ROACH

“You’re late,” Eli said, stooping to pick up a fallen paperback. He returned it to its place on the table with a pathetic, almost fond little pat that made me feel sick. “Sharona wanted to talk to you.”

“Sorry,” I said flatly, as he locked the shop door behind me.

“Hey, listen,” he said, turning away from the door to face me, his hands fiddling with the keys in his hands. He had this look of concern plastered over his face, like he was a doctor about to deliver bad news, and I swallowed. “Look, Sharona axed the True Crime section today,” he said. “She wanted to tell you herself, but . . . well. Anyway. I’m really sorry, I know it was kind of your thing.”

“She what?”

“We don’t have a True Crime section anymore. It was Sharona, she—”

“Laura did it,” I said quietly, venomously, looking him dead in the eye. My accusation took him by surprise and he laughed a nervous laugh and scratched the back of his head.

“What? No, no—this has nothing to do with Laura. It’s just a bit of a dying trend, and Sharona needed to find some space upstairs and—”

“Bollocks,” I spat. “It’s not a fucking trend, everyone loves true crime. Like students and doctors and housewives and police officers . . . all walks of life.”

“Maybe in general,” Eli said, cocking his head to one side and narrowing his eyes. “But in this branch . . . well, that just isn’t actually true, is it?”

I simmered, lost for words. I barely registered Eli’s weak apology, his reassurance that Sharona was always open for a chat. Without a word, I scuttled off to the Children’s section to stew.

True crime wasn’t a trend. Not in the bookshop. Serial and Making a Murderer and My Favorite Murder and The Staircase and RedHanded and I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and The Last Podcast on the Left and whatever else—that disastrous Instagram festival for rich idiots and the fake German heiress and the Silicon Valley fraudster—none of this manifested as a bookshop trend. My section wasn’t a fad, wasn’t crammed with shitty popular garbage that normies bought because everyone else was buying it, destined to be purchased, and then gifted, and then shelved, and then never read, and then eventually donated, and finally, fatally pulped.

I thought spending time in Laura’s flat had strengthened our bond, but every time I took a step towards her, she was taking a step back. She had a knack for finding new ways to drive a wedge between us, an unexpected talent for malevolence. I carried the heat of her betrayal throughout my final night shifts.

Once I understood the depth of Laura’s spite, random acts of destruction became my poetry. The words all but memorised anyway, I burned the lilac diary in a disquieting ritual of my own devising, but that wasn’t enough. I picked books from her shelves and used a razor blade to remove the odd page at random, and I took those pages home and pinned them to my bedroom wall to create a tapestry of sacrifice, of trendy women’s writing, the kind of shit that got normies like Laura excited. I poured vinegar into the soil of a particularly handsome houseplant, a leafy monstera, and imagined its leaves would wither and lose their shine. I stole every single hair elastic I found, took odd socks, dropped bobby pins between the floorboards, tipped expensive silver-tone shampoo down the sink, threw single earrings in the bin. I pissed in her toilet and didn’t flush, so my urine would greet her like a frothy glass of champagne when she came home from work. I dreamed of filling her wardrobe with house moths, or infesting the place with mice or rats or roaches. Anything vile, anything cruel, to burst her bubble of safety and to say Hi Laura, it’s me, I was here while you were gone and there’s nothing you can do about it.

And yet, all the while, I never lost focus. In Laura’s bed, on her sofa, in her space, I continued to read her diaries, and wrote page after page of prose. I transcribed podcasts, and copied entire sections from Wikipedia, news reports, online magazine articles, blog posts, and old, inactive message boards. I was an archaeologist digging up the story of the Stow Strangler, arranging the bones of it into chronological order.

Of course, if I was a real investigative journalist, I’d likely have some tricks up my sleeve. Chewing a biro, squinting over microfiche in some dusty library, I’d spend hours flipping through articles until I found my quarry. I wasn’t sure if my local library provided that kind of service, though. I wondered if those clunky old machines were only available to police officers and journalists.

Or perhaps I could write to Lee Frost. I’d strike up a correspondence, earn his trust, become his confidante. He’d open up to me, tell me about life in prison, share intimate thoughts and ideas, eventually spilling the details of the murders, what made him do it, what depraved motivation made him tick. I needed to find a way to write to him, the way I knew fans wrote letters to their favourite serial killers on death row, but finding his information proved to be more difficult than I’d imagined. I learned that I couldn’t simply address a letter to him and send it to the prison. I needed Frost’s prisoner number too. I picked over Reddit pages where people claimed to have corresponded with murderers for tips.

I was pen pals with one for a while—we talked about religion mostly . . .

Don’t bother writing to him, all he wants to talk about is baseball . . .

My husband wrote to one and he wrote back . . . I feel violated knowing the hand that held the knife was the same hand that held the pen to write that letter.

In the murky deep of a thread on some old, abandoned forum, I found someone who claimed to have written to Lee Frost. The poster had included a scan of their letter, and an earnest promise to update the message board with any response they received from the big man himself. They had never updated their thread so the letter must have gone unanswered, but that didn’t matter: right there, on the top right of the page, was Lee Frost’s name, address, and, written in a neat hand, his prisoner number.

I was so excited, I messaged Sam to tell him the good news.

Swear ur more into him than me, he complained. He was growing clingy, his enthusiasm for the project waning when he realised it was eating into our time together. He didn’t understand what it was to be a writer, to slice open the belly of a story and perform an autopsy. I was also unsure about whether I could trust him with the truth of how I was spending my time. I couldn’t articulate how essential the access to Laura’s flat was to my process. The work came alive when I was in her space, reading her words, surrounded by her things. I couldn’t let anything jeopardise my process.