But with this? Now?
I could be arrested. We could both be arrested.
The knock comes just as I’ve almost decided that our best option is to run, to go back to the Summer Door and pray it’s still open and fling ourselves through and beg the Crown Prince to have mercy on us.
‘Pearl Linford?’ the cop says when I open it.
‘Yes,’ I reply numbly.
You are under arrest for the murder of –
‘I’ve had a call from your sister, Paradise. I understand that Philippa Kostakidis is here with you.’
And we have a warrant for her arrest, and also yours, so –
‘Yes.’
‘Your sister also told us that you’ve heard what happened to Philippa’s mother. Can we come in?’
I stand aside to let him and his partner in. They sit down in the living room. At their request, I bring Phil in to speak to them.
‘Philippa, first of all, we need to apologise to you,’ the cop says.
Oh God, they’re going to take her in. Sorry, we know your mother’s dead, but we have to take you down to the station now. And they’ll fingerprint her and – I don’t know, take skin scrapings or something like they do on Law & Order and all those shows, and it will all add up to Phil Kostakidis murdered her own mother and then they’ll wonder if she had an accomplice and they’ll test me too, and no way did I manage to clean off all that blood in the shower, and –
‘We understand that you heard about what happened to your mother third-hand after a journalist at the Independent caught wind of it, and that’s not how that should have happened.’
Phil doesn’t say anything.
‘Can you tell us the last time you saw her?’
‘Last night,’ Phil mumbles. ‘Before I came over here.’
‘About what time?’
‘I don’t know, seven-ish, maybe?’
There’re more questions. Details they want to know. A lot of questions. I try and focus and help but my shoulder has started to throb, and what if it starts bleeding again and seeps through my shirt in front of all these cops?
‘We found your mother’s body washed up near Derrigong Beach this morning,’ I hear one of the cops say.
‘Washed up?’ Phil says faintly. ‘Someone threw her in the ocean?’
‘Miller’s Creek, we think. That’s where it meets the sea.’
‘Is there anyone you can think of that would have a vendetta against your mother?’ the other cop asks.
‘They threw her in the creek?’ I say. ‘It has to be Jenny and Kel, then.’
‘They’re certainly subjects of investigation, but –’
‘What do you mean, but?’ I say. ‘They’re still on the loose, and you know they like throwing body parts in the creek when they’re done with them, and they tried to kill Phil once before, remember? They must have come back to try to finish the job. And when they couldn’t get Phil –’
‘We need to make sure we pursue all avenues of investigation,’ one of the cops says, cutting me off. ‘So, Miss Kostakidis, is there anyone you can think of that would want to hurt your mother?’
Phil shakes her head, looking at the ground.
‘We understand your parents are divorced.’
‘My dad lives in Melbourne with his wife and my half-brother,’ Phil says quietly, not looking up. ‘And they’re in Greece on holiday. He wasn’t here. And anyway, it was – they didn’t – they still like each other. Liked each other.’
‘And you recently broke up with your boyfriend Julian Bishop, is that right?’
Phil nods.
How on earth did they get all this gossip between discovering Mrs Kostakidis’s body and coming here? Haylesford might be a small town, but it’s not so small that everyone knows who is dating who at the local high school.
The cops have been keeping tabs on us, haven’t they? They’ve got dossiers on all of us. This gentle, compassionate questioning is all a big fake-out, and a team of supercops with assault rifles wearing body armour are going to bust down the door any second now, and –
‘Do you think he’d want revenge for you breaking up with him?’ one of the cops asks. ‘Especially after what he did to your friend?’
What he did – oh. The it-would-have-been-revenge-porn-if-the-camera-angle-had-been-slightly-different incident, when Julian took a photo of me and Finn going at it on top of a piano in the music room at school and posted it on Facebook.
He somehow thought that doing that would prove Finn and I were murderers. Guess that one backfired pretty spectacularly on him.
‘I don’t know,’ Phil says. ‘I just – I don’t –’
Her chin droops even further towards her chest.
‘Look, she’s exhausted,’ I say. ‘I’m sure you can imagine that this is quite a shock. Can we do this some other time?’
‘The quicker we can get the information we need –’
‘The quicker you can find out who did this, I know, but – look at her.’ I make the mistake of gesturing with my bad arm, and the sick throbbing feeling is so intense for a moment I’m amazed I don’t black out. ‘She’ll – we’ll – answer all your questions, I promise. But she’s a mess.’
I wish I had Disey’s gift for staring people down. She’d have been able to get these cops out of the way in two seconds.
But it turns out that cops aren’t big on leaving minors alone in houses (even if they’re going to be legal adults in a few months) when there’s a murderer on the loose. They agree to let me put Phil to bed, and they agree to let me sit with her, and they even agree to let me close my bedroom door behind us, but they won’t agree to leave the house until Disey or Shad gets home.
Phil curls herself into a ball under the desk again. ‘Phil?’ I say, but she doesn’t answer me, and I don’t have the energy to keep trying.
I have no energy at all, not even a little. All that’s keeping me conscious is pain and panic. What if the cops not leaving the house isn’t about protection or supervision? What if they’re lulling us into a false sense of security while they wait for the supercops with the guns and the body armour to arrive?
How am I going to get Finn back if I’m in jail? How am I going to make the Crown Prince a liar if the supercops have me in handcuffs?
I can still hear him laughing.
My mind is a mess, every thought like a new patch of quicksand sucking me down, the agony of the stab wound in my shoulder like a red-hot poker shoved directly through my brain, but even through all of it, I can hear the prince laughing as he made me choose. My sister. Phil. Finn.
I left him there.
I left him there.
I have to choke the sound that wants to explode out of me so the cops don’t hear, and it gets caught in my throat, so painful it feels like it might burst and blow my head right off my body.
Oh God, Finn Finn Finn Finn.
This is the last time you will ever see her, the prince said to him, and when I called him a liar, he laughed.
I sit on the floor with the back of my head against my bed, and all I can hear is that laugh, dragging me down and down and down into the dark.