The Color of Bee Larkham's Murder

by Sarah J. Harris

  I tear out the pages, one by one. “I am not a manual! I am not a manual!”

  He stands in the doorway. He doesn’t attempt to save his book. He doesn’t contradict me.

  “I didn’t kill Bee Larkham!” I shout.

  “I know that,” he says quietly. “I never thought you had, Jasper. And you have to believe me when I say I didn’t kill her either.”

  “I don’t! I don’t believe a word you say!”

  59

  MONDAY (SCARLET)

  Morning

  It’s too scary to empty all the boxes in my wardrobe onto the floor at once. I couldn’t do that. I have to search one box at a time for the missing white-rabbit notebook. I can narrow the hunt. Rusty Chrome Orange pulled it out from one of the boxes during my First Account on April 12. Then the creature disappeared again because it didn’t want to be caught trespassing on someone else’s property.

  I start the search before Maggie arrives to talk to us both while I’m signed off school. She’s going to visit us regularly from now on and take me back to the police station again tomorrow to see if I can remember anything else about the evening of April 8. I only have five minutes until she gets here, which isn’t long enough. Rabbits are timid creatures. They won’t come out of hiding if they’re afraid.

  I should tell Maggie that. If I forget, I can always call her. She’s given me a special telephone number. I can ring her at any time of day or night if I’m frightened.

  • • •

  This is what Dad and me are going to do now Maggie’s left after drinking a cup of tea and eating two custard creams.

  We’re each going to write lists of Important Facts for the next fifteen minutes and compare the two. When we swap, we’re allowed to put up a hand to ask a question if we don’t understand a fact or want to make a statement.

  Dad’s Important Facts

  1. I didn’t kill Bee Larkham.

  2. I wasn’t in Bee Larkham’s kitchen on Friday night.

  3. I didn’t empty her suitcase, put her body inside, and carry it to the woodland.

  4. I spoke to Bee at about 9:30 p.m. on Friday night, at her front door. I’d knocked a few times during the evening, but she was playing music at full blast and probably didn’t hear.

  5. My boots were muddy from walking to work and taking a shortcut in the rain. My baseball cap is underneath the coats on the rack in the hall. It’s where I left it after my run. You can check. It’s faded black in color.

  I compare it to my list:

  Jasper’s Important Facts

  1. I didn’t kill Bee Larkham.

  2. Dad was wearing a dark blue baseball cap in Bee Larkham’s kitchen on Friday night.

  3. Dad confirmed I’d killed Bee Larkham.

  4. Dad lied about what he did with the knife.

  My hand shoots up. “Are you telling the truth about number two on your list?”

  “Yes, Son.”

  I can’t breathe.

  I drop the list and run upstairs. I shove the chair beneath my door handle. I’m not going to ring Maggie. She can’t help me.

  I have to dial 999 because this is an emergency.

  I need to tell the police I definitely think Dad killed Bee Larkham.

  It had to be him.

  He was there. In Bee Larkham’s kitchen. Wearing a dark blue baseball cap. Touching her neck.

  “Jasper! I promise you it’s the truth. I wasn’t there that night.”

  I’ve left my mobile downstairs.

  I hammer on the window. No one hears me. They can’t see my colors.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Dad repeats from behind the door. “You have to believe me, Jasper. I wasn’t there. Honestly, I wasn’t. The police believe me. They would never have let me take you home if they thought I was dangerous. They’re reinterviewing Lucas Drury’s dad. He’s a suspect now. He’s already been charged with assault, burglary, and making threats to kill. He denies everything, but D.C. Chamberlain thinks they’ll get a confession out of him because the baby was Lucas’s. Not mine. The police have confirmed that already from our DNA tests.”

  I don’t know who I should believe.

  Dad.

  Lucas’s dad.

  Lucas.

  I’m not coming out. The world outside my bedroom door is far too dangerous.

  The young parakeets have realized that. Some have already fledged, but they remain close to their nest at night. I saw them roosting in the branches of the oak tree, their parents nearby.

  They don’t want to leave me alone. They know I’m not safe, here in my bedroom, living on this street.

  60

  MONDAY (SCARLET)

  Afternoon

  I’ve rebuilt my den and all my paints that came with me to the foster carers are back in their right places.

  That makes me feel better.

  I’m going to paint the night of Bee Larkham’s murder properly this time—using two separate canvases. That way I can look at the two paintings side by side and work out where I made my mistakes.

  I’m doing it correctly this time, using the appropriate paints and equipment, which I’ve laid out on the table: keys, combs, Dad’s old credit card, and strips of cardboard as well as brushes and palette knives.

  Using a large, soft brush I do a quick white wash over the canvas before dividing my impasto gel into three sections on my palette. I mix white paint, bright sky blue, and gray into each.

  My blue is the exact shade I need, hard and metallic. Unforgiving.

  I layer the blue mix onto my picture with a palette knife, building up large, sharp peaks with a piece of cardboard and my fingers. I flick sharp titanium white paint at the blue pinnacles and prod more into the pointed edges, with my fingers and a key.

  I smear on the gray next, molding sharp icicles with the credit card and comb. My art teacher recommended experimenting at home with unusual tools, and these are the best for creating razor-sharp shapes.

  I know these sounds are correct: Bee Larkham screaming as she fell backwards.

  I fell next.

  Bee lay on the floor, eyes shut, on her back.

  Using more white gel mix, I make the twirling shape, which came from her mouth, and add the color of the clock.

  I date the picture correctly on the back of the canvas:

  April 8: Ice Blue Crystals with Glittery Edges and Jagged Silver Icicles on canvas

  I place the painting by the window and begin my second, more troublesome picture, showing my return to Bee Larkham’s house later that night.

  I re-create the pale yellow of the clock’s ticks. After that’s completed, I hesitate like last time, but it’s not because I doubt my tools or want to apologize to my canvas.

  It’s true the color of the clock is the same in this painting and the one under the windowsill, but I need to concentrate on the differences. The curly white noise that came from Bee Larkham’s mouth is missing.

  I’m 100 percent sure now.

  Other things are different too.

  I’d concentrated on trying to remember the colors of the sounds in the kitchen when I was at Skin Tone and Slate Gray’s house, but those definitely weren’t the important changes.

  It was what I saw, not the colors I heard, that had altered the most.

  Bee Larkham was lying on the floor with her eyes closed when I left her. But when I went back to the kitchen to rescue my paintings, her eyes were open.

  She was staring right at me—definitely dead.

  My hand shakes. Her eyes scared me that night. They terrify me now.

  Every single aspect of this picture is wrong. Not just the eyes: shut then and open now.

  Bee was wearing a black top and turquoise skirt, hitched up to her knees. Alien flesh. She’d changed clothes and position, lying on the floor on the other side of the table instead of by the hallway door.

  Her left hand was bandaged.

  The room was darker than before—the overhead pendant light wasn’t switched on, jus
t a smaller side lamp.

  Looking back to that night, my eyes want to focus on the spatters of blood on the kitchen floor, but they’ve gone, together with the puddle of vomit.

  They’ve taken the dirty plates and pots with them; all the washing up’s vanished. The kitchen’s clean and tidy. The parakeet pie’s disappeared from the table and the Dancing China Lady has taken its place.

  She’s watching a man in a dark blue baseball cap lean over Bee Larkham’s body.

  Bee Larkham’s eyes look like opaque stones.

  I shudder again.

  I remember smelling something strange and acrid: disinfectant. There’s another scent too, which hurts my tummy. I’ve smelt it before.

  My sealed art portfolio was on the clean table, my bag containing notebooks next to it.

  Someone had tidied away the mess—they cleaned up the blood and vomit and washed the dishes. They gathered together my pictures.

  I thought that person was Dad, the Dark Blue Baseball Cap Man, helping me out. But it doesn’t explain why Bee looked different and why she was lying in a new position.

  When I compare this picture with the canvas by the window, the differences terrify me.

  They prove I didn’t kill Bee Larkham. She must have got up from the floor after I’d left. She’d bandaged her hand and changed her clothes and mopped the floor with disinfectant. She’d collected my paintings and hung one on the wall, placing the others inside the portfolio.

  I see what I couldn’t see before.

  This is the correct painting, the one I should have believed from the start. It’s a genuine depiction of what happened.

  I’m calling it

  April 8: The Truth on canvas

  The first painting—Ice Blue Crystals with Glittery Edges and Jagged Silver Icicles—misled me badly.

  It’s a fake.

  I don’t know the colors or shapes of Bee Larkham’s murder.

  I never did. I wasn’t there when she died.

  61

  MONDAY (SCARLET)

  Later That Afternoon

  I’ve agreed to talk to Dad, but I’m not opening the door. We’re sitting on opposite sides. He pushed his list under the gap at the bottom, because I said I wanted to discuss number 4.

  “I told you I’d sort Bee and I did,” Dad says. “I called on her while you were asleep and asked her what the hell had gone on. She’d bandaged her hand. She told me you’d lost your temper when she refused to go to the police about David’s threats to the parakeets. You attacked her with the knife and slashed yourself to make it look as though she’d attacked you first. She said you were out of control and violent. She called you a menace.”

  “All wrong,” I say, putting my paint-smeared hands on the door. “It’s all wrong.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. I handled everything wrong. I should have taken you to a doctor that night. I shouldn’t have listened to Bee. I should have talked to you about what happened afterwards, but I wanted it all to go away. I had no idea . . .”

  He stops talking and starts again.

  “Bee said that, as a favor to me, she wouldn’t press assault charges,” he continues. “She didn’t want to talk to the police. She warned me if I took you to a doctor, Social Services and the police would become involved. The police would press charges against you, whether she cooperated or not. We both agreed to keep quiet, for your sake—we wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened. Neither of us would ever talk about it again. That’s why I told you to keep quiet, Jasper. It’s the only reason, I promise.”

  Bee had painted the wrong picture, a false one with deceitful colors like the one I produced earlier. She’d presented it to Dad to hang on his bedroom wall and he’d accepted it unquestioningly over the colors of my painting.

  He stood next to Bee Larkham, not me.

  “She did a favor for you because you had sex together after the party,” I say.

  Silence.

  “I won’t deny it. But we’re talking about a one-time thing. I regretted it later. I’m so sorry.”

  “Like you regret having me. It’s hard for you having a son like me. Bee told me. You wish you were single again.”

  “No! That’s not true. Look, I should have put a stop to your relationship with Bee long ago. I had no idea how she was manipulating you. Manipulating everyone on this street. She’s in your head, Jasper, and you have to get her out of there. She told lies.”

  I can’t.

  “I wasn’t trying to replace Mum, if that’s what you think,” Dad goes on. “It had nothing to do with Mum. I was lonely.”

  Me too.

  “Will you come out now?”

  “I have to paint. I have to find the white rabbit before I forget again.” I hear the color of his sigh through the door.

  “Let’s talk more after that,” he says. “Because there’s something else I need you to understand, Jasper. I spoke to Bee at nine thirty on Friday night, but the neighbors also heard her loud music until after one. They’ve verified my account. David Gilbert called round to complain again about the noise. He had another argument with Bee. He was the last person to see Bee Larkham alive. Not me.”

  62

  MONDAY (SCARLET)

  Still That Afternoon

  I don’t have to go downstairs—Dad’s left a cheese sandwich on a plate outside my bedroom door. I wait until the colors of his footsteps fade away before retrieving it. I shift my desk back into place, jamming a chair between the door handle and the bottom of the drawers.

  If Dad tries to shoulder the door, it won’t budge.

  He won’t do that, he says, because he doesn’t want to kill me.

  He didn’t kill Bee Larkham.

  He wasn’t in Bee Larkham’s kitchen on Friday night.

  I could be imagining seeing someone because of the drugs Dad gave me. He never heard me leave the house.

  Maybe I didn’t return.

  Maybe Dad was right. It was a horrible nightmare. I dreamt it all, a scene that didn’t connect or make sense.

  I’ve had a chat with Maggie on her special telephone number. She says it’s good I’m talking to Dad.

  I’m going to leave the paintings for now because they’re too confusing. I begin the hunt for the white rabbit notebook again; it doesn’t belong in this house. The animal lives over the road, but there’s sticky tape across the door so it can’t return. Maybe that’s why the creature’s visiting me.

  I find it at the back of the wardrobe in the fourth box I open, wedged between old notebooks detailing my first few months living on this street.

  I never put the rabbit in this box. In any box. The only possible way it could have got in here is if Bee Larkham left it behind when she was in my bedroom. But she hadn’t left it lying about, waiting to be scooped up by accident. She must have deliberately placed it in the box.

  Didn’t she want it?

  Had she left me a surprise present?

  Or had she forgotten to make me promise to keep it safe?

  I open the first page.

  This diary belongs to Beatrice Larkham, aged nine and three months. If you find this diary, please return to 20 Vincent Gardens.

  Sorry, I can’t do that now.

  Bee—I can’t call her Beatrice, like David Gilbert—had drawn pictures of rabbits on the inside cover. To be honest, they’re terrible. Opposite is the reading from Alice in Wonderland, the one she’d recited at the grave of the baby parakeet. This handwriting looks different. Neater.

  I flick ahead. It’s boring stuff: what she ate, which girls she played with at school. When she was at school. She spent pages and pages sick at home, reading the Bible. I’m not sure what was wrong with her.

  I skip to a turned-over corner. I straighten it out because creases look all wrong and if I don’t, it’ll bother me all day.

  Thursday

  Mummy says I’ve been a bad, cheeky girl. An untidy bedroom is a sin. Had to read the Bible together for two whole hours! No TV. Wish I could remember to b
e a good girl. It’s hard being good.

  Mummy and Mrs. Watkins are going to prayer meeting tomorrow night. I’m staying at home. Hopefully the babysitter won’t make me read the Bible. It’s boring. I can’t tell Mummy that. She’ll be angry again.

  Friday

  Looking forward to Mummy going out. Saw my babysitter on the way home from school and checked about the Bible. He said we could have a Mad Hatter’s tea party like the one in my favorite book, Alice in Wonderland. Can’t wait!!!!!!

  I climb into my den and put the diary under a blanket. Bee Larkham’s childhood was dull. If she hadn’t been murdered, I’d tell her I don’t think much of her gift. I’d give it back to her without saying thank you. I’d prefer to see the parakeets from her bedroom window. Surely she could have guessed this Important Fact?

  I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do with her dreary diary.

  What was Bee Larkham trying to tell me?

  63

  TUESDAY (BOTTLE GREEN)

  Morning

  Maggie will be here in ten minutes to drive me to the police station. To be on the safe side, I’m not shifting the desk or removing the chair from beneath my door handle until she arrives.

  I’m reading Bee Larkham’s diary from where I left off. It’s not much of a diary; it doesn’t accurately record her life. I flick backwards and forwards. There are too many gaps: pages torn out and entries violently scribbled over with black pen, ripping the paper.

  Some of the pages I wish I hadn’t read. I wish she hadn’t written them. The Mad Hatter did terrible things to her the night of the tea party and the other nights he babysat while Mrs. Larkham went to prayer meetings. I wish I didn’t know about it, but I can’t squeeze the colors out of my head.

  I wish I could go back in time and tell Mrs. Larkham to find a different babysitter.

  I reread one of Bee Larkham’s entries:

  Why won’t Mummy believe me? Why am I so bad? I hate the Mad Hatter. I hate him. I want him to stop coming here. I want him to stop making me cry. I’ll ask God for help again. He has to help me.

  Bee drew pictures of the March Hare, the Dormouse, and the Mad Hatter, who doesn’t look right. He’s not wearing a hat. He’s a stick man, holding a cup.