Drowned Vanilla (Cafe La Femme Book 2) (24 page)

‘Ready to go?’

‘I’ll give this one a miss,’ I said. ‘I was going to give cassata a chance tonight. Maybe pistachio.’

I was lying. I had three trays of vanilla bean gelato to make before I officially added affogato to the Café La Femme menu. Vanilla and I were still processing this change in our relationship status and we chose not to share it with others.

‘Tish,’ Xanthippe said in a stern voice. ‘There is more to life than ice cream. We were invited to go, and we are going. That’s all there is to it.’

I glared. ‘You’re the one who made friends with them.’

‘They asked us both,’ she replied, beating me down with the truth. Wench.

‘I don’t want to go. I need to keep Ceege company.’

‘As we speak, Ceege is introducing Darrow to the wonders of a vintage Hollywood online RPG. He found a website where you can pretend to be golden age film idols, and I don’t think either of them will surface for some time. Ceege said, and I quote, “tell Tabs if she comes home before 9pm I will make her wear the I Have No Social Life hat for a week. Also, bring back milk and beer”.’

‘Finally they find an RPG worthy of my time and they kick me out of the house? Is Ceege worried I’ll steal Grace Kelly before he gets the chance?’

‘They’re fighting over who gets to be Ginger Rogers.’

‘Fine, I’ll come,’ I said reluctantly. ‘But I reserve the right to get a headache at 8:55.’

‘I’ll make a note of that,’ Xanthippe agreed.

‘You’re here!’ Melinda crowed as we arrived at The Gingerbread House. I wore a black and white houndstooth-patterned frock cut off at the knee, with matching sandals and a handbag that had been repurposed from a vintage Sherlock Holmes hardcover. Xanthippe wore a real tuxedo. Rare for her to be more dressed up than me. ‘Perfect. Xanthippe, want to do the honours? We’re taking the last of them down.’

‘I’m up for anything,’ Xanthippe said cheerfully. ‘What am I taking down?’

‘The cameras,’ Melinda said, as if it should be obvious. ‘Come on, help me with the one in the living room. I can’t stand on a chair.’

‘Chairs I can do,’ said Xanthippe, and abandoned me. I hoisted my bottle of sparkling white and my two litres of raspberry crunch gelato (crunch is what happens when you forget to strain the seeds out) and pushed my way through the crowd, making for the kitchen. I’m always more comfortable in kitchens. Well, within reason. Alice ‘French Vanilla’ Conway was standing in this particular kitchen, which severely limited how comfortable I was going to feel.

‘Hi,’ she said, looking startled to see me. She was in her usual cardigan and sundress combination, her hurt leg wrapped in bandages that had been decorated by one of her arty roommates, with biro doodles and paper roses.

‘Hi,’ I said back, and lodged the ice cream in the freezer, the bottle in the fridge. No, the hell with it. I took the bottle back, and opened it. ‘Must be good to be home.’

‘Strange, is what it is,’ she said, with that little bashful smile that made me want to like her all over again. ‘I’m glad Cherry and Ginger — I mean, Mel and Libby took me back, I wouldn’t have blamed them for cutting me off altogether.’

‘They’re good people,’ I said. ‘You’re family to them. They were miserable when you disappeared.’

Alice nodded quickly. ‘That’s why they decided to close The Gingerbread House. They say it’s because Libby’s graduating soon, and Mel wants some privacy for when the baby comes. But I don’t think they would have taken it all apart so quickly if I hadn’t told them that I can’t live with cameras any more.’

‘I don’t blame you for that,’ I said. ‘A day in Flynn with cameras all over the place was enough for me.’ I hesitated. ‘Have you heard anything from Jason?’

‘No,’ Alice said, and sighed. ‘I don’t expect to. I know his dad paid his bail, but … he’s not supposed to make contact with me before the trial. And I don’t think he’d want to speak to me even if he was allowed to. He was such a good friend to me, and look what I did to him.’

I could have said that Jason was nineteen, not twelve. He knew that taking his dad’s gun was a stupid thing to do. Even if he thought he was protecting his friends. Life is not a slasher movie, and he had to know that pointing a gun at someone was going to have consequences. Those are all things that I would have said, if I wanted to put her at her ease. But I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to. The whole thing still had a wrong feeling about it.

What I said was: ‘Quite a party you have going on here.’ I’d spotted Lara and Yui on my way in, and a few other mates from around the city. I wouldn’t be bored.

‘We’ve never been able to have people over before,’ Alice said with a wan smile. ‘We had the rule for The Gingerbread House — no men at all, and the only time we invited friends here was when we knew we could trust them about keeping our privacy rules. And signing waivers, of course, since everything that happened here was broadcast live.’

I nodded. ‘It’s a shame you never wired up cameras in the driveway, really. It might have helped corroborate your story to the police.’

She gave me a wary look. ‘I suppose so.’

‘Or Vanilla here could have strapped a camera to her head and filmed everything just in case she needed to prove her innocence,’ put in Ginger — Libby, coming into the kitchen. She stood beside Alice, and even though it was casual, I knew a protective instinct when I saw one.

‘See,’ I said, matching her fake flippant tone. ‘The perfect solution. Constant CCTV coverage everywhere.’

‘Sounds like a terrible idea to me,’ said Libby, which only went to show that she was incapable of spotting irony. She opened another packet of corn chips and filled the empty bowl she had brought in with her. ‘Speaking as a film student — anything can be faked. If we relied on film footage for everything, a lot of innocent people would end up in jail.’

‘Interesting,’ I said, pouring myself a glass of the sparkling white and offering it to them both. Alice shook her head, while Libby reached for a new beer from the fridge. ‘I’d forgotten you were a film student,’ I added. ‘You didn’t take part in
Flynn by Night
?’

Libby wrinkled her nose at me. ‘Some random improvisation project produced and directed by a team with no training? Xanthippe’s a sweetheart, but I take my work a bit more seriously than that.’

‘That’s a shame,’ I said. ‘We had a lot of fun. You were there, though, weren’t you? At Flynn that day. You went to visit Pepperminty — I mean, Pippa.’

Libby’s face went from neutral to downright resentful. ‘Vanilla,’ she said. ‘Take these chips out, yeah? There are a few engie students eyeing the furniture hungrily.’

Alice gave her a wary look, but went. Obviously she’d been playing the meek and accommodating flatmate for so long, it was deeply ingrained.

Libby leaned in towards me, hissing her words. ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at here, or why you think you’re entitled to know our business. Pippa had been hassling Mel for months to close the website down and pretend it had never existed, because she didn’t have to worry about money any more and didn’t give a damn about the rest of us. Mel was half sick with stress about it, so I went down to give our so-called friend a piece of my mind. Vanilla doesn’t need to know that we were still trying to keep the site going a week ago — the last thing we want is her going all noble on us.’

She folded her arms and glared at me. For someone who didn’t think I was entitled to know her business, she was certainly being more than forthcoming.

I opened my mouth to ask another cheeky question, but Xanthippe interrupted us. ‘Sorry, Libs. Can I borrow Tabitha for a minute?’ She wound her arm in mine and dragged me off before I could express a say in the matter. She led me out the back, where the city’s last remaining smokers were gathered around a small glass jar. We kept going until we stood on the very driveway where French Vanilla had been jumped by her abusive ex. ‘Forgive me for asking, Tish, but didn’t we close this case?’ Xanthippe asked lightly when she was sure there was no one in earshot. ‘The police are pretty sure they matched the right people to the right dead bodies. Can’t you be satisfied with that and, you know, leave it at home where the party isn’t?’

‘Can you?’ I shot back. ‘The story doesn’t make sense, Zee. How did a small woman like Alice manage to lift a guy the size of Malcolm Drake into that car boot? I tried to raise it with Constable Heather and she gave me some bullshit about how mothers lift cars off their children in time of great emergency. It makes a lot more sense if the others helped her.’

‘So?’ Xanthippe said. ‘If they did, so what? It doesn’t make any difference to the final result of what happened that night. I know you want Jason to not be in trouble — to not have shot that bastard Drake — but you can’t hunt around for a different solution because you don’t like the real one.’

I leaned my head back against the wall, sighing. She was right. I knew she was right. The reason I was having this conversation with her and not with Bishop was because I knew he’d say the same thing, and I wasn’t ready to have a conversation about how much more he knew about police work than me, when we were still having tentative conversations using ice cream metaphors for our relationship.

‘I still feel like there’s a piece missing,’ I grumbled.‘How did you know Jason and Alice didn’t have a romantic relationship? I mean, you were so sure about it.’

Xanthippe shrugged. ‘I read their texts. Well, not all of them. Memory only saves so many messages. But it was a very different story to what the postcards told us. She spent her whole time talking to him about the bad relationship that messed her up for anyone new, and he talked about the person he thought he was falling for, after Annabeth left.’

I stared at her. Because hello, completely missing piece right there. ‘You read her texts? You had Alice’s phone? The one she left behind that night?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Zee. ‘But I found a memory card in the pot plant in her room, when we were searching it.’

‘You didn’t tell me.’ I had no way of knowing how to deal with this. What the HELL?

‘Xanthippe shrugged. ‘I was going to, but there wasn’t anything useful there, just squishy feelings. Plus other people were always around. Why do we never hang out, just the two of us?’

‘Greater temptation for me to strangle you.’

‘You make a reasonable point.’

I wasn’t comfortable with this. ‘So Alice just made a habit of hiding her memory card in her room?’

‘Hmm,’ said Xanthippe, which was her way of saying ‘you said something stupid there’. ‘Except it turns out the phone Alice left in the living room had a blank message history.’

‘They swapped it,’ I said immediately. ‘Libby and Melinda. Or one of them.’

‘We don’t know that,’ said Xanthippe.

‘It’s a logical suggestion.’

‘Mmm, are you sure you thought of it?’

‘Don’t tell me you haven’t.’

‘Okay,’ Xanthippe sighed. ‘So one or both of them hid her message history, and one or both of them helped her lift a body into a boot. That doesn’t mean anything. Not what you want it to mean.’

‘And what do you think I want it to mean?’ I demanded.

‘That Jason is innocent. Which, by the way, he’s not. Because evidence. And confession.’

‘Oh, whatever,’ I sulked, and swallowed half my drink. Sensibly I’d brought it with me when she hustled me out of the kitchen. ‘Don’t you think it’s strange that they are dismantling the cameras now?’

‘No, I really don’t. I think it stopped being fun, and they’re ready to move on.’

‘Do you know what else is not fun?’ I said. ‘This party.’

Xanthippe reached out, and took the glass from me. ‘So go home.’

‘What about Ceege and his hat?’

Xanthippe just grinned. ‘Kick his arse from me. If you want to mooch around and brood, then go for it. You’ve earned the right.’

Why yes, I had.

When I got home Ceege and Darrow were deep in an argument as to whether Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant would ever have hooked up in real life. They didn’t notice me sneaking in. I went straight up to my room. My bed was an island surrounded by discarded frocks and other items of clothing.

The little black dress was still hanging up in the empty wardrobe, taunting me with how mainstream and ordinary it was. Vanilla. I pulled it out, smoothing it out, looking at it. So not me. At all.

I think what Bishop was trying to say, in between all the awkwardness and ice cream mutilation, was that he’d rather have me in his life than someone who suited a dress like this. Which was good to know.

Unfortunately, this revelation had gone so much to my head that before I knew what I was doing, I had talked him into taking me to the family Christmas.

The phone and I stared at each other. I almost reached out and picked it up. It rang before I could touch it.

‘So I’m trapped in my room, with several days of no’ writing to catch up on,’ said Stewart in that voice that always made my skin warm. ‘Tell me yer having more fun.’

I relaxed, all the stress melting out of me, and lay back on the pillows. Stewart not being weird about me and Bishop failing to break up was one of the best things that had happened to me all week. ‘I’m hiding from Darrow and Ceege while they arm wrestle to decide which 1940s actress they would most like to shag.’

‘Those two really know how tae party.’

‘Tell me about your latest book,’ I said. ‘What’s the theme this time? Hot chef falls for restaurant owner? Journalist and photographer playing cat and mouse with each other? Foreign millionaire shags the nanny?’

‘Amateur detective falls fer murderer.’

Caught off guard, I glared down the phone at him. ‘Really?’

‘Nae, no’ really. That would be a good’un, though. This one’s about a film director who falls fer her leading man.’

‘Does he have rippling muscles?’

‘I never understood why they say that. Wha’ makes muscles ripple? Would anyone really want muscles tae ripple? Sounds painful.’

‘You’re just saying that because you don’t have any.’

‘Ha, I flex my puny muscles at ye.’

‘I would swoon at your puny flexing muscles but I can’t even see them…’