London: 2037

The Thames rises, creating marshland of London’s millionaires’ rows. I had the foresight not to buy right next to the water.

I have lived not far from Holland Park for nearly twenty years. A woman who reminded me of Anna—bossy, ambitious, hard as nails—brokered the sale.

Most of the neighbors involved in the events of long ago have moved from Weycombe. I think only Macy remains in her mansion. Divorced from Barry now and driving a new, younger model.

God knows where the rest of them got to. Some, like Rashima, have died, in her case tragically young. An accident. Unavoidable. Some believe she knew or guessed too much about what really happened with Will. That is wild speculation you can safely ignore.

Jason is dead: overdose. Heather: no idea. I did hear Lulu turned out to be some kind of prodigy. Go figure.

Once I came into Will’s money, not without a certain amount of horrified, genteel fuss from his mother, the Dragon Lady, I chose the anonymity of London over life in the fishbowl that was Weycombe. I’ve recently renovated my lovely flat, using money from the sale of production rights to my book based on Will and Anna, their betrayal, and all the rest. I titled it Indigo, for that was the code word I used to alert the cops that Will had gone berserk on that long-ago night in the park. Meta, I know, but the publisher and the folks in Hollywood thought it was a catchy title.

Write what you know, they say. So I did. And now, finally, it’s really paying off.

I live here alone. I like it alone.

Milo came to call the other day.

His kid didn’t make it, despite the gene therapy for which Milo would gladly have sold his soul. It was too new, too experimental. Nowadays, it undoubtedly would have worked, and his son would still be alive. Now we have vaccines for nearly every cancer going, and cures for the various plagues out of Africa, even though new viruses continue to evolve. Space travel is the norm for civilians. To the moon and back, easy, no big deal. To New York in half an hour, jet lag a thing of the past, with more time spent going through security than in the air.

So much has changed. Tehran reduced to rubble; chunks of California and Oregon lost to the Big One; the London Eye, gone. Spare body parts being cloned at birth and kept in special repositories, just in case. DNA collected at birth and stored permanently, heightening crime solves around the globe.

Milo has gone somewhat to seed, is rounded where before he’d been all muscle and sharp edges. My guess? He drinks a bit. More than a bit. He has that same woozy alkie look about the eyes that my father had before he ended his life, still sobbing about my brother.

It seems to me I’ve spent half my life surrounded by weak, whiny men. And the other half getting rid of them.

Milo phones early one sunny Sunday, asking if he can stop by. He is … curious, at a guess. He wants to see how I turned out.

He exclaims for a while at the view from my balcony, over the Thames and across the city. It really is breathtaking, worth every pound I paid for it. I keep a little herb garden out there that catches what is left of the sun.

The sky this particular day is a dusky blue. The blue of my brother’s face the day he died. I took just a little too long coming back with that injector, that’s all. It really wasn’t my fault. I was distraught at my brother’s death, and not much more than a child myself; I’d done my best.

People are so credulous, but mostly they are lazy. Questioning pre-conceived notions, especially where children are concerned, is hard work. They don’t want to think too much, and so they think in stereotypes. Dame Agatha knew this, to her advantage. It was how she fooled the idle reader every time.

This is why I studied her.

“Why are you here?” I ask Milo. “Not that it isn’t good to see you.”

He turns and comes back in from the balcony. I think about giving him a little shove, but … too obvious, and too many prying eyes across the way. Every town and village has a Frannie Pope.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I just wanted to say hello. And goodbye. That’s all. See how you were faring, after all these years.” He looks around. “It seems crime does pay. For some.”

I’ll not be led. “Why goodbye? Are you moving?”

“In a manner of speaking. The doctors tell me I’m dying, that I have only a few months. It seems I didn’t give up the cigarettes in time. Or it’s hereditary. Or it’s in my stars or something. Apparently nothing can save me. Not even all the new treatments can touch this.”

“I’m sorry.” The only thing to say. Never, “I know how you must feel,” because most people don’t and all of us hope we never get to find out.

“Sure. Thanks.”

I nod in solemn understanding, willing him to leave.

“Your place is beautiful—I’ve seen the photos in your interviews,” he says. “Still, I’m surprised you never moved away. Back to the US.”

“What for? This is my home now. England is my home.”

At first I had wanted to run away, but in the end, what I tell Milo is the simple truth: this is home. All the moving around when I was growing up—those days are over. I used to like all the fresh starts but now I’m getting older, weary of it. Plus, I’ve a beachhead established here. I’m known and respected as a writer in ways I never would be in the States. I don’t write potboilers for cash. Thanks to Will, I don’t have to.

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out. Your son and all. By rights it should have.”

He throws his jacket over the arm of a chair and settles in like he plans to stay awhile.

“When Anna Monroe was murdered,” he says, “I saw the case as a chance to exonerate myself, to prove myself to the force, you know? I still cared about that, even after they tried to kick me to the curb over nothing, really. It was a big case for those parts, the Monroe case, the biggest I was ever likely to see.”

I don’t care. Why are you telling me this?

“The thing is, Attwater wasn’t as dumb as she seemed. She just couldn’t prove her hunches.” He says this with a meaningful look. I can’t be bothered to ask him what he means. “She sent me in, thinking you would let your guard down with me.”

Thought so. Didn’t work, did it? I smile, a soft, puzzled smile, like you’d use with someone in an asylum. I wait.

“She’s gone now. Died last year.”

Fine. Why tell me?

“That bruise under your eye,” he said. “The day I came to talk to you about Colin Livingstone. You did that to yourself, didn’t you?”

Of course I did. I needed Milo to see for himself what a brute Will was.

“It wasn’t even a full-on bruise when I saw you. It hadn’t had time to darken into that. But I didn’t question it at the time. All I could think was what a shit your husband was. That made it easier to … you know.”

“Okay, yeah. I saw you arrive and I knocked myself a good one with a hammer. I knew you’d assume Will had done it.”

“Yes.” He sits, elbows on his knees, looking at me, taking me in for the person he’s finally realized I am.

Which is: brave and determined, if you ask me. I had stayed the course, having set a path for private justice. I had observed Will quietly for weeks, months, assessing the lies, my mind uncluttered by emotion. Once I was through lying to myself, I was strangely, eerily calm, able to think and plan my next move.

And I had followed through to the end.

I felt I knew Milo well, given that people don’t really change over the years, they just become more so. More set in their ways. Solving the murder of Anna was his way to prove himself, to win his way back into the fold, sure. But he also saw himself as a fearless rescuer of damsels. It’s a toxic mix.

There had been a lot of fun moments along the way. First I had to give Will a motive for killing his lover. And that motive was that Anna had wanted more; Anna, as was her way, wanted too much. I used the burner I’d found in the garage to text her the morning she died: Sorry but I can’t leave Jill. Let’s talk, usual time and place. W. Will clearly had lured her to that fatal meeting—at least it was clear as far as the police were concerned.

I made sure to hand her burner phone over to Milo, who reached his own conclusions: She’d not taken “no” for an answer. They’d fought.

I told Milo on the day of the threatening letter all my darkest suspicions about Will, that Will had as good as confessed to me. I knew for sure he was guilty, I said, but … Somewhat to my surprise, that was all Milo needed to hear. From that moment on, he acted accordingly. Never questioning. My hero.

They would need more evidence. I gave them more.

Of course I made a slip or two.

“The pool guy,” he says, reading me. “You said you could see the pool house from your first floor window at the Weycombe house.”

“And?”

“I assumed you meant you could see from what we Brits would call the first floor—the floor above the ground floor. But from what an American would call a first floor, you couldn’t see who went in or out. I should have asked you to clarify.”

I’m not going to enlighten him now. It was a very minor invention, intended to reinforce Anna’s credentials as a woman who slept around. So maybe I misspoke a bit. So what. “You’re right. You should have asked.”

He smiles. It’s one of those sad, accepting smiles of someone too weary to fight over trivial lies. I used to use that smile with Will.

“Then there was that woman at the lingerie shop. She told us your husband had been a customer, and she recognized you when you came into her shop. Checking up on why he’d be buying items that were much too large for you.”

“You’re calling that some sort of clue?”

“The only real clue we had,” he counters, “was that dress. The dress missing from Frannie’s shop. It was the only blue one in its size, and it was not in the inventory she’d taken just the day before, so the lack was noticeable. We guessed it had been shoplifted, for want of a better word—chances were good, by her killer.”

Yes, yes, yes, fine. In a fit of spite and madness, I’d stolen a dress from Frannie’s shop, stuffed it in my shopping bag as I was leaving. For once she had something in stock that wouldn’t make me look like a refugee from the Woodstock festival. And, well, it’s not like stealing, is it? Frannie would never miss it.

“She could have made a mistake, don’t you think?” I say. “In the inventory? This sounds like a very minor connection. Tenuous at best.”

I soon realized I was playing with fire with that dress, and the next time I went to Walton-on-Thames I put it in a bin outside the Sainsbury’s.

“We looked everywhere in the village for it,” he says. “Attwater put me on it—the sort of demeaning floater task she liked to hand me in those days. It never turned up. But there was nothing to link it directly to Frannie’s murderer. It was tenuous, as you say.”

“Another dead end,” I say. “Too bad.”

“But do you know, from Fannie’s inventory description, it may have been the blue dress you were wearing the day you called me over—the day you got the poison pen letter? Long sleeved with ‘ruching’—I had to look it up: ‘ruching.’”

What foolishness on my part. And what luck he never made the connection. But if he’d asked me about that dress, I would have said I’d ruined it with bleach and thrown it away.

The real mistake I’d made in the beginning was going to Miss Kitty’s, but what did that prove? The visit was a giving in to impulse before I realized I had a balancing act ahead of me that would require complete control: of myself, of the investigation. If I ever became a suspect, I needed to be sure there was a lineup of others a good solicitor could quickly pin things on to defuse any case that might be made against me: Jason, Colin, Macy, to name a few. Alfie, in a pinch. But in the end, I needed to make sure they had one suspect only, and provide them with the evidence to back it up: Will.

“But it wasn’t the same dress,” I say. “So another blind alley?”

He nods, his eyes never leaving my face. “Like that threatening letter you received.”

I say nothing. Of course I sent it to myself, making sure only Will’s prints were on the paper and envelope. It was necessary that the police know me as his terrorized victim.

“Killing Frannie is what I never understood. She was harmless. A bit of a scatterbrain. Why did you have to kill her?”

“You’re taping this, are you?”

He pats his shirt in a “search me” fashion; shakes out his jacket, empties his pockets. “I’m retired, remember? No warrant. No authority. Off the force.”

I give him a puh-leeze look but I see he’s got nothing on him.

“Shoes?” Just in case. “Watch?”

He takes them off, turns them over. There’s no hidden mic slotted into the heel or bug built into the watch in true MI6 fashion. But one cannot be too careful.

“Okay,” I say. “I can tell you what might have happened. You ask, why Frannie? I thought you knew. She was a blabbermouth who knew too much.” Frannie started piecing a few things together and realized who it was she’d seen that day on the river. She saw my two jackets, the red and the blue, hanging side by side in the hall closet the evening she came over to bend Will’s ear.

The day she died—all right, fine, the day I killed her—she’d been fussing in the corner with that scarecrow display, her back to me. Just thinking aloud, not editing her thoughts. Babbling. She was putting some jeweled bracelets on the scarecrow’s wrists when suddenly she stopped, turning as she spoke, brain not fully engaged with mouth.

“Do you know, Jill, I just remembered. As Anna argued with that person that day, the sun broke through and a flash of sunlight gleamed off something—something shiny on the other person’s wrist. Just as Anna turned away—in fear or to try to end the argument, I don’t know, but I saw it. The person was wearing short gloves, and I could see … diamonds, it had to be—bright and glittery. A jeweled watch. They were waving their hands around in this sort of wild, threatening way.”

“Really.”

“Which means it had to be a woman, don’t you see? Only a woman would wear a dainty watch like that. A little diamond thing, diamonds all round the face and band.”

She looked at me, at my wrist. At me sliding one hand over my wedding gift from Will.

“Like yours.”

A sort of expectant look came over her face, as if she hoped I might be able to clarify what was puzzling her. Fortunately, I was.

“And those jackets. Last night. Please tell me I’m wrong. Jill?”

I couldn’t choke her the way I had Anna. I’d lost that element of surprise Milo had talked about, and besides, Frannie was a big woman, tall, arms like a stevedore. Despite her age, she could leverage her weight against me in a struggle. I’d brought no weapon; it was supposed to be a friendly chat to find out if she’d realized the significance of the two jackets. To convince her those jackets were Will’s, if so. But it was too late for all that.

I suppose a good lawyer could have demolished her account of what she thought she’d seen, that day by the river, a dotty old woman like Frannie, but I was not taking the chance. Live free or die.

There was a letter opener on the shop’s desk. Make do and mend, as my grandmother used to say.

Milo’s eyes on me now, as if he can read the memories on my face. “We realized, of course, that we only had your word that you’d seen Jason at Frannie’s shop that morning. No one else claimed to have seen him. Or Will, for that matter.”

Yes, it may have been unnecessary to toss them both in like that. I always did have a tendency to embellish.

Killing Anna was easy compared with Frannie. But up until the last second, I wasn’t sure I’d go through with killing Anna. I always carried a knife in my fanny pack for protection. The habit was a holdover from my time in London, coming home late most nights. I liked the idea of surprising an attacker by fighting back; sometimes I almost hoped someone would try it on. This particular knife, a Swiss Army knife, belonged to Will. Afterward, I threw it in the river. They spent days diving and dredging for the weapon I kept hoping they would find, as it had his initials engraved on it. It turned up weeks later, washed ashore. By then it was just a bonus, the final nail in Will’s already sealed coffin.

I wore gloves against the cold so only Will’s prints were on the knife. I knew from BM: London that they can lift prints off an object even if it’s been soaking in water. It was fairly risk-free to attack her that time of year: there were fewer people about because of the weather, except for old Frannie, of course. Bad luck, that. Of course I wanted to be the one to “find” the body to explain my footprints on the steep embankment. In the struggle Anna and I had ended up partway down the slope, the overhead foliage concealing what was happening.

As she fell, already dying, there was another stroke of bad luck: she made a grab for my scarf and took it down with her. I couldn’t scramble after her without chancing my own neck, and I’d never be able to crawl back up. So I ran home and changed into my red jacket, threw the blue fleece jacket and gloves in the washer and turned the machine on in case they held any trace of Anna’s blood. Then I launched the kayak from the back garden and, muffled to the eyes with a different scarf and hat, paddled to retrieve that damned scarf from her body. There was no explaining it if it were found on her. Then I paddled home, put away the kayak, ran back to where I could see her body from the path, and called it in. The whole thing took less than half an hour from the moment she died.

When Frannie noticed the two different-colored jackets hanging in my hall closet, the scarf and hat I’d been wearing were in there, too. There was never really much question: she had to go. Even if I convinced her the jackets belonged to Will, which would be handy for setting him up, there was no way—not once her mind flashed on that diamond watch.

“What about Jason?” Milo asks. “You didn’t … ?” He leaves the question hanging with a delicate pause.

What an insulting suggestion. “Jason was an addict, you know that. Addicts die.”

Jason overdosed shortly after Anna died. Collateral damage, it came as a surprise to no one. While Jason did remind me of my brother, I had nothing to do with his death. Not directly. What he did in the privacy of his own bedroom was his business.

But what a karmic way to deal with someone who rummages through your stuff looking for drugs on the pretext of stopping by to return a casserole dish. You could say, and I do, that Jason did it to himself. I had no idea he’d root around in my bathroom cabinet—how could I possibly know any respectful, law-abiding citizen would do such a thing when left alone in my house for five minutes?

Still, there was a possibility Jason had started to suspect. There was something in the looks he gave me during his intermittent flashes of sobriety, when his face wasn’t glazed in addict sweat and a devil wasn’t peering out of his yellowing eyes.

That last time I saw him at his father’s house … Whatever he knew, or thought he knew, his head was so messed up I couldn’t take the chance. Even people running their mouths in some brainless way can trip over the truth, like Frannie did, and get the police looking at things from a different angle.

So I invited him over a couple of times on whatever pretext—a condolence meatloaf or something like that to take back to his father. And I deliberately left him alone—a sudden errand calling me away—with an array of my prescription pills in the medicine cabinet. Pain pills from when I’d wrecked my ankle, and a few more from a visit to the dentist. The leftover script from my shrink. I never throw any of that stuff away—Yankee thrift. I also left a nice assortment in my purse, which I left open on the table, knowing he couldn’t resist. The guest bathroom had another stash for him to pilfer, which he did. The little shit also took a twenty-pound note out of my wallet. Because that’s what addicts do, and they think people don’t know.

I didn’t care when or even if he managed to top himself. I just wanted to give him every opportunity. Worse case, he’d destroy the last shred of his mind and credibility even further if he did start putting two and two together about Anna.

But I wasn’t interested in talking about all this now with Milo. Leave the past in the past, I say.

He answers the question I haven’t asked. “No one knows I’m here. Even if they knew, would they believe it after all these years? Would they care? Almost everyone who cared about Anna is gone.”

That included, of course, my dearly departed Will.

A lie creates its own atmosphere. A shift in the air around the liar’s voice that makes the listener say Wait. Wait a minute. That’s not right. Something’s not right here. With Will, that feeling went on too long, happened too often.

That night, Will’s last night, I sent a message from my own new burner phone telling him to meet me in Riverside Park, at our favorite picnic table.

It had been a perfect night for a sting. Cool and clear, with the weather cooperating, and a new moon to provide sheltering darkness under the trees for Milo, Attwater, and Co.

Will drove up to the park to find me waiting. I’d wrapped myself in a blanket and was sitting on top of our favorite table—a sight that used to drive him wild with desire, by the way. Now he just looked wild.

“What’s all this about?” he demanded to know. He stomped his feet against the cold. His words emerged in puffs of white cloud. “What are you talking about?”

It was just about his last live comment. I pushed the play button.

Here is what Milo and his people heard on their receivers that night:

Me: You killed her, didn’t you?

Will: Of course I did. The faithless bitch.

Me: Anna and Frannie both.

Will: Of course, both. What are you, stupid?

Me: But why Frannie?

Will: Do you really have to ask? She knew too much.

And moments later, I stopped the feed that was going directly into the mic. “Did you bring it?” I asked. A judicious pause before I screamed and began hammering against his chest with my fists. “So it was you? You admit it?”

A confused burst of expletives from Will, who had grabbed my arms to pull me off him. I said, again live for the mic, “I promise I won’t tell anyone. Let me go!”

“Jill, what the—?”

“That hurts!”

I dropped the agreed-upon word, “Indigo,” that told the cops I was in danger. I broke away as they rushed in, shouting, screaming at Will to put his hands up. I heard one shot, and another. And I ran for cover into the woods.

I had recordings of his voice, lines I’d spliced together from the detective play he’d acted in at the local theater. I’d saved the recordings of those endless rehearsals when I would run lines with him at home after dinner. Seamless splicing was another skill I’d picked up at the BBC. They claimed, by the way, when they fired me, that I’d fictionalized some parts of the BM: London shows, editing and splicing and making up dialogue. Dialogue that could have occurred and should have occurred, in my opinion, but probably had not occurred. Whatever.

It’s easy with a judicious edit or two to make someone sound as though they’re threatening you, confessing to a killing, confessing to the Kennedy assassination or whatever you want them to confess to. My own lines the cops heard that night as they listened in were much simpler than Will’s: “No! Don’t! Stop! Will, that hurts!” And so on. This was followed by Will’s rather maniacal laughter. He always overplayed that bit. I added some choking sounds of my own. It was really very good, quite convincing, if I do say so. Then there was a lot of “So it was you?” followed by “Don’t worry, Will, I swear I won’t tell anyone! I swear! Just let me go. Let me go!”

And so on. Some of it recorded—overall, a nice mix tape of woman-in-jeopardy dialogue—some of it live as needed. Then I simply screamed in time-honored, wom-jep fashion, the scream of a woman frightened out of her wits. I am seriously good at that. I used to love playing in thrillers.

I cut it a bit close, escaping from Will at the last minute, making sure he remained the slow-moving target that he was, frozen in place by confusion, wrong-footed, stunned by these unexpected developments. The cops were already charging in as I ran, giving them a clear shot.

Will had the Browning with him, the gun I’d told him to bring along. We were there to set a trap for Anna’s killer, I’d said, and he’d need it for self-defense. The last thing the cops expected was for him to show up with a gun. When he reached for it, actually to hand it to me, they completely freaked out.

I hadn’t enjoyed anything so much in a long time.

I hadn’t told Milo about the gun, of course. He’d have cancelled the sting. I knew the cops would go wild when Will pulled out this honking great Browning. There were half a dozen of them, hyped up, all young and macho and dying to play the hero, to rescue the fair maiden. They saw the gleam of metal, they heard my frantic screams about the gun, and well … they’re trained in these situations to shoot to kill when they have no other choice. They told him to drop it and he just froze.

If Will had shown up without the gun for some reason? Or if he’d done as he was told and dropped the gun? I’d improv it—grab the gun from his hands and have it “accidently” go off. In case he survived—well, I’d brought a knife to make sure he didn’t. Because his survival was the biggest risk to me. I could always tell the police I was so terrified I’d brought along a little something for self-defense. Just in case.

“Do your best, prepare for the worst,” as my grandmother used to say. I think she got that one from the Bible.

Of course Will had to die. As mad as his story would sound, there would always be some conspiracy nut to believe him. What I really wanted was for Will to rot in prison, but I had to settle for less. I couldn’t let him live to tell his story.

From where Milo stood, what was going down was clear: I had screwed up my end of things; I had set Will off. I’d warned them already about his hair-trigger temper. From a distance what they saw was a woman struggling to break free of Will’s arms, fighting for her life. Milo, listening to the transmission, gave the signal to go in.

In the end, of course, the knife wasn’t necessary. The police did the job they were trained to do.

I also had transferred some photos from my phone to Will’s before destroying my old phone. I’d taken random photos of women in Weycombe Court in various stages of undress, women who seldom bothered to draw their bedroom curtains. Photos of Anna were a particular highlight of the parade of lovelies, taken from a spot hidden by trees in her back garden. These password-protected photos were on Will’s phone when he was taken down. It took their IT guys no time at all to break in. It was the descriptions of the photos by the kinkier news outlets that finally made Will’s mother leave the country. Oscar was a big help in getting that insider tip published.

I’d thought it through dozens of times, rehearsing step by step how Will must have gone about killing Anna, so I could present my theory to the police, tied up with a ribbon when the time was right: Anna was killed early enough in the morning that Will still had time to get to the station and catch a train. He had arranged to meet her upriver, where he killed her, first stashing the kayak several yards downriver where the ground sloped to the shore, making the kayak easy to retrieve. He then paddled his way home, where he changed out of his gear into a suit. He figured if he was seen on the river—for example, by those Japanese tourists—well, his face was partially obscured by a scarf and hat. He was just another health fanatic out on the cold river.

I happened to mention to Milo that I saw Will come home that morning to change. And that this was a complete departure from his usual morning routine. I’d never known him to kayak that time of day, especially not in October, in the cold. How very odd.

I also left a pair of Will’s glasses in Anna’s car—she never bothered to lock her car any more than she worried about drawing the shades. No one in the Court bothered; it was gated, after all. The glasses were not conclusive evidence, but just one more matchstick on the pile I was set to ignite.

None of this, the theories and the glasses and so on, needed to work. Certainly it didn’t need to hold up in court—I would make sure it never got that far. This was only to get the cops so certain they were in the right they’d be more likely to take him down.

Of course Will’s mother cried bloody murder, but too late. She had a second stroke—the first minor one, when Will had left Weycombe to fly to her side, had weakened her. By the time she recovered enough to take in what had happened to him, the whole thing was history as far as anyone was concerned. Still, she hired solicitors to harass the police. When they got nowhere, she got on the horn to Whitehall. She petitioned her old schoolmates in the House of Lords and on Fleet Street, demanding an inquiry. But as the facts emerged even her oldest friends began to back off, saying that time would lessen the hurt, useful things like that.

Her son, she claimed, was incapable of killing anyone: he barely knew the Anna Monroe creature. His so-called confession? It must have been staged, altered somehow. Or it wasn’t him at all!

“You did this.” She had her chauffeur drive her all the way over to Weycombe one day to accuse me. “I don’t know how but you’re behind this. You needn’t think you’ll get away with it.” Politely, shaking my head in pity, I showed her the door. Poor old fruit.

She didn’t shut up until all the evidence of Will’s affair with Anna started rolling in. Honestly, I think she could stand for him to be known as a murderer rather than as the faithless and conniving creep that he was.

Eventually she disappeared into the south of France, where she waited for the scandal to die down. It never quite did. Will had made the famous White name infamous.

Rossalind did force a standoff through her solicitors over where Will should be buried. She insisted it be not in Weycombe but on the grounds of his estate, where he would be “among his own kind.” She actually said this, looking straight at me. “His own kind.”

She’s long gone now, a heart attack following yet another stroke. I got to keep the fucking pearls.

But I’d let her have her way over a few things. I was like, whatever. I wasn’t going to win the burial scrimmage, which I didn’t care about, anyway.

I won everything else.

Had you been thinking Milo and I had a thing going on? No way. Attractive he may have been, but—no way.

You know that saying that two can keep a secret if one of them is dead? He may have needed cash for his kid, for that expensive, experimental treatment he couldn’t afford, so I did consider bribery—I was going to be a wealthy woman once all this was over. But I figured Milo would need to be there for his son even more. That’s the upstanding kind of guy he was.

Milo was solid. Although I’d had some reason to doubt that.

That day of the BACK OFF note, I finally asked him: “You were in uniform the day I first met you. You never did say why. And now you’re back in civvies.”

“Minor infraction of the rules. They wanted to remind me who was boss.” Remembering his demeanor around Attwater, his barely disguised contempt, his obvious chafing at the bit, I could see this.

“You weren’t undercover, something like that?”

He laughed. “Wearing a uniform? You are joking, right?”

“I know. But I thought in some John le Carré spy story way, you were in clever disguise.”

“This is Weycombe, for God’s sake.”

It turned out he’d been suspected and cleared of getting someone an early release—checking the wrong box on the paperwork or something. The suspicion, never proven, was that he did it for money—I got all this from the ever-useful Oscar. Of course Milo claimed he was innocent. Oscar believed him. I had my doubts, and that’s when I considered trying to bribe him. Honestly? I didn’t think he was crooked enough to go for the big time.

I’m sure I made the right choice. All I needed from Milo was to point his investigation in the direction I wanted it to go. He was distracted enough by his own problems to let it happen.

Now, twenty years later, here he is in my flat. Somehow I don’t believe it’s just a friendly visit.

“When did you start to doubt?” I ask. “Or did you doubt?”

He doesn’t pretend, he knows exactly what I mean. “I suppose it bothered me later that you tried to put the finger on that vagrant. He was in jail, and there’s no way you could have seen him. Or anyone like him. As you yourself said, in Weycombe, we’ve got one token poor guy, and Roger was it.”

I shrug. “A mistake. Mistaken identity. That happens all the time, right?”

“Maybe. Could have been. That’s what I told myself.”

“You had doubts but you didn’t report them.”

He shakes his head. “Then of course there was the kayak. More than one person besides Will had access. More than one person was physically capable.”

Home, change jackets, quickly back. The only way to make up the time was to use the kayak.

“But that amounted to nothing. And Attwater’s opinions were worthless.”

“What opinions?”

Milo smiles, a flash of that same white smile that had so impressed me when first we met. “I think she just didn’t like you.”

Someone in the New Yorker wrote of Robert Durst, “What the villain always knows, ultimately, is not why but why not.” That’s it, exactly. If there’s no heaven or hell, why not, indeed? Why not go for the life you want?

Is there a God? I actually believe there is, although I haven’t allowed it to get in my way unnecessarily. If worst comes to worst, I’ll call for a priest and confess—hedge my bets. But heaven is not a question that makes me hunger for answers. Only the here-and-now is guaranteed.

At Oxford I went along one day to hear a talk by a famous atheist—a scientist known mostly for his disputes with the university’s theologians. I can still hear him say, this handsome guy with the jutting brow and the shock of silver hair: “Look into the face of a child as it is slowly destroyed by disease, poverty, and ignorance and tell me there is a living God.”

And there you have it.

But there are miracles along the way, wherever they come from, some invisible helping hand. And that day in my flat, Milo told me of one.

“The recording of your conversation with Will, of his ‘confession’ before he died—someone misplaced it,” he told me. “Lost it, actually, because it never turned up. One of those bureaucratic snafus that can happen when the protocol on an evidence locker gets ignored once too often.”

“I didn’t know there was a recording.” I should have known it wasn’t just a live feed.

“Standard procedure, sure. Of course there was.”

“I see,” I said. “Go on.”

“But the thing is, there were one or two odd gaps. Nothing glaring. Nothing you’d notice if you weren’t looking for it. Some odd phrasing. And Will—he sounded genuinely surprised in places, puzzled. At least, I thought so. He started to ask something like, ‘Why are you playing that?’—words to that effect. It could have been, ‘What are you playing at?’ and probably it was. It was a bit garbled. But we had some new kid on the team, a young woman, who started poking around and wanting the recording authenticated. There was talk of having an expert examine it. Attwater thought it was a waste of time. ‘Why would we waste budget on that?’ she asked. ‘We were all there and heard what he said. And we can testify to what we heard.’ They got into a bit of a contest over it but of course Attwater won. And then, it went missing.”

I’m miffed. I’m a self-taught whiz in the recording studio and I don’t like having my expertise questioned. The recording I played that night for the waiting team of police was seamless, I’d swear it was.

I couldn’t have overlooked any detail. What gaps? There were no gaps. So even if they recorded the whole conversation, did it matter?

Milo sees the wheels turning. I look out the window, at my million-dollar view.

Counting up the bodies.

When I first met Will, he’d had a girlfriend. I think I told you about her. The one his mother thought was so great: Penelope or Clarice or Cordelia, one of those posh names. The one who up and left Will one day, breaking his mother’s heart.

The poison I got from Rossalind’s stable took care of her. I even thought if I got the chance, I might try to pin it on old Roz, but I never could figure out a clear motive for her. I kept some poison in reserve, though. Because you just never know when something like that might come in handy.

I’m sorry about Milo. I really am. After twenty years, he should just have left it alone. Curiosity/cat.

But you can trust no one, not even a slightly bent cop with a short time to live. He might be in a come-to-Jesus mode, especially with his diagnosis, and I can’t have that. Some cases are not meant to be solved. Some secrets are meant to be taken to the grave.

I stretch out my neck, like an animal seeking the sun. I’m tired. It no longer matters, I think. It’s too hard to prove at this long distance.

But I won’t be found out. I’m young—fifty-five is young these days, when the life expectancy for women is 120 years.

Live free or die.

“It’s all right,” he says. “It had to be done.”

Something tugs at a corner of his mouth, some sad smile of bitter remembrance, and I know. I know even before he says, “I loved Anna. And I’d have done anything to get the man who did that to her. I had Will in my sights early on. I just needed you to help me bring him down. This I did for me, and for no one else.”

I nod. Weighing, judging. Live or die?

Had Milo disappeared the recording?

“She was on her way to meet me that morning. In the park. We always met in Riverside Park. Whenever we could. As often as we could.”

What a touching story. Has he known all along? Suspected?

He sees me wince, one glancing giveaway, and thinks it has something to do with the park, or with the fact he used me to get what he most wanted. “I’m sorry. I … ”

What in fuck was it about Anna anyway? She wasn’t all that great. Was she? And yet all these men. And she cheated on them, every one.

He more than suspects me now—he knows. Why else wait so long before looking me up? This is a wrinkle that needs to be ironed out. 

“May I offer you some tea?” I ask.

“Ah. Do you have something a little stronger? 

“I sure do.”

And with that can-do Yankee spirit I go into the kitchen and rummage out the old Rossalind remedy I used to such good effect, so many years ago.

If that doesn’t work, I have the dried herbs from my little garden on the balcony, and my Chinese lanterns growing in a pot. They say poison is a woman’s weapon. What narrow-minded sexist claptrap. We use what we’ve got.

I have to figure out how to get rid of the body. In pieces, I suppose. I’m quite strong but Milo’s a big guy. I smile, remembering that woman who put her husband in the curry. But no, I can’t do that to Milo. He’s a good man, as men go. But still. The thought of him in love with Anna makes it easier to do what must be done.

I jump at the sound of the kitchen phone ringing. I start to let it go to voicemail, but I’m expecting a call from Oscar about our plans for the evening, so I pick up.

A woman introduces herself as Lily Higgenbotham. She tells me she’s a member of the committee to select the Rasmussen Prize for best screenplay. Indigo is on the longlist. The story I began writing so long ago. My true crime novel. My Capote book, my nonfiction novel, with names changed to protect not the innocent—who cares about the innocent?—but to protect me. The only names I didn’t change were Weycombe’s, and Anna’s.

Indigo. I still keep my notes and research in an encrypted file folder, with the same password: IKilled@nn@.

“How wonderful!” I say, so flooded with happiness I’m practically dancing across my new Italian tiles. It was the call I’ve dreamed of, since … since all my life, really. Shot through with a lightning bolt of pure joy, for a second I think I might spare Milo after all, the way an emperor in a good mood might spare a gladiator’s life. But as quickly, I think again. I have even more to lose now.

“I never dreamed of this!” I say to the woman. “Thank you! Such an honor.” I’m gushing, unabashedly thrilled. She says she’s delighted to be the bearer of good news and wishes me luck.

And she asks me to keep it to myself until the entire list has been notified and they officially release the news.

That will not be a problem, I assure her.

I am good at keeping secrets.

the end