The bullshit of television dramas where everything gets wrapped up after six episodes was such a lie. We need that resolution, sure, because we don’t get it in real life. Real life is a mess, non sequiturs, inconsequential moments, no building tension to a satisfying climax. Real life didn’t need hooks before the advert breaks or cliffhangers at the end of an hour. Real life just left you bereft and lonely, grieving for people who would never come back, wishing you’d lived differently in some unspecified way. Real life was a bastard. And then you die.282

She lifted a pillow off the floor. There was a long black hair on it, one of Mel’s, and she rubbed it between her fingertips, watching it spin. She’d read somewhere that hundreds of years ago they believed that the face of a murderer would be imprinted on the eyes of his victim. Then there was muscle memory, the way your body could do certain things when your mind couldn’t, like play a musical instrument or drive a car. And she remembered a silly show on television where someone got a heart transplant and started dressing differently, liking different food and music, their new tastes exactly matching those of the donor. Maybe this hair was the key, maybe if she absorbed the information locked in its proteins she would know who killed Mel. Maybe on a quantum level the quarks and leptons in her own atoms would mingle with Mel’s, creating an energy field that connected them. She could become Mel and live her life over and figure out what happened to her.

She placed the hair back on the pillow and lay there listening to her breath. Eventually she sat up and took in the room again. What would happen to Mel’s stuff? Who tidies up after the dead? What’s the point of keeping physics notes for a degree that no one is ever going to get? What about all the technical stuff, bank account, university enrolment, rent, voter register, national insurance number. There were a million incidental details that defined a life and they all had to be terminated after you die. How could anyone face that?

She thought about phoning Vic, see how he was doing, how his mum and dad were coping, but she couldn’t face that conversation. She was a coward. Maybe this private investigator stuff was a way to deflect herself from thinking about how she actually felt about her friend dying. She knew all about coping mechanisms from Indy working at Skelf’s, and from her gran and grandpa. And that was another piece of avoidance, Jim had died ten days ago and she’d scarcely given it a thought, filling her mind with second phones, mystery lovers, DNA matches and dead babies.283