She tore her eyes from the mass to look up at the walls. There were two neon signs. One said “John” and she didn’t really understand until she saw the other at the other end of the large area—“Yoko.” She started toward the “John” arrow, but a dark figure appeared in front of her. In the next flash of lights, she saw it was the guy from the bar—Tim. The stalking creep—but she had underestimated him at least. “I would really like to buy you a drink.”
“I’m not interested,” she said, sharply. She tried to step around him, but he stepped too. She didn’t have time for this—Sheppard would be in and out quickly, he was a man after all. She was going to miss her chance.
“It’s weird, ‘Zoe.’ I only know one ‘Zoe’ on the set.” Tim was slurring—he was drunk.
“I’m new,” she hissed, and pushed past him. Tim responded in kind by grabbing her arm. She turned. “Let. Me. Go.”
“I will, if you have a drink with me,” Tim said happily—probably thinking all of this was flirty sparring.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’d rather kill myself.”
“Don’t be like that.” Tim grabbed her other arm—he had her now. This was bad. And the opportunity she wanted was slowly slipping away. Her anger suddenly flared—she thought in that moment, she could kill this little minnow just to get her chance at the big fish. “Aren’t you here to have fun?”
“You want to know why I’m here?” she said, before she could stop herself. “I’m here to have a little word with your lord and savior Morgan Sheppard. You’re all pathetic little idiots partying with that monster, latching onto him just because he can get you to the top. You don’t care what he’s done, do you? In fact, you probably helped him do it.”
Tim was struggling to comprehend what she was saying, and his grip on her arms was loosening. What she wanted to say—what she came here to do—was spilling out, and she couldn’t stop it now. The fact that Tim was not her intended target didn’t seem to matter anymore.
She started to cry. “Morgan Sheppard ruins people’s lives. And you all stand there, and film it for television. For what? Personal gain. Do you remember him? Do any of you remember my brother? Sean Phillips? He was on Mr. Sheppard’s, on your, show. Three years ago. He was on with his wife, the mother of his child. Morgan Sheppard proved that Sean was having an affair. When he wasn’t. I can prove it—I have solid proof that he was not having an affair. And Morgan Sheppard ruined his life.”
Tim was looking uncomfortable. She was screaming now but the volume of the music meant everyone else around them was oblivious.
“He killed himself,” she shrieked. “My brother killed himself.”
Tim let go of her.
“He killed himself,” she said, finally. She buried her face in her hands and cried. She hated it. How he got to her. She hated the tears.
Sean was quiet in her mind. Had nothing to say. Was that it? Was she alone?
Tim was still staring at her. “Okay then,” he said. “You know what, I prefer my girls a little less—you know—psycho. So I’m going to go have a drink alone and you have a nice night.” And with that, Tim disappeared—becoming another black mass in the room.
She dried her eyes and thought she still may have a chance to catch Sheppard. She turned toward the bathrooms, and her heart stopped.
There he was, in front of her. The smug bastard, looking glazed and happy. He was walking through the crowd toward her. She had missed him at the toilets but now he was coming for her. This was her chance. So why would her voice not work? She had seconds. He got to her—they were centimeters from each other—and then he passed her. She could almost feel the smugness coming off him like steam.
She wheeled around. He was disappearing into the anonymous crowd. This was it. Her last shot.
“Sheppard,” she found herself shouting.
Sheppard stopped—he had heard her—and turned around. He didn’t know it was her of course, and his eyes moved around the room as he tried to find out who shouted.
She held her breath as his eyes fell on her. How long was it? It couldn’t have been for more than a second, but for her it felt like an hour. All that time, all she had to do was open her mouth—open her mouth and say what she came here to say. But she couldn’t. Whether it was her exhaustion, or Tim, or seeing Sheppard’s face, she just found she couldn’t do it. It suddenly became real.
And then it was over. He looked for another moment and then turned. He got swallowed up by the dark. And just like that it was all over. She suddenly felt dizzy, and staggered to the wall. She slid down and buried her face in her knees, becoming as small as possible. And the tears began. And they carried on.
Sometime later, she looked up to see two men laughing at her. She ignored them and got up, pushing past them with a force that stopped them laughing. She pushed her way across the dance floor. Not looking to the VIP area, not looking for him. She couldn’t.
She got to the bar and ordered another gin and tonic. Just another to add to the collection. Sean used to say that their family was born with iron livers.
She toasted to nothing, and everything. Drank it in two gulps. She stared at the empty glass, thinking about how she had failed. Maybe she would just get drunk—that seemed like a good way to forget. It was working for his holiness Morgan Sheppard.
“Can I buy you another?” said a voice. Had Tim lucked out with every other woman in the club and decided the crazy one was better than nothing? But when she looked up, she saw a different man. The smart man she had seen in the queue to get in.
“Gin and tonic,” she said. Abruptly.
The man didn’t seem to mind. He flagged down the barman and ordered. She regarded him a bit more. He was young, but not as young as her. Thirty, maybe thirty-five. He wore rectangular glasses and had on a suit with a red tie. He looked stern, but inviting. To most people, he would be disregarded as normal. But there was something about him. Something that she had noticed before in the queue—a sort of presence.
He slid her her drink—he had ordered a pint. “You seem distraught,” he said.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“These things are always despicable,” he said, throwing his hands up all around him. “A monument for the self-involved.”
“Then why are you here?” She sipped at her drink.
“Because it’s always good to keep tabs on people. Otherwise you just get left behind,” he said, and she totally understood. And everything he said seemed to make perfect sense. “Why are you here?”
She smiled sadly. “I had to get some answers.”
“And did you get them?”
“I had my chance to get them. And I didn’t take it.” And he must have read her sad face, because he said, “Well, you mustn’t take it out on yourself—answers aren’t always the end. Sometimes they’re just not worth the wait. Bad things happen to good people. That’s the way of the world.”
He was right. She touched his glass with hers, not loud enough to make a sound but enough to show the sentiment.
There was a loud commotion over in the VIP area. Sheppard’s colleague had passed out and the man himself was creating quite a fuss about it. He gestured to the DJ and the music cut out.
Sheppard got up onto a table, liquid sloshing visibly off as if he’d landed in a puddle, and produced a microphone. “Three cheers for dopey Rogers!”
She didn’t know who that was, but assumed it was the passed-out colleague. The entire club erupted into hip-hip-hoorahs. She did not join in and neither did the man.
When it was all over and the music turned back on, the man said, “Now, that Morgan Sheppard, that’s a man who needs taking down a peg or two.”
She looked at him and he looked back. “Kace Carver,” he said, putting out his hand.
She started to say “Zoe” and stopped herself. She cleared her throat and said “Mand
y,” shaking his hand.
She smiled for the first time all evening.
51
The red string connections in Sheppard’s mind were working overtime. Winter had made it so simple for him—and he still hadn’t seen. But now it all made sense. It was all clear. The only possible conclusion. Winter laid a trap—maybe he saw the situation going south and decided to make a breadcrumb trail for Sheppard. If he was a better man, he would’ve seen it earlier.
He staggered out of the bathroom and looked up at them all. The notebook in his hand. A finger still marking the page, where the underlined words were—and where the description of the nightmare was. “Aggressive, Muddled, A dream about...” The answer he was searching for. And even if Sheppard didn’t understand what Winter was getting at, he spelled it out too. A word puzzle—an incredibly easy one.
“It was you,” he said quietly, not wanting it to be true. Ryan looked around.
The first letters...spelling it out...spelling out AMANDA. The trap that Winter set for Mandy, telling her about the dream no doubt—hoping that she would let something slip. And she did.
Headphones jumped up. But she jumped up too late.
Mandy had realized and grabbed the teenager, restraining her. To his surprise, Mandy brandished the knife—she must have slipped it from his back pocket—and held it to Headphones’s throat. The teenager didn’t make a sound—just looked at Sheppard with eyes that didn’t fully understand.
“No one move,” Mandy said, looking at them each in turn. “Move and I’ll cut this emo’s throat.”
Movement didn’t seem to be an option. He was too busy processing it. Mandy, the sweet young girl who’d always had his back.
Ryan seemed to be in a similar state of bewilderment, holding his hands up in surrender.
Mandy started backing to Ahearn, who screamed gleefully. Mandy took no notice of the mad old woman, sidling past her and resting her back against the window so Sheppard or Ryan couldn’t get behind her.
“Mandy, what are you doing?” Ryan said.
“Go ahead, Sheppard,” Mandy said. She didn’t even sound like the same person anymore. She sounded cold and hard and inhuman. “Explain it to him.” She waved the knife in front of Headphones’s neck as if impatient for blood.
“What? You?” Ryan said, to Mandy.
“I was wrong,” Sheppard said, wondering how to manage to get to Mandy before she did something insane. He tried a short step forward, holding his hands up too. Mandy didn’t seem to notice, too focused on his eyes. “Ever since the start, this has been designed to fool me.
“It was the wounds—the wounds in Winter’s gut that were so deep. I didn’t think it could have been Mandy because of that. But there were some things that I missed, at least not enough for me to notice at the time, but she was more than capable of plunging a knife deep into the body of Simon Winter.”
She pulled me up, one of the first things she did. I remember thinking she was strong.
“Right at the start—you pulled me up off the floor. If I had been a proper detective, I would have seen it, I would have noticed straight away.” Another step forward.
She slapped me. My face flew to the side, because it was so strong. Anger. The anger in her eyes when she had done that. Like anger she had had to keep pent up for days, months, years even. Setting her eyes on fire.
“Somehow I just know there’s a family in that house, children burning.” The ultimate slipup that she wouldn’t even know she was making. Winter was clever—he was very clever—and Sheppard had almost missed it entirely.
Ryan was incapable of helping—he still didn’t understand. It would make him slow and unsure—not useful. Headphones was squirming in Mandy’s grip, her eyes following the edge of the knife hovering at her throat. He couldn’t be sure Mandy wouldn’t do it. He didn’t know her—not anymore. Another small step.
“You’re strong, but that doesn’t mean you’re a murderer. But then there were more clues, weren’t there? More reasons to suspect you,” he said, edging closer. “Like how you woke up first and seemed to know information about everyone. You probably would have told me more if I’d asked, but you told me just few enough details to get away with it.”
She knew plenty about Constance. Her name, where she worked. She got away with it because Constance was famous. But he was betting she had known about everyone in the room.
Step, a small breath, Mandy looked from him to Ryan, smiling to herself, as if she was pleased at what she had accomplished. Sheppard had never expected to see her face look that way.
He was level with the television now. Headphones watched him—she saw everything, she always did. She was the silent observer. She had said about ten sentences in the past three-something hours. She’d be able to see things others didn’t, just by virtue of being silent. Sheppard gave her the quickest and smallest nod he was able to manage. His head hardly moved, tilting forward maybe a few centimeters. She watched him for a few moments after and then mimicked the motion.
Mandy was too busy, probably feeling proud of herself, to notice.
“I don’t understand,” Ryan said. “That doesn’t explain what she did?”
“She’s been playing us off against each other, Ryan. When Alan was stabbed, Constance was behind him, right? And who was next to her?”
Ryan didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
“Constance here killed Alan, seemingly unprovoked. At least at first.”
He chanced a look at Ryan. Finally, something in his eyes.
“All that rubbish Constance spouted wasn’t rubbish at all. She was told. I looked her in the eyes and I knew she believed it herself, but I just thought she was mad. Sorry, Ms. Ahearn, but you have been lied to. We all have.”
“How could Mandy get someone to kill someone? I saw—Ahearn did it.”
“Do you want to field that one?” Sheppard said to Mandy, and when she shook her head, he continued, “Have you said two words to Constance, Ryan? No, there was only one person who spoke to Constance in the entire time we’ve been in here—whispering so no one else could hear.”
Sheppard looked to Mandy, to make sure he was getting it alright. It appeared he was.
“You knew about her religion, and you used it against her. Mary Magdalene—really?”
Mandy smiled, an ugly-looking thing that reeked of positivity. “I embellished it a bit. Gave myself a nice title.”
“You used a poor woman. You made her into a murderer,” Sheppard said.
Mandy tilted her head and gave a pout. “Try and say that like you’re not proud of me.”
“All for what? Just to make things a bit more interesting?”
“Oh come on,” Mandy sighed. “Hughes was eternally boring. Walking around like he was king of the world. He had to go.”
Sheppard ignored the ease with which she dismissed a human life. “You set this whole thing up, didn’t you? You and Eren and Winter. You lured Winter down here and killed him. Used him too. You’re sick.”
Mandy laughed. “Winter was in it all along, Sheppard. He knew what he was getting into. Winter hated you as much as we do. You ruined his life, just as you ruined ours, remember?”
“I don’t know you. I’ve never seen you before today.”
“No, but you knew my brother. You probably don’t remember him, do you? You don’t even remember Sean Phillips? How you drove him to kill himself?”
Sheppard faltered, stepping back a bit defensively. The name rang a bell, he thought he might have been briefed about the situation in some production meeting or something. But he couldn’t remember Mandy at all. But that didn’t say much when you couldn’t remember what happened yesterday. “Whatever I did, it’s not a reason to kill an innocent man.”
“Sean Phillips was innocent. Winter was different. He had a darkness inside him—the burn for revenge. Just lik
e me and Kace. Winter walked down here of his own accord. He was so very wanting to see your face when you woke up. When you realized what we’d done. Unfortunately for him though, his time came before then.”
“You used him.”
“Yes,” Mandy said. “Rather stupid for a psychologist, don’t you think?”
“I think he was more intelligent than you gave him credit for. I think he worked it all out. Albeit too late. He left me a message. Telling me exactly who killed him. I don’t think you’re as perfect as you think you are.”
“Fantastic, wonderful,” Mandy said, “you worked it out all too late. You really are pathetic, Sheppard, and now the whole world knows it. You are a fake, and you have blood on your hands that will never wash off. We’ve beaten you.”
“Eren knew how to play into my hand,” Sheppard said. “He knew I would never expect the young blonde. He knew you were just my type.”
Mandy frowned at this. “What? Don’t be disgusting. Kace and I are in love. There’s no way he would use me like that. My reason for hating you is just as valid as his. Why don’t you think I’m the mastermind of this whole thing, huh?”
“You’re not the mastermind because you’re here in the room. I almost feel sorry for you.” Sheppard stopped. Mandy had to notice he’d moved now. He was almost within an arm span of her. He could probably reach out to grab Headphones. At least he hoped he could.
If Mandy had noticed him, she didn’t show it. “You don’t get to feel sorry for me. Why do you feel sorry for me? Stop it.” The knife was quivering in anger in front of Headphones’s throat.
Sheppard poised himself, ready. “I feel sorry for you because we got played—” he locked eyes with Headphones and did the small nod they had communicated before “—and so did you.”
Headphones didn’t falter—she sank her teeth into Mandy’s wrist.
52
Mandy howled with pain, pulling her wrist free. Sheppard ducked forward, just avoiding Mandy’s blind swing of the knife and grabbed Headphones, pushing her onto the bed and free from harm. Ryan had reacted to the move as well, jumping over the bed and moving up toward Mandy.
Guess Who Page 25
