Page 27 of Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests
“Poor kid was terrified,” Melvin says. “I tried to reassure him, but it looks like the depression had already taken hold.”
“He must have been tortured by the thought,” Tristan murmurs, picturing Matthew up on the roof.
Tristan’s eyes drift over to the table of “weeping widows.” Eight of them! Tristan isn’t sure he’s even spoken to eight beautiful women, let alone dated them. Why couldn’t Matthew have been happy with just one? Tristan was more than happy with Ellie—her gap-toothed smile, her wild curls, her cackling laugh. He gave her everything. And yet it wasn’t enough.
He’d spent hours trying to answer his mother’s question: “What did you do to chase her away?” The only answer he could find was that he’d loved her too much. When they first met, he’d read the books she loved, listened to her favorite folk bands, even let her pick out clothes for him, like linen shirts and one particularly loud tie-dye shirt.
When it was the two of them, it was perfect. It was just when other people got involved that things went wrong. Ellie’s sister was chronically unwell, and she was forever in and out of the hospital. Ellie’s phone would ring and then she’d dash off at a moment’s notice. And her colleagues at school were constantly dragging her out for drinks after work. At first, she’d ask Tristan along, but he shudders even now when he pictures her teacher friends laughing at their in-jokes. The creepy way the headmaster watched Ellie, even with his glamorous wife and young child in the room. After a while, Tristan started to make excuses whenever she’d invited him out with her work friends.
“Don’t you like them?” she finally asked when he’d cited a migraine on the night of the headmaster’s birthday party.
“I just don’t trust them—and I don’t think you should either,” he admitted.
“I know you’re just thinking of me, but sometimes you can be quite suffocating,” she told him. “It’s like you see the worst in everyone.”
Tristan promised to step back, to give her friends another chance. They went on a make-or-break holiday, which he thought went well, but she ended things the following week.
“I’ll have the arancini balls for starters—actually, make that two portions—followed by the burger and chips with a side of onion rings,” Janet tells the waiter. Vivienne and Melvin both order sandwiches, and Gordon impatiently waves the waiter away.
“I wonder if any of Matthew’s family are here,” Vivienne says, glancing around the room.
Tristan looks for an older couple or a sibling who shares Matthew’s dark eyes. But there’s only the weeping widows, some smart-suited colleagues, and them.
“Perhaps they weren’t close…” Gordon says with a shrug.
“That’s no excuse,” Vivienne snaps.
Then Tristan pictures his own parents attending their only child’s funeral. His dad’s stocky shoulders shoehorned into an old suit that had stopped fitting him years before. He couldn’t imagine him crying; no, he’d be more likely to hit the bar and hope to drink his sorrow away. His mother would have bought a new dress especially for the occasion—probably with a garish floral design—and the tears would be freely rolling down her face. But then Tristan cuts short this line of thought. After what he discovered in the box, perhaps they wouldn’t react in that way at all. Perhaps they would just see his death as a blip and their lives would continue as before.
And what about Ellie? Tristan wonders whether his ex-girlfriend would turn up at his funeral. Perhaps that would be the shock she’d need to finally realize she made a mistake by ending things with him. That, like Robyn said of Matthew, he would have made a fantastic husband. It would be too late then, though.Suddenly, Tristan’s heart is racing. Adrenaline rushes through his body. He can’t sit there any longer.
“I’ll just be a minute,” he mumbles, practically falling off his stool and heading for the door.
Outside, he turns right, nearly crashing into a large plant, its palmlike leaves spiking his shoulder but also hiding him from view. Crouching, Tristan covers his eyes, starts to count.
“Are you all right?” a voice asks from the darkness. Tristan feels a hand on his shoulder.
“Get off,” he snaps, pushing it away, hard.
“All right, pal, take it easy,” the man says, apparently undeterred by the shove. Tristan detects a strong northern accent, a strange mix of Geordie and Lancashire. “I’ll just stay here until you feel a bit better.”
Tristan takes seven deep breaths and then reluctantly uncovers his eyes and glances at the man now crouching alongside him. He’s not looking at Tristan, just staring ahead, apparently lost in his own thoughts. The man looks to be around Matthew’s age, dressed in a suit, but it’s too broad on the shoulders and made from a cheap-looking shiny material that would have horrified Matthew. His hair is slicked back from his face, giving it a plastic effect. Tristan has an irrational urge to reach out and touch it. The man’s trousers have ridden up, and Tristan notices that one sock is black and one is navy blue.
“Thanks. I’m fine, really,” Tristan says. “Sorry about that.”
“No worries,” the man says, flashing a row of little pointy teeth. “Gareth Atkinson.” He sticks out his hand. Tristan shakes it, trying not to turn away as the strong smell of beer hits him.
“Did you know Matty very well?” he asks Tristan.
“Erm…not really,” Tristan mumbles, but it’s clear that Gareth isn’t listening; he’s just looking for an opportunity to talk about “Matty.”
“Actually, he hated being called Matty,” he begins, his hands pressed together as if in prayer. “I went to school with him. Hadn’t seen him in years, but then I bumped into him a few months ago. He wasn’t pleased to see me, mind. Can’t blame him, really.”
“How come?” Tristan’s knees start to ache, so he shifts his weight slightly.
“I wasn’t that nice to him at school. But you should have seen him—thick glasses, a constantly streaming nose,” Gareth says. “It’s no excuse for bullying, though. I know that now.”
“No, it isn’t,” Tristan says, thinking of his own childhood.
