THEN
This is what happens when you put a pair of unemployed teenagers in charge of a murder investigation.
What we lack in investigative skills we make up for in free time.
Lilia and Ben are in their school uniform because they still have two more days left in the term before holidays begin.
The way Lilia looks, you’d think she had her school uniform tailored, but, nope, she just looks like that. In everything.
Ben having his licence – and, more importantly, access to his mother’s car – almost takes the sting out of his presence.
I’m tucked into the back seat with Patrick.
It’s just about possible to pretend we’re catching an Uber and have nothing in common with the couple in the front seats, even if they insist on trying to engage us in conversation.
‘Do you think we should tell Sarah and Farnoosh about the life insurance claim?’ I ask Patrick, keeping my voice as low as I can without it becoming a whisper. Farnoosh, Sarah’s wife, had apparently been at the party too.
‘I don’t think so, at least not at first,’ Patrick says. ‘We don’t want them to worry that we’re trying to implicate anyone, especially them.’
‘So what do we say to them?’
‘I may have implied on the phone that you need some closure,’ Lilia says from the front seat before Patrick can answer. (Super hearing is one more thing she has that I don’t.)
‘What?’ I say, showing great restraint by not shouting.
‘I didn’t know what else to say. It was that or requesting a group piano lesson, and I thought that might seem suspicious,’ Lilia says.
‘Brilliant.’
‘It’ll be fine,’ Patrick says, and I can tell from his soothing tone that he knows how pissed off I am. ‘Heidi, your only job is to look haunted, maybe a little depressed.’ He looks across the car at me. ‘Yeah, that’s perfect.’
Ben parks in the carport of a salmon-brick home with a half-dead lawn and a hatchback EV charging next to us.
‘Ben, you stay in the car in case we need a quick getaway,’ Patrick says as Ben opens the driver’s door.
‘Are you joking?’
‘These are murder suspects we’re interviewing,’ Patrick says, his face flat as a dead man’s heart monitor.
‘Is he serious?’ Ben looks to Lilia, the court of appeal, and her eyes flutter, hummingbird-fast, to mine and back before she answers.
‘It probably makes sense,’ she says. ‘Just in case.’
Ben slams the car door shut, but he doesn’t fang it out of there.
‘Quick getaway,’ I say to Patrick as we walk to the front door. ‘You’re psychotic.’
‘Aren’t you glad I’m on your side?’
Neither of us look at Lilia.
Sarah answers the door in jeans and a sloppy t-shirt with T-Rex spelled out in diamantes, which is threatening to fall off her shoulder. She’s around Elena’s age, give or take, with a nice smile and a mullet that has to be ironic.
‘Lilia,’ she says warmly. She gives her a hug, which doesn’t seem like a thing teachers are supposed to do these days, but Lilia doesn’t seem surprised. ‘How are you holding up?’
‘I’m doing okay,’ Lilia say. ‘This is Felix’s little sister, Heidi, who I told you about and her, uh, Patrick. He’s Elena’s brother.’
Sarah hugs each of us and she’s stronger than she looks. ‘Come in.’
‘Thanks for having us,’ Patrick says as she leads us inside.
‘How’s Elena doing?’
‘It’s hard, but you know.’ Patrick looks like he’s trying the haunted and depressed thing, too. At least he’s got the cheekbones for it. ‘She’s getting through it.’
‘Come through to the living room and I’ll put on some tea.’
We follow Sarah to an open-plan kitchen-dining area where a woman is perched at the kitchen bench on a stool, tapping at a laptop. She’s wearing athleisure, but the kind that’s not really designed for the gym.
‘Farnoosh,’ Sarah says, ‘this is Felix’s sister, Heidi, and Elena’s brother, Patrick. You remember Lilia, my student. I said she was coming by?’
Farnoosh smiles, but her eyes almost immediately flick back to her computer screen. ‘Nice to meet you,’ she tells the screen. And then, ‘Sorry, I’m on deadline.’
‘This way,’ Sarah says, leading us to a smaller room overfilled with two leather couches, an upright piano and a gigantic bookshelf that immediately puts me at ease. The urge to scan the spines of the books fights with my desire to charm this stranger into telling us something important.
‘Lilia said you might have some questions about the night Felix died, which I absolutely understand. I’d love to help any way I can,’ Sarah says as we all take a seat.
Patrick and I drop onto the biggest couch.
Sarah perches on the other. Lilia eyeballs the cushion next to me like she’s thinking about it, then takes the spot next to Sarah instead.
It’s at that exact moment that I realise my focus up to this point has been on looking haunted, not coming up with something to say.
I look at Patrick, hoping he’ll jump in.
‘You were with Felix and Elena that night,’ he says in that special voice he uses when he’s trying to charm people. ‘I guess we – Heidi and I – are trying to come to terms with what happened, and we wanted to talk to the people who were there.’
Sarah nods. ‘That makes perfect sense,’ she says, which is a surprise to me, because does it?
‘You went over for dinner, is that right?’
‘Pizza and drinks, yeah. Elena invited a few of us. We all adore Elena at work – you know what she’s like – but we’d never met Felix. Then, a few weeks ago she invited us over.’
‘What was the party like?’ Patrick asks.
‘Before Felix died?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Fun,’ Sarah says. Then she looks guiltily at me. ‘Sorry.’
‘I’m fine,’ I say, hoping the rest of my face is adding: But I need more closure.
‘Elena introduced us to Felix, who was great, and we got to check out the house. It’s super impressive.’
There’s a roar from outside as a neighbour starts up what could be a lawnmower, a chainsaw or a rocket being launched into space.
‘How did Felix seem that night?’ Patrick asks, raising his voice over the noise.
‘He was charming. I remember he kept topping up our drinks all night.’
‘Was Felix drinking?’ I ask. I know how charming my brother could be, but I also know how the mask slipped a little more readily when he was drunk.
Sarah frowns. ‘Sure. I think so. It was that kind of a night.’
‘What else happened?’ Patrick asks.
‘We had a few drinks, some crackers and hummus, then the pizzas arrived. Afterwards we were sitting around with more drinks and Felix said something about popping outside.’ Sarah sat forward in her chair. ‘Sorry, I was going to make tea. Do you guys want one?’
Patrick waves the tea away, although I would have quite liked one. ‘We’re fine. What happened then?’
‘Felix went outside, but the rest of us were hanging out on the couches. The aircon was cranked pretty high and Elena wanted to go upstairs to grab a cardigan. That’s when the lift got stuck.
You know about that, right?’ Patrick nods as Sarah continues, ‘It was wild. We thought Elena was joking around at first – she can have a black sense of humour sometimes – so I was laughing. Then we realised she was really stuck.’
‘What did you do?’
‘We tried to press the button to bring the lift down and that didn’t work.
Then we tried to make it go up and that didn’t work, either.
Someone – I think it was Haruto – said we were making it worse, that we were confusing the system.
He thinks he’s an engineering expert, because he built his own robot one time.
’ Sarah adds the last line with a laugh.
Patrick and I exchange glances, and I wonder if he’s curious about the robot too.
(How big? What does it do? Any chance it could push a man to his death?)
‘Eventually, I guess Elena remembered she had her phone in her pocket, because she called me,’ Sarah says.
‘Why you?’ Lilia interrupts and we all look at her. I can’t be the only one who sort of forgot she was there.
‘What do you mean?’ Sarah asks.
There’s a pink splotchiness on Lilia’s neck that’s at odds with the casual tone as she clarifies: ‘Why wouldn’t Elena call Felix, her husband, first?’
‘He was still outside. Farnoosh went to find him to see if he could help, but, well, you know what happened.’
‘That makes sense,’ Lilia says.
‘Elena told me to call the number on the lift control panel, so I did. The technician talked me through a system reset and Elena was probably only in there for twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes, in the end.’
‘That must have been scary,’ I say, partly because it’s true and partly because Lilia’s intrusion into this interrogation is giving me the shits.
Sarah shrugs. ‘Honestly, it was kind of exciting. Better than playing Trivial Pursuit or something.’ She winces at her own words. ‘Obviously I didn’t know about Felix then.’
‘It’s okay,’ I say.
‘Pretty weird to have two accidents happen in the same night,’ Sarah says.
It’s more than weird, it’s suggestive. Did someone want to keep Elena trapped in the lift while Felix was being attacked?
‘Did anyone use the lift before Elena did?’ Patrick asks.
‘No. We took the stairs on the house tour.’
‘And Felix was outside the whole time Elena was in the lift?’ I ask.
‘He went outside just before Elena went upstairs.’
‘Did the lift technician say anything about what might have happened to the lift?’ Patrick says.
‘Like what?’
‘Could it have been done on purpose?’
Sarah seems genuinely surprised, like she couldn’t even spell the word sabotage. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t.’
‘When did Farnoosh find Felix?’ Patrick asks.
‘It was before we finally got Elena out of the lift,’ Sarah says. ‘She … hold on.’ Sarah turns towards the door. ‘Farnoosh!’
Farnoosh appears in the doorway, phone in hand. ‘What is it?’
‘Do you have a sec or are you up against it?’
Farnoosh looks at the three of us, possibly trying to decide if we are worth her time. ‘I’m waiting for a call back from a dodgy councillor,’ she says. ‘But until then, sure. What’s going on?’