Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone

EPILOGUE

The For Sale sign was staked into the ground with the lopsided laziness that comes from a sure commission. Juliette had come to help pack up the last of my things. Erin and I had decided that the best way forward, if we were trying to move ahead with a clean slate, was to sell the place and leave all memories and actions behind us. I’d met Juliette at the house, having just come from breakfast, which had been fantastically uneventful.

Juliette unlocked the door. The house was stripped, ghosts of furniture leaving dark shadows across the otherwise sun-paled wood floors. The last of my boxes were in the attic. She pulled the ladder down and climbed up; my position below was trash-catcher. She passed me a few boxes and then a small suitcase, one with wheels on it, good for airports but bad for snow resorts. When I’d finally gotten home – after police stations, hospitals and media galore – I hadn’t had the heart to unpack it.

Of course, I’d taken the sports bag out of the top. The McAuleys wouldn’t take it back. They’d accepted the photos were gone forever, but had still sent divers into the lake to retrieve the coffin. I hoped they’d had the funeral for their daughter they’d always wanted. I’d told everyone about the money, and we’d agreed what to do with it together, as a family. We’d given half to Lucy’s parents, brothers and sisters, and we’d also paid for her funeral. Then we’d agreed to split the rest. I’d forfeited my share, figuring that I’d already spent it.

Michael’s funeral was short, cold and depressing. It wasn’t his fault; the weather did him no favours. I checked the coffin before it went in the ground. Lucy’s funeral was organised by her family. It was tragic, sad and beautiful. The church was packed, and it took me a while to figure out why, but the mystery solved itself: I’ve never been pitched so many business opportunities at a wake. Even though Lucy’s not with us anymore, I’m pretty sure last week she got promoted to Associate Vice President, Oceania.

Andy and Katherine have never been more affectionate, and Katherine never more relaxed. It’s a bit much. Andy is still the type of guy whose shoulder you look over in a bar to find someone more interesting, but now I’ve seen him knock the jaw off someone, I’m open to enduring at least fifteen minutes of mundane conversation.

As it turns out, Sofia was one of the most badly burned in the fire, which did her a favour in the end, because guess what they dosed her with for the pain? Oxycodone. Her bloodstream’s alibi secure, the coroner had nothing to gain from testing her, as no pattern could be proven. She was found to have acted as she could have reasonably been expected to. Katherine’s keeping an eye on her, and she’s doing better. They are almost friends.

Marcelo, Audrey and I have dinner once a week. Audrey stands up far less often, which is nice. I’ll invite Erin soon; she’ll always be family, flint or not. Divorce is a word that’s scary and formal, but we’re working towards it, ironically enough, as a team. Juliette and I got to know each other better on publicity tours, since she’s also signed a book deal for this story. Hers is called something like Hotel of Horror. My publishers are trying to squeeze mine out a month before hers.

What else?

There are some technicalities to go through, I suppose.

You might think that my mother didn’t kill anybody. You’d have a point. I’ll argue that I told you I’d tell you the truth as I knew it to be at the time that I thought I knew it. I also told you that my use of grammar was not deliberately dishonest. Perhaps I could make the argument that a locked car on a baking summer’s day was the end of Jeremy Cunningham. That my mother was responsible for ending that life and birthing another: one who dreamed of choking. Where Jeremy ends and the Black Tongue begins is up to you. Or at least that’s my excuse. We can debate the literary merits of this reasoning later. Email my agent.

And Andy and I both having our own sections? I don’t know what to tell you there. Andy struck Jeremy. I’d say it was a mortal strike. Jeremy was burned and bloodied and was surely dying in the snow from his injuries when I got to him. And me? My lawyer tells me to tread carefully here. All I’ve told you is the truth: that when my brother died, I was sitting next to him. You can make up your own mind.

Katherine Millot is an anagram of I Am Not The Killer, by the way. Darius derives from a Persian king, Persia being where the suffocation by ash torture began. I didn’t change that for the book though; it really was the moniker Jeremy gave himself. Too bad he didn’t target a group of history professors; they would have solved it straight away.

Juliette’s phone dinged, loud enough to echo in the attic. Her laugh barked out of the hole I was standing below. Her face appeared above me. ‘Katherine’s planning the next reunion,’ she said. She was on the family WhatsApp chat: I know, big steps. ‘Wants suggestions.’

‘Somewhere warm.’

She laughed again and clunked off to toss around more boxes. I turned back to my bag, pulling out a crumpled, mouldy jacket. It had still been damp when I’d shoved it in, hurrying to leave. The smell was foul. That decided it; I’d toss the whole bag. There was nothing in there I needed and I didn’t have the stamina to sift through it. I checked the pockets just to be sure, and pulled out a folded piece of paper. Sofia’s bingo card.

I looked at Michael’s edit: Ernest ruins fixes something.

And I had. Despite everything that it represented, I still felt a warmth as I took out a pen and crossed through the square. It wasn’t enough for a bingo, but it was pretty damn satisfying.

That was when I realised I hadn’t been taking my own advice.

I took out my new phone (battery: 4%; I’m ashamed it was lower here than during a mountain-top snowstorm). I downloaded a magnifying app, which wasn’t as good as a loupe, but I figured it would be enough.

I remembered Michael had taken a moment of thought before writing on the card. Or maybe he’d spent those few quick seconds, his contact lens case beside him (I knew he hadn’t worn contacts!), fiddling with something else. Something small enough that my father had to use a needle to handle . . . but I supposed the tip of a pen would do. Don’t lose that, he’d said, holding his thumb down firmly as he handed the bingo card back to me, as if pressing the ink in. I’m trusting you. He’d written some words, but he’d also added the full stop. I told you: in a mystery, there are clues in every word – hell, in every piece of punctuation . . .

My heart pounded in my throat with the sense of discovery. I scanned my phone camera (battery: 2%), magnifying app running, over Michael’s added full stop. Photos. Sixteen of them, in a 4x4 grid.

The photographer was at the bottom of a sprawling driveway, looking up at a palatial estate, the rigid lines of a security fence imposed on the images. There is a sedan, trunk open, by the pillared entryway. The setting remains static through all sixteen photos, but there are two people in the frame, faces hidden, that move from image to image. In the fifth picture, the figures disappear, but the front door is a black hole: open. The figures return in the eighth picture, except they are carrying something – it looks like a sleeping bag. The figures are each holding an end. In the ninth, they are halfway to the car, and I could see what appeared to be long tendrils of hair hanging from one end of the bag. In the tenth, the sleeping bag is gone, and the car’s trunk is closed. In the sixteenth photo, the car’s position has changed. One of the figures is still on the porch, watching it leave. Finally, a face.

It might be disappointing that I can’t give you the typical catharsis of the bad guys getting their full comeuppance, but my editor tells me we have to go to print and it’s all still before the courts, so I don’t really have the details. It will have to be enough to know that I zoomed in as close as I could on Edgar McAuley’s face, revealed in the porchlight of his mansion, and that if his name is not redacted here, it’s safe to assume he’s gone to prison for a very long time.

Did Michael show you the photos?

Edgar McAuley had asked me that question twice. The second time he’d been insistent, I remembered. I’d thought he was annoyed, but I realised now that his tone was not impatience, but desperation. He wanted to know if I’d seen the photos, if I’d seen him in them. I remembered Siobhan’s dismay at the body being lost and his calm words to her: we can get divers.

The McAuleys had been unwilling to pay half as much for their daughter’s safe return as they were for her dead body and the photographs of her killer. Alan wasn’t selling them closure, it was just good old-fashioned blackmail. He’d gone to Jeremy first, in the hope he’d be able to swindle money from the Williamses without having to put himself at as much risk as selling to the McAuleys. When he’d struck out there, he’d had to take the more dangerous path. He’d needed someone as a shield to go in between him and Edgar, but a Cunningham also gave his threat legitimacy, which was why he’d then approached Michael. And then Michael, when he’d been released from prison and had seen who was in the photos, had decided that the McAuleys owed him as well. What had he told me in the Drying Room? It’s right for them to pay. Them.

A false kidnapping to cover up a murder. It was clever. Hire a well-known gang to put on the front, create motive in the fluffed ransom, and come out the other end a victim rather than a suspect. Just like Marcelo had told me, it was an old story in which I’d know all the beats: easy to understand and easier to accept. As everyone had at the time. Rebecca was already dead before the first demand was ever made.

I called the police. A detective said they’d come past that afternoon to pick up the evidence, and then my phone ran out of battery.

‘Hey, Ern.’ Juliette’s face appeared again. She held up a dusty bottle of wine. ‘This has either aged well or terribly. Wanna come up?’

I promised certain things wouldn’t happen in this book, so I’d best end it here lest this chapter make me a liar.

I followed her up the ladder.