You Owe Me a Murder(52)

“Now, this might seem rude, but I’m going to need your phone”—?Nicki shrugged—?“and I’m going to pat you down.” She smiled. “No bad touch, I promise.”

I stepped back. “What?”

“I want to make sure you’re not recording what I say. I want to trust you, but with recent events . . .” Nicki let her voice trail off.

I handed over my phone, feeling my hopes shrinking down, collapsing in on themselves. She smirked when she saw the record function open, but she didn’t seem angry. If anything, she seemed proud of me for making the attempt. She erased the track, then clicked the phone off, jamming it into her bag. I stood stiffly while she quickly patted down my pockets and ran her fingers through my hair, making sure I wasn’t wearing any kind of wire. “You done?” I asked coldly.

“Don’t be a cranky pants. I’m just making sure that we go into this discussion as equals. No more trying to outmaneuver the other—?we’ll start fresh, okay?”

“Clean slate?”

“Exactly.” She linked arms with me. “Let’s walk and talk. We started off well, but we got onto a bad track.”

I blinked rapidly, trying to clear the fog of anger. “A bad track? You murdered Connor. That’s not bad. That’s a fucking disaster.” I glanced around belatedly to make sure no one was close enough to overhear our conversation.

She rolled her eyes. “A disaster would have been getting caught. We went over this last time. Connor isn’t worth being this upset.”

“He didn’t deserve what happened to him.” I flashed to the image of his shoe lying on the train platform.

“You want the world to be this place where things happen because people deserve them, but you know it’s not that way. Does someone who gets cancer deserve it?”

“No, of course not,” I said furiously.

“And someone who’s born into a family with a lot of money, did they do something to deserve their privilege?”

I pulled my arm back from hers. “No, I’m not saying that . . .” I wanted to shake her words out of my ears. They had this tendency to burrow in, as though they wanted to take root. She repulsed me, but she was also fascinating.

“But you are. You’re trying to insist that there is some ultimate sense of justice in the world. My point is that Connor wasn’t a great guy. Because he’s dead, you’re focusing on the good stuff instead of remembering his real character.”

“I’m not saying Connor was perfect, but he wasn’t evil.” My mind darted against my will to what Miriam had told me about him manipulating girls to get photos and then sharing those pictures with the world. I shoved away the uncomfortable truth that Nicki might be right, that he wasn’t worth it.

Nicki giggled. “Evil? Jesus, you do have a bit of your mum’s woo-woo genes. Next thing I know, you’ll be reading his aura. Of course he wasn’t evil—?this isn’t some BBC drama with angels and demons. He was in your way and now he’s not. It’s that simple. If it had been an accident, you wouldn’t admit it, but part of you would have felt he got what he deserved.”

I refused to even let myself think about how I might have felt. It didn’t matter. It hadn’t been an accident. “And your mom is in your way,” I said.

Nicki nodded enthusiastically as if she were my tutor and I’d finally figured out a tricky geometry problem on my own. “Exactly.”

“I can’t just kill someone.” I cracked my knuckles in the hope that that would release the tension building up in my body.

“Do you know how the military trains people to kill?” Nicki asked. “They studied it—?an American, I think. He called it killology.” She noticed my expression. “I’m not making it up. I can’t recall the guy’s name, but he wrote a book about it after studying World War Two. It’s complicated, of course, but it’s all about training. If you want to make people who are generally not killers into a military unit capable of shooting and bombing others, you have to change how they think.”

“And that’s what you’ve done?”

“You’re making it sound like I’ve got loads of people buried in the cellar or something.” She rolled her eyes. “Do you think a soldier in the army is looking at the guy across the field from him and pondering how that guy might have a family, or own a dog who likes him, or be a great painter? No, of course not. He thinks, That guy is in my way. That guy’s my enemy. He doesn’t even really see him as human, but an obstacle. That’s how you win wars.”

“At least that’s how you get what you want.”

“If that’s your best option, then yes.” Nicki pointed to a small food cart ahead of us on the path. “Do you want something to drink?”

She didn’t wait for me to answer. She walked up, considered her choices, and fished through her pockets for some money.

“A Perrier and . . .” She looked back at me. I shook my head. I was certain if I swallowed anything it would come right back up. Once she had her drink, we kept circling the observatory building.

“Why is your mother in your way?”

Nicki unscrewed the top of her Perrier with a crackle of the metal cap and took a drink before answering. “Did you know that you have to be really careful if you’re trying to rescue someone who’s drowning?”