One by One(84)

The kettle hisses softly. Liz just sits there, staring at the kettle, one hand held out the blaze, the other in her pocket, and suddenly I can’t take it anymore.

“You were saying?” I blurt out.

Liz looks up. She looks at me appraisingly, in a way I don’t like. She is crunching a piece of plastic in her pocket. The noise is loud in the silence and I think if she doesn’t say something, I might scream.

And then she swallows and picks up her story again.

“The shares. Yes. So yes, there I am, twenty-two, a shareholder in this up-and-coming app—and Topher and Eva start treating me a bit more like a human being, now that I’m invested in the business. I mean, I’ve only got two percent. Even Elliot and Rik dwarf my share. But I am a shareholder. And one night, a few days after we signed the papers, there’s this drinks party in this flashy London bar—I can’t remember why, I think they were after a partnership with some streaming company, some kind of quid pro quo.”

She stops. Something is coming, I can tell. I don’t know what exactly, but it feels like Liz is gearing herself up for something, forcing herself on to a part of the story she doesn’t want to spell out.

“They had an argument, over whether I should go. I remember Rik saying, Do you think this is the image we want to project? He didn’t know I was listening, of course. They were in Eva’s office, and I was listening in via the intercom. And Eva said, For fuck’s sake, Rik, it’s not rocket science, I can make her presentable. And she’s one of us on paper now, thanks to Toph, so she might as well look the part. Then she paused and said, Besides, Norland likes her type. He likes them young. So I knew what was going on when Eva got me to come over to her house before the party and offered to lend me a dress, because she knew I was on a budget after pouring all my money into Snoop. When she said it like that it sounded perfectly reasonable, kind, even, but I knew the truth.

“Well, you’ve seen Eva. You know what she’s like. There’s probably only about three women in London who could squeeze into her jeans. But we found something, somehow, and Eva made up my face, and when we arrived at the bar and were introduced to the executives from the other company—I don’t know—I actually started to feel like a real Snooper. Eva introduced me not as her PA but as Liz, who is a minority shareholder, and they talked to me with respect, and as the evening wore on I really started to believe this was it—this was the life I had been waiting for. I don’t normally drink much, but I drank that night. I drank a lot—a lot of cocktails, and—”

She stops. The kettle is hissing and bubbling, and she picks it up gingerly by the handle and fills each of the cups, then drops a tea bag in the top.

I take the one she hands to me, looking down into it surreptitiously. I don’t want to aggravate her suspicions, but given how Elliot died, it would be stupid of me not to check. The melted snow is a little cloudy, and the tea is starting to leach out of the bag and color the hot water, but I can still see the bottom of the cup and there’s definitely nothing there. No pills, anyway.

“And?” I prompt, very gently, and then when she looks away, I say, “I’m sorry. I don’t want to pry. If this is too painful—”

“No,” she says, with a rush. “It’s okay, honestly. I—it helps in a weird way, talking about it. I just haven’t thought about it in so long. We all got very, very drunk. And somehow—I can’t remember how—I ended up going with Eva… with one of the executives from the bar. It was just the three of us. Topher was going to come, I remember that, because he was in the taxi, but then at the last minute he bailed out and asked the driver to drop him off. We arrived at this house in Pimlico, and my God, it was amazing—it was so beautiful, this Georgian building, stories high, with a balcony right at the top overlooking the river…” She is staring past me now, as if she is looking at something I can’t quite see. “He took us upstairs, and we went out onto the balcony, and he gave us champagne and we chatted for a while, and then Eva excused herself and went to the bathroom.”

She breaks off. But I don’t think it’s because she can’t go on. Not quite. It’s because she is trying to work out what to say, how to say it.

“He tried to assault me,” she says at last bluntly. “He had his hands down my top, I was trying to push him away. And I—I—”

She stops, she puts her hands to her face.

“I pushed him. I pushed him hard. I pushed him off the balcony.”

“Oh my God,” I say. Whatever I expected, it was not this. “Liz, I’m—I’m so sorry. I—”

The implications are buzzing in my head, even as I stammer out my pathetically inadequate attempts at sympathy.

She killed a man.

But it was self-defense.

But Liz is still talking, ignoring me, rushing on, as if she wants to be past this part of the narrative.

“I broke down when I realized what I’d done. But Eva—she—she was amazing. She came running, and when she saw what had happened she didn’t ask any questions, she just got us both out of there, and when it came out in the paper, it was written up as a tragic accident. There were drugs and alcohol in his system and people; they just assumed that he fell I suppose, or that he threw himself over. No one ever mentioned that Eva and I were even there. It just goes to show what money and influence can buy, I guess.”