‘Rhian Douglas – you were there. You left Rhian’s house after shooting her dead, and saw Muriel Pearson, the deaf, elderly neighbour, come to her front door and look around. She didn’t spot you, but you saw her. She looked left and right and said something out loud about a blonde lady. “Hello? Where’s the blonde lady gone?” or something like that, was it? You’d seen the Asda van too, delivering Samantha Granger’s shopping. You put two and two together – worked out that Muriel, when interviewed by police, would mention this blonde woman, and that someone else – a drawing of a woman, not even a real person – would briefly get the credit for your crusade. You couldn’t bear that idea, could you?’

  Simon turns his back on Isobel and looks at his colleagues. ‘None of you saw what was missing when we heard the story of Muriel Pearson realising her mistake. Even you, Wing – you told us the story, but you didn’t understand what it meant. Muriel’s son rang the police to say that she was terribly sorry but, as it turned out, she hadn’t seen a woman, only a poster on the side of a van. None of you asked yourselves the obvious question: what made Muriel Pearson realise her error? She spends all day sitting in a chair, hardly stirring from in front of the telly. The only reason she didn’t instantly know Van Woman wasn’t real when she saw her was because she’d never seen the Asda van before – though it delivered to her neighbour regularly and had for years. Everyone was so busy thinking her mistake was hilarious, no one thought to question how she worked out that she’d got it wrong. So I asked DC Wing to ask her.’

  ‘And?’ says Charlie.

  The eye-roller takes a step forward, then quickly steps back when he sees he’s not going to get a turn. So he’s DC Wing, then. Pencil-up-the-arse must be Dunning.

  ‘Muriel told Wing that one day, nearly three months after Rhian was murdered, a nice lady from a bookshop popped round with some lovely free books for her,’ said Simon. ‘Danielle Steel was the author, I believe. That lady was you, Isobel. Muriel IDd you from a photo Wing showed her, printed off the internet. According to Muriel, this bookshop woman had said she was stopping at every house, giving away books. She’d just been next door, she said, talking to them in their lounge, and she’d seen a blonde woman at the window who’d looked so real, but at the same time looked kind of weird – and she’d turned out to be not a woman at all but a picture on the side of an Asda van.’

  ‘Wow,’ Charlie murmurs.

  ‘Yeah. That’s how Muriel Pearson realised she’d got it wrong – Isobel here made sure she knew.’ Simon looks at Sam Kombothekra. ‘Remember when Wing was telling us about Muriel’s cock-up? After she’d admitted to having made a mistake, he said, he’d wanted to check she was right second time round, so he took a picture of Asda Van Woman round to her house. Muriel was upset by the picture. It was clear from Wing’s account: that was the moment she knew for certain that she’d made a serious error. That didn’t make sense to me, and it shouldn’t have to anyone else. Surely in order to contact Wing and his team and tell them she’d been wrong, Muriel must already have seen the Asda van again, or seen a picture of Asda Van Woman, or else how had she been made aware of her mistake? Answer: Isobel Sturridge had said things in her presence that had convinced her she’d messed up and given the police false information.’

  Liam clears his throat to speak, and I jump. I’ve got used to the sight of him; now it seems I’m going to have to acclimatise myself to the sound. ‘Even if you’re right about that part, what you’ve just said doesn’t put my sister at the scene of Rhian Douglas’s murder.’

  ‘True,’ Simon concedes. ‘But she must have been there, otherwise she wouldn’t have known Muriel Pearson was bound to tell the police that a blonde woman had been hanging around outside her window that day.’

  ‘“She must have been there” is different from “She was there”. You’re guessing.’

  ‘So were you in on these five murders too, Liam? Were you helping her?’

  ‘No, he wasn’t,’ Isobel says quietly. ‘Though I think …’ She turns to face her brother. ‘I think you suspected, didn’t you, Liam?’ Her voice is full of a need for affirmation. She wants him to say yes.

  ‘I don’t bother suspecting things,’ he puts a scathing emphasis on the word. ‘I know things, or else I don’t know them. There’s no in between.’

  So he knew. I call it knowing, whatever he wants to call it.

  Drew is crying. I catch myself wondering whose brother is more disappointing: mine or Isobel’s.

  Faith Kendell. My dead houseplant friend.

  Isobel looks up at Simon. ‘I killed them all – all five,’ she says. ‘Liam had nothing to do with any of it.’

  ‘Kim.’ Liam briefly makes eye contact. ‘I didn’t know or have any reason to think that Isobel intended to kill you.’

  Why did she want to? I want to scream. Why did she then stop wanting to?

  ‘I believe you, Isobel,’ says Simon. ‘I think you acted alone, with a motive that would have crumbled if you’d had to discuss it with anyone else. It obsessed you, but, at the same time, you knew the logic of it was too fragile to prove itself outside of your head. That’s why telling the truth would have ruined it for you. Even telling your own brother.’

  Isobel’s staring at me. ‘You were going to be the first,’ she says. ‘But on the night I was supposed to give you your book, you were there with my brother. I wasn’t expecting that. Liam saw me trying to put the book in your bag. My own silly fault! I chose to come and see you in Canterbury of all places because Liam sometimes worked there. It seemed almost meant to be. When I saw that Liam had spotted me, I ran away. Hid outside.’ She turns to him. ‘I saw the two of you kissing on the street, and you put your hand up her skirt.’

  I get a grimace from Pencil-up-the-arse Dunning and a half-smile from DC Sideburns that looks like a secret message of approval.

  That’s right: I have skirts. I let men put their hands up them sometimes.

  ‘I love my brother – he’s the only person I have left – so I knew I had to change my plan,’ Isobel goes on. ‘I couldn’t kill the woman he loved.’

  ‘“Loved” is putting it a bit strongly,’ says Liam.

  ‘So, I adapted,’ the killer called Billy Dead Mates says in the voice of an educated woman in her early forties. ‘I decided I’d leave Kim till last. There were always going to be six deaths. It had to be six.’

  ‘Why?’ Simon asks.

  ‘I knew of six cases, and only six, who qualified,’ Isobel says with an earnest expression.

  ‘Victims,’ says Dunning from the sidelines. ‘Victims, not cases. You killed real people, with families who loved them.’

  ‘Do you know anything about numerology?’ she asks him. ‘I didn’t used to either. Lane has a book about it. The number 6 is the most harmonious of the single-digit numbers. It’s also about sacrifice, and … that’s what it was, for me, what I did. Too much harm had been done that couldn’t be allowed to stand. A symbolic protest was necessary, or else how would the world ever know that it mattered to anybody – enough to take extreme action?’

  Simon nods, encouraging her to go on.

  ‘I decided to wait, see if Kim and Liam broke up. I could kill her then, I thought – later.’

  Sure thing, Freakoid. Happy to fit into your schedule wherever’s convenient. Let’s diarise.

  ‘I expected Liam to talk to me about what he’d seen me do in Canterbury, but he never did,’ Isobel says sadly. ‘I was too scared – well, more embarrassed, really – to bring it up, so I had no way of knowing what Kim meant to him, or if they were still together. I waited and waited, putting Kim and Marion off till last instead of having them as the first pair as I’d originally planned. I did the others, and didn’t mind waiting to finish. I wasn’t in a particular hurry. The opposite, really. It was motivating for me to think that there were still some outstanding. It buoyed me up. Without that …’ Isobel shakes her head as if it doesn’t bear thinking about.

  Outstanding. The word makes my stomach turn over. Outstanding not as in excellent; as in still to be killed.

  Funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha.

  ‘Then one day Liam told me his ex-girlfriend’s grandmother was dying. Well, he didn’t say exactly that. He asked me what I’d do if I knew someone whose grandmother was about to die of cancer. Would I send a card, and what would I write in it? I asked him who he meant, and he told me: Kim. He didn’t need to say her surname. There was only one: Famous Kim, Superstar Kim.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I mutter.

  ‘Liam called her his “ex”. I didn’t realise they’d split up. I managed to get the story out of him: Kim had rung him in a complete state, even though they were no longer seeing each other. Her grandmother was about to die and she …’ Isobel glances at me, then looks quickly away. ‘She didn’t think there was any way to make peace or resolve anything before Marion went. Liam didn’t want to get involved, but he was thinking about sending a card so that he could do the right thing, at least.’

  Cheers for that, Liam. What a big-hearted sex robot you are.

  ‘I offered to buy the card and tell him what to write, but he decided in the end that he was better off not interfering. I think, having lost our mother so recently, he couldn’t bear to think about death long enough to do the whole card thing.’

  That’s one thing Liam and I have in common, then: both allergic to the idea of death.

  ‘With regard to my … project, I knew that Kim was once again available to me since she was no longer my brother’s girlfriend,’ Isobel goes on. ‘I had to act fast. Marion Hopwood was dying, but she couldn’t just die. I had to kill her. I was upset that I couldn’t use my gun that I used for the others, but she was in hospital. People would have heard the shot.’

  ‘Your gun,’ says Simon. ‘Let’s talk about that.’ He walks over to the bar area of the restaurant and leans his elbow on it. God, I could do with a drink, though it’s not yet ten in the morning.

  ‘You used it to shoot your first four victims, and when you weren’t using it, it was here at the Khaybar, safely stowed away.’

  ‘Here?’ says Kerensa the profiler. ‘In an Indian restaurant? But—’

  ‘On a hunch, I asked the manager how often you were here,’ Simon tells Isobel. ‘This place used to be Rudolphy’s, I thought – surely you’d still be obsessed with the physical space that your family’s bookshop used to inhabit. Turns out they know Faith Kendell very well at the Khaybar. After every killing, within two or three days, you’d book a table for one and come here for a meal, alone. You did the same before each killing, apart from Marion Hopwood. I got the exact dates from the manager, who keeps records of bookings going back about a year, luckily for us.’

  Isobel smiles as one might at someone else’s good news. As if she’s pleased for him.

  ‘You can all see the seats in the booths.’ Simon looks around the room. ‘Long rectangular cushions set into wood. Each one acts as a kind of lid for the bench it covers, and there’s a hollow space underneath. Isobel, you came here and replaced your gun after each shooting. And you’d retrieve it before the next one. You’re probably assuming it’s where you left it, directly beneath where you’re sitting now, but it’s not. I had it removed two days ago.’

  Her face crumples. ‘You shouldn’t have touched it. It wasn’t yours to take.’

  ‘Where did someone like you – educated middle-class woman who’s interested in books – get a gun?’ Dunning asks her.

  ‘Derby,’ says Isobel briskly. ‘Being educated and bookish isn’t a barrier to accomplishing practical tasks, you know. It infuriates me when people imply that it is. Without books and the knowledge they contain, we’d none of us know how to exist in the world at all.’

  ‘Tell us about Derby,’ says Simon.

  ‘There was a documentary on Channel 4 about a council estate there where little children had guns. That’s where I went. It looked perfect. I paid a lot. It was hard to find a child to buy one from, but I did. I was determined not to compromise and buy one from an adult or even a teenager.’ She smiles suddenly. ‘I had a first edition of a Secret Seven book, you see, and I wanted to give it to whoever I bought the gun from. You have to catch them early.’

  ‘Who?’ Simon asks.

  ‘Children. If you want to instill a love of reading.’

  ‘Something I don’t get,’ says Gibbs. ‘Isobel, you’re saying you were planning to kill Kim before you knew your brother was involved with her?’

  ‘Yes. She was going to be the first. I knew she was famous, which seemed somehow … I don’t know. Auspicious, I suppose.’ Isobel smiles. ‘People talk about going out with a bang … I wanted to go in with a bang, start with someone who was a public figure. That way I knew I’d get people talking straight away, before there were more victims or a pattern or anything. I set about doing some research and I became a bit obsessed, I suppose. That never happened with any of the others – only Kim. I bought all her “Live at the Blah-Blah” DVDs, and a box set of The Village Parallel. I watched them all endlessly, telling myself it was useful preparation, but that was an excuse. You don’t need to know someone’s work by heart in order to shoot them dead. I … I guess I grew to like Kim. I liked her voice and her way of looking at the world. That’s why I was relieved when I realised I’d have to put off killing her till last.’

  You and me both, Billy.

  ‘Liam watched Kim’s DVDs with me because he was there in the room. We ate in front of them. I talked about Kim all the time – he could hardly avoid her. He … I suppose he came to share my interest in her and … well, I had no idea he’d done anything about it until, as I say, I found them together in Canterbury. And Kim, please believe me – I did change my mind about you. I changed the number to five – that would be fine too, I decided. Just as good as six, though it’d be two pairs and an odd one, but I didn’t care about that. When we spoke outside the hospital, I knew I’d never be able to kill you. I liked you too much – already, from the DVDs, and then we got on so well … and I’d read up on you, too, so I knew you’d never really had a proper mother—’

  ‘Yes, I did. I had a mother, a brilliant mother. I just never got to meet her.’

  Drew pointedly looks away.

  ‘I lost my mother in 2013,’ says Isobel. ‘I know your pain inside out.’

  ‘No,’ I say. My pain is mine.

  ‘Knowing you’d been through that, I couldn’t inflict any more pain on you. I just couldn’t.’

  To the room, Simon says, ‘You must all be wondering why Isobel chose the six victims she did. To understand her choices, we need to look at the story she wrote and sent to Sondra Halliday: “The Dress”. You all assumed, and so did I at first, that all three stories Billy sent to Halliday were from the Stories of Enlightenment section of Lane Baillie’s website. When I looked, though, I only found two of the three. Whoever wrote the stories – and that’s not Lane; she only uses them – they’re obviously American. They write “realize” with a zed, and “color” and “favorite” without the “u”s.

  ‘I couldn’t find “The Dress” anywhere on the internet, and it contains only English words and spellings: “lift” instead of “elevator”, “pavement” instead of “sidewalk”, “colour” with a “u”. That’s because it’s the original work of Isobel Sturridge. It’s her murder manifesto. In it, she describes why she needed to kill, and how she chose her victims. It’s not a literal explanation – it’s all done metaphorically, but it makes it very clear why Isobel chose to kill the six people she did.’

  Simon puts his phone, which he’s been clutching all this time, back in his jacket pocket. From the pocket of his trousers, he produces some papers, unfolds them and waves them in the air. ‘Anyone who hasn’t yet read it and wants to can read it. It’s about a dress that’s ugly and evil, but most people don’t realise. Most people think it’s beautiful, and all women start to buy it. They get away with buying the evil dress because they’ve fallen for it – they genuinely love it – but one woman, Perdita, buys it as a gift for her PA, though she personally hates it. The PA, Dolores, accepts the dress, though she loathes it too. And both of their hands start to ooze and seep with terrible sores. They’re mystified about why touching the dress has affected them both so badly when no one else has had that reaction.

  ‘Luckily, a sage is on hand to explain.’ Simon reads aloud. ‘“You gave something that you knew to be a vile thing to someone you care about,” the Sage tells Perdita. “You would never have bought one for yourself, yet you bought one for Dolores here. And you …” – here the Sage is talking to Dolores – “… you accepted this gift, though you didn’t want it and would never have bought one for yourself. You spotted its ugliness straight away, yet you accepted it. Both of you recognised instantly the horror of the dress, yet you said and did nothing against it … You acted against your own judgement and your own hearts. When we do that, we allow evil to prosper. That is why you have sore hands today.”’

  Seriously? This sounds like a ludicrous story.

  ‘“We are all human, frail and flawed,” the Sage expands on her wisdom. “We all find it impossible, sometimes, to resist our own strong desires. When we do harm to ourselves or to others, it is often because our better judgement has been paralysed by what feels like an urgent need. But the important thing is this: when our hearts are fully engaged in our actions, even the harmful ones, we are not beyond redemption. All hope is lost, however, when we are not infatuated, not helpless with desire, and yet still, from a position of clear-eyed objectivity, choose to behave in ways that promote evil.”’

  ‘A dress can’t be evil,’ I blurt out, unable to sit in silence and listen to this rubbish any longer. How can crap like this be the explanation for anything, let alone five murders? ‘What was so wrong with the dress – did it have Nazi propaganda all over it or something?’

  Simon shakes his head. ‘Remember, all the other women in the story apart from Perdita and Dolores love the dress. To most people, it looks like a beautiful dress – highly desirable. But the most important thing to remember about the dress is that it isn’t a dress, not really. It’s a metaphor for something else – something Isobel believes to be evil. It’s a metaphor for this.’ Simon approaches Charlie from the side, pulls her bag off her shoulder, sticks his hand in and pulls out what looks like an e-reader. Yes, it’s a Kobo – I see the name as Simon brings it closer. It’s the same as the one Marion gave me on my fortieth birthday, the one I didn’t want but accepted anyway. Like Dolores, who accepted the dress she didn’t want.