Chapter 16
And now we’re at the seaside. I don’t remember the last time I just hung out at the seaside with a few friends.
Not that this lot are friends, of course. But they’re not exactly colleagues, they’re certainly not family, and ‘acquaintances’ sounds a bit Victorian. Ugh. Whatever. We’re at the seaside together and that’s good enough for me.
Also, we’re not really ‘hanging out’, given our to-do list for the next few days (avoid detection by angry shaven-headed thug, avoid police, trace killer).
But I’m not feeling unhappier than before we got into this mess.
I expected to feel horrible after spending a few days with the same people. Very discomfiting.
Part of that is Em’s influence. I’ve never met anyone who does what I do.
She’s not quite as good, of course, but it’s still interesting, like seeing yourself from outside.
There’s a kind of ‘raw performer’ element about her that I’m sure I used to have, before I started twisting my ankle on short drops or leaving coasters everywhere.
And if I’m honest, I’m curious about her too.
Where did she and her sister come from? I don’t quite buy their ‘piscining’ story, which seems a bit semi-baked to me – the sort I might trot out to deter annoying questions.
They mentioned someone called Claudia a couple of days ago, but that’s hardly a lead, and I don’t have any leverage to ask.
Worth keeping an eye on, our Em.
We know – thanks, Jonny – that Lulu Harcourt is studying textiles, and he’s somehow got into her (private) BeReal too.
She goes to a lot of gigs, and she seems to spend the rest of her free time in a three-storey café deep in the Lanes.
It’s one of those places where students can turn up and play a board game for five hours straight on one latte without the management throwing them out.
One other thing we know is that her mother’s alibi is watertight.
On the train journey, Jonny logged in to a website he uses sometimes when he and the girls are planning their own interlopes.
It’s a flight tracker for private planes, and he confirmed that Bunny Winthrop’s Embraer private jet had indeed made the journey back to the UK the day before yesterday.
So Charli seems to have told us the truth there.
It’s a fair way from the King’s Road to Brighton’s Lanes. I guess in both places you’ll have your idea of what a functioning human society looks like fundamentally challenged. But the vibe in the Lanes is a trifle more laid-back, and getting served in Six Sides of Sourdough is taking a while.
The place is lined with faintly international wall-hangings.
There’s a noticeboard covered in yellowing adverts for events: ‘Vibraphone lessons’, ‘Uric therapy workshop’, ‘Syndicalist crochet slam’.
The terracotta tip pot by the till looks like it was thrown by an employee: on the side, glazed in wobbly writing, is the word RESIST. It’s very, very studenty here.
If I’d been to uni, I bet I’d be nostalgic now.
Elle wanders off while we queue, and a few minutes later comes back excited.
‘She’s here,’ she says. ‘Upstairs, with a friend.’
‘What’s she doing?’
‘Playing a board game. Couldn’t see which one. Should I go back and check?’
‘No, Elle. No, that’s great. OK, how shall we do this?’ We talked on the way down about how we might make our approach, but we didn’t come up with the final answer.
I was all for playing student welfare officers – I could just about pass for a PhD who had taken his time over his studies, and the other three are so fresh-faced they could plausibly be doing master’s degrees and making cash on the side by asking troubled undergraduates how they’re doing.
Em wanted to go in harder – pretending to be from the authorities – because she reckons that as the heiress, Lulu’s got a good chance of having killed her father, or having him killed.
I said that was risky; I have a faint memory that impersonating a police officer is a crime that comes with an especially long sentence.
The police don’t like it when you do impressions of them.
(I find this particularly unfair, because apparently they’re allowed to do impressions of normal people and that’s just ‘undercover work’.) In the end, we persuaded Em round to my view.
The other thing hobbling us is what we’re actually going to say. Em wanted to ask about the death; I think we should just gently enquire about Dead Man Davy and lead her onwards from there.
We head upstairs as two unconnected couples. Elle and Jonny go first, flump themselves down in the corner on a pair of beanbags, and start playing an incredibly involved board game that looks from the box like it’s about the glass-blowing industry in fifteenth-century Europe.
Once Em and I have got our teas (fennel and lemongrass for me; builder’s for her, with what the pencil-moustache and pencil-neck barista disapprovingly refers to as ‘teat milk’), we follow along. Upstairs we spot our mark immediately. Poor thing, I think.
Lulu Harcourt doesn’t look terribly sad from the outside, but that’s not what grief is like, of course.
She’s nineteen years old, I know that, and although I don’t know much about textiles, you wouldn’t think she did either.
She’s in a big, shapeless grey top over black leggings, capped with massive trainers the size of snowshoes.
‘Lulu?’ She looks up.
‘Hi. I’m Kiki, from Student Services,’ says Em. ‘This is my colleague, Kevin.’
I wave, awkwardly. ‘Hi.’
‘Do you mind if we have a little chat with you?’ Lulu shrugs, and Em glances at the girl with her. ‘I mean … in private?’
Lulu gives us a flat look, then looks at her friend and rolls her eyes. ‘Does it have to be?’
I nod. ‘I’m so sorry. GDPR rules. We’d go to prison if we discussed personal Student Service details in front of anyone else.’
‘Can you come back another time?’
‘No,’ says Em. ‘We’re wall-to-wall this week.’
‘It’s all right,’ says the other girl. ‘I have to get to a class anyway.’
After a lot of coat-gathering and one final throw of the dice, Lulu’s friend gives her a big hug, and leaves.
Lulu takes a photo of the board set-up, then starts packing away the pieces.
From the box, the aim of the game appears to be to decarbonise the power grid while simultaneously avoiding blackouts and any investment in new nuclear. What’s wrong with Uno?
Eventually we have Lulu Harcourt to ourselves. She’s sitting in the tatty remains of a huge imperial wicker chair. Em and I are on a squashy sofa facing her. Nobody is sitting upright.
‘Thank you for your time, Lulu. I know this can’t be easy.’
‘If you’re here about Faisal, I told you guys everything I know. Then I told the police twice.’
I’m about to reassure her that we’re not here to talk about Faisal, like an idiot, and then I feel gentle pressure from my side.
‘I’m so sorry,’ says Em. ‘There was a burst tap at the office. Your notes got a bit mushy. Do you think you could bear to tell us again?’
Lulu sighs, Em clicks her pen, I surreptitiously hit ‘record’ on my Dictaphone app, and we’re off to the races.
Here’s how it went. Oh, incidentally, if you’re ever involved in this kind of situation, do try to sweep your phone for anything incriminating before your arrest. I have a hunch that a fifty-minute chat with the daughter of the deceased on my Voice Memos will make a pretty strong plank of circumstantial evidence at trial.
Lulu was just out of a relationship. Now, I know what you’re thinking.
Students are always in or out of a relationship.
If you’re over a certain age reading this, you’ll be thinking: Students these days, they’re all polysexual or something, aren’t they, not like when we were young, when our icons were normal, straightforward, male-presenting males and womanly women, like Mick Jagger and David Bowie and Grace Jones and … er … er …
Well, Lulu’s had been an old-fashioned hetero love match, or so she’d thought at first. Faisal was Iranian – sorry, Persian, she explained (about five minutes of my recording from the first mention of the P word is a severely garbled history of Middle Eastern politics) – and he was over here studying for a master’s.
I never went to university. I put York on my CV – I reasoned I should go Russell Group, but not get cocky and claim Oxbridge (partly because I’ve seen just how much other Oxbridge types enjoy quizzing you about exactly what sort of gown you wore to breakfast).
So I have no experience of this world. But apparently, a master’s student seems very glamorous and worldly-wise to the average undergraduate.
Looked at from the other end of the telescope, of course, you can see that all these people are basically twelve.
But Faisal had impressed Lulu. He’d taken her to restaurants.
He’d bought her a few presents: clothes from decent shops, jewellery a cut above the costume stuff most students can afford. He’d been wooing her.
And then he’d turned.
One night, they’d been in her room. He’d come over around six, they’d slept together straight away, and then they’d spent the rest of the evening chatting, ordering a takeaway (more largesse by Faisal), and watching other teenagers play video games online.
Faisal was religious, but he drank, and they’d both had a fair bit to drink when he fell asleep in her bed.
Lulu wanted to retrieve a photo from Faisal’s phone. Her bright idea was that she’d send herself some of the photos on his camera roll, then get them printed out onto some bunting to celebrate their six-week anniversary. (I know, I know. The sheer amount of free time students have.)