The murder victim had been in the library with me.
I had thought my presence there all night was an alibi, but it wasn’t. It was incriminating.
The police clearly didn’t have enough to arrest me, but before long they’d check Poppy Kerr’s ID card and figure out that our time in the library overlapped. I just had to hope that Poppy left a while before her time of death – and that the inevitable DNA test on my blood-soaked shirt came back as my own.
The knowledge that I had seen Poppy just hours before she was killed should have filled me with dread. I should have been terrified that I was the murderer, but I wasn’t. I felt very little and remembered even less. That oppressive sense of detachment lulled me to sleep while still fully clothed, spread-eagled on my bedsheets.
I awoke to a quiet rustling, and the acute sense that I was not alone. For a disorientated moment, I thought the police were still here, that I’d drifted off mid-interview. I’d been dreaming of handcuffs and of prison, and of how devastated my parents would be to see their only daughter in chains. My mum in a hospital bed, reaching for me and I wasn’t there. Noémie seeing my face on the front-page news, tossing the paper away in disgust. Aidan, my sweet little brother Aidan, scared to come near me. Those images bled into the daylight, and it took me longer than usual to separate them from reality.
When the scene in the bedroom finally solidified, I saw Lottie rifling through the copy ofThus Spoke ZarathustraI’d used to prop open the window. It was the book I’d read more than any other, and was filled with my own marginalia; musings and offshoots of thought from the original text. An immediate feeling of vulnerability settled on my skin like sunburn, pink and raw.
‘What are you doing?’ I croaked.
Lottie looked up at me. ‘Sorry. I went to close the window, because it was cold in here and I didn’t want you to freeze, and I ended up flicking through the book.’ Her forefinger hovered over a page I’d underlined and annotated. ‘“I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.” That’s beautiful.’ She smiled, with an expression on her face I couldn’t parse. ‘As is this rose you’ve drawn in the margin.’
Heat rushed to my cheeks as I grabbed the tome and noticed the camera in her other hand. Had she been taking pictures of my marginalia? Or was she really just casually flipping through the book with no ulterior motive?
She laid down her camera, kicked off her shoes and clambered up on to her bunk, which was still in a state of disarray from her 4 a.m. departure. ‘Why philosophy?’
I blinked. ‘What?’
‘I mean, why are you studying philosophy? I don’t think I’ve ever asked you before.’
Propping my pillows up against the wall so I could sit and face her, I was struck by how intensely vulnerable it is to share a bedroom with someone. To show them the innocence of you in sleep. Maybe it was that air of exposure that made me offer my real answer – not just the one I’d parroted to impress Le Conte in my first class. Or maybe it was the ritual, stripping back the hard veneers I’d worked so hard to build.
‘Because as much as I love the ideas, the actual philosophers are absolutely batshitinsane, and I adore them dearly.’ I smiled. ‘Like, Diogenes lived in a wine barrel and owned only a cloak and a staff. He walked backwards down the street to confuse other pedestrians. Once he overheard Plato define man as a “featherless biped”, and Diogenes ran out and plucked a chicken. He returned to Plato and shouted, “Behold! I’ve brought you a man!”’
I did a grand gladiatorial accent on this last part, and Lottie laughed.
‘That’s hilarious. Who else?’
‘Pythagoras –’
‘The triangle dude?’
‘Yup, although a lot of scholars don’t think his eponymous theorem was even his. But that’s a much more boring story. He was actually well-known as a mystic, and there was a cult who embraced his philosophy of living.’ I could feel myself talking too fast, but the stories were gushing out of me. ‘The cult had all these bizarre customs, like members couldn’t take public roads, eat beans, bake bread or put their left shoe on first. Some people think he was killed by an angry mob that chased him to the edge of a bean field. Not wanting to touch the beans, he stood at the side of the field until the mob caught up to him and bludgeoned him to death.’
‘Incredible.’
‘Thenthere was Jeremy Bentham, who . . . god, sorry.’ Suddenly the fresh, pink vulnerability was too much, and deep- rooted paranoia told me the entertainment on her face was built on mockery. That she’d tell her hockey friends about how much of a loser I was. So I muttered, ‘This is probably extremely boring for you. I’ll shut up.’
Lottie’s grin spread from freckled dimple to freckled dimple. ‘No! Please don’t. I love hearing you talk like this. It makes a nice change from all the brooding.’
Ordinarily I’d take almighty offence at this, but there was something in the playful levity of her tone that made me think she was just trying to be nice.
I smiled back, trying to ignore the pull of my scar as my lips parted. ‘Okay, so in Bentham’s will, he demanded that his remains be publicly dissected by a friend of his. Invitations were sent out to see the great philosopher opened up. He also bequeathed twenty-six mourning rings to his mates.’
‘Mourning rings?’
‘Yeah. They featured a silhouette of his bust and strands of his hair. I’m surprised they haven’t caught on.’
Lottie snorted. ‘If you die and don’t bequeath a mourning ring to me, I’ll be livid.’
But somehow, the joke seemed to kill the moment; we both knew we weren’t good enough friends for mourning rings. Lottie looked away, peering out of the window towards the North Tower. Shame creeping up my chest like ivy, I followed her gaze. A raven was perched on the highest window and the sky outside was mottled like a bruise.
‘I’m sorry for giving your shirt to the police,’ Lottie said finally.
‘Oh.’
‘I mean, I’m assuming you knew that was me.’
‘Well, yeah. The subsequent interrogation gave you away, somewhat.’
Lottie met my gaze once again. ‘They said you were in the library all night. So you really did just fall and hit your head?’
‘I really did just fall and hit my head.’
The lie was beginning to feel natural, now, and it frightened me. I got the sense that every time I recited this cobbled- together version of events, I’d erase the truth of what really happened – because the fact of the matter was that I still didn’t know.
There was still every chance that I killed Poppy.