‘I think that’s enough for now,’ Disey says to the cops at last. ‘She’s had a long, tough day.’
‘You understand that –’
‘That you’ll need to ask her more questions, yes,’ she says. ‘This isn’t the first time we’ve been through something like this.’
One of the cops nods. ‘We’ll give you a call if we need her to come in again.’
It hits me like a punch in the stomach.
Call. Phones.
I called Matilda in the middle of the night, and begged her to come and help me. How long until they work that out? How long does it take to get hold of phone records?
And – oh no, what did I say?
I asked her to help. I asked her to please help me.
Can they get recordings of phone calls?
‘Come on, Pearlie,’ Disey says, taking my arm and steering me out of the room. I don’t know if she realises that she’s the only thing holding me up.
We have to wait for Phil. Every second we spend is somehow both a hundred years and the blink of an eye.
I’m waiting for the shout. For some cop somewhere in the building to check Matilda’s phone records and yell, ‘Eureka!’ For them to slam me up against the wall and cuff my hands behind my back. Disey and Shad will be yelling but the cops won’t care. They’ll take a mugshot, and it’ll be splashed across all the newspapers, and they’ll interview people who have been on board the Killer Girl Pearl train from the start about how they knew I was a killer.
They’ll interview Julian, won’t they?
‘She held me down in the bush in the middle of the night and tried to cut my heart out,’ he’ll say. ‘She’s a murderer. And that boyfriend of hers, he’s a murderer too.’
Maybe Finn is safer in fairyland. He can’t take the fall for murder out here. That’ll be all Tam.
But if he were here, Finn could fix this.
He would look everyone in the eye, and use that voice of his which says, ‘I am a fairy prince, and you must listen, and you must believe,’ and he would command everyone to disregard the evidence.
And they would do it. They’d let me go. They’d let Matilda go. They’d forget they ever suspected either of us.
But Finn’s not here. He might be able to appear in my dreams and heal my stab wounds, but he can’t fix this.
No one can. Especially not me.
Wait. No. There’s one person that might be able to fix this.
But a) she’s the worst person I’ve ever met in my whole life, b) she’s currently out of commission, what with the being wrapped in iron chains, and c) I have no idea where Holly hid her.
No. No. I am not seriously considering freeing Emily. Not a chance.
What would her reaction be if I woke her up and was like, ‘Rise and shine, Em, I need a favour! I need you to brainwash a whole bunch of people so I don’t go to jail for murder! BTW, can you save my boss too? The one that made the iron chains we wrapped you in?’
She probably wouldn’t even bother with the #1 fairy pastime of laughing at me. She’d just murder everyone I’ve ever met. And then that’d probably get pinned on me too.
There’s no one who can magic me out of this. I’m completely and utterly on my own.
We have to go to the funeral home after the police station, and even though it’s about eleven million degrees, the sweat dripping off me is cold.
Keep it together, Linford. Think.
Okay. If – when – they look at my phone records, and see that I called Matilda in the middle of the night, I’ll just deny everything. Phil was with me, after all. We’re each other’s alibis. ‘No, she didn’t call Matilda,’ she’d say. ‘We were watching Netflix, and –’
No, that’s a bad lie. They can probably tell when you’re watching stuff on Netflix.
‘We were talking,’ Phil could say.
‘Then how do you explain this call?’ the cops would say, angrily.
We’d look at each other, wide-eyed. ‘I don’t know,’ I would say.
Phil would groan. ‘Oh my God. Remember when you rolled over onto your phone and we couldn’t find it for like fifteen minutes? It must have been a butt dial.’
‘A butt dial,’ the police would say incredulously.
‘It must have been,’ I’d say, putting on my best upstanding face, the one I use when I have to represent the school at something.
Yes. I can sell this. Butt dial. I can make them believe that me calling Matilda was a mistake. A terrible coincidence.
And then, when I get Finn out, I can get him to brainwash everyone and no one will even think she’s guilty any more, and it will all be moot.
Provided they don’t look any deeper. Because if they look at my browser history, I’ll be in so much shit. They wouldn’t even ask any questions about all the fairy websites I visit. They’d see that my most recent searches include a whole bunch of medical articles and YouTube videos of surgery about how to cut someone open to get at their heart, and they’d throw me in the deepest darkest dungeons they have.
Why didn’t I ever listen to any of Shad’s rants about internet privacy? Why did I never go, ‘Hey, having a legit tech genius for a brother would be a fantastic opportunity to learn mad skillz at his knee in case I ever have to dodge a murder charge’ instead of, ‘Hey, now I can avoid having to learn a ton of complicated stuff because Shad will do it for me’?
And then there’s the fact that I have to get Phil to co operate if I want the butt dial defence to work, and in some ways, she’s even further away than Finn.
The funeral home is cold and sterile. They’ve tried to make it cheery and welcoming, but it’s like they haven’t quite worked out what cheery and welcoming means, and the only thing they know that fits the bill is flowers. The place is covered in them, bunches of daffodils and carnations and irises and gerberas on just about every flat surface they can find. But the flowers don’t hide anything. Even just standing in their office, with its beige carpet and the sun streaming through the window highlighting dust motes floating through the air, you can feel the stainless steel and the chemicals and all the death, death, death echoing through the walls.
There’s a whole bunch of people packed into the funeral director’s office – me and Phil and Disey and Shad, and Phil’s yiayia and pappou and her aunts Efghenia and Christina and her uncle Marcos. Phil greets them all with that facial expression and tone that isn’t quite a smile, the one that says, I’m glad you’re here, but I don’t want to be, not now, not ever.
I try to listen to Phil’s family organise the funeral, but I can’t focus, not even when Phil’s pappou totally breaks down when the funeral director mentions that they’ll have to have the funeral later than they might like because they have to wait for the coroner to release the body. He’s sobbing, and Phil’s aunts are trying to comfort him, and her yiayia is gripping the hand of her uncle Marcos so tightly her arthritic knuckles are turning white, but all I hear is that word coroner, and my mind starts turning even faster, trying to work out how long coroner stuff takes and what they can find out.
I don’t even really know what a coroner does. I wondered exactly the same thing at Marie’s funeral, and I never bothered to find out.