Don’t get excited—it’s not the archangel Gabriel dropping by to help us out. It’s just my mother, stepping out of a cab, and she is very much alive. I’m not sure why she has a kind of radiance around her, but I’m more interested in what she is doing here at the scene of the crime.
Go home, Mum, I want to cry. You don’t need to be here; you don’t need to see how I died.
Dot hands the driver a few scrunched up notes, then shuffles over to the edge of the police tape, just peering towards my front door, tears welling up in her rheumy eyes. She has a walking stick in one hand—when did she get a walking stick?—and a stiff little handbag in the other. She looks a bit like Queen Elizabeth with her tweed skirt and tightly permed grey hair, and now I wish I could help her indoors, lead her to that special chair, the comfy one I was saving for VIPs.
Did I ever let Mum sit in it when she came to visit Bob? Did I ever make her feel that special?
Tandia, who is just stepping out of my house, appears to recognise Mum and strides straight across, a concerned look on her face.
“Mrs Gold?” she calls out. How she recognises Dot I don’t know. “I thought we were meeting up at the mortuary a bit later?”
“Yes, pet, I just…” Mum falters. “I just wanted to see where…” She breaks off as her voice catches in her throat.
Tandia reaches a hand out to her across the police tape. “I’m sorry, Mrs Gold. It’s still a crime scene. I can’t allow anyone in.”
She nods. “Yes, yes, of course, dear, I know you have a job to do… I just… I just wanted to be close to where she…”
Mum’s knees begin to buckle, and it looks like she’s about to fall to the gutter when Tandia grabs her and holds her steady. She glances behind her and motions for another officer, the guy with the receding hairline who has taken over from Megan on boundary patrol.
Together they help my mother across the road to one of Brenda’s crisply painted white wicker chairs. I know I keep going on about them being crisply painted but, honestly! You should see them. There’s never so much as a mouldy smudge or a string of cobwebs to be found. What does Brenda do? Touch them up every week?
Mum falls into the chair, gratefully.
“I’m sorry, pet,” she says. “I shouldn’t have come.”
“Mrs Gold, you just lost your daughter. You don’t need to apologise to us.”
“No, but maybe I need to apologise to her.”
“Oh?” says Tandia.
Oh? I repeat.
“I wonder now if I had done things differently… If it’s partly my fault.”
Actually, no it isn’t. Listen to me, dear reader, and listen good. My mum did nothing wrong. Both my folks were great. Hell, they were better than great, they were boring, I already told you that. There was no abuse. No neglect. No sticking me outside with a bottle of soft drink and a comic book. They loved me, they provided for me, that’s all there is to it. Sure, they didn’t give me siblings and didn’t take me to Mass, big bloody whoop. Dad’s long gone, but I won’t let you lay any blame at my mother’s feet, and I won’t let her either. I don’t know who killed me, but it had nothing to do with Dot.
Got it?
“I… I thought we gave her a decent upbringing,” my mum is saying. “I thought she knew she was loved.”
I did! I do!
“I was so happy when she came back to live here after university. I really thought she’d settle in the big smoke, but she returned! You could have bowled me over with a feather when she showed up one day, bags in her hand, said she was moving back. And we loved having her here, really we did, but she was different, Detective. Something had changed. She became hard. She became brittle. Do you think that’s why she was… Why it happened?”
Tandia smooches her lips to one side. “It’s early days yet, Mrs Gold. But, well, people don’t generally get stabbed unless they make someone very, very angry.”
Oh thanks, Tandia, that’ll make Mum feel better. Thanks a lot.
“And our investigations seem to suggest that your daughter did put a few noses out of joint.”
Dot sighs. “Ludovica could certainly do that, dear. She wasn’t always like that you know. She was quite a delightful child. Funny, oh so funny and cheeky like you wouldn’t believe. I always thought she’d be a journalist or, heaven forbid, one of those standing comedians.”
“Stand-up comic?”
“That’s the one. She always found a joke in everything. She was aptly named. After a German king, you know? The eccentric one who built that magnificent Neuschwanstein. Have you ever been to Germany, pet?”
Tandia shakes her head. Mum nods as if she were expecting that.
“It’s the most stunning castle you’ve ever seen. They say Walt Disney modelled Sleeping Beauty’s castle at Disneyland after Neuschwanstein, did you know that?”
Again Tandia indicates no.
“Well, anyway, it’s beautiful and delightful, and that’s what my Ludovica was like.” Her face clouds over. “And then, well, she wasn’t.”
Tandia waits, but when my mum says nothing more, she asks, “Do you know what happened? To Lulu, I mean? Why she became so… brittle?”
Mum thinks about it for a moment. “Not exactly, no.” Her lips purse together for a moment. “Although I blame that man. Her first love. He broke her heart. You mark my words, she was never the same girl after that.”
The detective is nodding. She thinks she knows what Mum is talking about, but she doesn’t have a clue.
My heart got pummelled badly, but it had nothing to do with Cass.