I don’t need a reflective surface to tell me I look like I’ve seen a ghost. Why did this have to happen?! We were so close to walking out of here with every adult none the wiser. My shoulders droop. Helin pales and gasps. Riri yelps. ‘Chloe –’
‘No, Ani,’ she says. ‘No excuse will be accepted.’ She narrows her eyes at Helin and Riri too. ‘From any of you. There’s no way you can excuse trespassing onto a crime scene!’
I wince. ‘We were following a stray cat? Right, Helin?’ I scratch my head. She isn’t standing beside me anymore. ‘Helin? Yo, where are you?’
Me, Riri and Chloe move our heads, looking for her, like we’re trying to dodge a wasp. It’s so quiet, it doesn’t even sound like she’s still here. Has she managed to escape? What a traitor. She swore the TUSC oath so she should know better.
‘Found her.’ Chloe motions to the statue of Athena. Helin’s hiding behind it.
‘Please, please, don’t arrest us!’ Helin is seconds away from wailing.
‘I’m not going to arrest you, any of you. But I do have cause to do so. It’s illegal to unlawfully enter a crime scene on the grounds of obstruction. You’re lucky all I’m going to do is drive you home and tell your parents.’
How unfair. ‘Please, no!’ Riri squeaks.
I clear my throat, embarrassed that I thought she could be our backup with her boxing background.
‘Right, yes. I-I know how to box?’
I shoot Chloe a smile, no choice but to step in. ‘The only way we’ll learn a lesson is for you to trust that we’ll tell our parents ourselves, as soon as we get home. If you’ll excuse us . . .’ I motion to Riri and Helin to go to the door. ‘Besides, this is a former crime scene.’
‘Ani, pump your breaks – there could be a murderer on the loose. And even if not, how do I know you won’t trespass another place where you shouldn’t be?’
And then, me, Riri and Helin are escorted home in a police car.
A quick look through the car windows confirms that LaShawn ran off, out of sight.
Mom almost faints with shock and Dad’s forehead vein protrudes. I get shouted out and have to promise never to do that again. Riri’s tears started to fall even before she put her seatbelt on in Chloe’s car. She’s so apologetic to Mom and Dad. I hate that I have to pretend to cry when Dad says he’ll ground me all summer long and will ban me from sleuthing forever. Although, the sadness of that thought came from a very real place.
The things I have to do for justice.
‘Pass the ketchup,’ Riri says as I fiddle with the greasy chips in the paper on my lap. She keeps talking but it turns to background noise in my mind. ‘Hello? Earth to Ani?’
‘Huh?’
‘I’m asking for ketchup and want to know what you’re thinking about.’
I pass an unopened ketchup sachet. Don’t look up from my food.
We’re sitting on a park bench. The park near The Skyscape. Near enough that if I squint hard, I can see Mom watching us from the window. That’s because I’m technically grounded and have broken a few rules this summer. The only reason she’s let me and Riri out is because I gave her a speech for the sole purpose of sympathy.
I’m now eating fish and chips – a treat I bought with my secret pocket money (being grounded means Dad confiscates my un-secret pocket money). Riri’s just eating chips because of her lifestyle-enforced dietary choices. Mom must know we’re eating this and hasn’t stopped us, so maybe she’s decided to cut us some slack. ‘I’m thinking about who did this. Whoever they are, they’re better than me. The murderer is –’
‘Fred,’ Riri says.
‘I think it’s looking to be Rodolfo but we need solid evidence. Could be Fred.’
‘Ani, shush. I mean that Fred’s right here.’
I look at where Riri’s pointing. Fred is here. ‘We don’t take bribes to eliminate you from the suspect list. You are still a person-of-interest, Fred.’
He gives me a look. ‘That isn’t why I’m here. I-I’m here to talk to you about . . . well, about my interrogation.’
Interesting. I look up at Fred. Lean back against the bench’s backrest. Raise my eyebrows. ‘If you wish to recant your answers, then there’s a process.’
‘I do want to recant some of what I said.’
‘Riri, do you have the notepad?’ My eyes stay on Fred.
‘Always.’ She wipes her hands on a serviette then uncaps her pen.
‘Fred, can I record?’
He blows out a breath. ‘Yep. So . . . the reason my document modifications were so spaced out was because . . . at 4.30 p.m., me, Mimi and Derek weren’t at our tables doing our own things like we said to you and the police.’
‘What?!’ I stand and throw away my food. I see red. ‘You’re a liar and a murderer?’
‘No, no. Listen for a minute –’
‘Have you told the police?’ Riri murmurs.
‘I was going to. I saw you two here on my way so I thought I’d tell you first.’
‘So, the three of you murdered Mrs Kostas together?’ I scream the accusation. ‘Was Rodolfo part of it too? Oh gosh, this is like Murder on the Orient Express! This was planned group project! Mrs Kostas was Cassetti!’ I’m starting to hyperventilate.
‘Nothing like that happened.’ Fred seems calm for a murderer who’s just given himself up. ‘We had a chat. Derek called me and Mimi over to his house before the police questioned us. We were all away from our tables and were scared it would look like we were guilty. So, we lied to cover our backs.’
I clench my fists. ‘You lied? I knew it. Riri, didn’t I know it?’
‘You had a feeling. Fred? Where exactly were you at 4.30 p.m. then?’
‘I went to the toilet.’ He goes bright-red. ‘IBS. The cafe’s facilities are near the entrance of The Secret Garden. There was an OUT OF ORDER sign but the toilet worked.’
‘You must’ve heard something,’ I say.
He presses his lips together. ‘No. Sorry. I swear I didn’t.’
I groan and rub my face. ‘So we did Operation Cou-cou for nothing?!’ Riri looks at me so I explain: ‘We thought that in the times between the next updates of their devices, they were murdering. When really, in Fred’s fifty-nine second window, he was on the toilet!’
Riri pats my shoulder. ‘We still have some useful information from our investigation . . . even though it seems to be slipping away from us.’ She squints at Fred. ‘Where were Derek and Mimi?’
‘Derek was taking a call near the snack bar.’
I frown. The snack bar was only added to the cafe because of Derek’s insistence. Now, I realise that his nagging was as a silent partner. It was a nice addition where you could just grab a snack (after paying, of course). ‘A call near the snack bar? That must’ve been what happened in his thirty-nine-second window. But why would he when it’s opposite to where his table is? And Derek doesn’t snack – I know this because Mrs Kostas/Dimas always tried to get him to eat one of her snacks. Sure, Frankie does but he didn’t enter the cafe until hours later. There’s no bad phone signal in Cafe Vivlio – it’s good everywhere, so why? For privacy?’ Also, the snack bar is closer to the entrance than The Secret Garden. So is the toilet. And the bookshop isn’t too far.
So, any of them could’ve done it.
Especially now that the data from Operation Cou-cou is not an accurate representation – we didn’t take the readings of the distances from the facilities, the bookshop or the snack bar. Shouldn’t I have prepared for this?
‘He didn’t tell me. To be frank, I didn’t ask – I only took his word for it.’
‘Well, he’ll tell me when I ask him. What about Mimi?’
‘Now, this sounds superficial for anyone else but Ani, you know her. It’s on-brand for her to dash back into the cafe’s bookshop to retake an accidentally deleted picture.’
‘OK, so her deleted folder? Her phone should be able to recover it for us, providing the timestamp. And that explains what she was doing in her thirty-second window.’
‘No. She uses that app, Sparks-something. You upload your picture and then, Mimi says, edit and save. Once it’s posted on socials, it automatically disappears from the app. There’s no way of recovering it. Apparently it’s to do with their privacy policy.’
Fred is right that it does sound like something Mimi would do. However, there’s one huge problem. ‘But you didn’t see them doing these things, did you, Fred? If you were in the toilet. They just told you. No inside CCTV camera to verify their alibis either.’
Fred gapes, looking hopeless. ‘I-I know. That’s why I had to go to the police. I don’t know if they’re in on it together – they are both acting strange, secretive, though – but I can’t keep lying any more. Someone killed Mrs Kostas and she deserves justice.’
I make Fred run along, then I eat Riri’s leftover chips. Between bites, I say, ‘What a breakthrough. The Clio Trio lied! That’s why Rodolfo never went for a smoke break – they planned to say that to cover their backs and pin it on him! And the police are too busy with Dad, instead. For shame.’ My chest tightens. I don’t like that the suspects lied to me. I thought they liked me enough to tell the truth. More urgently, ‘This throws the focus of our investigation so far out of the window.’ I groan at that.
‘Lying is nothing to a murderer, Ani. It’s expected. But we can try to salvage our investigation and solve it. Now, let’s see if we can piece together what actually happened at 4.30 p.m. that day.’