THEN
‘This is their place?’ Patrick asks as I veer my bike off the road and bump onto the driveway that leads to the house formerly known as Felix and Elena’s home.
Their place is definitely in the fancy part; it’s a steel and glass box built into the cliffside next to the water on a set of stilts.
It’s twenty years old and a little rundown in parts but, at first glance, it still looks like a posh bunker where a charismatic con-artist might choose to start a cult, not a house for two people.
When I say ‘cliff’ you might imagine a rugged coastline and crashing surf, like something out of one of those horror movies that end with a girl wearing a white nightie in the rain, covered in blood (no bra, obviously – never a bra).
It’s not like that. The limestone cliffs around here are not quite vertical, and they’re covered in low-lying scrub that leads down to the river, which is placid enough when the jet-ski bros aren’t out in force.
‘You’ve really never been here?’ I ask.
‘Elena mostly visited us in Melbourne,’ Patrick says. ‘We’ve come to Perth a couple of times since the wedding, but Mike and I always stayed in a hotel.’
‘You know there are, like, three spare bedrooms?’
‘I kinda got the impression Felix didn’t want us here.’
We park our bikes at the side of the house.
‘Did I mention that Mike and I live in a two-bedroom flat with mould in the bathroom and a neighbour with night terrors?’ Patrick says. ‘I can’t believe they could afford this place.’
The truth is that Elena and Felix could only afford to buy this place because Elena became a semi-big-deal fitness influencer while she was still at university – before the accident that put her in a wheelchair.
If burpees are your idea of a good time, you might recognise her: coordinated crop tops and leggings, gravity-defying glossy ponytail, and drinking an unfeasible number of green smoothies.
The money she got from online collaborations, plus a small inheritance when her mum died and Felix’s finance salary, was enough to get them this house.
At least the part of it not owned by the bank.
Now, she has a sensible teaching job at a special needs primary school and I’ve never bothered to wonder before now how she and Felix could still afford all this architectural fanciness.
We unlock the front door and I quickly locate the alarm and carefully tap in the code Elena wrote down for me. Inside, the place isn’t looking its best. Party detritus from the night of Felix’s death is everywhere.
Someone was thoughtful enough to throw out the actual food, but dirty plates are stacked on the kitchen bench and in the sink, while half-empty bottles sit abandoned on the dining table. Fruit flies buzz around a cluster of wine glasses.
Patrick ignores the dishes and heads straight for the big glass lift Elena and Felix had installed after her accident (I’m getting to that, by the way).
‘That’s where Elena was stuck the night Felix died?’ Patrick asks.
‘Yep.’
‘What was everyone else doing while she was stuck in there? Just trying to get her out?’
‘I wasn’t there,’ I remind him.
‘Haven’t you asked?’
‘She’s your sister.’
‘I thought I should give her some time to recover before launching straight into asking her to reconstruct the night of her husband’s death.’ Patrick gives me a look that’s probably supposed to make me feel bad.
Maybe it would work if I’d never met him.
‘Since when do you care about not being an insensitive prick? I thought that was your whole vibe.’ Only as I hear the words coming out of my mouth do I worry I’ve been too harsh to a guy I don’t know all that well.
‘I’m touched you noticed,’ he says, and I relax. ‘I guess she’s been busy and there’s never been a good time.’
I consider Patrick’s question and what I know about the night of Felix’s death. Most of it has come from eavesdropping on Aunty Sam’s phone calls. ‘I guess so. One of their friends called the lift company.’
I look around the room, trying to imagine it.
‘But one of them found Felix’s body while Elena was stuck in there,’ Patrick says. ‘So they weren’t all there trying to help Elena. Someone else must have been outside, as well as Felix, obviously. Why would a guest go outside when Elena’s stuck in the lift?’
‘To murder Felix, obviously,’ I say, mostly to get a rise out of Patrick. It works, sort of, because Patrick’s head jerks up in surprise and he gives me a look like he’s trying to figure me out. (Good luck, buddy. Smarter people than you have tried.)
But all he says is, ‘I’m gonna take some photos of the house and the place where Felix … fell.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know yet. Maybe there’s something here. I’m just being thorough. Measure twice, cut once.’
‘Something that the police missed?’ I ask his back, which ignores me.
Patrick starts by snapping photos of the lift control panel, then moves on to the dishes in the kitchen. I’m not sure any crime has been solved by a photo of a hummus-smeared bowl, but I don’t bring this up.
‘I’ll go upstairs and get Elena’s stuff,’ I say instead. ‘I’ve got the list of what she wants.’
The main bedroom is tidier than it is downstairs. The bed is made, the curtains drawn and there’s only one pair of shoes on the floor, half-kicked under the bed. It doesn’t take me long to pack Elena a bag of clothes. (How many Breton t-shirts and elasticated skirts can one woman own?)
By the time I get back downstairs, Patrick is gone.
‘Hello?’ I call. Nothing. I walk through the house, wondering if washing the dishes constitutes interfering with a crime scene, given the case is not yet closed. There’s no police tape, and Elena said she was allowed back in the house, so I open the dishwasher and start stacking.
Ten minutes later I find Patrick out on the balcony, head craned to look back up towards the house and at the path that snakes around one side, cutting a zig-zag trail through the scrub.
‘What was Felix doing up there?’ he asks.
‘It’s pretty.’
‘At night?’
‘Peaceful, then?’
‘Going outside in the middle of a party for a nature walk – that’s weird,’ Patrick says.
‘Not if he was thinking about killing himself.’
He looks at me. ‘You’re not what you’d call a sentimental person, huh?’
‘I have my moments.’
‘Me neither,’ Patrick says. ‘I don’t think my family does sentiment.’
‘Elena literally works with special needs kids. She’s all sentiment.’
‘Maybe it skips a generation.’
‘You’re the same generation,’ I point out.
‘You’re very argumentative today.’
‘Not just today.’
Patrick grins and we’re back stuffing ourselves with profiteroles under that table, wiping custard off our fancy wedding clothes.
You couldn’t waterboard it out of me in front of Patrick, but it feels nice to hang out with someone who a) is not speaking French at me, and b) hasn’t recently hooked up with either my boyfriend or my best friend (to the best of my knowledge anyway: Ben is bi and Patrick is …
I have no idea where Patrick’s interests lie).
‘Do you want to come up the path with me?’ Patrick asks.
‘Sure.’ Whether Felix fell or jumped or was pushed, I want to see where it happened.
I’ve only done the walk once before. The week after the house settled, Felix and Elena invited me and Aunty Sam over for what would prove to be a rare visit.
All I remember from that day was Felix going on about how expensive it all was and Aunty Sam giving him some stick about his property portfolio, as she called it.
‘Portfolio’ seemed like a stretch to describe a single house, but I think Aunty Sam disapproved of Felix’s finance bro lifestyle, which seemed to be all about buying the best house, car and clothes you could (almost) afford and worrying about the cost later.
Back then, I hadn’t been conscious of any dangers walking on the path that snakes up the cliff next to the house.
Now, I’m aware of how easily a person could lose their footing and their balance.
Every time my foot skids in the dirt, my stomach lurches in fear.
At one point, I embarrass myself by grabbing at Patrick’s t-shirt, which he politely ignores.
When we get to the place where a scrap of torn police tape flutters from one of the bushes, I stop. ‘I guess this is where the police think he fell,’ I say.
‘Or jumped or was pushed.’
We both look down at the path we’ve come up, surrounded by overgrown scrub and a couple of trees hunched into absurd angles by years of Perth winds. Patrick snaps photos of the view with his phone, including closeups of bushes where branches have been snapped off.
‘If you fell from here, don’t you think you could hold on to a bush or something and slow yourself down enough not to fall?’ Patrick says.
‘You’d really have to throw yourself into the air to make it all the way down to the water,’ I say.
‘Or someone could throw you,’ Patrick says.
Felix was not a huge guy, but I can’t imagine him calmly allowing himself to be picked up and thrown to his death. If it happened that way, his attacker must have been big. Marvel Cinematic Universe big.
Patrick crouches down to look at the patch of dirt. He snaps a few more photos. ‘There are a few broken branches here and we passed some on the way up, too. Maybe he did grab on to them.’
‘Or it could have been the weight of his body snapping off branches,’ I say.
I run a couple of scenarios in my head: a) Felix feeling himself slip and reaching out for a bush; b) Felix suffering from a secret misery and throwing himself dramatically from the cliff’s highest point; c) Felix in the muscular arms of the Hulk, trying to stop himself from being thrown down the …
‘It could have been the cops as well,’ I say. ‘They might have snapped off some branches while looking around. Or maybe if Elena and Felix’s friends came up here when they were looking for him, they did it.’
‘Can you tell me everything you know about that night?’ Patrick asks, snapping a photo of my face when I turn to look at him.
‘Hey. Delete that.’
‘Shut up, you look great. Windswept chic is in. Now, come on: you only told me the bare bones. I want to know everything.’
I give him the spiel, the best I can put together from that first phone call with Aunty Sam, the subsequent texts back and forth, and the long conversation we had on the drive home from the airport when she seemed so calm and I was the one with the questions.
‘Felix and Elena were having a party the night that he died,’ I say.
‘Not a proper party, just like some friends over for pizza. They’d finished dinner, I guess – there were loads of plates in the sink, so they must have.
Although who uses plates for pizza when you can just eat out of the box?
Was there dessert? I don’t know. Nobody mentioned dessert, but then maybe they were having a little break … ’
‘When I said tell me everything,’ Patrick interrupts, ‘you know that’s a turn of phrase, right?’
‘Anyway, Felix wasn’t feeling great. He wanted some fresh air – that’s what Elena said. Something like that.’
‘Elena didn’t go with him?’ Patrick asks.
‘No.’
‘Because it’d be hard to get her wheelchair up the path?’ he says.
‘You know she can use a stick too?’
He gives me a look. ‘She’s my sister.’
‘Then don’t ask silly questions. I assume she didn’t go with him because they were in the middle of a party and it would have been weird if they both wandered off and left their guests on their own. Or maybe it was because she had to go upstairs. That’s why she was in the lift when it got stuck.’
‘And while she was stuck in there, one of their friends found Felix?’ Patrick asks.
‘Yeah, they must have gone looking for him at some point. They found his body in the water. The police said he probably hit his head during the fall and would have been unconscious when he landed.’ It’s a moment I try not to think about too much.
A breeze is ruffling my hair and t-shirt, and out on the water little white boats, which are probably not so little up close, draw lines of whitecaps in the surf. It really is quite picturesque if you can forget why we’re here. I look over at Patrick, who hasn’t forgotten why we are here.
‘If Felix didn’t jump and he didn’t fall, then who pushed him – hypothetically?’ Patrick asks. ‘Can you think of anyone other than my sister who would have had a motive?’
I’m surprised. ‘Elena? For the life insurance, you mean?’
Elena, who spent every Christmas Day serving food to the homeless (before she got married and Felix kicked up a stink about it)?
Elena, who spends her days teaching kids with intellectual disabilities?
Even when she was raking it in for being photogenic in athleisure, I never got the impression that Elena cared much about money.
Now Patrick looks surprised – we’re taking turns, apparently. ‘I meant more because your brother put her in that wheelchair,’ he says.