

‘There are police here,’ Michael surmised. ‘Patrol SUV by the maintenance shed. I didn’t think anything of it, but that makes sense. Okay. Poor guy.’

‘There’s something else you need to know.’ This time it was Sofia. Lucy spun around and stared daggers at her. Marcelo cleared his throat to talk over her, but Michael raised a hand in his direction, which, I think purely because that had never happened to Marcelo before, stopped him mid-breath. I swear the snap of his mouth closing echoed across the valley. ‘They don’t know who it was. Apparently, it’s not someone staying here. No one’s really doing anything at the moment, but there are more detectives on their way. They may wish to do some questioning.’

Everyone nodded in agreement, impressed by Sofia’s newfound tact. I wasn’t buying it; I think she was trying to push Michael’s buttons. Words like ‘detectives’ and ‘questioning’. She was trying to scare him.

‘Detectives for someone who died of exposure?’ said Erin, thinking aloud, realising something was wrong, and giving Michael a worried look. Sofia’s smile in reply was a thin line. She’d seeded what she wanted.

‘If you don’t want to stay, we can go somewhere else,’ our mother said. ‘We wanted it to be up to you.’

‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ Marcelo said. ‘In my experience, being in prison is a pretty good alibi. Besides, the officer here, he’s not what we’d call experienced. The body’s got him rattled. So he’s waiting on his superiors. They’ll come, they’ll be here five minutes, and then they’ll all be out of here.’

‘And the accommodation is—’ Katherine started, and I knew she was one breath away from the word ‘non-refundable’.

‘Crawford’s his name,’ I cut in.

‘Crawford. Sure,’ Katherine said, with the implication that it didn’t matter. ‘He doesn’t have the chip on his shoulder that the city cops do. Seems the name Cunningham doesn’t travel like it used to.’

‘And as for police presence,’ Lucy jumped on the reassurances because she clearly thought, if we did disband, she was a hundred dollars and a motel room away from losing Michael for good, ‘there pretty much is none. He’s not asking questions. We’ve barely seen him around.’

‘This cop that’s supposedly not doing anything,’ Michael said. ‘Is that him?’ He pointed to the steps of the guesthouse, which Officer Crawford was currently hurrying down. He steamed over to us, sought our faces for the new arrival. Spotted my brother.

‘Michael Cunningham?’

Michael raised his hands in jest and said, ‘Guilty.’

‘Glad we agree. You’re under arrest.’

CHAPTER 14

Katherine was right: the name Cunningham didn’t travel like it used to. If it had, Officer Crawford may have better considered his personal safety before striding into a circle of us.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Lucy was first to erupt. She barged in front of Michael, forming a physical barrier.

‘There’s been a misunderstanding,’ Katherine said, firming up the defence beside Lucy and dragging a reluctant Andy with her.

‘Everyone just chill out,’ Andy said, faking a small shaky laugh. He was a married-in Cunningham, remember, so he still held the usual law-abiding citizen’s reverence for police.

‘Get out of the way.’ Crawford had handcuffs dangling from his left hand like a lazy whip, I noticed.

‘Can’t you just leave our’—this was my mother, not sprightly enough to be part of the blockade but the venom in her words was enough of a shield—‘fucking family alone?’

I suddenly believed every news article I’d read about mothers lifting cars to save children. Well, the ones they liked anyway.

‘Audrey,’ Marcelo soothed her, ‘that won’t help.’ He stepped forward and introduced his Rolex to Officer Crawford. ‘I’m his lawyer. Let’s go inside, sit down, talk it out.’

‘Not without the cuffs.’

‘You and I both know that’s not how policing works. He’s only just arrived, how could—’

‘Dad,’ Michael said, and it took me a moment to realise he was talking to Marcelo. ‘It’s all right.’

But Marcelo was in full flight. ‘You don’t get to call martial law on this resort just because you’re the only policeman here. I know you’re in an uncomfortable situation and someone out there is missing a father or a brother or a son – and my family and I will be happy to participate in informal interviews to assist in your identification. But to imply there’s anything criminal . . . that’s . . . well, that’s just a staggering accusation. It’s profiling based on the family history. We will sue. If you wish to detain him, you’ll need cause and a charge, of which you have neither. Now, I’m only working six minutes pro bono, and I think we’ve just ticked over. Are we done?’

I felt the urge to apologise simply being in the proximity of Marcelo’s tirade. But Crawford dug his heels in. ‘We are not done. I’m allowed to use my discretion, seeing as there’s been a murder.’

This started a murder-murmur as everyone repeated the word in disbelief. I caught Sofia smiling. Marcelo balled his fists. My mother was not one for gasping, but she covered her mouth with one hand.

‘Some incident,’ Michael said pointedly.

‘You’re finished,’ Marcelo growled to Crawford. That was legal speak that even I understood. ‘I’ve ruined people over less.’

‘And I’ve stood up to people over more.’

They were interrupted by the slam of the guesthouse doors. A tall woman, my age, with a tanned jaw but a pasty colouration around her eyes – a ski-goggle tan – was standing on the deck. She was bare-armed, in a t-shirt and vest, unbothered by the cold. I recognised her as the woman with the amphibious Land Rover who’d fixed my tyre chains.

‘Officer, do you need a hand? People are on edge as it is – what’s all the yelling?’

‘It doesn’t concern you,’ Marcelo said, tiring at the prospect of another argumentative party.

‘I own this resort, so I think it does.’

‘Well, in that case, could you tell this wannabe Poirot to stop harassing your guests? And if you want to quell panic, how about not throwing the word “murder” around?’

‘First time I’ve heard the word “murder”.’ The owner raised an eyebrow at Crawford. ‘Really? You mean Green Boots?’

As far as colour-based nicknames go, Green Boots was easier to understand than the Black Tongue. It was the colloquial name given to a man who’d died hiking Everest; because it was too dangerous to retrieve the body, it remained just off the path, his neon green boots serving as a landmark for climbers. While this morning’s body hadn’t been wearing green boots – I’d know, I carried the left foot – they’d clearly settled on the name as shorthand for our frozen mystery guest.

‘I have reason to believe his death could be suspicious.’

‘Why? Because of her?’ Katherine’s pitch lilted, both in incredulity and possibly the altitude, as she pointed across at Sofia. ‘You’d get a better medical opinion from a shaman. What did you tell him? How long until the actual detectives get here?’

‘I am a doctor,’ Sofia assured Crawford.

‘Are we ignoring the fact that, even if this death is suspicious, Michael has an alibi?’

‘Dad. Let me—’

‘I’ll handle it, Michael. Are you sure you want to go down this road, Officer? Your suspicions are based on some rap sheet that you dug up, maybe a bit of family history, and your loyalty to your badge, because blood bleeds blue and all that. Your bias is not only showing, it’s making you look like an idiot. You tell me how Michael can be involved when he just got out of prison this morning, for heaven’s sake?’

Marcelo’s outburst sucked the breath out of everyone. Crawford looked between all of us; I assumed he was trying to scope any shred of remaining support. I avoided his gaze. Even Sofia looked at her toes: her belief in Black Tongues and Green Boots aside, she knew when someone was Red Faced.

‘Come on,’ Marcelo said, taking Audrey’s hand and starting to move towards the guesthouse.

But Michael didn’t move. He swapped a nervous grimace with Erin.

I’m not embellishing to report that there was, at last, a thunderclap.

‘I thought so,’ Crawford said. ‘Do you want to tell them, or should I?’

‘I didn’t hurt anyone.’ Michael put his hands up and took a few steps towards Crawford. ‘But I’m happy to cooperate to help you find out who did.’ He was looking at me when he said this.

‘Michael! Stop! Officer, he doesn’t know his ri—’

‘He is not my lawyer.’

‘What are you doing?’ Audrey walked back over and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You were in Cooma last night. It’s okay, you just tell him.’

‘It’s cold, Mum. Go inside.’

‘Just say the words. Just say it. Tell him.’ She started thumping his chest with her spare, balled fist. As if she could force the confession out of him. Then, I think because of a combination of the cold and the exertion, her knees drooped and she gently sagged into the snow. Michael tried to catch her but was too slow to do much except guide her down, where she sat in the snow. Crawford, Sofia and I all hurried to help her up, but she swatted us away. Katherine and Lucy both started shouting at Officer Crawford for keeping an old lady in the cold.

‘Mrs Cunningham,’ Crawford said, loud enough to quiet the rabble, ‘Michael was released yesterday afternoon.’

Yesterday? I remember the slow dawn of realisation. But that meant—

Michael’s eyes darted to Erin. I think I saw Lucy’s face collapse inwards. The first snowflake landed on my eyelash.

‘That’s not bulletproof. Okay. Okay, so he wasn’t in prison. Sure.’ Marcelo was reeling off his thought process, trying to find the best option, while hauling Audrey up. ‘But that doesn’t mean he was here. You can’t stay there, love, you’ll get wet. So, just tell us where you were last night, Michael, and that’ll be the end of it.’

‘I’d rather go with you, Officer.’

Crawford clicked the handcuffs on and gave Michael a reassuring look. Even without knowing the full subtext of Michael’s concealment, Officer Last Resort could see that this was the less harmful option. I noticed he put the handcuffs on very loosely. Maybe not loose enough to slip through, but loose enough to not be threatening. He turned to the owner – look, chronologically I know the owner hasn’t told me her name yet, but it’s bugging me, so I’m going to start calling her Juliette, because she tells me soon – and said, ‘I need to keep him on his own, for the safety of the guests.’

‘He’d get out from wherever you put him. No rooms or chalets lock from the outside only – it’s a fire hazard,’ Juliette replied. (See, I told you it’d be easier.) ‘We’re a hotel, not a prison.’

‘What about the Drying Room?’ Lucy said. Her face was darker than the sky, her voice throaty, tongue thick with anger. I would find out later, but she must have already known the Drying Room was nothing more than a heated closet-sized space filled with wooden benches for boots and clothes racks for coats, which smelled like damp mould and the type of sweat you only get when you’re wearing something so waterproof it traps everything inside as well as keeping it out. It was a petty revenge, but it was the best she could do on short notice. Her tone was smug as she added, ‘I saw it has a slide bolt on the outside.’

‘Um, the Drying Room is not really for people to stay in,’ Juliette said.

Crawford looked up, held a flat hand out and watched a few small flakes land in it and melt. He was keen to wrap this up and get inside. He turned to Michael apologetically. ‘It’d only be for a few hours.’

Michael nodded.

It occurred to me then that this would have been a perfect time for Erin to speak up. If prison wasn’t Michael’s alibi, then she could be. We all knew they were together anyway, so what was a night between them? When she still didn’t say anything, and I realised that whatever they were keeping secret was worth being locked in the Drying Room on suspicion of murder over, my curiosity was piqued.

‘Where did you learn to be a police officer?’ Marcelo might have hit Crawford if he hadn’t had my mother draped across his shoulder. ‘None of this is legal.’

Police officers in these books, while being Last Resorts or Only Hopes, can also have character traits such as By The Book or Screw The Rules. It appeared Crawford had surprised me again.

‘I’m happy to cooperate,’ Michael repeated.

‘It’ll be all right,’ Erin said, giving him a hug. Her hands slid down his spine and into his rear pocket, the other one this time. Not that I noticed.

Then they were all walking towards the guesthouse. I followed, swept up in the tide. Marcelo was keeping pace, having handed Audrey off to Sofia, talking Crawford’s ear off in language I’ll deem colourful, both for the flurry of legal terms and the graphic descriptions of how one could fornicate with their own face.

‘I need you to give me some space,’ Crawford said at the top of the stairs, in a stern voice that belonged to Screw The Rules cops. He was talking to Marcelo, but we all stopped. Being that we were all at different heights on the stairs, it felt like we were in a stage play or posing for a wedding photo. ‘Get warm. We’ll talk soon.’

Crawford put his hand on Michael’s back and guided him towards the door.

‘You will not talk to him without me present.’ Marcelo got in one last jab.

‘That man does not speak for me. He is not my lawyer,’ Michael said. Then he turned and raised both cuffed wrists, clasping the lower half of his hands in a club shape, both pointer fingers together. He was pointing at me. ‘He is.’

CHAPTER 14.5

Right. A lot has happened, so I thought I’d jump in here with a quick recap.

I know: it’s a bit weird. But I want us all to be on the same page. Figuratively: I know you bought the ebook. If you’re confident in your cognitive abilities, you can skip ahead.

Books like this generally tease out the backstory of an ensemble of reprobates, lock them in a singular location and then present a body that can be linked to parts of each player’s backstory as possible motive. I’ll try that.

The backstory: Three years ago, my brother Michael arrived on my doorstep, with a man named Alan Holton in the back seat of his car. Alan was dead, then he wasn’t, then he was again. Even though I knew it would effectively banish me from the family – mistrustful as we are of police after my father was killed robbing a petrol station – I sided with the law and turned my brother in.

The location: We’d all met up at the Sky Lodge Mountain Retreat! to welcome Michael back from prison. It’s Australia’s highest drive-in accommodation. There’s a storm coming, because of course there is. But please don’t think it so clichéd that we’re trapped there, because we’re not: we’re just stingy and indecisive. Although, I guess we are a bit stuck there now, seeing as Michael’s been locked in the Drying Room and we can’t just leave him behind – but that’s more the focus of the next couple of chapters and this is supposed to be a recap.

The ensemble: There’s my mother, Audrey, who blames me for the fragmented state our family is currently in; Marcelo, my stepfather, partner in esteemed legal firm Garcia & Broadbridge, who wears a university tuition on his wrist and represented Michael in his murder trial but won’t touch Sofia’s negligence case; Sofia, Marcelo’s daughter and my stepsister, who needs at least fifty grand for something, perhaps to do with a malpractice suit that may cost her her medical licence, is a surgeon who, among other achievements, handled Marcelo’s shoulder reconstruction; Katherine, my hyper-organised teetotaller aunt, whose idea the whole weekend was in the first place; Andy, Katherine’s husband, who wears his wedding ring like some men wear Purple Hearts; Lucy, Michael’s ex-wife, who stuck by him during the trial but whom he divorced while he was in prison because he had formed a special connection with . . . ; Erin, my current wife, though we’re separated, who has found solace in my brother’s letters (and, apparently, his arms for a night) after, I think it’s fairly obvious, some past trauma ripped us apart; Michael, who lied about getting out of prison that morning and previously asked me to look after a bag containing $267,000 cash; the resort owner, Juliette, roadside assist and concierge in one; Officer Darius Crawford, a cop who’s so far out of his depth he might have just come out the other side in China and started to float again; and me, shunted from the family and stuck with a bag of blood money. That’s the cast. I think we well qualify as the required reprobates.

The body: This morning, a man was found dead in the middle of the snow-covered golf course. Sofia believes it’s the work of a serial killer named the Black Tongue, and that the victim didn’t die from exposure. According to Lucy, no one is missing from the hotel guest list. If you think that her telling me this is suspicious, I’ll remind you that Juliette, who, as the owner, has access to the guest list, coined the anonymous nickname Green Boots, which implies that Lucy’s gossip is correct. The problem is none of us could possibly be linked to the dead man by motive, because none of us know who the hell he is.

Here are some important nuggets I’d like to highlight at this point:

Someone was in Sofia’s chalet when she was in mine; they called my room’s phone.

Sofia’s also the only one with an alibi, because she was with me in my chalet at the exact time Green Boots died, which you’re not technically supposed to know, but I’ve told you anyway.

Marcelo called off dinner because my mother was unwell. I had no contact with Andy, Katherine, or Lucy overnight.

Sofia, Andy and I have seen Green Boots’ face, but Crawford didn’t exactly spend the morning holding an open casket, so we might be the only ones. None of us recognised him.

I still don’t know where the bag of cash came from. It’s about to occur to me that someone may be after it.

There were three sets of footprints to Green Boots, only one back, and it didn’t snow overnight.

Lucy’s taste in make-up is second only to Erin’s taste in men and Michael’s taste in terrain-appropriate vehicles.

I haven’t forgotten I dangled the plural ‘brothers’ before.

Michael would rather be suspected of murder than tell the truth about where he and Erin were the previous night.

We are seven chapters away from the next death.

And in the middle of it all is me. Someone who writes books about how to write books, with no legal background, who has just, for reasons I can’t yet fathom and with questionable legality, been nominated as legal counsel for a suspected murderer – or maybe serial killer, if I take Lucy’s word about the dramatic prerequisites – who is supposed to despise me.

If you’re happy that I’m playing fair, we’ll move on.

CHAPTER 15

I could have caught Audrey easily, but we had all flocked into the foyer as a group and I wanted to wait until everyone spread out. As Michael was guided away to the Drying Room, he told me he’d send for me – he actually used those words, as if I was a court jester – once he’d had some time to think. Some time to conjure a convincing alibi, I suspected.

Everyone else dispersed to the bar, the restaurant or their rooms. Michael’s arrest had been quite the show for the other guests: there were a lot of greasy-forehead smudges on the front windows. Marcelo guided Audrey upstairs. He had her under his light arm, folded into the wing of his coat, and was talking in a soothing monotone. My mother is not old enough to find stairs an obstacle, but old enough to be good friends with the banister, so they moved slowly. I’d half expected Marcelo to chase after Crawford, raining verbal fire, but he’d given up that fight and instead bashed at his phone (battery: unknown). I imagined he was trying to get a bar of reception to call someone who could fire Crawford.

I waited until they reached the first-floor landing, which I decided was probably spacious enough to corner them into a conversation. It had been a long time since I’d spoken to my mother face-to-face, after all. She might know something.

As I made to follow them, someone rested their hand on my shoulder from behind. It wasn’t aggressive, but there was the slightest tug backwards. I turned to see Katherine wincing apologetically, in the way people do when their face is trying to tell you they’re sorry for what they’re saying. It’s the face Andy often makes behind his wife while she’s explaining why they’re leaving a party early.

‘Is now the best time?’ she asked, doing the Katherine thing of being concerned and responsible, but also just a tad condescending. Sure, she was a good dozen years younger than my mother, but she’d started to coo at Audrey. Katherine was by no means mocking or insincere about it, but it was clear: she thought my mother was getting on.

‘Oh,’ I said, nodding in solemn agreement, ‘I agree. Let’s wait for a few more corpses.’ Then I remembered I’d promised Andy I’d go easy. After all, she was only trying to help. I softened, explaining, ‘If I’m going to help Michael, I’m going to need to know as much as I can. I’ll have to talk to her eventually.’

Katherine seemed to begrudgingly accept my reasoning. ‘Just try not to get her worked up.’ There it was again, concern for Audrey’s frailty rather than her happiness. ‘That’s if she even talks to you, anyway, which she probably won’t.’

‘I have to try.’

‘So what’s your angle?’

‘Dunno. Grovelling?’ I shrugged. ‘She is my mother after all. I’ll just have to get through to her maternal side.’

Katherine laughed. It was hard to tell if it was cruel or empathetic, but she let go of my shoulder, not holding me back. ‘If that’s your whole plan, I hope you brought a ouija board.’

Audrey was in the library flicking through a novel by Mary Westmacott but not exactly reading it, in a high-backed, studded red leather chair. It would have been the perfect chair to sit in for a denouement. Despite having Library written on the door, the room was a booklover’s nightmare: water-damaged, mouldy yellow paperbacks with brittle potato-chip-dry pages ringed the room, mounted on bookshelves crafted out of old-timey wooden skis and snowboards. The pamphlet-adorned stone fireplace in the corner held hungry crackling embers, the architect seemingly quite unaware of the combustibility of books. The fire kept the room too warm, but it smelled less damp than the rest of the hotel. There were no guns on the mantle, certainly none of Chekov’s: I would have been hard-pressed to murder someone with the taxidermy pigeon and framed war medal that were there instead.

On seeing me, my mother closed her book, stood and turned her back, pretending to be busy picking through the rest of the Ws on the snowboard-shelf.

‘Audrey,’ I said. ‘You can’t ignore me forever.’

She slid the book in – it was miscategorised, if you ask me, since Mary Westmacott is a pseudonym for Agatha Christie, but what’s in a name? – turned and frowned when she saw I was blocking the doorway.

‘Come to gloat?’ She folded her arms. ‘To tell me you were right about him?’

‘I wanted to see if you were feeling better, actually.’

It took her a second – either to process that I was reaching out, or to remember her alibi for cancelling dinner, I wasn’t sure – and then she snorted her derision.

‘I can look after myself.’ She was being evasive, betraying her likely frustration at being over-cared for, which she no doubt saw as a threat to her independence. I imagined Katherine had been needling her about her age and faculties recently, and I’d only added to it by checking on her. ‘If that’s all?’ She made to step around me.

‘Michael hurt somebody, Mum. I did what I thought was right.’ I deliberately said ‘I thought’ in the middle, even though I knew I was in the right. ‘I’m doing what I think is right now.’

‘You sound like your father.’ She shook her head. It was not a compliment.

I was curious; it was rare to hear her talk about Dad. ‘How?’

‘Robert could justify anything. The way every robbery was the big ticket, the last one. He talked himself into absolution, too.’

‘Absolution?’ My father had found no absolution; he’d died in a gunfight with two policemen, killing one of them. Unless she meant that he had talked himself into each crime he committed, believing it was for his family, a necessity, and that he was a good enough man to walk away from the next one. Just like Lucy’s cigarettes. ‘Dad was a bad person. You know that, right?’

‘He was an idiot. If he’d just been a bad person, I could have lived with that. But a bad person who thinks they’re a good one – now that’s what got him into trouble. And now you’re forcing me to watch you make the same mistakes he did, and you expect me to smile and pretend it’s okay? Just when our family was coming together . . . and now this to deal with.’

Her words rattled me. The same mistakes my father made? Was she accusing me of being involved with Green Boots’ death? I was aghast at the implication. Then, because I was hurt and because I’d never said it to her face, I lashed out. ‘Michael is a killer.’

‘He killed someone. But does that make him a killer? People kill people and get medals for it. People kill people because it’s their job. Michael’s not rare or different. You label him a murderer? Do you think the same of Katherine? Of Sofia? If you had to make the same choices he did, for whatever reasons he made them, what would that make you?’

‘It’s not the same.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘I think there’s a body outside who would disagree with you.’

‘Michael didn’t kill him.’

‘I believe that.’ I said it so quickly, I realised I did. ‘But someone did. And it seems all too convenient that this happened this weekend, with Michael arriving. It’s got something to do with us, I know it.’

That seemed to annoy her. There was something else in her agitation, in her glances behind me.

I took a chance and stepped towards her, lowering my voice. ‘Do you know who the dead man is?’

‘I don’t.’ At the risk of spoiling things, she’s telling the truth here. ‘But he’s not one of us. That’s all that matters.’

‘What is it you’re not telling me?’

‘So you want to find a killer, do you? Because it’s easier to conjure up someone with a knife or a gun that you can hunt, someone who is objectively bad so that you can ignore what you know is true? What happens if you find them? Do they pay the price? It’s okay if the villain dies at the end of a novel – in fact, they’re supposed to. What if that’s what Michael did to Alan? And it’s just the end of Michael’s story you’ve got confused with the start.’ She needed a couple of breaths after that tirade. I digested the truth in her words. ‘We’re here because of you. Michael is in that room because of you. You did this. You’re just like your father. He knew what he was leaving us to fight, and he left us to fight alone anyway, and we paid the price. We all did.’ Her voice was venom. ‘If only he’d left us a weapon to fight it with. But he didn’t. Nothing in the bank. And you did the same thing to Michael.’

For a second I thought she was accusing me of keeping Michael’s money, and I was about to ask her how she knew about it, when I realised she was simply saying that, by dying, our father had left us poor. In truth, we hadn’t grown up that poor. But I didn’t really know what it had been like to raise us alone. In any case, maybe she meant it as a metaphor.

‘Dad was a killer just like Michael.’ I blocked out her argument and stuck with the black and white truth. ‘The only difference was he was a junkie as well.’

‘Your father was not a junkie!’ Audrey bellowed.

‘They found a needle on him, Mum. Stop lying to yourself!’

‘Stop panicking your mother.’ A voice came from behind me: Marcelo, holding a mug of something brown and steaming. He’d said it jokingly, but caught on to the intensity of the room pretty quickly. He slid me out of the doorway with a brush of his forearm. Audrey slunk past, grabbing the drink on the way out and shuffling quickly down the corridor.

Marcelo raised his eyebrows. ‘Everything all right?’

I nodded, but it was so mechanical he saw right through it.

‘I know, everything’s upside down. The way I see it, Michael obviously wants to talk to you. This who’s-his-lawyer crap won’t go any further than the next few hours, but if it helps us get Officer Crawford on our side, so he sees that we’re cooperating, we may as well play along.’ He could see I was wary. ‘Oh, don’t think I’m lying down. I’ll destroy him later, promise. There’ll be nothing left of him. But I know when to put ’em up and when to let ’em sit. And I think I’m benched for now. You should talk to Michael first, because that’s what Michael wants. We’re playing his game, not Crawford’s.’

I found myself wondering if mixing sports metaphors was a universal trait of stepfathers, or if it was just Marcelo.

‘But you’re the real lawyer. A good one, too. You got him a meagre three years on a murder charge – that’s a pretty good result. Why doesn’t he trust you anymore?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘Seems like he doesn’t trust anyone much. Maybe he’ll tell you why.’

‘When you meet a client for the first time, how do you know the difference between the heroes and the villains?’ I asked. ‘Like, I know you have to be unbiased, but you must think some people are lost causes, and others have some hope?’

‘That’s why I got into corporate law – I don’t have to worry about that. They’re all dirtbags.’

‘I’m being serious.’

‘I know, mate.’ He reached out and squeezed my shoulder. Marcelo always found an alternative word that danced around ‘son’ for me, as if he wasn’t entirely comfortable with it, even now. ‘Mate’ was one of the more serious, an upgrade from ‘buddy’. ‘You’re asking about your dad.’

‘Audrey said he was a bad person who thought he was a good one.’

Marcelo considered that for a second. ‘I couldn’t say.’

I got the feeling he could, but didn’t push it.

‘You were friends. What was he like? Were you close?’ I surprised myself by asking.

Marcelo scratched the back of his neck. He found the words slowly. ‘Yes. I knew him well.’ He made a show of checking his watch. It was not a topic he was comfortable with – I assume because he’d married his dead client’s wife. ‘I’d better catch up to your mother.’

I stopped him. ‘Can you do me a favour?’ He nodded. ‘You have researchers, paralegals, contacts in the police – all that stuff, right? Can you check out the victims of the Black Tongue? Lucy says they were a woman named Alison Humphreys and a couple named Mark and Janine Williams. Anything that might be useful.’

He paused. Probably hesitating at encouraging me along this path. ‘Who was the first one again – Williams and . . .?’

‘Alison Humphreys.’

‘Got it. Sure thing, champ.’ He loosened up. Thankfully he didn’t affectionately punch me in the arm, otherwise we would have had to go outside and play catch, and I hadn’t brought my baseball glove. ‘I’ll ask around.’

I didn’t follow him out, choosing to spend a few minutes in the library alone to gather my thoughts. I found myself looking at the medal above the fireplace, thinking about what my mother had said: some people were awarded for killing. The medal was a dark bronze, framed on blue velvet in a glass-faced portrait, with a small rectangular slip of paper, like that inside a fortune cookie, mounted beneath it. The paper had a grid of dots on it, but it wasn’t Morse code or anything I recognised. Beneath all of that was an engraved plaque: Awarded for carrying a life-saving message through heavy fire, 1944. The medal itself was engraved with the words FOR GALLANTRY and WE ALSO SERVE.

Relax. I didn’t just spend eighty words describing a medal because it wasn’t important. I realised my mother was looking at things with a biased eye, but she was right. All killing wasn’t equal; that’s what the medal meant. Audrey was telling me she believed Michael had a good reason for it.

You did this, she’d said. And under her curt words I heard again everything Lucy had told me on the roof: it would have happened a different way. I realised I believed her. I’d sent Michael to prison – what if his anger had metastasised, created something worse? I felt ashamed for my guilt – Michael had deserved to go to jail – but felt it anyway. Knowing that none of this was my fault gave little comfort. It was a sliding doors thing. What had I made him into?

And so, right then, I decided to help him. Not because I thought he was innocent, and not because I thought he was guilty. But because of what everyone had been telling me since we arrived.

You did this.

I was the reason it had happened the way it did. Call it the shame of testifying against blood in the first place, the emotional banishment from my mother or the guilt from my indoctrinated Cunningham loyalty, but my conscience couldn’t handle it anymore. I made up my mind: I’d do the digging. I would either pave my way back into the family with Michael’s absolution, or deliver the final, validating nail in his coffin. Call me a traitor, in league with the coppers, but I also had a feeling one of us was involved. It seemed clear to me: the only way to put my family back together again was to find out which one of them was a killer.

Well, we all are – I’ve already told you that. I just mean most recently.