Page 58 of Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests
“Hello, stranger,” she says. “Where have you been hiding?”
“Sorry, I’ve just been busy with work,” Tristan says. “How’s Melvin?”
“Not good. I’ve spoken to Mary. She says he took a dodgypill on a night out with Christian. He’s on life support and not responding.”
She hears Tristan breathe out.
“Poor Mary,” he sighs.
“And then there were two,” Vivienne says.
***
Vivienne is emptying the big black handbag to take to Melvin’s police-memorial drinks the following day. A piece of black paper drops onto her bed, and she gasps. For a second, she thinks she’s finally found her missing envelope, but then she sees Melvin’s name on the front and remembers taking his empty envelope following Gordon’s lecture. At the time, she noticed a little symbol on the back, tucked away in the corner. Now, finally, she puts on her reading glasses and takes a close look at it. The symbol is lightly embossed and seems to show the lettersEMBin decorative scrolls. She grabs her laptop and types the letters into Google, but thousands of hits come up, everything from insurance companies to the European Milk Board. So she addsprintingto the search andLondon. That narrows the list down, and she works her way through. One catches her eye, in Central London. She clicks on the website, and her blood runs cold.
Twenty minutes later, she’s walking up the tube steps, arriving on an all-too-familiar road. A young woman impatiently overtakes her, her large bag knocking against Vivienne’s side, leaving a loud sigh in her wake. Vivienne remembers feeling frustrated with all the slow walkers around the city back when she was rushing aroundherself.When did I become one of the slow walkers?
She stops outside the printers’ storefront, catches her breath before stepping inside.
“Vivienne! So lovely to see you!” the woman greets her.
***
Where is he?Vivienne glances around the room and looks at her watch again. It’s not like Tristan to be late. In fact, he’s usually around six minutes early. The tardiness of other people is one of their pet peeves. “Since when did the whole world start running ten minutes late?” he’d say, and that would set them off for a good half hour of comparing stories of colleagues and friends who regularly turned up twelve to fifteen minutes late without an apology or explanation. More than seven minutes deserved an apology, and more than ten minutes merited an explanation, and not just “I don’t know where the time went,” which was highly ridiculous in Vivienne’s opinion, because time is one of life’s few constants. Every minute, every hour is always the same length; it is not a movable feast, thank God. Tristan always agrees wholeheartedly with Vivienne about this, so why is he now running six minutes late? He promised he’d come and support Vivienne and Mary. Vivienne recently read an article linking panic attacks with suicide, and now she worries about Tristan whenever he doesn’t respond to her.
“Tristan will be here soon,” she says to Mary for the third time. Mary nods and continues to watch the police officers moving around the workingmen’s club. Every few minutes, one ambles over to offer his condolences. These men (it is mostly men here)are professionals when it comes to speaking to the grief-stricken. You don’t hear the go-to “I’m sorry for your loss” from them. Oh, no, their words are considered, personalized—heartfelt, you might say. “He was a fantastic copper, one of our best”; “He taught me everything I know”; and, somewhat unexpectedly, “I felt his presence this morning when I was shaving.” And yet Vivienne has noticed how they are keeping their distance. There is something unsaid in this room. Perhaps it’s the unexpected manner in which Melvin died, or perhaps it’s something else. She wonders if Mary can sense it too.
“My friends were always jealous of our marriage, you know,” she suddenly says, looking down at her perfectly pink nails.
“Oh, yes?” Vivienne prompts. Like being a parent or living with a deadly disease, Vivienne always thinks that marriage is something that remains a mystery to you until you do it. She has friends who have married the unlikeliest of men, becoming couples who grow to seemingly hate each other through the course of their marriage, and yet they stay together. Vivienne once made the mistake of blurting out to her friend Celia—who was mid-rant about her vile husband, Harry—“Maybe it’s time to speak to a divorce lawyer?” and Celia had been so horrified, so offended, Vivienne spent the rest of their lunch apologizing and then ordered a bouquet from Interflora the next day. Even now, years later, she’s not sure Celia has fully forgiven her. Perhaps it was a generational thing. Cat always seems to be talking about friends of hers who are getting divorced just a few short years after she danced at their weddings.
“They would say, ‘Melvin is so devoted to you.’ He always held my hand, never forgot a birthday or anniversary; he kept the garden immaculate, he was a fantastic cook, he wasn’t a slob or a drunk like some of their husbands.”
“He loved you, Mary.”
“Yes, I suppose he did, in his own way,” she says, nodding, then whispers, “I’ve been thinking about what you said about sins, Melvin’s being sloth. I suppose there have been times when he’s looked the other way for an easy life. I remember one occasion when he came back from a night out and told me he’d stopped a gang attacking someone in the street. He’d taken the poor chap to the hospital to be patched up and promised to write up a report at the station. A week or so later I asked him about it, and he just shrugged, said he’d forgotten and that the lads probably would never have been charged anyway.”
Vivienne takes in Mary’s words and gazes out the window at the busy Londoners marching down Bishopsgate. She thinks back to her last conversation with Melvin. How he told her that he and Christian had moved in together after their secret had been spectacularly exposed, and Vivienne congratulated him on his “happy ever after,” been impressed that he was no longer living a lie. But now she sees that he’d just followed the tide once again. This time, into Christian’s arms. Yet he would have drifted in any direction, depending on the strongest current.
As she watches, she sees Tristan crossing the road and walking slowly toward the club. His head is down, his brow furrowed, his right hand gripping the leather satchel he wears across his body, asif he’s protecting his heart. Vivienne shivers. She hates to see her friend looking so sad.
“Here’s Tristan,” Vivienne says as he pushes open the door and walks toward their small table. He gives Vivienne a quick kiss on the cheek and then crouches down low next to Mary, taking her hand and speaking in a whisper, his words out of Vivienne’s earshot.
As Tristan moves to sit on the stool beside Mary, she is beaming, nodding, tears rolling down her face. This is what Cat doesn’t see, Vivienne thinks—Tristan in moments like these, when he knows just what to say, just what that person needs to hear. He insists on ordering them more drinks and heads to the bar just as another police officer walks toward their table.
“Mary, I’m so pleased you came,” the familiar man says. He’s tall and slim with angular cheekbones jutting against flawless skin, reminding Vivienne of a long-distance runner. Not an ounce of fat on him. He’s objectively handsome, but Vivienne herself prefers a chunkier chap, hates the idea of feeling large when compared to your other half.
“Oh, hello, Christian,” Mary snaps, then Vivienne remembers where she’d seen him before—in the holiday pictures Melvin had proudly shown her eighteen months ago.
The temperature at the table suddenly drops by about ten degrees. Mary picks up her empty wineglass and pretends to take a small sip.
“I know we can never be friends after everything that has happened. But I want you to know that I am heartbroken too. Like Itold my colleagues, I have no idea where that pill came from, but I take full responsibility for Melvin’s…passing.”
Christian delivers the words looking down at the table, takes a breath, and finally looks up at Mary. His eyes are haunted; it’s the only word Vivienne can think of to describe them. He is telling the truth, his heartisbroken, and even worse, he believes it’s his own fault. Vivienne’s stomach spins.
“Thank you, Christian. I’m sure Melvin would have beentouchedto hear that,” Mary spits back at him. Her voice is low, and Vivienne is sure each word is like a bullet in Christian’s side. Visibly wounded, the man scuttles away from them, nearly knocking into Tristan, who is carrying their drinks over.
“Mary…” Vivienne says, reaching for her hand. Tristan sits down quickly and raises his eyebrows at Vivienne.
