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Murder Mystery

Oz Hardwick

I’m at that point in the story where it’s too late to introduce a new major character and I just have to work with what I’ve got. So, when I find the body face down on the kitchen floor, instead of a hard-bitten detective wise-cracking from his forty-a-day fug, I fall back on those who I just sketched in at the start and never developed. I reason that it will look like careful planning, so when the knock comes at the door, it’s a girl from my class when I was about 9. She’s wearing an outsized trench coat belted tight around her stick-thin frame and she’s carrying a strawberry cornet that’s melting over her hand. Neither of us knows how to weigh up unexpected death, so I take two Cokes from the fridge, open them, and pop in candy-striped straws, while she finishes her ice cream and starts drawing a goldfish in a spiral-bound notebook. She adds a stream of bubbles and in the largest one writes: Why have you forgotten me for fifty years, only to bring me back for this? I don’t know if they’re her words or the fish’s but it’s awkward either way, so I break the silence by opening a couple of bags of crisps. They’re flavours that didn’t even exist the only other time she ever came round and the novelty gives me a minute to delete the paragraph where I find the body. When I look up, she has a goldfish in a polythene bag held against the Sun, and she and I – aged about 9 – are studying it as if it could tell us how every plot was going to unfold. Maybe it could. Maybe it couldn’t.



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