Meredith carried through a tray with mugs and milk jug grouped around a steaming cafetière and placed it carefully on a footstool large enough to accommodate a pair of seven league boots. As she poured, Lindsay looked at her more closely. Meredith’s dark blonde hair was ratty, pulled back into a ponytail held by an elastic band. Her eyelids looked bruised and puffy, and dark pouches had appeared under eyes whose grey irises swam in a background of red and white craquelure. The skin on her face and neck seemed to have sagged and crêped overnight, and her lips were chapped and split. Passing her in the street, a casual observer would have assumed the expensive clothes, carefully chosen for their flattering cut and colour, belonged to someone else. Lindsay had always thought Meredith attractive; now she understood that it was only the spark of her liveliness that had made her so. With Penny dead, the light in Meredith’s face had died, leaving her damaged and ordinary.
‘I appreciate you coming,’ Meredith said. ‘I didn’t know if you would.’
Lindsay felt a pang of guilt that she’d even considered refusing. ‘Yeah, well, we’ve been friends a while now.’
‘I haven’t behaved much like a friend since Penny and I split up. I didn’t return your calls, I didn’t come round.’
Lindsay shrugged. ‘I assumed you weren’t ready to talk about it. I wasn’t offended.’
Meredith sighed. ‘It wasn’t just that I wasn’t ready. I knew Penny was seeing Sophie. I saw Sophie pick her up one night around dinnertime and drop her off a couple of hours later. I figured you’d have heard Penny’s side of it. Which would not have been a pretty story. I didn’t expect you’d be too bothered about the case for the defence.’
‘You should know me better than that.’
Meredith acknowledged her reproach with a sad smile. ‘I know. But I haven’t been thinking too straight.’
‘That’s what I’m here for now. But if you’re serious about wanting me to investigate this, you’re going to have to give me a free hand.’
Meredith nodded, cradling her coffee in her hands as if it were precious and fragile. ‘You got it,’ she said.
Lindsay nodded, her lips tight in anticipation of awkwardness. She pushed her hair back from her face and said, ‘It means I have to ask difficult questions. You probably aren’t going to want to answer some of them, but it’s important that you tell me the truth, okay? Even if it’s something that makes it look bad for you, you have to tell me. I’m not going to misunderstand the way your lawyer might, because I know you couldn’t have killed Penny.’ Well, not like that, she added mentally. Not with that degree of premeditation.
Meredith stared into her coffee. ‘I don’t have anything to hide,’ she said, her voice flat as a synthesised answering machine. She looked up, her eyes blank. ‘I didn’t kill Penny. I don’t know who did. That’s what I need you to find out.’
‘I’ll do my best. So, when did Penny actually arrive in Britain?’
‘She’d been here a day or two under three weeks.’
Lindsay jotted a note on the fresh pad she’d dropped into her backpack in Half Moon Bay. ‘I knew she was coming over, of course, I just wasn’t sure exactly when she’d left. It was Sophie who spoke to her last. And you were due to come too, is that right?’
‘I guess you remember how carefully she liked to plan things, and she’d been organising us both for this trip for months.’ Meredith sighed. ‘Originally, the plan was that I was going to join her for a couple of weeks near the beginning of her stay, then I was coming back towards the end for another ten days. After we split up, she decided it would be good for her to go ahead with the trip anyway, only alone.’
Lindsay nodded. ‘But you decided to come regardless?’
‘I couldn’t leave it be. It meant too much for us to walk away from it. Hell, you know how much we loved each other. You and Sophie, you were there right from the start. Ruby’s birthday dinner at Green’s. The lights shining on the bay, only all I had eyes for was Penny …’ Meredith’s voice tailed off and two fat tears spilled down her pale cheeks.
Lindsay leaned forward and put an awkward hand on Meredith’s arm. ‘I remember. She was the same. I couldn’t get a word of sense out of either of you. If there hadn’t been a table between you, you’d have been arrested for indecency in a public place.’
A sad smile curled the edges of Meredith’s lips. ‘Yeah. Feels like ancient history now, though.’ She rubbed the tears away with an impatient hand. ‘That said, I still cared about Penny too much to want to let her go. I figured I had a chance if I could only get her to listen to me. So I came on after her. I’d already booked the vacation time, it was just a matter of arranging a base for myself.’
‘And when did you get in?’
‘Exactly a week ago.’
Lindsay gave the room a quick scrutiny. ‘You dropped lucky with your digs.’
‘Pardon me?’ Meredith looked puzzled.
‘Sorry. Soon as I get back on British soil, I become more idiomatic than the natives. I was saying, you lucked out with the apartment.’
Meredith looked round her vaguely. ‘This place? The company has a deal with the management here. This is where we always stay when we’re over on business. It’s easier to be private for meetings and stuff in an apartment like this than in a hotel. I just asked our travel department to book me a place and bill me direct.’
Lindsay leaned back, relieved that her ploy had loosened Meredith up a little. ‘Going back a bit,’ she said casually. ‘To when you split up. That was about five, six weeks ago, am I right?’
Meredith’s eyes went back to her coffee cup. ‘I guess,’ she said.
‘I’m not entirely clear what went wrong.’
Meredith made a choking sound that Lindsay translated as a bitter laugh. ‘The chapter and verse is clear enough. But why it escalated the way it did, that’s the obscure part.’ She stood up abruptly and walked across to the window to stare out at the canopy of trees. ‘Do you have a cigarette?’ she demanded, turning back into the room.
‘Meredith, you know I quit years ago,’ Lindsay protested.
‘I know, I just figured you might have brought some in tax-free for somebody. Friend, family, I don’t know.’
‘You quit too. About six months after me. Don’t do it, Meredith. Don’t let the bastard kill you as well as Penny,’ Lindsay said passionately.
With an impatient gesture, Meredith freed her hair from the elastic band and let it fall around her face in a limp curtain. ‘Oh, fuck it!’
‘You going to tell me what happened?’ Lindsay said quietly, not taking her eyes off Meredith’s face.
She threw herself into a large wing chair opposite Lindsay. ‘It all started with Penny deciding it was time she got out of the closet on her own terms before some smartass decided to out her.’
‘Was that likely?’
‘You better believe it. There are a lot of militants out there who think that people like Penny owe it to the lesbian sisterhood to be out and proud. No compromises accepted. Never mind that Penny’s been doing more good by keeping her sexuality to herself and providing positive images in her books. The politically correct know there’s only one way to