Chapter 26

from Origami by Kim Tribbeck

Tuesday, 27 January 2015

There’s a new email from Liam in my inbox. I’ve just had a boiling hot, lavender-scented bubble bath and I wish I hadn’t pulled the plug. After reading Liam’s words, I know I’ll wish I could climb back in and get clean all over again.

He won’t be able to resist sticking up for his sister. He’ll say she did terrible things, yes, but she’s not a bad person. If he defends her, knowing how close she came to killing me, what’s left of my faith in humanity might break for good.

I should delete his message unread, but I open it – for Simon Waterhouse’s sake, I tell myself. There’s a chance Liam has something important to add, as the person who lived with Isobel. I might learn something useful from the email that I can pass on to the police.

There’s no ‘Dear Kim’. There never was, from Liam. The message reads, ‘Want to meet? Feeling horny. Jerking off twice a day at the moment.’

No reference to his sister having been charged with five murders.

I click the bin symbol at the bottom of the screen to delete it. Keep my finger pressed down hard.

Disappear, disappear, disappear.

There’s nothing he could have said to change my mind. But if there had been, that wasn’t it.

I’m about to close my inbox when another new message pops up. The sender is Niall Greeves. What the hell does he want? I make a mental note to get my website changed so that there’s no way for strangers to contact me directly.

This is a good opportunity to prove to myself that I’ve learned something. There’s nothing Niall Greeves could want to say to me that I’m interested in hearing. If it’s anything important to do with Billy – with Isobel Sturridge, as I must now learn to say – then he can contact the police and leave me alone.

I click on the envelope icon to open the message. Might as well know what I’m punitively deleting.

No ‘Dear Kim’ at the top of this one either. Where are men’s manners these days?

The subject heading of the email is ‘Do you know the woman in this sketch?’

I’m looking for a woman whom I think I might like a lot if I could only get to know her. (Yes, I’m afraid I’m the kind of person who says ‘whom’.) I did once ham-fistedly try to approach her, and ended up, briefly, as a suspect in a serial murder case. As a result, and most inconveniently for me, I now feel unable to consider dating anyone who hasn’t at one time or another become entangled in a nationwide hunt for a serial killer. I’m told I’m too fussy, but I disagree. I don’t think a basic level of shared experience is too much to ask for.