Page 37 of Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests
“I wonder if she’s related to Janet; looks a bit like her,” Tristan comments, watching her lower the now-quiet baby into a pram.
“They must be devastated,” Vivienne says. “She was young—and had such a lust for life.”
Tristan holds back a snort. That’s one way of putting it. On the three occasions Tristan had met Janet, they must have exchanged no more than twenty words. Her eyes easily skipped over Tristan as if he weren’t even there. Janet barely even registered his existence. He wasn’t attractive or powerful; he wasn’t competition, a conquest, or a potential comrade. To her, he was nothing. And now, it is Janet who is nothing. Literally nothing. She is no longer on this earth. Ashes to ashes, and all that.
“Well, hello there,” a deep voice booms out, cutting through Tristan’s thoughts. Melvin beams as he plants a kiss on Vivienne’s cheek, gives Tristan a heavy pat on the shoulder, and then sits down with them.
“Melvin, how are you?” Vivienne asks. Tristan notices that Melvin’s paisley shirt has a red-wine stain on the sleeve; his eyes are bloodshot and sort of glazed. Has Melvin come to a wake straight from a night out?
“Good… Well, saddened by the news, of course,” Melvinsays but his smile only flickers for a second. “I’ll get another round in.”
“We’ve only just…” Vivienne starts to say, but Melvin has already rushed toward the bar, so she shrugs at Tristan.
“He seems…upbeat,” Tristan comments, watching Melvin laugh with the barmaid.
“I do wonder if it’s time we made an official report to the police,” Vivienne says, her voice low.
“We agreed to wait and see what Melvin has to say,” Tristan reminds her.
Melvin appears with a tray bearing six brightly colored cocktails complete with tiny umbrellas and pink straws.
“It’s two-for-one on all cocktails—I couldn’t resist,” he says, plonking the tray down in the middle of the table, right on top of Vivienne’s notebook.
“Well, Janet might not have approved of this place, but she’d certainly approve of these cocktails,” Vivienne says, taking one.
“When the report came into the station and I realized who it was…honestly, it shook me,” Melvin says after taking a large slurp from a bright-pink cocktail. “She was a lovely, vibrant lady.”
A loud laugh suddenly echoes through the pub, and they look over to see Bill standing at the bar.
“I think that must be Janet’s husband,” Vivienne says. “He doesn’t exactly look heartbroken.”
Tristan watches him and wonders if he had any idea of the way his wife carried on with other men. Perhaps it went both ways. Perhaps they had some sort of arrangement. Who knows what goeson in another person’s relationship?
Tristan only knows that he’d found a rare love with Ellie. As more time passes from their breakup, this fact only becomes clearer. They were meant to be together. Until it had been snatched away—yes, partly by his own behavior but also by her vindictive friends, who he’s sure pushed her into ending their relationship. He picks up a bright-blue cocktail and takes a sip.Urgh, it’s so sweet and syrupy, he can instantly feel the sugar coating his teeth. He pushes it away and reaches for his Guinness again. He thinks of Ellie’s irresistible gapped-tooth smile and wild curls, but then the image is suddenly replaced by a different one: hair pulled back into a harsh bun, wide-legged trousers and baggy shirt hiding her curvy body, and a deep scowl across her forehead.
Following Matthew’s memorial, Tristan was plagued by dreams of Ellie dressed in black at his funeral, of himself-as-Matthew standing on top of that office tower, his hair ruffled by the wind. He’d find himself wide awake in the early hours of the morning, so he’d get out of bed, endlessly check Ellie’s social media or pull his coat on and walk the streets of London. Then, one night, he finally saw it. On Ellie’s Facebook page, where it had previously stated Single, it had changed to In a Relationship. Even though he’d been expecting it, a white-hot rage surged through him, and he roared into the darkness of his little flat.
Three days later, Tristan leaned against a bus shelter on a quiet street in Bermondsey, a cap pulled down to his eyes, holding aMetroin front of his face. A bus slowed down and he waved it on.
“For God’s sake, Dale, hurry up.” A familiar voice, but harsherthan he’d remembered. Although his eyes were studiously trained on the paper, Tristan’s every other sense was alert to the house next door.
“You sound like a fishwife, yelling like that,” a man’s voice responded, then slammed the front door, hard.
“We’ll be late for the appointment; then I need to get to work, and it’s parents’ evening tonight,” Ellie answered, more gently this time, but her voice was dull with exhaustion.
“You’re not the only one with a busy job, you know,” the man named Dale said, and suddenly they appeared at the end of the driveway, walking quickly toward the bus stop. Tristan bowed his head behind the paper and held his breath. He got a quick look at Dale, at his stocky frame, his self-assured walk a few steps ahead, knowing without looking back that Ellie was following.
“But I am also lugging this around,” he heard Ellie sigh. He peeped his head quickly around his paper to see her hand resting on a small bump in her middle.
“It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” Dale snapped, without stopping or even slowing his pace.
Tristan felt his gasp must have been loud enough for them to hear, but the bickering couple continued their mismatched march.
When Tristan and Ellie had been together, she had always spoken wistfully about having children. Whenever she’d brought it up, Tristan had changed the subject; he could barely look after himself, let alone a demanding baby. He shakes his head now at how dismissive he’d been, how immature. Mind you, it didn’t look like Ellie was exactly relishing the prospect of impendingmotherhood like he’d thought she would. She seemed thoroughly miserable—as did her boyfriend. But they’d made a baby together, and that could never be undone. They were joined together for life by a bond much stronger than any wedding vow. Tristan had wanted to see for himself if Ellie really had moved on, if he really had missed his chance. And what he saw confirmed that it was over. Regret and fury fueled his walk home. As he marched along a well-to-do road just a mile from his flat, he took aim at the wing mirror of an obnoxiously large Land Rover, landed a flying kick that sent the mirror shattering into the road. It made him feel better. So he did another, and another. By the time he got home, his foot was aching, his face scratched from splinters of mirror that had rebounded back at him. Yet he felt a wonderful sense of release. But the next morning he woke up filled with a festering fury once more. For the next few days, he locked himself away in his flat. It was Vivienne who yanked him out of his hibernation, made him talk.
“You’re not alone,” was what she said. And then she turned to a new page in her notebook and started to make a list. He followed her plan to a tee—well, almost. He saw his GP, mentioned panic attacks. He nodded along and walked out with a handful of leaflets covering everything from medication to counseling. The leaflets went straight into his recycling bin. Vivienne’s second demand was to get back in touch with his old uni mates. The thought made Tristan’s stomach twist. As an eighteen-year-old, he’d bonded with Dave, Eddie, and Fergus during three years of shared frustrations over the opposite sex and all-night debatesabout the comparative merits of Sega and Nintendo. After graduating, Dave and Fergus had gone traveling, Eddie had taken a job in IT for one of the “Big Four,” and Tristan had signed up with a temping agency. Every few months they’d swap messages about their current jobs (Dave, now a university lecturer; Eddie, director at an accountancy firm; and Fergus, something vague to do with “project management”) or gossip about former classmates. Tristan had allowed himself to drift away from them, making excuses when they’d tried to meet up. So when he sent Dave a quick message apologizing for not being in touch, asking if he was around for a pint soon, he was amazed when a response popped up within minutes:
Friday 8pm, usual place?
