Guilty Conscious, Oliver Davies [small books to read TXT] 📗

came out of a shop. All blonde, coiffed hair and smart clothes and stupid smiling face like he hadn’t just wrecked my little sister.” Billie stopped, sucked down a ragged breath, her hands clenching and unclenching. “I walked over to him before I knew what I was doing. He didn’t see me at first, not until I was right in front of him.”

“What did you do?” I asked her again, keeping my voice low, my tone soothing.

“Punched him in the face,” she admitted blankly. “Broke his nose, turned around, and ran home.” Dr Crowe did say his nose had been broken recently. Billie placed her right hand on the table.

“I never learnt how to punch, and I did it wrong,” she said, showing us her thumb, the joint slightly wonky. She must have broken it when she punched him. My chest tightened in sympathy and sorrow for the girl, but I swallowed it all down and focused on the job.

“What happened after that?” I asked.

“I got home,” Billie said. “I just sat on the sofa and cried. I was there for a while until Stella woke up. She put a bag of frozen peas on my hand and just sat with me.” Billie sniffed and smiled through her tears. “We must have looked a right pair.”

“Was Edward with anyone when you hit him?” Mills asked.

Billie thought for a moment, then shook her head. “Not that I saw. Someone might have been in the shop, though?”

“Did anything happen after that?” I asked her gently.

She shook her head. “Stella asked me not to do anything like it again. We were okay, and then…” She shrugged, her face falling in a heartbroken expression.

And then Stella died.

“Why didn’t you tell us? You said the last time you threatened him was back in April.”

“Because I knew how it would sound,” she said desperately. “I mean, he’s been murdered, and less than a month ago, I punched him in the face. I was scared if you knew…”

“You realise that lying to us about it is worse,” I said, trying to get the right balance of patient and stern that my own mother used to use.

Billie nodded, and looking at her now, she looked her age for once. Not the grown-up, working, rent-paying mother bear trying to raise and heal her little sister. She was a twenty-year-old girl, without a family, without a sister, sitting in a café crying. The sternness disappeared from her eyes, from her face. She was just a girl, barely old enough to have shouldered all that she had for so long.

“I know how it looks.” Her voice was wobbly. “And sounds. I know that I have all the right reasons to have wanted Edward dead. Sometimes, I wish it had been me,” she admitted darkly. “But it wasn’t. After Stella died, this,” she indicated the café around us, “this is about all I’ve had the strength to do. I go from upstairs, to here, to the supermarket, and that’s it.”

I believed her, believed her sincerity and her grief, and I knew Mills did too. Still, he had to do his due diligence.

“How well do you know the building Edward lived in?” he asked.

Billie looked surprised. “I—I knew where it was. That was about it.”

“You never went inside?”

“A few times,” she said, looking down at her fingers again, twisting the rings there. “I didn’t like it much. Smells funny, a bit like an attic.”

I held in the laugh that threatened to huff out and leant back in my chair. “What about the basement?”

“The laundry room?” Billie made a face. “What about it?”

“Did you ever go down there?”

“Once. I spilt water down my jumper and went to put it in the dryer. Why?”

Mills and I shared a look, and I shook my head subtly, wanting to keep the information about the basement door for ourselves. Either Billie didn’t know about it and didn’t need to, or she was a very good liar.

“So, after the incident by the park,” Mills went on, brushing past her question, “you didn’t see Edward Vinson?”

“No,” she said, still looking confused. “Stella asked me not to.”

“Did she say what he spoke to her about?” I asked, watching Billie’s expression turn sour again.

“No. She didn’t want to tell me that.”

“Did that bother you?”

She shook her head. “The next day, she walked around like it hadn’t happened at all, and I went along with it. Didn’t want to push her. The only reason I was sure it happened was that I had to go and get an x-ray of my hand.” She twiddled the thumb in question.

“Is there anything else, Billie?” I asked in a firmer voice. “Anything that you didn’t tell us before that we need to know?”

She hesitated, looking at both of our faces in turn. “He and I were close,” she said after a while. “It’s what made me so angry. That he would do that to me, as well as her.”

“How close?” I asked. She shrugged, and I let it go for now, sighing deeply. “Thank you for answering our questions, Billie. We’ll probably be in touch again. Please don’t leave the city.”

“Nowhere else to go,” she muttered sadly. I grimaced, standing up from the table with Mills.

“You still have my card?” I asked. When she nodded, I nodded back. “Good. Don’t be afraid to use it.” I tapped the table once before turning and walking away, my hands in my pockets.

Mills trailed after me, a frown on his young face. He was quiet on the drive back, deep in thought, and I left him to it, knowing him better than to make him talk whilst he was processing.

We got back to the station, and I headed straight for the office, Mills lagging behind, muttering about needing a cup of tea. I walked to the board, shrugged my coat off, and grabbed a pen, adding Billie’s punching of Edward to the timeline a week before Stella’s death. I wondered if Lena would want to know about how his