You Had It Coming by B.M. Carroll (snow like ashes series .txt) 📗

festered over the following years; Jess realised she could never reclaim that point in time, that precipice between being a schoolgirl and a young woman, or the giddy whoosh of freedom on finishing school and celebrating it accordingly. She wasn’t a girly-girl, but the dress and make-up were part of that rite-of-passage, and she’d missed out on them.

‘I’ll take you to a dinner dance,’ Alex promised, a few months after they met. The conversation came up at the farm. Jess loved it there: the animals, the fresh air, Alex’s down-to-earth parents, seeing him outside the constraints of the city, herding cows astride a dirt bike, his huge hands helping with the birth of a calf. At night they drank beer on the veranda, and talked honestly under the protective cloak of the black sky and abundant stars.

‘You? At a dinner dance? In a suit?’ Jess laughed off his offer.

But he followed through and arranged tickets for a city-centre charity ball. Jess got her hair and make-up done and spent a staggering amount on a dress. Alex bought a suit (the only one he owns to this day) and even hired a limo. They drank champagne in the back, and Jess told him she loved him. Here was someone special, someone who wanted to right a wrong, even if it meant being totally out of his comfort zone.

Alex didn’t reciprocate with, ‘I love you, too.’

He pulled her closer, his breath heavy in her ear. ‘I’ve got your back, babe … I’ve got your back.’

Stronger than a thousand proclamations of love.

45

BRIDGET

‘Well, case closed?’ Katrina enquires in her usual direct manner. The detective inspector is sitting behind her desk, pen tapping, waiting for Bridget’s briefing.

‘Certainly looks that way,’ Bridget says, taking one of the two visitors’ seats. ‘I’m waiting for the official report from forensics but it looks like we have the right motorbike and gun. Thomas Malouf had been using the storage facility for years, so no suspicious new lease or anything like that. It’s not a very high-tech facility, no PIN codes just plain old locks, so it’s hard to determine exactly when the Yamaha was left there. We’re going through CCTV, but so far there’s no activity we can see on the day of the shooting or the day after, which means we have to comb through potentially two weeks of footage.’

Katrina jerks her head towards the list of names still on her whiteboard. ‘So, they’re all irrelevant?’

Bridget runs her eye down through the names. Suzanne and Joshua Newson. Diana Simon. Megan Lowe, Jessica Foster and various family members. Fergus Herrmann, Laura Dundas, Hayley Webster and others who suffered because William Newson was so adept at proving there wasn’t enough evidence.

‘The biggest question I have now is why,’ she says. ‘Maybe, between them, they hold the answer.’

Why did Malouf kill William Newson, the man who saved his bacon not once but twice? Did he resent Newson, blame him in some way for the direction his life had taken? Did his guilty conscience finally catch up with him, haunted by what he’d done to Hayley, Jessica and who knows how many others? Was he part of some religious sect, one that advocated atonement, an eye for an eye or some nonsense like that? And why did he hang on more than two weeks before committing suicide? It’s not as if the police had been closing in and he was at risk of being caught. He had a gun, for God’s sake, so why jump in front of a train? None of it makes much sense.

Bridget crosses her legs, then uncrosses them again. She’s feeling fidgety and directionless. It’s the come-down that happens when an investigation is all but solved. Normal pace feels weird after all the long hours and intensity.

‘What else did you find in the storage unit?’ Katrina asks.

‘Mainly furniture. I understand Thomas inherited the pieces from his grandparents and wanted to keep them until he owned a home that was big enough.’

‘Doesn’t sound like the actions of someone who was planning to kill himself,’ Katrina points out.

True, but suicide is often a spur-of-the-moment decision, and maybe that’s exactly why nothing is making sense. Thomas’s financial affairs were not in order, also implying his death hadn’t been planned. His credit card statement – the one where they found the monthly charge that alerted them to the storage unit’s existence – was overdue, as were other bills. Crockery was found in his kitchen sink, his bed was left unmade, it didn’t look like his flat had been prepared in any way for his imminent death. And there was no note, at least none they could find.

‘Okay, let’s wait for forensics,’ Katrina says, leaning back in her chair. ‘Your team can take their foot off the pedal. No more overtime or weekends. Just tie up what loose ends you have while we wait.’

‘It’s an apparition. It cannot be my wife. It’s only five thirty. Can I touch you, see if you’re real?’

‘Shut up, Shane.’

Bridget deposits her handbag on the floor and takes a moment to look around. In the open-plan kitchen, her long-suffering husband has paused in the middle of prepping vegetables for dinner. Parked in front of the television is her neglected fifteen-year-old son, his attention divided between a futuristic-looking show and his iPhone. In the front room, visible through the glass of the French doors, is Cara, studying for her upcoming exams (her Year Advisor recommended that her studying space be somewhere other than her bedroom). It’s daylight. Bridget can’t remember the last time she arrived home from work in daylight.

‘Well, it must be case solved if we’re seeing you this early,’ Shane says, chopping some carrots with a deftness she didn’t know him capable of.

‘That’s the thing,’ she says with a half-yawn, half-sigh. ‘I really don’t know if it is. Still lots of unanswered questions.’ She shoots him a tired smile and asks half-heartedly, ‘Anything I can help with?’

‘All under control. Just check in with the offspring,