How to Kill Men and Get Away With It(7)

‘Probably not on the WhatsApp chat, if I’m dead.’

Hen laughs. ‘Don’t make me have to microchip you, like a dog.’ She gulps down the rest of the water. ‘Ooh, maybe you should get a dog. Or a man?’

‘Your brother actually volunteered his bodyguard services,’ I say and Hen makes a face.

‘Not that type of dog.’ She laughs. ‘Right, I need to finish this run before it gets any hotter. Can I fill my water bottle up quickly?’

‘Of course, no problem.’

‘Thanks, Kits,’ she says when she’s done, standing at the door. ‘See you later.’ She gives me a peck on the cheek and a tinkly little wave from the elevator before we’re separated by the steel doors.

Jokes with Hen aside, I can’t believe I forgot my phone. And then forgot about forgetting it. It’s dead, of course, so I amble into the living area and plug it in. I curl up on one of the sofas – the Jonathan Adler Claridge in Belfast Stone – and wait the few seconds for it to come to life.

I open the news app but it takes a lot of scrolling to find what I’m looking for. The body was found by a ‘reveller’ walking home after a night out. The reveller is being treated for shock but the death of Matthew Berry-Johnson (thirty-four and ‘in property’) isn’t being treated as suspicious. A Met spokesperson said: ‘We can confirm we aren’t looking for anyone in connection with the tragic death of Matthew Berry-Johnson. An autopsy will be carried out, but it appears he was heavily intoxicated and died as the result of an unfortunate accident. We are appealing for any witnesses who may have seen Mr Berry-Johnson last night.’

A quick Facebook – yuck – search tells me he’s left behind a sad girlfriend, Hayley. I scroll through her photos. Lots of nights out with friends. Lots of holidays too. She’s young and pretty. She’ll love again no doubt. The idiot. They also seem to have a daughter. She looks about two or three. Chubby cheeks and blonde hair, always smiling. She’s called Lucy. I zoom in on some of the photos of her. She’s so happy.

I’m glad I killed her dad.

Now she has the freedom to grow up unblemished by his toxicity. He can be whoever she wants him to be. She won’t have to deal with the truth about him.

That he was a cheat. A liar. A danger.

He can live on, forever perfect, in her memories.

I wish I had that unsullied version of my own father.

God, I loved my dad so much when I was that age. He was my hero and I absolutely worshipped him. He knew everyone and everything. He always had a hilarious story for me or a fascinating snippet of information. Did you know, for example, that pigs have a similar anatomy to humans? They have the same thoracic and abdominal organs as us.

Not like cows with their four stomachs, the freaks.

Honestly, his mind would be blown now if he knew pigs’ hearts and kidneys are being successfully transplanted into humans.

One of my favourite ‘dad memories’ was when I was about seven or eight. I was sad because I’d missed the summer fair at school. It was something I always loved going to because it was a proper fair with a Ferris wheel and rides and toffee apples, not soggy cakes on a sad trestle table in the school hall.

I’d been ill with tonsillitis. But my dad actually put on a fair in our garden, complete with clowns and trapeze artists, everything, when I was better. He invited my friends without telling me. There was even a candy floss machine. It was the best day of my life. Everyone at school talked about it for months. It still comes up in conversations now occasionally. Before people remember Dad’s now a ‘missing person’ and it gets all awkward. I wish they wouldn’t do that. Sometimes I’d like to talk about him. To let everything I need to say come bursting out.

Of course, I can’t though.

My mum, on the other hand, has always been distant. I never doubted her love, and still don’t, but she’d spend days in bed or would disappear off to some retreat or another for weeks. She seemed to get exhausted by life very easily and suffered from terrible and frequent migraines. Funnily, these symptoms have all cleared up now she’s living her best life in the C?te d’Azur with oodles of cash and a man fifteen years younger. But I can’t deny her any happiness.

Not after everything.

When I was really little, I used to beg her to take me on her trips, but she’d just kiss me on the head before swishing out of the door with her oversized Chanel sunglasses perched on her nose.

I gave up asking in the end.

Things changed between my dad and me when I hit my teens. I became incredibly aware of where our money came from and increasingly annoyed that it wasn’t something more glamorous.

Ben and Hen’s dad, James Pemberton, is a big deal in the music industry and they were constantly hanging out with pop stars and getting to go backstage at all the best gigs. I mean, I got to go with them too, but it wasn’t the same.

Maisie’s dad used to be an F1 driver and is still involved in it – don’t ask me what he does though. Or how. He must be about a thousand years old. Her mum was a famous model in the Eighties and Maisie and her sister, Savannah, spent most of their teen years in places like Monaco, hanging out on superyachts with supermodels.

Tor’s mum adopted her from Sierra Leone when she was a baby. Her birth parents had been murdered and Sylvie Sunshine-Blake – a singer, sometimes actress and UN ambassador – took home the beautiful baby girl she’d fallen in love with during a televised visit to an orphanage.