I breathe out long and hard, trying to exhale the tension that’s accumulated from telling my least favourite story. It doesn’t work. ‘So there we have it: Drew got to stay chez Hopwood, and got to have a mother who loved him, because he was able to provide evidence of love for Marion early enough to save himself. I didn’t.’

  Simon shrugs. ‘I still think it’s more likely to be the boy thing. The rubbish about eyes was a less offensive-sounding excuse.’

  ‘Less offensive?’ I laugh. ‘How d’you figure that? I’d rather it was because I was a girl, but I don’t think it was. I think Marion just didn’t warm to me. I’d prefer “Marion’s a sexist idiot” to “I’m inherently unloveable” as an explanation.’

  Could he be right? Even if he is, I’ll never convince myself.

  ‘If you’re about to ask me why I sought out the Hopwood family after the only member of it who gave a shit about me had died … I wanted to meet my brother. I thought I might have hit the nuclear family jackpot: at last, a blood relative who was neither dead nor a conspirator in a plot to banish me. Unfortunately …’ I stop. This bit’s going to be harder to convey.

  I used to think Drew was simply uninterested in anyone but himself. Then Gabe and I got together and I noticed Drew related to Gabe differently. He asked him proper questions. That’s when I realised how uninterested in me he is. The questions he asks me are always what car I’m driving at the moment, how much I think my house is worth, which airline I think is the most reliable. That’s because he’s interested in cars, houses, travel. He hides his refusal to ask me anything about myself amid an extensive and varied assortment of questions about all the things I know about but care nothing for, bombarding me with trivial enquiries as a way of blocking me – of demonstrating that I’m not someone with a heart and soul that matters, as far as he’s concerned.

  Questions Drew never asks when I see him include: how are you? What have you been up to? How’s work going? Are you writing new material at the moment? Have you decided what your next tour’s theme will be yet? Any love life developments?

  Gabe, on the other hand … I watched time after time as my brother chose the exact right words that would enable my husband to expand on all the things that mattered most to him: the films of Michael Haneke, the legalisation of marijuana, Gabe’s work for a verbal branding company.

  Since Gabe and I split up, Drew’s first question to me is always, ‘How’s Gabe? Have you heard from him? What’s he been up to?’

  Another of my brother’s strange and discouraging habits is suggesting I’m probably guilty of everything I criticise others for. If I get an uncooked chicken breast in a restaurant and complain, he points out that I once served him an inedible meal; if I say a politician’s a hypocrite for dodging inheritance tax and then condemning tax avoidance, he reminds me of the time I said everyone should give blood and then chickened out because I’m scared of needles.

  If I’m murdered, Drew will appear on the TV news and tell the nation that, however unfortunate Billy’s actions might have been, mine also, frankly, had always left a lot to be desired.

  According to my brother’s rules, nothing bad can be allowed to have happened to me, nor may I notice wrongs done. It’s a form of protection from harm that’s anything but reassuring.

  ‘On the surface, Drew was keen to welcome me to the Hopwood family,’ I tell Waterhouse. ‘He’d just lost his mum. As a bloke who doesn’t like to be short-changed, he knew he was down to the tune of one close relative and he was happy to be able to fill that gap. Marion and Trevor went along with the “Of course you’re one of us” routine – probably to please Drew – but there was a silent, non-negotiable condition attached to all of this: nobody was allowed to mention the backstory.’

  ‘You mean—’

  ‘Everything I’ve just told you: my adoption, Drew’s planned adoption, Marion not being able to go through with it, Elaine hating her and Trevor as a result, my miserable childhood with the Tribbecks. We all had to pretend nothing out of the ordinary had happened, that Drew and I were equal members of the family who’d never been treated at all differently … I went along with it at first, but it soon started to rankle. I didn’t have the guts to walk away, so I rebelled covertly, hinting whenever I could at the traumatic experience I’d had that my brother hadn’t. That’s what really set them against me: I was a troublemaker, determined to rake up horrible things from the past. I didn’t want to be like that but the enforced silence got too much for me. Marion never apologised, or acknowledged any aspect of what happened to me. Instead, she behaved as if I’d chosen to go on a very long holiday, then reappeared with the sole intention of putting a dampener on everyone else’s happiness.’

  ‘I have to ask, because I know you could have; you had plenty of opportunity … Did you kill Marion?’

  ‘No. Cancer and Billy Dead Mates did, between them.’

  ‘Did you know, or know of, any of the four other victims: Linzi Birrell, Rhian Douglas, Angela—’

  ‘I know the names. No. Never heard of any of them until they were in the paper after they were killed.’

  Waterhouse pulls a small lined piece of paper out of his shirt pocket and hands it to me. ‘These are the dates they were killed. I’ll need to know what you were doing on the afternoons of those days.’

  ‘For most of them I was probably being driven from one gig to another. Look up Kim Tribbeck autumn tour 2014 – you can also talk to my driver, Dmitri Pescov. I’ll give you his number.’

  I reach for one of the pens on the shelf above my head, write Dmitri’s number on the back of the lined paper and pass it back to Waterhouse.

  ‘Thanks. For what it’s worth, I don’t believe you killed anyone.’

  ‘I’m more worried about being killed, to be honest,’ I say. Worried. Still not scared. It seems too unreal, all of it. And confusing. An hour before Waterhouse arrived, a uniformed police officer was sitting where he’s sitting now, scraping the inside of my mouth with a wooden stick to get a DNA sample.

  Apparently no one can decide if I’m a danger or in danger.

  ‘Your worry’s understandable,’ says Waterhouse. ‘I’m hoping that once you’ve had your session with our sketch artist and we’ve spread the image of the man who gave you the book far and wide, we’ll be well on our way to catching Billy. In the meantime, I’m glad you’re going away with Charlie tomorrow. That’ll give you some protection while we make progress.’

  My tour-in-reverse, in search of the mysterious gig venue that I can’t identify. I’m dreading it.

  ‘Let me ask you something. Who might want to harm you?’

  ‘Apart from members of the public who tweet me death threats because I’m not funny?’

  ‘Are there many of them?’

  ‘No, and please don’t waste your time tracking them down. They’re saddos letting off steam. I feel sorry for them. Who might want to harm me seriously? Gabe, Liam, Drew. I can’t think of anyone else.’

  ‘Your husband, your ex-boyfriend and your brother.’ Waterhouse makes a note. I imagine it says something like ‘Only knows three people in entire world. All probably want her dead.’

  ‘To turn that question around and look at it another way: who, if they’d planned to kill six people and you were one of the six, might not be able to bring themselves to harm you, even if, theoretically, they wanted to?’

  This one I have to think about. I’m surprised by my conclusion. ‘Strange as it sounds … the same three people. Gabe. Liam. My brother Drew,’ I say. ‘No one else would care enough to spare me.’

  I was surprised when I met Charlie and she was a woman. Waterhouse hadn’t mentioned it.

  My first thought: if a Charlie can be a woman, maybe a Billy can too.

  When she introduced herself to me – the police officer who was to be my chauffeur for however long it took – I knew it was too late to call off the gigless tour. I considered feigning an illness: sharp pain in my stomach. Maybe that ringpull I swallowed could be brought into play, I thought.

  I didn’t want to let anyone down, but I feared I would, whatever I did. If I helped them find the man who gave me the little white book, I’d be leading them to the wrong person. I didn’t know why I was so certain that man wasn’t Billy, but suddenly I was.

  So why had I felt so uncomfortable when he approached me? My instincts had told me there was danger …

  Not danger of murder, though.

  I shook my head to banish the incoherent swirl of thoughts. It would be easier, I knew, if I stopped thinking, got into the car and let Sergeant Charlie Zailer drive me around the country as planned. It wasn’t as if there was anything else I wanted or needed to do at that moment.

  She was tall and thin, with wavy dark brown hair cut to just above shoulder-length, pale skin and no make-up apart from bright red lipstick. ‘You’re not wearing uniform,’ I said.

  She looked down at herself. ‘Actually, I am. This is it.’

  ‘No, I mean … when we go on our blast-from-my-past tour, I’d rather you wore regular clothes. Otherwise I might feel like I’m an escaped loony who needs a uniformed attendant.’

  ‘I’m glad you raised this.’ Charlie perched on the edge of the table in the corner. ‘I’d rather not play driver to a spoilt star with an over-inflated ego.’

  Star? Was she deluded? ‘Is that your way of saying it’s important to you to wear uniform?’

  ‘I’ve seen your list of requirements: a gold-plated dressing room, a Filipino butler with a six-pack to polish your toenails between interviews, etcetera.’

  ‘Wow. Seems there really are a million different ways you can interpret the words “pickled onion Monster Munch”.’

  We were going to be getting into a car together soon whether we wanted to or not. Since Charlie Zailer was unlikely to stop being an arsehole – people rarely did – I decided I’d have to be the one to make the effort. ‘I only made that list because I’d been treated badly by an event organiser one time too many,’ I said. ‘Feel free to ignore my list, and wear whatever you want. You’re right, it’s none of my business.’

  ‘I probably don’t need to wear the uniform,’ she said. ‘Leave it with me. First things first: we need to draw up a schedule. Where we go and in what order. Also hotels – I want to get on and book them.’

  ‘Hotels?’

  Every bed is narrow.

  When I’d first read those words in a little white book, I’d thought they meant that any bed you share with another person feels too small. Even in the early days of our relationship when I couldn’t get enough of his body or his conversation, I’d wished Gabe would sleep somewhere else at night and not next to me. I’d have suggested it, but you’re not supposed to. People who are in love are meant to want to sleep side by side, so I tried to want to. It took me more than a year to work out that Gabe’s intermittent snoring was the perfect excuse to make a case for separate rooms.

  ‘B and Bs more than hotels, probably,’ said Charlie. ‘I have to try and keep costs down. If we’re travelling all over the country, we’re going to need to sleep somewhere – unless you want to start from the Culver Valley every morning.’

  ‘No. Sorry. Hadn’t thought it through.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ She peered at me.

  Totally, and not at all would have been an honest answer. For as long as I could remember, I’d been absolutely fine and a complete mess.

  ‘If it’s okay, I don’t want to stay in any of the hotels I stayed in before, when I gigged in those towns. I don’t like going back to old haunts if I can avoid it.’

  ‘Fine. I’ve got the list from your agent of where you stayed while on tour. I’ll avoid places you’ve been before. Chances are they’re beyond our budget anyway.’

  ‘And we’ll have our own rooms? I mean, separate? No twin rooms to save money?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Thank God for that.

  ‘Once we’ve identified the event venue we’re looking for, we’re also going to need to go to whichever hotel you stayed in – the narrow bed hotel – to check it’s the right one.’

  That was the main one I didn’t want to revisit. Damn.

  ‘Simon wants to know for sure. He said you should positively identify both: venue and hotel.’

  This was an opportunity, I told myself, to learn a hard lesson: namely, that you couldn’t have everything you wanted all the time. All you could do was force strangers to buy you your favourite kind of crisps and pretend that was all your dreams come true at once.

  ‘You’re not keen to revisit the hotel?’ Charlie asked me. ‘How come?’

  ‘It was hardly the Savoy.’

  ‘We can just walk in, you say, “Yes, this is where I stayed,” then we walk out.’

  We could walk in? Was she going to insist on coming into the room with me? God, that would be embarrassing. Unless …

  ‘Let me tell you now and get it over with,’ I said. ‘Any hotel room I go into, whether I’m spending the night there or just popping in, I have to take a book into the room with me and put it in a drawer. If there’s a Bible in the room, I have to put my book in the same drawer as the Bible. If there’s no Bible, any drawer will do.’ My face radiated heat as I spoke. I’d have found it less embarrassing if I’d had to admit that I travelled with a bag of sex toys.

  ‘Really?’ Charlie wasn’t smiling. She didn’t look as if she was preparing to mock me. ‘Which book? The same one every time?’

  ‘Yes. It’s called Delirium of the Brave. By Terence Nithercott. I guarantee you won’t have heard of it. Please don’t ask me why I have to take it to every hotel with me. There’s literally no reason. The book has … had … sentimental value. Soon after I got it, as a present, I took it with me to a hotel because I wanted to try and read it – turns out it’s unreadable – and then it kind of became a thing. A mascot, or … I don’t know.’

  Why was Charlie Zailer suddenly paying such close attention to my every word?

  ‘What would happen if I said, “I want you to go into hotel rooms without that book from now on”?’ she asked.

  I shrugged. ‘I’d probably take the opportunity to persuade myself it’s turned into an irrational obsession, and now’s a great moment to break the habit.’

  She nodded. ‘And if I say, “Do what you like with regard to the book”? Then are you going to bring it or leave it at home?’

  ‘Bring it. Don’t you have any irrational superstitions?’

  ‘Have you read Beloved by Toni Morrison?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I’ve read one of her books – The Bluest Eye. Why?’

  ‘Billy Dead Mates sent a copy of Beloved to Sondra Halliday, a journalist who’s been—’

  ‘I know who Halliday is. I’ve been reading her commentary on the murders. With mounting incredulity. I wish someone’d get her the help she needs.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘From the few autobiographical columns of hers I’ve read in the past, I know she should be crying on a shrink’s couch and drinking hot milk with honey in it till she feels better, not trauma-laundering to create unrest.’

  ‘I’ve seen her mention PTSD but never anything specific.’ The hardness of Charlie’s voice suggested she wasn’t convinced. I was. You don’t end up like Sondra Halliday if nothing terrible’s happened to you; you don’t harm others unless you’ve been harmed yourself first.

  You think I’m wrong? You have counter-examples? That’s so sweet and naïve – which is tactful-speak for ‘fucking stupid’. Whenever people say about someone who’s committed an evil act, ‘But he had a happy, loving childhood,’ feel free to say to them confidently, ‘No, he didn’t.’ Not all wounds or causes of hurt are visible to those on the outside.

  ‘Halliday had an abusive stepfather from a really young age – seven or eight, I think – and a mother who colluded,’ I said.

  ‘Simon calls her the Hate Preacher,’ said Charlie.

  ‘I feel sorry for her. She so desperately wants to believe women aren’t as venal and vicious as men. Maybe she never went to school with other girls between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Why did Billy Dead Mates send her a Toni Morrison novel?’

  ‘We don’t know. He also sent her Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Books are everywhere in this investigation. Billy’s little white ones with lines from poems in them …’ Charlie gave me a pointed look.

  ‘And now my copy of Delirium of the Brave.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Books don’t commit murders,’ I said. ‘Even the very worst of them. That’s why books are so much better than people.’

  Lifeworld online, 14 January 2015

  BILLY DEAD WOMEN STRIKES AGAIN

  by Sondra Halliday

  Yesterday, Culver Valley Police revealed that the killer they’re failing to catch, while affectionately dubbing him Billy Dead Mates, has struck for a fifth time. Guess what? Once again, the victim was a woman: 82-year-old Marion Hopwood from Silsford. Unlike Billy’s other victims, Marion wasn’t shot. That would have attracted too much attention, given she was in hospital at the time of her death. Instead, she was injected with something very similar to battery acid.

  How do the police know Marion was killed by Billy and not by one of the many other lethal male death machines freely roaming our streets? Well, a little white book containing one line of poetry was found in her hospital bed shortly before she died, and, as we all know by now, Billy serves a little white book to each of his targets before killing her, like a sinister murder-subpoena.

  By murdering Marion Hopwood, Billy Dead Women proved the validity of my adapted nickname for him. For those of you who aren’t following each new permutation of the story, Billy has now murdered four women. In chronological order: Linzi Birrell from Combingham, Rhian Douglas from Poole, Angela McCabe from Chiswick, and now Mrs Hopwood. And just as Billy’s latest foray into brutality shows us, as if we were in any doubt, that ending the lives of women is his top priority, it shows us something else about him too. It’s not enough for him that women’s lives should be snuffed out; he personally wants to be the one to make it happen. He’s even willing to put himself out to achieve that goal, being no slouch when it comes to practical misogyny.