Donna pushes open the door, revealing the vast entrance hallway. There are sofas and side tables, portraits of men in wigs, a locked cabinet full of shotguns, a suit of armour on a plinth.
And, on the hallway carpet, the body of Jack Mason.
Running, Donna reaches him first. He is on his back, a gunshot wound to the head. In his hand is a small gun. He is freezing cold, and very dead.
Donna starts to secure the scene as Chris calls it in. They will have a long wait with the body.
Chris takes a closer look. That really is a very small gun. Chris tucks this thought away.
‘You OK?’ he says to Donna.
‘Of course I’m OK,’ says Donna. ‘You?’
Chris looks down at the body. ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m OK too.’
They are both OK, but they put an arm around each other regardless.
Chris is thinking. The Thursday Murder Club starts looking into the Bethany Waites case and, before you know it, the two main suspects in her killing are dead. Hell of a coincidence. He glances at Donna. It looks like she’s thinking the same thing.
‘I’m just thinking,’ says Donna, ‘that we should really do something about your trousers before the circus arrives.’
68
Fiona Clemence thought she had heard the last of Elizabeth Best.
With her questions about Bethany Waites. With her accusations.
How wrong she was.
It was no secret that Fiona and Bethany hadn’t got on. What of it? It doesn’t mean you are going to drive someone off a cliff, does it?
So what if Fiona hadn’t cried on the tribute show? There had been two letters in the Evening Argus about it, which was the South East Tonight equivalent of a Twitter storm. But it meant nothing. Everyone cried at everything these days. You got rewarded for it. Fiona had pretended to cry at the BAFTAs, for example, and it had gone down very well. The Mail Online headline had been ‘TV Fiona turns on waterworks as she flaunts gym-honed body in figure-hugging dress’。
Does anyone ever actually cry for real, or is it always for attention? Her mum cried when her dad died, and within a week she was on a yacht with a dentist from her golf club. So spare us the histrionics.
You could point the finger all you liked at Fiona, but you wouldn’t get what you wanted.
Fiona Clemence is still trying to work out how Elizabeth got her number. Presumably her friend Joyce had tracked it down through her government contacts. Either way, the message had turned up last night.
I wonder if you might be able to help us, dear?
A few messages later, and Fiona knew the score.
Does she trust Elizabeth and Joyce? No. Do they really know who killed Bethany Waites? Fiona doubts that very much. But will she help them? For reasons she can’t quite access at the moment, yes, she probably will.
Fiona is filming an advert for yoghurt this morning. Or for breakfast cereal. She forgets which. She knows she has to lick her famous lips and say, ‘It’s delicious,’ but she hasn’t looked into it beyond that. She sits on a plastic chair in a cavernous studio as lights are adjusted, and groups of men in glasses congregate, scratching their beards, while much younger people hand them coffees.
Fiona is scrolling through her Instagram. Three point five million followers now. She has promised her Instagram adviser, Luke, that she will post a story today. He is very strict with her, but, seeing as he can get her twenty-five thousand pounds a time to post about a free holiday to the Maldives, she lets him be. But it’s all very regimented and boring. She is a brand now, and everyone wants to tell her what to do. And, worse, what not to do. Maybe she should push back against that a little? Next to her, a man dressed as a banana is eating a banana. She looks at the time. Just gone eleven a.m. It’s make-your-mind-up time, Fiona.