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Seven Lies (ARC)

Page 26

by Elizabeth Kay


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  successful that we had promptly repeated our plan a second time.

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  MARRIAGE. MURDER. MONEY.

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  That was emblazoned at the very bottom of the page. She wrote

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  that we were now living in utter bliss, reveling in our wealth, the for-

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  tunes extracted from the fists of our dead husbands.

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  Chapter Twenty- Four

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  e might never have heard of Valerie, might never have read

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  her article, if it hadn’t been picked up by a national tabloid

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  newspaper. Her website had a few thousand followers— mainly young

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  Londoners— and perhaps we’d have stumbled across it eventually or

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  maybe it would have been flagged by one of Marnie’s fans. But it was

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  equally possible that our lives would have continued uninterrupted.

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  Unfortunately, it ended up on the front page of a paper distributed

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  across the country in a piece that heralded the nation’s growing fasci-

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  nating with true crime. Apparently, there were thousands of blogs,

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  hundreds of podcasts. It used our story as an example.

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  They said that the blog post had gone viral. It had been shared on

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  Facebook and Twitter more than one hundred thousand times, which

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  while not exceptional was certainly remarkable. Maybe they were tell-

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  ing the truth; perhaps people really were interested in the story of two

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  young women who’d murdered their husbands. I suppose I can’t blame

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  them; I’d have been, too. But the cynic in me wonders if that feature

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  was simply a disguise, a clever way to publish defamatory stories and to

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  cash in on the noise and the excitement without real legal risk. They

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  quoted from Valerie’s website several times, but they referred to an “al-

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  leged” murder and didn’t directly accuse us of anything.

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  The piece was published a few pages in, but there was a small,

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  E L I Z A B E T H K AY

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  incendiary headline on the front, and Marnie and I were immediately

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  inundated by messages from our friends and families. They were horri-

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  fied not by our supposed behavior but instead on our behalf. They

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  didn’t believe a word of it, they said. Have you ever heard such rubbish?

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  And what was the world coming to; was fact- checking still a thing in

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  this day and age? They eagerly reassured us that no one who mattered

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  would pay any attention whatsoever to that sort of drivel.

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  We hadn’t seen the article at that point— we didn’t know there was

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  a website— and so I rushed to the corner shop to pick up a copy, still in 10

  my flannel pajamas, the garish pattern hidden beneath a long black

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  raincoat. I brought it back to the flat and laid it open on the breakfast 12

  bar. Marnie and I read it together, our eyes sliding left and right as we 13

  skimmed each line in tandem and our faces contorting at similar mo-

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  ments, identical frowns for the same terrible lies.

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  There was a line from Valerie at the end. It said, I absolutely under-

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  stand the fascination with these stories, but I think it’s wrong to focus 17

  specifically on the bloodshed and assume that death in itself is the cause 18

  of the allure. For me— and for many of my regular readers— it’s more

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  about the truth than it is about melodrama or scandal. There was a link

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  to her website.

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  I pulled my laptop from beneath the sofa and opened it up on the

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  countertop. The website was slow to load— I suppose we weren’t the

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  only ones looking for the original piece— but eventually that red head-

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  line appeared on the screen.

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  The truth is that Valerie’s article didn’t make much sense. The facts

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  didn’t support her proposed version of events at all. I didn’t kill Jona-

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  than. He was killed by a taxi driver, a man in his late fifties who was

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  serving a prison sentence, having been arrested for inadvertently caus-

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  ing a death while driving drunk. And, after the mortgage had been re-

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  paid, there was very little profit from the sale of his flat, mainly thanks 31S

  to the recession and the subsequent property crisis. And I hadn’t spent

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  a penny of his life insurance payout.

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  Valerie was suggesting that we were so inspired by this overwhelm-

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  ing success— again, her words— that we then waited a not insignificant

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  four years to reenact our plan once more.

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  How did they do it the second time? she wrote. I have to confess that

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  I was tempted to finish the story here today. I considered keeping you

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  waiting until next week for an update. But I just couldn’t do it, not with a 06

  story this tantalizing. Even so, I’ll leave a space below and do take a mo-07

  ment or two to think about this: What did they do the second time?

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  I scrolled down.

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  The drugs, she wrote. Is that what you were thinking? If you had

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  something more grisly in mind, then I think you’re underestimating these

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  two women. Jane Black wasn’t directly responsible for the death of her

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  husband: she wasn’t driving the car that killed him. She simply manipu-

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  lated the situation to achieve her desired result. The same is true of Mar-14

  nie Gregory- Smith. She didn’t push her husband down the st
airs— we

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  know that she was at the library when he died— but she might have

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  smuggled a few extra tablets into his coffee that morning.

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  It was nonsense.

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  But the truth didn’t matter. Because, as I’ve said before, even the

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  strangest fiction can feel entirely true. And believable lies are no great 20

  feat. It was a brilliant story. And that was what mattered most.

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  I should say now that I didn’t respond this calmly at the time. I

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  wasn’t pragmatic at all. I was really fucking angry. It burned in my

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  stomach, like that acidic ache when you know you’ve eaten something

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  rotten, and I felt a strange adrenalized excitement spasming in my

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  limbs. I was alive with rage, much as I had been when I first hated

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  Charles. I assumed that Marnie would feel the same, but when I looked

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  over at her she was crying.

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  “How could she . . .” she whispered, so quiet and airy that her voice

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  sounded almost like a hiss. “How could she write something like . . . It’s 30

  not true. How can she lie? She’s said that— oh, God— how can she say

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  this stuff? Who is this woman?”

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  She pointed to a line in the middle of the screen. Her index finger

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  was trembling. A few words were there in bold, isolated from the rest

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  of the text.

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  “They’ve always been close,” says a friend of the two young women.

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  “Always very insular. Intimate, I’d say.”

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  “Who the fuck is that?” She slammed her empty mug down on the

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  worktop. “Who the fuck has said that? What sort of— Both our hus-

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  bands are fucking dead. And some little bitch is— Who the fuck, Jane?

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  Who is that?”

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  “Marnie,” I said, and I was a little frightened by her, because I’d

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  never once, not in twenty years, seen her lose her temper— she was al-

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  ways so contained— and yet here she was, angrier than I’d ever seen

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  anyone. “Let’s just take a minute.”

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  “A minute? We don’t have a fucking minute. Jane, this will be ev-

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  erywhere already. This bloody piece is on doormats across the country,

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  waiting to be read with a cup of coffee and a slice of fucking toast, there 17

  in supermarkets and newsstands and at fucking airports, and then

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  they’ll all pick up their laptops— we did, didn’t we? It’s there in peo-

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  ple’s tablets already, all black and white and shining on a screen.”

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  “Marnie. Let’s just— ” It was sort of thrilling to see her so wild.

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  “Do you think my parents have seen it?” she said. “Oh, God. My

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  parents have read it. Oh, fucking hell. And if they haven’t, then how

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  long will it be— not very long, I can tell you that right now— until they 24

  receive a knock on the door from a neighbor or a polite little text from

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  a golf club chum that says, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry that your family are featur-26

  ing in the fucking tabloids, what an imposition,’ and snicker snicker,

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  then they’ll fucking know. It’s on the internet, for fuck’s sake. They’re 28

  going to be livid. Their colleagues will read it. Oh, Jesus, Jane. What do 29

  we do?”

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  And then, as quickly as she’d appeared, she was gone, and Marnie

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  was crying again, her head in her hands and her body shaking and all of

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  that strength and power dissipating into the space around her.

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  That was the moment my fear reappeared. It built in me like a fever. It 03

  started with her anger. I could see the shape of it; I could feel its vibra-04

  tions. I knew that it might one day come for me. And then the realiza-

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  tion that there was someone somewhere who was unconvinced by the

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  most obvious answers, the facts as they’d been confirmed.

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  There was something in the way Valerie wrote, in the shape of her

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  sentences, that was so much more sinister than the words themselves. I

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  had this inkling then that we were only at the very beginning. I had a

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  suspicion tightly tied to my fear that the worst was still to come.

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  A few hours later, we began to receive calls from other media

  outlets. I’d installed a landline phone when I’d first moved in

  because it made my internet substantially cheaper, but I soon regretted

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  that decision. The messages were never- ending, long and descriptive or

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  short and punchy, but vast in number and arriving quicker than we

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  could possibly delete them. And soon they were emailing and texting

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  us, too. The story had captured the imaginations of their readers, or

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  listeners, or audiences. And what did we have to say about it? Did we

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  want to add our comments? They promised us— all of them— that they

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  were different from the other reporters, or radio hosts, or broadcasters.

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  The others simply cared about numbers, about the drama, about being

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  part of the hype. But us? No, that’s not us at all. We really care. And

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  this was the moment— “this is your moment,” they all said— to put the 25

  record straight.

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  Don’t laugh. It’s not funny. What are you laughing at? “
Put the re-

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  cord straight”? Well, yes, I suppose that is a little funny. I certainly

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  wasn’t going to be doing that.

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  Anyway, Marnie and I knew that the lie— the fantastical tale of two

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  lesbian murderesses— was more tantalizing than the truth. Or, at least,

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  than the assumed truth. Who didn’t want to read about the two Ma-

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  chiavellian widows living in sin?

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  And so we said nothing. We unplugged the landline and turned off

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  our mobiles and redirected every email that wasn’t from a recognized

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  sender to our junk and spam folders. Then we locked the front door and

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  didn’t leave the flat for two weeks, ordering food online every few days

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  and illegally streaming new movies. I didn’t call my boss, but I assume

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  someone in the office had seen the article because I received a very

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  simple message to “be in touch as and when I felt able to return.”

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  Marnie and I were confident that the drama would ease eventually.

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  There is always a more interesting story waiting to be told. And, thank-

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  fully, the photograph used in the newspaper was horribly pixelated. It

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  had been taken in our first summer home from university and our

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  fancy- dress costumes, while undeniably sexy, made us rather hard to

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  identify. There were others of Marnie— on her website, on social

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  media— and I know that there was one of me hidden somewhere on my

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  company’s website, but that must have been the only one of us both.

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  We simply had to be patient.

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  Even so, I wanted to know more about the strange woman who had

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  so disturbingly inserted herself into our lives and so I scoured the inter-18

  net for information. I found out about her marriage: her ex- husband,

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  his new wife, their wedding website. I scrolled downward, backward,

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  until I found the wedding venue, the endorsement they’d given the

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  caterers. I found photographs of her home on Instagram: they showed

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  the shared flat she now lived in; her roommate, recognizable immedi-

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  ately; the balcony where they’d sat in the summer drinking wine. I

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  could see the name of the café opposite and it was easy then to find it

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  online, to know where she lived. In the last few weeks, she’d started

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