“So Mick knew at least one of the marriages was real. So what?”
“He lied about it. Why? He wasn’t surprised that Woody was a real husband, either. He should’ve been as astonished as we were. What if he knew all the marriages were real? He’d be aiding and abetting... trigamy. Is that a real word, Alastair?”
Alastair nodded wisely. He was still circling Joss’s name on the napkin.
“And,” Gail went on, “he kept avoiding the question about the key — had the police found it? Why didn’t Mo unlock herself when it got cold and wet? As soon as we brought that up he started droning on about art. He wants us to think it was all about art and promoting art.”
Alastair looked up and said, “Did any of us look at his work? Did any of us look at anything that wasn’t Mo’s?”
“Hers was nearest to the door,” I said. “The music — it was so gob-smacking — ‘To die by your side, well the pleasure and privilege...’ It drew you straight to her installation.”
“Did it, though? Mo despised that kitsch ’nineties retro. Her thing was Extreme Dance.” Alastair looked down at his list and hesitantly wrote Mick’s name. “If you ask me, the music didn’t go with her work at all. She’d never have chosen it.”
“That’s it!” Gail said.
“What?” I said.
“The music was wrong. Mo wouldn’t have picked it. So Mick had to.”
Gail seemed to be obsessing about Mick just to wind me up. And yet, now that I thought about it, although the music spoke to me that bizarre morning, Alastair had a point — it was utterly wrong for Mo.
But Gail had moved on. “And it was Mick who turned the music on when we went in to see Mo’s installation. The music was Mick’s choice, not Mo’s. And the only reason he’d have done that was...” She looked at Alastair and then me, her eyes gleaming, inviting us to catch up with her train of thought. I didn’t know about Alastair, but I was thinking so slowly I was unlikely to catch up with anything.
“Mick was Mo’s boyfriend,” Gail declared.
“Boyfriend?” I slumped in my chair. “Boyfriend? But...”
“Both Joss and Woody thought Mo had a boyfriend — they each thought it was the other. But it wasn’t. It was Mick. Think about it. He didn’t go to the funeral. Why not?”
I glanced at Alastair, then shrugged. There are plenty of reasons not to go to a funeral, but they didn’t seem compelling in the face of Gail’s enthusiasm.
“Because he knew Mo’s husbands would be there,” Gail said. “I think Mick was in love with Mo. I’ll bet to begin with he really did think the ‘husbands’ in the installation were actors — like he said — until he found out somehow.” She turned to Alastair.
“What?” he said.
“Charles. Charles is the answer. Where is he?”
Alastair looked at me. I said, “Isn’t he with Bekki? Or, rather, isn’t Bekki with him, and his cashmere?”
“Mick didn’t duck out when Woody showed up,” Gail said, “but he vanished as soon as Charles arrived. I’ll bet Charles will confirm that Mick knew he was Mo’s husband. One of Mo’s husbands.”
I said, “And finding out one of the husbands was for real meant they all were?”
Gail said, “All we have to do is talk with Charles to prove it.” She turned to Alastair. “Call Bekki.” She dug out her cell phone and handed it to him. “I saw her slip her card into your pocket.”
“She did?” Alastair looked in his pockets and discovered a card. “Why the hell would that silly woman think I’d want her phone number?” He turned to Gail without knowing he was already defeated. “No way, no day am I calling Bekki.”
“Mick’s responsible,” Gail said. “Maybe he didn’t mean for Mo to die, Liza. I’m not saying he’s a cold killer. He probably just wanted to teach her a lesson — leave her chained to her husbands in her wedding dress till she was really uncomfortable. Went for a drink, perhaps, but then had another and another and by the time he went back... Well, it was too late.”
“Three husbands,” I said, “and yet it was her boyfriend who killed her? Gail, you can’t mean it. She married three men for her installation and had Mick on the side for love?”
“She didn’t marry for art, Liza, she married for money.”
“But, Gail, she already had money.”
“Her father had money, but he married a greedy woman. Why do you want everything to be about art?”
“Because art’s the only thing that makes sense of life. Otherwise it’s all random and horrible. And Mo was an installation artist who had witty stuff to say about marriage. She was our friend. I don’t want her death to be about clichés like jealousy and money.”
“Love, jealousy, and money,” Gail corrected me. “Love isn’t a cliché.”
“It is, in this context,” I said, miserable.
“Don’t argue with her, Liza,” Alastair said. “You know she’s always right.” He started circling Mick’s name. “Always, always right.” He began to draw hearts and pound signs around Mick’s name. It was a detail I could fit into a narrative — the story about this day which I would tell myself sometime in the future; like the detail about the music — something I had not recognised as important at the time — which was that the soundtrack to Mo’s life was Dance music because Dance is music for the party people in the pretty dresses, the people who don’t care.
With astonishment I realized that I had never liked Mo and that I despised her taste in music. And with sadness I accepted what Gail probably knew instinctively, that Mick was a man who hid depression and destructiveness behind wit and irony — just like Morrissey. His taste in music gave him away. Just as the other big giveaway was my taste in men. There had to be something wrong with Mick if I liked him.
Gail crunched into a popadum. “Make the call, please, Alastair,” she said.
And I started to remember all of us as if it were already long, long ago. We are young, drunk, howling but essentially happy. The grim reaper hasn’t chosen us. Yet. We have theories but no experience, no proofs. We’re too green for that. In thirty years’ time, who knows — Mo’s death may mean more to us than it does now. It might even have become some sort of art. But until then there is hot food to eat and life to live and a story to construct.
Gail said, “Are we going to tell the police?”
Copyright (c); 2005 by Liza Cody.
The Witching Hour
by Katherine H. Brooks
(with apologies to Longfellow and “The Children’s Hour”)
Between the dawn and the darkness
And into the midnight gloom,
He’d stalled the promised repair job
On the wall of a run-down room.
The barn-board was piled in the kitchen
By the hole, as yet unfixed,
And the wall was waiting and open,
With the plaster freshly mixed.
As he grumbled he heard on the stairway
The clatter of someone’s heel—
His daughter with veiled expression—
His wife with a jaw of steel.
A whisper, and then a silence
And he knew from an instinct wise
They were plotting and planning together
To tackle him by surprise.
A sudden rush from the hallway,
A sneak assault from the side—