Home > The Smart Woman's Guide to Murder

The Smart Woman's Guide to Murder
Author: VICTORIA DOWD

It happened when the snow first fell, violet white, branding our eyes with its glare and covering our steps almost as soon as we had lifted our feet. The cold bit deep into our faces and when we opened our mouths to speak, snow singed our tongues. The wind laced round our legs as we leaned into the fierce air.

It was just as Mother shouted towards Aunt Charlotte, ‘This is madness!’ that we first caught sight of the body.

The woman was only half visible beneath the rotten trunk of a long-dead tree, the snow silently covering her. The tree had fallen long before this body appeared, parts of its withered trunk already eaten away. She had been shoved into its hollow along with her strange nest of gaudy scarves and silk shawls. Fully dressed, she was wedged face down in the dirt, her legs impolitely spread, a disrespectful pose for her final moment. I wanted to rush over, gently ease her legs together and cover her carefully with one of her thin scarves. It was strange that the preservation of her dignity could overshadow the simple fact that someone had killed her.

The whip of the storm stung our raw faces. She would be completely lost under her blanket of snow soon. She must have lain here since last night, cold pearls of snow gathering across her back. Whoever had done this, whoever had handled her like so much meat, had stepped outside the boundaries of humanity.

I could feel the familiar panic rising like bile. There was a blank moment, the same as climbing into a scalding bath, before I understood the pain, before it settled and gathered itself. Then it dragged up through me.

I tipped my head back and stared into the battlefield sky. Two stinging tears were dislodged and traced down my cheeks, framing my face. The black twigs of the tree clawed at the sky, as if they too were trying to escape. We stood, three women, none of whom had ever known how to respond to death, staring at the crude tomb of a stranger. A bird watched me, its cold charcoal eyes saying, I know you. Suddenly, its wings splashed up, an ink stain against the sky.

None of us could have known, when we first climbed the steps of the house, just how much blood was going to flow in those next forty-eight hours. The Slaughter House, that’s what the press would call it later.

* * *

Six women and a dog assembled in an isolated country house. There was one non-woman, as Mother refers to men, but he’s one of the dead now too. We’re all very Bechdel here. I don’t think of murder as inherently masculine. Certainly not now. But I do think about murder a lot. Most of the women I know do. Maybe that’s just the company I keep.

This had started out as some aspirational weekend retreat for my mother’s book club; I was just the uninvited guest. They had a reading list as challenging as most middle-class toilets and, for reasons that will become obvious, I’d always known it as booze club. Some of us would go on to kill, some would die. I survived. When our story finally emerged, it went as viral as the plague, but we women remained a collection of loosely drawn figures, our story nothing more than a vapour trail. We just became ill-formed spectres and the subject of many fabulous speculations. Until now.

I always come back to my motto — the truth cannot be libellous. And the truth is that when we entered that house, we were like everyone else, with all our dirty little secrets and festering resentments.

What is also true is that my mother was certainly not the sort of person anyone would want by their side on a life-threatening weekend. As we drove down the long gravel drive to the house, she made her position quite clear.

‘Dearest Ursula.’

I held up my finger to interject.

‘You are not even supposed to be on this trip,’ Mother went on, ‘so please do not at any point feel the need to utter your opinion on anything. Stay silent throughout.’

I dropped my finger.

‘May I remind you, this is my one and only weekend away with my book club and you had to come and piss on it. You are here on my sufferance and if you hadn’t had another one of your incidents . . .’

‘Mother,’ I said, ‘I’ve not just wet myself. I’m sure I will cope.’

‘And yet you so rarely do.’

‘How hard can your book club be? You’ve read Gone Girl three times in a year.’

‘That is not the point. We are a serious literary group.’

‘Old detective novels and a few slightly titillating thrillers you relate to because the characters drink too much really doesn’t constitute a serious literary group.’

She pursed her lips with her usual motherly contempt. ‘If you hadn’t been doing your girl-in-the-attic routine again, I would be winging my way here without my self-absorbed child.’

‘I’m twenty-five!’

‘And yet you act like a teenager and dress like a pensioner.’

I turned to look at the side of her face. ‘Oh, so we’re doing the analysis thing again, are we? Can you just stop trying to fix me like I’m a leaky tap or something?’

The Look.

Mother’s side-line is trying to remake me in the way she might deal with an untidy bed, giving it hospital corners, clean fresh sheets every day and the fake sweet scent of lavender. My refusal of this sanitized treatment only angers her even more; my attempts to explain that there should be layers, stripes of life and sediment, are always met with her dismissal of the idea as just an excuse for dirt.

‘And,’ I added, ‘you did the “locking me in the attic” routine, as you so beautifully style it. Which is just shit parenting rather than Gothic fiction.’

‘That was because of the incidents after . . . your father left.’

Her foot slowly ground down into the accelerator as if it were someone’s throat. Whose is not important right now.

Mother and I have always had a very healthy relationship, full of banter and playful repartee. We have always been so close, ever since Dad’s death.

Dad was God, in case you were wondering. Until he died, of course. And no, he wasn’t murdered. Just a common or garden death.

I was thirteen when he died and Mother immediately sent me to boarding school. In fact, she ploughed much of the life insurance into my new school and spent most holidays at the bookshop working from dawn till dusk to keep me there. She owns an antiquarian bookshop in Kew and somehow resisted the temptation to call it Pandora’s Box. She’s Pandora and I’m Ursula, Ursula Smart. She never considered Ursula’s Box, that’s just not a thing. That, and the fact we’re not really called Ursula and Pandora Smart. Those are the pseudonyms I chose for us. My real name is another misdemeanour I set firmly at my mother’s door.

I looked out of the greasy car window. We’d arrived at Ambergris Towers. The vast carved façade of tombstone granite loomed down in disapproval. As with every journey I ever took with Mother, she had begun by telling me not to lean my filthy head against the glass. I’d started this one by posting #BoredWithMother comments on Twitter, and ended here, with my head resolutely against the car window, scrolling through various memes involving matricide.

‘You can put the bloody phone down now,’ Mother snapped. ‘Like a bloody worry bead.’ She opened the door and made one of her characteristic exiting-the-car final comments that don’t allow for any answer before the door shuts. It’s not the most charming of tactics, but it’s effective. ‘You’d think you’d have changed the screen by now.’

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