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

“You thought it would make you seem a suspect?” Mills guessed, and she nodded.

“Lying is a worse thing to do in a case like this, Billie,” I told her, watching as she winced and nodded.

“My sister died two weeks ago,” she whispered. “Two weeks.” She turned to look at us. “I hadn’t said Edward Vinson’s name out loud for over a year. I threw away anything that reminded me of him, or I left it when we moved. I burned all of my photos.” She looked at the ones Edward had kept. “As far as I was concerned, he didn’t exist. It was me and Stella, brand new. Starting over. I’ve been getting used to a world that doesn’t have my baby sister in it.” She met my gaze and didn’t look away. “Why would I go after him when the reason she’s gone is me?”

“We don’t—”

“I have the right to a lawyer, don’t I?” She asked.

“You do,” I confirmed. “Would you like us to call one for you?”

She paused, looking down at her hands, toying with the now empty cup. “I’d like some more water, please,” she muttered.

I nodded and tapped Mills’s shoulder as I stood. He followed me, taking Billie’s cup, and we walked into the next room where Sharp watched through the glass, her eyes fixed on Billie with a burning intensity, almost tearing up herself.

“Ma’am?” I asked gently, standing beside her as Mills went to fetch water.

“I see what you mean,” she told me, still looking at Billie, “but we have to look at the facts.”

“I know, but we can’t keep her here without making an arrest, not without real, hard evidence.”

“We have a suspicion of murder,” Sharp informed me. “It’s a start. Will she want a lawyer?” She finally turned to look at me.

“She did ask,” I muttered, “but I don’t know. I think she doesn’t care what happens anymore.” I looked at Billie, staring at the photos, her finger trailing lightly over one of them, of Stella.

“If she had seen those photos before,” Sharp said, “seen them in the studio, she’d have had her proof or close enough to it that Edward was definitely interested in Stella. Definitely following her, anyway. Would she have just sat on that?”

“Depends on when she found them,” I answered. “If she found them before, then not at all, she’d have been down here, horns blazing. But after hiding the trophy?”

“Killing a man with her sister’s trophy,” Sharp muttered. “That’s rather grim.”

“Ironic, but also disrespectful to Stella’s memory. I’m not sure Billie would have gone for it, and there are plenty of other things in that studio that could be easier to kill with,” I pointed out. “Plus, she’d have had to go to the studio to get it in the first place, where she probably would have seen the photos, then gone to Edward’s room, then got all the way back to the studio to hide it.”

“We don’t know when the weapon was hidden,” Sharp reminded me. “She could have taken it home, hidden it back in the studio at a later date.”

We watched as the door opened, and Mills stepped back in, sliding the water and a packet of tissues her way with a faint smile. Billie took them and held the cup in her hands, staring at the water as Mills ducked out, joining us a second later. Sharp nodded to him, and he stood by the window with us, his hands tucked into his pockets. I relayed the conversation we had just had in his absence, and he nodded along, frowning at the glass.

“If she’d moved it back to the studio at a later date,” Mills said, “why wouldn’t she have cleaned it? If she had it for a few days, that makes no sense. It looked like it had been shoved there in a hurry.”

“Would she have treated it like that?” I wondered in agreement. “It was Stella’s. All the guilt that Billie feels is because she blames herself for what happened to her sister, not Edward.”

“That much is fairly plain to see,” Sharp agreed, “but we have to follow the book on this one, boys. Go back in there, see what else she’s neglected to tell you.”

My face was grim as I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

Twenty-Two

Mills

It was with some reluctance that we didn’t bother to hide from Sharp that we went back into the room. Billie was sitting quietly, her body still, face wet from tears that stained her skin, but no more fell. She looked numb, just staring at the photographs, eyes flitting from the trophy to Stella and back again. As we sat back down and resumed the recording, she tapped the one of Stella in the garden, tapped the hands belonging to the person just out of shot, and lifted her sad green eyes to us.

“That’s me,” she told us.

“It’s a nice picture,” Thatcher told us. “Circumstances aside.” He pulled up the folder that he’d kept to one side and opened it for Billie to look at. Some photocopied notes from Edward’s journal, his sketches, the quotes he had littered around.

“Do you recognise any of these?” He asked her. “Do they mean anything to you?” He was keeping his voice light, gentler than he did with any other murder suspects. If Billie knew he was nice to her, she didn’t let on, only shuffled closer on her chair, looking down at the pages and shook her head slowly.

“I was never as good with that kind of stuff,” she admitted. “He loved it, though, I remember. Art, classics, philosophy.”

“He was writing an essay,” I told her, her gaze switching to my face. “About forgiveness. Whether or not forgiving someone is a moral thing to do. We think he wrote that with you and Stella in mind, that when he spoke to her in the park those weeks ago, he might have been asking her for forgiveness.”

Billie tensed and looked away, teeth grinding. “If