17 #4
Lyssa made a show of putting the recorder away, but once it was out of sight in her bag, she pressed the record button before withdrawing her hand.
It broke her own self-imposed rules of ethics to do this, but if she was right, and she was about to hear the confessions of a killer, surely she could not justify her failure to provide evidence of such an awful crime?
And if, after all, she was wrong, she could easily delete it.
Emily sighed faintly. Whether her sigh was one of relief or resignation, Lyssa wasn’t quite sure.
The old woman turned to stare back out of the window, deliberately breaking eye contact.
‘I never thought I would speak these words to another living – or even dead – soul,’ Emily said simply. ‘But I killed her.’
For a moment, Lyssa thought and felt nothing – not even satisfaction that she’d got it right. For, ever since she’d started to question the accident or suicide version of Monty’s death, she’d gone over that night, running the suspects through her mind, and kept coming back to the same answer.
Glen’s parents had the most obvious motive, but both the cine-camera footage and the police investigations had proved that they’d never left the party once Monty had gone into the garden.
And whilst Racey Joiner and even some of the other band members might have resented Monty, their motive was relatively weak.
Only Emily Bannister had never come under suspicion – because of her young age, and because she was presumed to be in bed, and no one had noticed her sneaking out. Which, given the state of the majority of the rather drunken and drug-fuelled guests, was probably not that surprising.
But children did kill, as had become sadly only too clear over the intervening decades.
And when she’d viewed the cine film of Amelia’s birthday party last night, and seen the image of a young child, peering through the crack in the half-open door, gazing in at the grown-up party taking place beyond, things began to add up.
If Emily had been awake and spying on the party, who was to say she might not have spotted Amelia leaving, and followed her into the garden?
Children picked up on a lot more about tensions within a family than adults liked to admit.
It wasn’t hard to believe that she knew how her parents and older siblings resented Monty and blamed her for what they must have thought of as Glen’s betrayal in leaving her his fortune, instead of themselves.
And children could be very protective of their parents . . .
Suddenly, the moment of numbness evaporated, and Lyssa felt herself go cold in shock. The thought of a child being responsible for Monty’s death made her feel rather ill, and for a moment her vision seemed to recede in black spots, before coming back.
She took a long, slow, deep breath. But her hands were icy, and she was sure she had started to shiver a little.
Lyssa realised that the seconds were passing by, and that Emily remained ominously silent. She was just beginning to wonder if she was going to say anything more at all, when the old woman stirred herself once more.
‘I was eleven years old. I didn’t understand death.
And what happened never seemed real.’ Still staring out of the window but probably seeing a very different garden in her mind’s eye – one that was illuminated only by moonlight – Emily shook her head.
‘I remember that I just couldn’t get to sleep, with the sound of the party and music and everything.
It was easy to sneak down the stairs and through the kitchen.
I peeped in through a door to watch them all dancing, then I slipped out the back door and into the garden.
I was in my pyjamas and slippers. I just wanted to see the water lilies, of all things. ’
At this she turned briefly to look at Lyssa and then quickly away again – as if human contact was the last thing she could withstand.
Watching the reflection of Emily’s face in the glass, Lyssa saw the old woman’s lips tug up into what might have been called a smile.
‘I’d never seen water lilies before, you see – there weren’t exactly a lot of them floating around the estate!
But they were everywhere in my fairy-story books – with a fairy sitting on them, or a frog prince, or what have you.
They looked so beautiful and magical – I never thought that they might exist in real life.
But on the drive over to the party, I heard my parents talking about the fancy garden Glen had been going on about, and how he’d had a fountain put in the pond and added more water lilies in case the ones already there died. ’
The old woman shifted a little on her seat, and Lyssa instinctively knew that she couldn’t sit in any position without being in pain.
‘I became so excited at the thought of seeing them, but when we arrived Mum made me take a bath and go to bed instead. I was so disappointed. And after lying in bed for what felt like ages, I decided I would sneak out and go and find them anyway.’
Emily Bannister sighed. ‘Strange, isn’t it, how something so .
. . innocent, could lead to something so evil.
But there was a full moon and party lights strung up all over the place as well, so I found the pond all right, and that’s when I saw her – sitting at the edge of the pond, dangling her feet in the water, swaying a bit, and drinking from a glass.
Monty. Oh, how we all hated her. Me especially. Do you know why?’
She glanced briefly at Lyssa, who nodded.
‘You wanted to be an artist,’ Lyssa all but whispered.
She was still feeling a little bit disembodied.
It had been one thing to come here with a vague theory that Emily might have had something to do with Monty’s death, but deep down she hadn’t really believed it.
Had she? But here she was, calmly listening to a killer’s confession.
It was all rather surreal.