I slouch on the stool. I don’t understand what I’m looking at.
Annabel lifts the laptop out of my hands. ‘Do you want me to?’ she says gently, and begins to read.
‘As we understand it, the subject in question had developed a personal relationship with Ms Cohen during the process of the filming. Ms Cohen had no involvement in the death, which resulted from a road-traffic accident north of the city of Bath. While admitting that the forming of relationships such as that between Ms Cohen and the subject when working undercover poses ethical concerns, Ms Cohen and the production company were cleared of any involvement in the death. Therefore this should not interfere with her future employment—’
‘Okay, all right,’ I say, and she stops.
Neither of us speaks. After a minute Annabel gets up, digs in a bag at the base of the single cupboard in the corner and brings out two cans of cola.
‘You didn’t know,’ she says, handing me one.
I pull the tab, take a sip, set it down carefully. I line the label up just so. ‘I did not.’
‘I mean, it said she had nothing to do with it.’
I meet her eye. It takes me that long to realise what she means. ‘Annabel, Dee didn’t kill this person. For goodness’ sake.’
‘No. Sure. But I mean, under the circumstances—’
I realise what she means and I laugh out loud. ‘You’re saying, what: Dee killed John? Give me a break. What possible reason could she have? And also, no. There’s no way – don’t be absurd. She’s the one trying to convince everyone it’s foul play in the first place, isn’t she?’
Annabel nods. ‘But it’s a big secret, isn’t it? A big thing to keep back from—’ She cuts herself off, leaving the implication to leak out of the severed end of the sentence. From you, she means. From someone who’s supposed to be her friend.
Part of me wants to tell Annabel to go screw herself. Who is she to sit there and judge me, judge our friendship? This woman, this girl, has been around us for a matter of months and, what, she’s qualified to tell me what Dee and I should or shouldn’t tell each other?
But the other side of it, the bigger part, is that she’s absolutely right.
She finishes her drink, crushes the can under her foot and drops it into the bin. ‘I can imagine Dee keeping something like that quiet, actually. She’s very – secretive. Isn’t she?’
I almost laugh. ‘You could say that, yes.’
‘Was she always like that? I mean, before it happened. Did she not tell you about the work she was doing at all?’
‘All I knew was that it was an investigation. Something about a school.’
*
A memory bubbles up. We’d met for a drink after Dee had got the job, I remember now – the kind of spit-and-sawdust place she always seemed to suggest. Wine list of red or white. I’d waited at a corner table for twenty minutes before I realised she was already there, laptop open, but almost unrecognisable from when I’d last seen her a few months before. New hair, different kind of clothing. Professional-looking, cool but mainstream – a long way from the threadbare black jeans and buttoned-to-the-neck checked shirts that off-duty Dee tended to favour. I didn’t even have to ask what it was in aid of.
‘The new undercover’s started then,’ I said, pulling out a chair and placing my dishwasher-dulled glass of room-temperature Sauvignon Blanc on the beer mat.
She rolled her eyes as I air-kissed her cheeks and sat down. ‘So what do you think?’ she asked, inclining her chin this way and that to show off the chic new pixie cut. ‘This is Sophie. Sophie is a teaching assistant.’
I raised my glass to toast her. ‘Nice to meet you, Sophie.’
She told me only the most skeletal details about the investigation. It was a private school, a local one. Some suspicion that there were teachers there who were writing assignments on behalf of the students – essentially, exam fraud. And then what did we talk about? It was soon after I’d started getting Tori Tells Stories off the ground, so I would have talked about that. About Will, probably. I remember that when Dee looked at her watch, saying she had to leave, it was still kind of early.
I bored her, I realise now. I bored her by talking about myself, back when she trusted me enough to talk about an undercover investigation. Even though she’d have been fired for telling me about it, she would have done so. But I barely asked her a thing.
The next time I saw her, a couple of months later because we’d both been so busy, something had changed. There was a colour to her. We literally bumped into each other in a bathroom at a jazz bar – I was with Will and his friends, Dee was about to leave to meet someone else. The conversation lasted a minute, two.
‘Anyone handsome?’ I’d asked about her date. She had broken into a shy, one-sided smile.
‘Might be. I mean, it’s kind of work, so …’
She told me his name – Leo.
And then the thing I remember most: she got out a lipstick. And Dee never wore lipstick.
‘Is this a Sophie thing?’ I asked her as she dabbed a smudge from a tooth. And it was somehow not the right thing to say, because Dee was flustered after that. She promised she’d call, and then she was gone. The next time I saw her, months later, she arrived on my doorstep with little more than the clothes she was wearing, rain-soaked and inconsolable. And Sophie was little more than a memory.
‘You all right?’ Annabel asks.
I look up. Blink. ‘Give me that email again.’
She passes it over and I read it through. And it’s like a path of lights illuminating a runway all of a sudden – a path between two things that I hadn’t thought to connect.
This Leo. This death that happened during Dee’s investigation. They’re the same thing – the same man.
There’s a click behind me and then I’m shoved forward as the door crashes open.
‘Shit, sorry,’ Dee says, ‘I didn’t know you were here.’
My heart skids. I silently will Annabel to angle the laptop away, but she does nothing but blink, frozen.
‘I was just going to speak to Wolf,’ Dee’s saying. ‘But the passage was locked off. I got Ulla to let me in and she was steam-cleaning vomit off the carpet. Someone had been sick outside John’s cabin. It wasn’t there when you swapped, but Ulla noticed the smell the next day, before we found him dead. So someone might have known he was—’
Then she stops.
I follow her eyeline.
‘What the fuck is this?’ She picks up the laptop. ‘This is confidential.’ Her voice is low, dangerous.
‘Dee, look, I was only—’ Annabel starts, but Dee shoves the computer, hard, towards her. It makes contact, and Annabel gasps and staggers back.
I get up, hands out, conciliatory. ‘Stop it. Stop. Let’s talk about it like adults—’
‘Really? Adults who go around digging through the private information of their colleagues? Am I a fucking suspect here? Is that what this is? You two squirrelled away up here, trying to find shit out about me?’
She’s close enough for me to smell the damp of her wool sweater.
‘We wanted to know what Wolf meant. About a coincidence.’
‘Right. Great!’ she says, throwing her hands up in furious sarcasm. ‘And it didn’t occur to you to, I don’t know, ask me?’
And I know I should try to be kind, try to be compassionate, but the way she’s looking at me now, with nothing short of hate – it breaks something in me. And for the first time I can remember ever feeling like this about her, I want to hurt her. I want to hurt her back.
‘It’s not like you’ve been exactly behaving rationally, Dee.’
‘What?’
I don’t want to lie. But it’s out of my mouth before I even realise what I’m saying.
‘This broken gas pipe, or whatever it is. That no one else can see. And it’s not the first time, is it?’ Dee shakes her head, warning me, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it. ‘You know when you were convinced someone had let the air out of your tyres? Or that someone had broken into your email?’
She takes half a step back, her eyes flicking over my shoulder to Annabel. ‘Tor, don’t.’
‘Or when you didn’t go out for two whole weeks because you insisted someone was following you?’
‘Someone was following me.’
It’s my turn to laugh now. ‘But why? No one even knows who you are. No one knows where you live. Isn’t that how you like it? Hiding behind these fake names? Pretending you’re someone they can trust, when secretly shit like this happens and you don’t even tell your best friend? I know you haven’t been well, but you’re supposed to trust me! Why didn’t you just say someone had died?’
She holds my eye for a moment.
‘You want to talk about trust, Tor? Really? You’ve done nothing but lie since we got here. You went in there last night, in front of a room full of people who are here because of you, and you lied to every one of them. You’ve even lied about me, because – no, I’m saying it – we both know you were pushed that first night. You want to keep running this show like that? Fine. I’ll shoot it, because I need the money. But that’s all I’m doing. Here on out: you’re on your own.’