Guilty Conscious by Oliver Davies (best ereader for students .txt) 📗

Billie nodded. “I wasn’t going to go at first, but Stella wanted to. She’d never been to a proper party like that, so I took her along. We were only going to stay for a bit. We have an old tradition of watching films on Halloween. Addams Family, Beetlejuice, all of those.”

She paused for a moment, her expression darkening. “I went to the toilet at one point, left her with others, but when I came back, she was gone, and the others didn’t know where she’d gone.” Her voice went slightly bitter. “So, I go looking for her, and they help since they lost her anyway, and I found her upstairs in one of the spare rooms.” Her eyes filled with tears again. “I knew straight away something was wrong. You know when you can just tell?”

Mills and I both nodded.

“She was all pale and quiet, she had these weird bruises on her arms, and her clothes were all messed. She wouldn’t say anything, so I picked her up and took her outside to the car. As I started driving away, she started crying. Scary crying, like she was hurt, so I pulled over and walked around to her and just held her as she shook. When she calmed down enough, she told me what happened. I took her straight to the police station.” Billie kept her eyes on the table. “For a while, she wouldn’t let anyone but me touch her. Wouldn’t listen to music that was playing that night, got rid of her clothes. And then, a few months ago, I walked upstairs for my lunch break, and she was in the kitchen, dancing with the cat,” Billie remembered with a smile.

“Do you know if anything happened between then and a few weeks ago?” I asked gently.

“Not that she told me. You could ask her therapist,” Billie said suddenly, pulling out a pen and pad from her apron pocket, scribbling down a name and address. “Tell her you have my permission or whatever if you need it.” She tore the page off and handed it to me.

“I hated his guts,” she told me earnestly, “but I wouldn’t kill him. For Stella’s sake, she’d never have forgiven me for doing that to a person, even him.”

“Thank you, Billie. We’re sorry to have brought that all up.”

She shrugged. “Over with now.”

I handed her my card, just in case, and she walked over to Agnes, who smiled as we left. We stopped outside in the cold air, looking up at the daunting shadow of the Minster, Billie’s words and expression striking us dumb. I looked down at the address and showed it to Mills.

“One more stop before we head back?”

He nodded, and we climbed back in the car, stricken.

Ten

Thatcher

Dr Nura Kumar’s offices were across the other side of the city, and I wondered how much time the two sisters had spent shuttling between buses to get to where they needed. I sat back; my head turned to the window as I thought about everything Billie had shared with us. She’d been a devoted big sister, that much was clear, and there didn’t seem much in her in the way of violence. She had wanted Stella to be alright, not to exact vengeance on her behalf, but that might have changed at some point, a sudden, broken, desperate outpour of emotions. Edward could have gotten in touch, might have replied to a letter, might have seen her out and about and tipped the balance against himself.

“Did you notice that she kept using the present tense?” Mills asked me as he drove. “For both of them? But Edward especially.”

“I did,” I replied, and he looked at me in the mirror. It made me think that her surprise of hearing about Edward’s death was genuine. If she already knew, why would she have continued talking about him as if he were still alive? It often took people a while to fix that grammatical slip, and only someone who had known about the death would have spoken about him in the past. Despite her tenuous alibi, it put her in good standing in my book.

“Do you think we’ll get much from the doctor?” he asked.

I sighed, a little uncertain. I wanted to know as much about Stella, and what happened with Edward as we could, and what she shared in her sessions about him, her sister, and her father might help to open a few doors for us, but at the end of the day, we were investigating Edward’s death, not Stella’s, and it was easy to get side-tracked looking into the events that led to this poor girl’s end.

“I think she might, given the circumstances,” I answered. “At least, she might be able to tell us a bit about Stella and Billie and their father. Or whatever Stella managed to share about Edward.”

“That would mean that our killer was someone who knew about it all, knew the Helman girls. Someone from the party?” Mills said. “Someone from that friend group?”

“If it’s not someone directly from Stella’s life,” I added, and he hummed in agreement.

“What are your thoughts on Billie?” he asked me.

“I think Professor Greenberg was right. She doesn’t strike me as a killer. She’s sad, rightly so, and it’s possible that she did lash out because of it. But I’m just not sure…” I trailed off at the end, unhappy to admit my confusion with it all.

“I agree with you, sir,” Mills told me. “On paper, she’s the perfect suspect. Knew Edward, was there the night of the incident, knew her way around campus, her alibi isn’t exactly great… but Billie herself?”

He shook his head, no doubt with the same image in his head as in mine. A young girl, looking a bit too thin for my liking, she looked like she hadn’t eaten well in a while, with chipped nails and drawn-on shoes, whose entire life now