The Next to Die Read online

  Dedication

  For Paul Pagett, who almost guessed the right answer

  to the Liv and Gibbs question

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Sophie Hannah

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  From: [email protected]

  Sent: February 10, 2016 11:41:24

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Origami by Kim Tribbeck

  Dear Susan,

  I am thrilled to be sending you the latest (and, we hope, final) incarnation of Origami by our wonderful Kim. Yes, I’m afraid she’s still determined to call it that! Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. I have put your case to her as eloquently as I know how, but she refuses to entertain the idea of calling it Kim Peculiar, Kim Ha Ha. She is of the view that it’s undignified, and I must admit I can see her point. I don’t know if people in France or Japan ask one another if something is funny peculiar or funny ha ha. Do you think they do? It feels very English to me. I suspect it’s a title that would travel badly, and since Kim is one of the few British comedians of her generation who’s starting to make a real impact internationally, I’d like her book’s title to have broader appeal. And as Kim pointed out (and of course she’s quite right), she’s hardly a “ha ha” kind of comedian. She’s far too dark and subtle for that, and endlessly under fire from the “Why can’t you just tell funny jokes?” brigade. To put “Ha Ha” in her title would, I fear, give rise to a few “Ha ha? There’s not a single good punchline in the book!” sort of reviews.

  I also think this book will sell not because it’s a comedian’s memoir—a flagging genre, I suspect—but because it’s essentially a true crime book: the story of Kim’s involvement in the Billy Dead Mates murder investigation. For this reason, I wonder whether we might do better with a title that sounds more crime-ish? I think I can persuade Kim to relinquish her cherished Origami if you will, at your end, agree not to mention Kim Peculiar, Kim Ha Ha again. What about something referencing Billy and his books directly? The Billy Dead Books? Or is that too oddball?

  Since the book will form the basis of Kim’s tour later in the year (and I’m afraid the tour is called “Origami,” whatever the name of the book ends up being), we will need at some point to talk about a special edition of the book to be sold only at Kim’s gigs, perhaps with some extra content. I’ve attached a full list of tour dates as requested.

  I think that’s all for now. I am on the very edge of my seat and likely to bounce off it in excitement as I await your reaction to this stunning book!

  Warmest regards,

  Inessa

  * * *

  Kim Tribbeck in Origami—Autumn 2016 Tour Dates

  Newcastle/Theatre Royal—September 2

  Newcastle/Metro Radio Arena—September 3

  York/Grand Opera House—September 4

  Harrogate/Royal Hall—September 5

  Scarborough/Scarborough Spa—September 10

  Durham/Gala Theatre—September 11

  Huddersfield/Town Hall—September 12

  Southend/Cliffs Pavilion—September 13

  Wimborne/Tivoli Theatre—September 19

  Stoke/Regent Theatre—September 20

  Coventry/Warwick Arts Centre—September 21

  Nottingham/Playhouse—September 22

  Warrington/Parr Hall—September 23

  Ipswich/Regent—September 29

  Scunthorpe/Baths Hall—September 30

  Folkestone/Leas Cliff Hall—October 1

  Birmingham/Genting Arena—October 2

  Bournemouth/International Centre—October 5

  Stevenage/Arts & Leisure Centre—October 8

  Aylesbury/Waterside Theatre—October 9

  Hayes/Beck Theatre—October 10

  Chatham/Central Theatre—October 11

  Northampton/Royal & Derngate—October 16

  London/Southbank Centre—October 17

  Cambridge/Corn Exchange—October 18

  Aberdeen/Music Hall—October 24

  Dorking/Halls—October 29

  Swindon/Wyvern Theatre & Arts Centre—October 30

  Carmarthen/Lyric Theatre—October 31

  from Origami by Kim Tribbeck

  For Elaine Hopwood, the mother I never met but always loved

  1

  My tip for anyone under scrutiny from the police: as soon as you try to hide something, you make it glaringly visible, like the buildings and bridges that are sometimes wrapped in white cloth by artists, making everyone stare and point at them. Pull off the cloth and you’ve got an unremarkable office block or a congested commuter route across the water; people walk past with their heads down, oblivious.

  Tell the police the truth, immediately and in detail—all your sleazy lies, all your unsavory personal habits—and no one will pay a scrap of attention. It’s kind of obvious: when you hide, people seek, whereas when you talk about something that matters to you, no one listens. Ever. This is the main way in which human beings are reliable.

  Standing before detectives, I decided straightaway that I mustn’t appear to be a mystery. For as long as I was one, there was a danger I’d look like one, so when I first went to the police, I held up my secret and waved it around ostentatiously like an ID card in a wallet: “Here’s my secret; now let me pass.”

  I wouldn’t have minded, except I only had the one. A solitaire. It wasn’t even current—it was the memory of a secret. Nevertheless, it was my most treasured possession and my best friend. (I’ve had human best friends in the past. They’re overrated.) I preferred my secret to my home, my work, my remaining blood relatives. Giving it up was a significant sacrifice.

  I don’t regret telling the police the truth. To do anything but reveal all would have been daft. As a real person, I understand this. Only fictional characters in TV crime dramas think, “Here come the cops, investigating a series of brutal slayings—I’d better tie myself in elaborate knots to make sure they don’t find out I watched a pirated movie in 1997. Who cares if it hampers their efforts to prevent the garotting-with-piano-wire of yet another apple-cheeked schoolboy? Just nobody mention The English Patient. I know nothing about that. I’ve never seen a burned English guy in a hospital bed in my entire life, I swear.”

  The TV-crime-drama police are just as puzzling in their behavior as the civilians they interview, aren’t they? The minute they twig something’s being kept from them, they launch into their passionate “We, the detectives, don’t care about most crimes” routine. “Look, sir, we’re investigating a murder here. That’s all we care about: catching this killer. We don’t give a toss if you’ve parked illegally or partaken of a contraband English Patient video. Just tell us what you know about this murder. If you’ve curb-crawled, or lied about your age to buy booze or cigarettes, we’re very chilled about that. Drugs? Do me a favor! Shoplifting, carjacking—all fine with us. Have you mugged an old lady, leaving her with s
evere head injuries? Try not to bore us, yeah? Like we could give a shit about some irrelevant old boiler.

  “Despite being employed to keep society safe from harm, we only actually want to solve one crime. We’ve decided, for some peculiar reason that is never elaborated upon, that none of the others count. We’re the police equivalent of a lollipop lady who’s determined to usher one kid safely across a road while ignoring the dozens falling under the wheels of SUVs nearby. Tell you what, we’ll cut you a deal: give us something, anything, that’ll get us one step closer to catching this killer—the only criminal on the planet we care about, even though that’s utterly irrational—and we’ll grant you immunity for all your other crimes, like the baby you strangled and the fire you started in which eight nurses died.”

  “I still can’t risk telling the truth,” thinks the narcissistic suspect with no sense of perspective. “I’ve been assured by the most eminent superintendent in the land that I could have melted my neighbor in a cauldron of boiling wax and he’d totally let me off, but there’s still no way of predicting how annoyed he might be about the whole English Patient thing. Nope, that’s a tough one to call. Better play it safe and say nothing.”

  In my first real-life experience of this kind of situation, I gleaned a perverse satisfaction from giving up my shocking secret straightaway. Truth is, I felt a little bit ashamed to be involved with the police in the role of boring Goody Two-shoes who’d done nothing wrong, so I decided to try to annoy them. A detective’s job is to ferret out what people are hiding, so how irritating must it be for them when someone’s opening gambit is “Let me tell you everything”? Imagine how furious Jamie Oliver would be if he opened his oven on Christmas Day and found a perfectly cooked turkey with all the trimmings in there that someone else had prepared earlier; it must be like that.

  I shared my solitary secret with the detectives investigating the Billy Dead Mates murders as if it were a great gossipy anecdote. It was. I said, “I don’t know where to start. Oh, wait! Yes I do!” And laughed.

  There was only one place I could start: in the middle in every sense, with the symbolic object that stood at the center of it all, a solid barrier between one half of my life and the other—an unpainted wooden door with a silver handle . . .

  * * *

  Tuesday, January 6, 2015

  Ringpull. I think the word as I swallow the object.

  It happened too quickly: a hard snag in the orange-flavored Fruit Rush in my mouth, then gone. Nothing to be done. Unless . . .

  No, I didn’t imagine it sliding down. It was too small to hurt, but I felt it: a lump in liquid. And the visual evidence tells me I swallowed it: its absence from the top of the can in my hand. I must have worked it loose and dropped it in—plucking and twisting, my fingers barely aware of what they were doing. My only aim was to fill time with physical activity. Although (I realize, now that I’ve swallowed metal) it’s a habit I have even when I don’t need to distract myself: I work the ringpull loose, snap it off and drop it into my drink to get it out of the way of my mouth.

  If you think about it, it makes perfect sense: only one item to dispose of if it’s inside the can. And—I’d have said before today—there’s no danger of it ending up in your stomach. Only a fool would swallow a ringpull.

  Did I do it on purpose? Because now I have a problem, maybe, and it occurs to me that might be exactly what I wanted. Another distraction: what to do about the foreign object inside my body. Is it dangerous? If it is, I have to do something about it, which means I’ll need to leave this ward and go to another one.

  Did I mention how efficient I am? This will impress you: when I need, unexpectedly, to find out if swallowing a ringpull is likely to do me any harm, I’m already in a hospital—the Rawndesley General Infirmary. You can’t get much more ergonomic than that.

  I’d never been inside a hospital until last Saturday apart from when I was born, but I’ve watched my fair share of medical dramas, and I’ve never heard anyone mention the ringpull ward. At the moment I’m in Ward 10, the cancer ward. This is where my grandmother is dying. I have to stay until she dies, unless I can come up with a really good excuse to leave.

  A sharp-edged metal object that might slice my gut open from within sounds like a brilliant excuse to me, but then I’m not an expert. And I’m not sure if the edges were sharp. They probably make them rounded so nobody cuts their fingers. I’d better ask someone. The nurses and doctors on Ward 10 are bound to be more interested in cancer, but anyone working on the world’s top illness must first have been trained in the basics of Fruit Rush can-component ingestion, surely. I just need to catch someone’s eye . . . although ideally not hers.

  Too late. The nurse with square-cut gray hair and tortoiseshell glasses on a chain around her neck is approaching. “You’re still here?” she says.

  “Yes. Marion’s still dying,” I say with a shrug. “Can’t really leave halfway through.”

  I don’t want to discuss the ringpull situation or anything with this woman—Bridget, according to her badge. I already know she doesn’t have my best interests at heart, or else she’s not bright enough to work out that they might differ from her imaginary version of them. She hasn’t left me alone since I decided to sit in the ward corridor. She wants me tidied away, next to the deathbed. So far this morning she’s tried, “Has the doctor sent you to wait out here?” (No) and “You can take that chair into Gran’s room if you’d like.” (No, thanks. Actually, I only just brought it out.)

  “I know it’s hard, but you’d probably feel better if you were in there with Gran,” she says now.

  Stop calling her that. She’s not your gran. Why not try calling her Marion like I do and always have?

  Bridget extends her neck to peer sympathetically down at me. It makes me think of those sticks with pincers on the end that sanitation workers use to pick up litter in public places.

  This has been happening ever since Marion was admitted to the hospital: the people who work here keep reminding me of inanimate objects, even as they move around freely, and the things on the ward remind me of living creatures. The shiny silver hand-sterilizing unit on wheels makes me think of a pelican every time I walk past it.

  I walk past it a lot. I leave Ward 10 as often as I can—for an extra bar of mobile phone signal for all the calls I’m not making; a drink when I’m not thirsty; painkillers from the hospital shop when I don’t have a headache; a magazine I can’t focus on; extra-strong mints. Any excuse. It doesn’t do me much good, though; I still have to come back here, to Ward 10. A dying grandmother isn’t like a crap movie at Cineworld—you can’t decide to sack it and leave halfway through.

  “I’m sure your brother’d appreciate the support, too,” Bridget adds.

  “I don’t support him,” I tell her. “He’s asked the doctors to continue treatment—more transfusions, more oxygen. He wouldn’t let them catheterize Marion because a nurse I’ve never met said she might get a bladder infection, so instead they have to keep going in and changing her, and you can see in her eyes that she hates it.”

  My voice sounds increasingly hoarse as I say what I’ve said a dozen times already. I don’t know why I’m bothering. No one listens. The staff here have things they’ve been trained to do—Treat patients! Avoid infection!—and they’re determined to do them.

  “It’s crazy,” I tell Bridget. “My grandmother is twenty-four, forty-eight hours away from death at most. Stop rolling her around like fucking scone dough! She wouldn’t want it. Put in a catheter, now. Stop listening to Drew when he talks about moving her back to her house with medical support, and maybe with daily transfusions she can regain some quality of life, and maybe she can listen to audiobooks. Who knows, maybe she can learn to play the clarinet and join a brass band!” I blink back tears. “She can’t. Just go in there and look at her eyes. She desperately wants it to be over. Drew doesn’t care. All he cares about is him not losing his grandmother. If you had any decency, you’d give her a morphine over
dose. I know you can’t. But you should be able to, because this is ridiculous!”

  Bridget pulls over a chair from the nurses’ area, sits down next to me and pats my hand. Who on the planet feels better after having their hand patted? Anyone who does is a pushover.

  I could put an instant end to her sympathy for me by revealing that I’m knowingly making the most of my “relative of dying cancer patient” status to say all the outrageous things I’d want to say anyway. I’ll never get a free pass to be this obnoxious again, and I’m determined to make the most of it.

  “It’s a painful time for your family,” says Bridget, as if this aspect of the situation might have escaped me. “But there are ways of making it less painful. And more meaningful.”

  I eye her suspiciously. “You’re going to tell me sitting in the corridor with my back to the closed doors of Marion’s room isn’t one of those ways, aren’t you?”

  “You could sit quietly by her bed instead. Hold her hand, tell her you love her.”

  “I don’t think I’d get a look in. Drew’ll have her strapped to a treadmill by now, keeping her muscles toned in case she makes a miraculous recovery in time for this year’s London Marathon. If you listen at the door, you’ll hear him firing old University Challenge questions at her to keep her brain alert.”

  After a short silence, Bridget says, “I know you’re a comedian. I don’t recognize you, but Fiona told me. She says you’re quite famous.”

  “I can’t go into a room full of death and pretend it’s anything else,” I say. “Or rather, I could, but I won’t. I’ve spent a fair bit of time in there. I didn’t like it, so now I’m staying out.”

  “Well, I can’t force you . . .”

  “Hold her hand, tell her I love her? No. Do you tell everybody to do that?”

  “Well . . .” Bridget looks around, as if hoping for a prompt.

  “Do you have any idea how bad Marion’s feeling at the moment? Not physically; emotionally. Here’s what you can’t know: historically, when Marion feels bad, terrible things happen to me. So forgive me if, when she’s feeling worse than ever before, I don’t want to get too close to her.”