of thing that bored housewives like her did when the kids left home, “mindfulness” or something like that, and one of the techniques they’d taught was visualization. You had to picture yourself doing what you wanted to do. You had to imagine yourself succeeding at it.
“So we went in to see her that day.”
The day she died. “How did she look?” Susie found herself saying.
“Did you not see the video?” said Karen, surprised. “You must be about the only person who hasn’t.”
Susie shook her head. “In any case, I want to know how she looked when she arrived for work, not how she was when she was all dolled up to do a job.”
Karen threw her head back, snorting with laughter. Her earrings danced. “It’s not fucking Hollywood, you know. She just came in with the same slut clothes she normally wore. She was a gorgeous girl, no doubt about it. They all are at Foxy Kittenz, it’s our stock-in-trade. But between you, me, and the gatepost, she looked zonked out. She looked like somebody who did too many drugs, you know, too much heroin.” Karen stopped, looking sharply at Susie. “Did you know that about her, Susie? Did you know that little Emma was using the spike?”
Susie shook her head slowly. “Not at the time.”
Karen smiled her strange grin again, making her look almost vampiric. “Of course not. Of course you didn’t. There’s a song, ain’t there? About a posh girl with a rich daddy who decides to slum it just for the hell of it, to see how the other half lives. ‘Common People.’ You know the one?”
Susie didn’t bother to answer, just stared at Karen as though observing an alien life form, aware now that there was nothing remotely truth-telling about this session; it was simply an exercise in mental torture.
“‘Common People’ by Pulp, that’s the one. That’s what I think of when I think of Emma. She started to mix with the likes of us, then it all got a bit too much for her, didn’t it? In the song, the girl can ring Daddy and Daddy can stop it all, but your Emma didn’t do that, or couldn’t do that. Why was that, Susie?”
“We’re not posh,” said Susie, dimly wondering why she even bothered making that point. “Guy was an engineer. Up north. He was made redundant. He used his redundancy pay to—”
“I googled him,” spat Karen. “I googled him fourteen years ago. Fuck, it was so long ago, I probably didn’t even use Google. It was probably Ask Jeeves or some shit like that. It’s not him I’m accusing of being posh, Lady Muck, it’s you.”
Karen’s color was rising and Susie wondered if she should be afraid, but with a dim sense of triumph she realized that she wasn’t.
“Because you certainly didn’t live in the north or get made redundant from any engineering job, did you? Privately educated, that’s you. Met Guy Drake at a charity function.
“Poor old Emma, she probably didn’t know where the roots lay. On the one hand she’s got all this wealth, public-school friends of her own, privileged money; on the other hand, there’s Daddy, giving it the big ‘when I were a lad’ speech. Working-class hero, all that malarkey. Am I right? No wonder she ended up so fucking confused.
“Here, I wonder if she ever thought that Daddy might secretly approve of what she was doing. What do you think? What do you think a psychiatrist might have to say about that? Like, was there something deep inside? Was she trying to win her daddy’s favor? They say that’s what all little girls do.”
“Like you, you mean,” said Susie.
“Very good, missus.”
“You wanted to win your father’s love by murdering my daughter.”
Karen sneered. “I didn’t need to win my dad’s love by murdering your daughter. This is the whole fucking trouble with you, you have such a high opinion of yourself, you think the whole world revolves around the Drake surname. I already had my dad’s approval, I gained it years and years ago and I gained it by not being a pussy. And I gained it by being clever, which is why I offered Emma a choice.”
A damp stillness seemed to settle in the room. Susie knew that they’d arrived at the part of the story where Emma dies, and she wasn’t sure she was ready. Just as she’d never wanted to watch the film, she didn’t want to hear it from her killer’s lips.
“But you didn’t kill her,”