The Interview

This short story is a companion piece to Blood In The Margins. Backers who support that project at a physical tier in the first 48 hours receive a free limited edition signed and numbered chapbook of this story.

Then

The snow swallows the sound, but I still hear it - the crack, the gasp, the crushing silence that followed. His body lies where we left it, crimson seeping into white, and my hands won’t stop shaking. Tomorrow we’ll sit in lecture halls, sip coffee, and smile like the world hasn’t tilted off its axis. But tonight, shadows crowd the edges of my vision, and his voice echoes in every creak of the floorboards.

After it was done we didn’t know how to react. We stood, frozen, breathing hard, the enormity of what had just happened settling over us. Nina was the first to move, grabbing my arm, pulling me away.

“We need to go, now,” she said. “Before someone comes.” Her actions were quick and hurried, her hand on my arm rough and tight, pain flaring under her grip. But her words were calm and measured, like she’d weighed this whole thing and found herself equal to it.

Cold air burned in my lungs, my chest pulling tight against the cold. From where we stood, high on the hill, I could see down over the grounds of the academy building to the rows of student housing that I live in, lights blazing in the night.

“Is he…” Lucas asked, and Nina nodded.

“We can’t be here,” she said.

“This isn’t right,” I said, staring down at my shaking hands. Cold, or something else? “This wasn’t the plan.”

Nina dragged at my arm, yanking me a few steps down the path.

“It wasn’t the plan,” she said, “but it’s the situation. Now move. We can’t be here.”

And so I moved, and Lucas moved, and we left Daniel up in the snow. My hands shook all the way back to the quad, where Nina kissed my cheek and made a big show of waving goodbye, going back to her room to do whatever it was she did in her own company. Lucas and I exchanged a long, silent look. What do you say in a situation like this?

“Your hands are still shaking,” he said, at least. “You should go inside, get warm. Go back to the party, maybe.”

So I did. I went inside, and I stripped off my clothes, stuffed them deep into the bottom of the laundry basket. I stood under a shower turned as hot as it would go, scalded my skin until the water began to run cold, scrubbing until I was red and raw.

And then I sat at my desk, and my hands wouldn’t stop shaking, and I didn’t know what to do.

Now

“You and Daniel,” he asks. “Were you close?”

The room is small and sterile, a single table in the middle of a square box. It’s warm, almost stifling. There’s an aircon vent in the wall above the door but nothing comes through it. Sweat pools at the base of Alex’s back, her forearms growing slick where they rest of the table.

The detective - what’s his name? Alex can’t remember, though she knows he told her - is calm, casual. He leans back in his chair, alternates between chewing his pen and tapping it on his temple. It’s blue, a cheap plastic biro, and Alex can see the marks of his teeth on the base of it. Beyond the small window, barred and set high in the wall, she can see the slate grey of the sky. Snow, again, even though it’s April.

“Not particularly,” she says. “Just classmates. We’ve had a few group projects together but we don’t really hang out outside of class.”

The question was past tense - were you close? - but Alex answers in the present. She’s seen so many shows where this is a sticking point, the thing that gives the killer away. You’re talking like he’s dead! We never said he was dead!

“I don’t know if you’ve explained what this is all about,” she says, cautious. How much am I supposed to know?

The detective sits up, wrinkles his forehead in a slight frown. “I thought that was explained to you when we asked you to come in for this interview,” he says, glancing at the small door, the only way out of this room. “But that’s fine. Daniel has been reported missing. We’re talking to everyone who knows him, trying to figure out where he was last seen. Where he might have gone.”

He pauses.

“So where did you last see him?”

She feigns thought, looks up as though trying to remember, not to the left like she might be lying. She remembers reading that, once. Maybe it’s not true but she’s not going to take the risk. She doesn’t actually need to think about it, of course, she hasn’t stopped picturing the last time she saw him. The blood, and the snow, and the way his body folded onto the ground.

This question was why they rehearsed the alibi. Nina was way ahead of this, dragged her and Lucas into her room and spent the whole night drilling them until they could act it perfectly, until they almost believed each other. Where they last saw Daniel, and where they were the night he disappeared.

“Probably in class,” she says, after a suitable amount of thinking time. “I couldn’t say exactly. He keeps himself to himself, you know? Like I say, we aren’t close.”

He notes something down on his pad, his writing small and tidy, impossible to read from this distance.

“Great,” he says, “thank you. We’re trying to piece together his movements. The last time anybody saw him was on the night of” - he checks his notes, though Alex is sure this is just pretence, something to throw her off, make her think he doesn’t know every detail of this case - “the fifteenth of March.”

He looks up as he says the date, and she stares blandly back at him. Is she blinking too much? Her lips suddenly feel dry and she wants to lick them, but maybe that’s a tell. She’s trying to keep track of so much, trying to be aware of everything her body is doing, and it’s exhausting.

“Do you know where you were?” he asks. “The night of the fifteenth?”

Again she feigns thought, counts down the seconds before giving the practiced alibi.

“Was that… Friday? Two Fridays ago?” she asks, though she knows full well it was. He nods, and she smiles. “Then I think that was the night of the party,” she says.

“Party?”

Her turn to nod this time. “Yeah, there was a big party in Constantine. That’s one of the accomodation buildings, where-”

“I know Constantine, yes.”

“So yeah. Big party. I think I got there at about eight?”

“And you left…?”

She laughs and shakes her head, the motion she’s practiced so many times. “Honestly I couldn’t tell you. I, uh. Well, we were drinking, you know? I don’t really remember getting back to my room.”

“But you did go back to your room.”

“Yes,” she says. No, she thinks.

“Alone?”

She laughs again. “I hope so. I was alone when I woke up.”

He nods, jots something down, closes his notebook. But there’s a pause, something that lingers in the air, something intanglible that she doesn’t like.

“Thank you,” he says. “We might be done here, but I’m just going to step out for a second. Just bear with me a minute longer, okay?”

She smiles, nods, watches him stand and leave. And beneath the table her hand is gripping the edge of her chair so hard that her knuckles have turned grey.

Then

Before we got back, before Nina left us to return to the party and I went and burned myself in the shower, we had to endure the long, silent trudge through the trees. The path back was dark and cold, the ground slick with dark ice that threatened to send us tumbling to the ground with every step. Our footsteps crunched beneath us, and my face slowly froze as the fog of our collective breaths settled around me.

“Why are we leaving him?” I asked, my voice brittle. “It was an accident. We can still get help.”

Nina laughed. “Does it look like an accident?”

“We can explain, though. We-”

“No,” she said, and her word dropped on us like a rock. Lucas glanced back through the trees, as though willing Daniel to appear on the path behind us, to tell us that it was all okay.

I stuffed my hands deep into my pockets, willing some warmth into my fingers. I felt the hard lump of my phone, and something else beside it, something small and hard, something I wouldn’t realise the significance of until later.

I dropped back a bit from the others, trying to get some distance. I could call for help right now, dial the emergency services, get someone out here so that Daniel’s body didn’t sit in the snow for days. Would it rot? Or would the cold preserve him? I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to know. I wanted to end this before it had a chance to start.

Nina turned as I pulled my phone out of my pocket and shook her head. “Don’t,” she said.

“I- I wasn’t,” I said. “I thought we should turn them off. Location services.”

“Mine’s back in my room,” Lucas said. “I never bring it to parties. Lost too many of them.”

I pressed the button on the side of my phone, flinched away as the screen lit up and dazzled me. Out here in the woods I had no signal. I wouldn’t have been able to call for help even if I wanted to.

I held down the power button, watched the screen fade to black, shoved it back into my pocket. That small, hard thing scraped against my hand and I pulled it out as I released my phone, glancing down at it as Nina turned back to the path to continue leading us away from what we’d done.

A USB stick. I didn’t remember picking it up, had no idea what it might contain. But my fingers tightened around it and something in the back of my mind told me that it was important.

Ahead, the trees thinned. The lights of Constantine Court blazed in the darkness. Bass thumped from the rooms upstairs, and students stumbled drunkenly around the courtyard.

We were home.

Now

When he comes back it’s with two cups of overbrewed machine coffee in small polystyrene cups, the white plastic lids dewing with steam, and Alex knows she’s going to be here for a while.

“We won’t keep you for much longer,” he says, and she thinks, liar. He starts to flip through his notes, stopping every now and then to read something as he blows through the drinking hole in the lid of his coffee. It makes a little whistling noise. She wonders if he’s hoping she’ll get uncomfortable in the silence, start talking just to fill it. He’s not wrong that she’s uncomfortable, she’s deeply uncomfortable, but she’s happy to wait. The less she says, the less trouble she can get herself in.

“So this party,” he says, eventually. He sips on his still-too-hot coffee and winces. Alex peels the lid off hers, drops it onto the table next to the cup. “Was Daniel there?”

She picks up the coffee, blows on it to buy a little time before she has to answer. Steam clouds up in front of her and she remembers walking through the clouds of Lucas and Nina’s breath.

“Maybe?” she says. “I don’t really remember.” Which is a lie.

“Interesting,” he says, and more pages turn. “A couple of people - I can’t tell you who obviously, I’m sorry - mentioned they saw you arguing with him.” His tone is light, casual, but she feels the probe, like he’s just jabbed her in the chest with his fingers. “What was that about?”

“I honestly don’t remember,” she says. “I don’t remember him being there.”

He nods, says nothing.

“We’d all been drinking,” she says. “It could have been anything.”

He chews his pen again, fixing her with eyes as cold as the snow that night. She feels like he’s stripping away all her layers of artifice, that he can see right into the thoughts flitting across the surface of her mind. But of course he can’t, that’s the paranoia and the guilt talking. If he could see everything then she wouldn’t be sitting here, would she?

“I know what they did,” he says, and her heart jolts for a second until she realises he’s reading from his notebook, quoting something on the page. “And I know you know.” He looks up at her. “That’s what we’re told he said to you,” he says. “And then you hit him. Do you have any recollection of that?”

Then

“I know what they did,” Daniel said, “And I know you know. How could you be involved in something like this?”

We stood in the corridor outside the kitchen. The lights out here were off - ambience, Nina said - and his face was bathed in flashing red and green light spilling out from the doorway. The music thumped from beyond the wall, people laughing and shouting as they danced and drank.

I grabbed his arm, pulled him further away from the door into the darkness where the wall separated us from the music, where we could talk without shouting.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. His face twisted into a grimace and he turned away from me.

“Fuck, Al,” he said. “I thought you were better than this.”

“Better than what?”

“Are you really going to lie to me? Straight to my face.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and it was true.

“Bullshit,” he said. “You, and Nina, and Lucas, you’re all in on this, I know it. No wonder you’ve been pushing me out all semester, you knew I’d never go along with it. You don’t even know that she’s planning to-”

“Daniel,” I said, grabbing his chin with my hand, twisting his face to look into my eyes. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Don’t pretend, Alex. This oh-so-innocent act has never been endearing, you know? We all see right through it.”

I stepped back, put a hand to his chest to push him away. Something sloshed in the back of my head and I didn’t know if it was the booze or the wrap I’d dropped half an hour ago finally starting to work or if it was something else, some response to Daniel - my friend, my best friend - talking to me with that loathing in his voice I’d never heard before.

“You’re drunk,” I said.

“Not drunk enough, clearly. I can’t believe you kept this from me.”

“I didn’t keep anything from you!” That sloshing was getting worse. I was definitely starting to come up, and this was the worst possible time for it to happen. I wanted to be happy and dancing and bathed in light and sound, not arguing in a dark corridor with someone I thought I cared about. I felt heat flush my face, my hands, felt a rush of warmth and love that in any other situation would have made everything feel nice and safe and like nothing was wrong in the world.

Daniel slashed through that feeling, pulled it apart with his hands and his teeth and his words. “You’re a liar,” he hissed. “God, I thought I knew you.”

“Dan-”

“You know we’ll all be expelled, right? They won’t believe I had nothing to do with this, we’ve been working together all year.”

“Daniel-”

“This is blackmail, Al. It’s illegal. We won’t just be expelled we’ll be fucking arrested.”

“I swear,” I said, stumbling slightly as I stepped towards him, my words tumbling out of my mouth. “I have no idea what you’re talkng about.”

“Fuck you,” he said. “You fucking liar.”

I slapped him before I knew I was going to, my hand lashing out and planting itself on his cheek, my freshly-manicured nails - done for him, so maybe he’d think I was pretty, I’d had all these ideas that tonight might be the night he saw me as more than a friend - biting into the flesh beneath his eye. I saw blood bead up on his skin and a dark look dropped over his face.

He stepped back, gathered himself, opened his mouth to say something.

“I-” I said. And then from beside us, a shape in the kitchen doorway laughed. Shrieked, practically.

“Yeah!” whoever it was shouted. “Fucking let him have it, girl.”

Daniel looked over to them, looked back at me with rage in his eyes. And then he stormed off, disappeared into the lights and the press of bodies, and the next time I saw him was up in the trees, in the snow, when it all ended.

Now

She shakes her head, brushing off the memory. She’d come up properly after that, spent an hour or two dancing and crying and drinking, kissing people she shouldn’t have kissed, not knowing or caring where Daniel was or what he was doing. She didn’t think about him again until Nina came to get her, said we have to go, said it was urgent.

“No,” she says. “I don’t remember that at all.”

Then

“Daniel knows,” Nina said, “and he’s making threats.”

We were in her room, her and Lucas and me. The music from the party rumbled through the walls. My buzz had gone and I could feel the comedown starting, a tight knot of burning pain in the back of my head, my mouth starting to dry up.

“Have you got any water?” I asked. Nina didn’t answer.

“What did he say?” Lucas asked. His hands were wrapped around a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels. The stink of it wafted up into the room, turning my stomach.

“He said he’s going to go to the dean,” she said. “Maybe even the police.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Can you talk to Daniel for us?” Nina asked. “We all know he has a crush on you. Maybe you can calm him down.”

I thought back to the hallway, to the snarl on his face, his face under my stinging palm. Did he really have a crush on me?

“I don’t know what I’m meant to talk to him about,” I said, and Nina sighed.

“We can’t ask her to do this,” Lucas said.

“Of course we can.”

“No, Nee. We can’t ask her because if we ask her we have to tell her, and that means someone else knows. It’s not safe.”

Nina rolled her eyes. “She’s not going to tell anyone.” Turned to me. “Are you?”

Bile was rising in my throat and I pulled myself from the bed, stumbled over to the small sink in the corner of Nina’s room. The water came out in a trickle, tasted like old pipes. I gagged as I tried to swallow some down, my tongue feeling too big for my mouth.

“Someone please tell me what’s going on,” I said. It was real effort to force the words out, to keep them from slurring.

Nina sighed, raised her palms to Lucas as if to say what do you want from me? Something passed between them, a decision being made that I had no context to even attempt to understand.

“Show her,” Nina said, throwing herself onto the bed, turning away from me and Lucas, hiding her face away.

Lucas guided me to a chair, sat me down. Then, kneeling next to me, he pulled the phone from his pocket and unlocked it. He scrolled for a bit, tapping open folders, and then the screen was hovering in front of my face.

I couldn’t reconcile what I was seeing at first. The image was dark, slightly blurry, taken in a low-lit room with no flash. I made out flesh, legs, the curve of a breast, but my eyes wouldn’t focus.

“What am I looking at?”

Lucas swiped. This one was clearer, a man lying back on a bed - Nina’s bed, I realised, I recognised the pictures on the wall above it - hands above his head, shirt off. There was a dark mass of something where his crotch should be, and below it a tangle of limbs.

“I don’t want-”

He swiped again, and now the tangled mass made sense. Nina, on her knees, face clear this time, mouth and hands occupied as the man relaxed into the pillows.

“Why are you showing me this?”

“Do you recognise him?” Lucas asked, and I shook my head - a mistake, as everything shook and sloshed. I groaned, leaned over to put my head between my legs, waiting for everything to settle down.

“Look again,” Nina said.

“I don’t want to,” I said. “I don’t want to see you doing… that.”

“No,” Nina said. “And he doesn’t want you to see it, either. Look again.”

I looked again, stared at the face of the man rather than the face of my friend. It swam in my vision, my eyes refusing to focus. I blinked, rubbed my eyes, slowly made sense of it.

“Is that… Pro-”

“Yeah,” Lucas said. “That’s Professor Alden.”

Now

“Alex,” the detective says, and she looks up from the coffee she’s been staring into for the past few minutes. “There’s something I need to make you aware of.”

She nods, takes a sip of the coffee. It needs sugar - lots of sugar, if it’s ever going to be remotely palatable - but she won’t ask for it.

“I know you think we’re just looking into Daniel’s disappearance,” he says, and she nods. “Unfortunately it’s a bit more serious than that.”

From his papers he produces a thin folder, slides it across the desk so that it sits in front of her.

“Why don’t you have a look in there?”

“What is it?” she asks, though there’s a part of her that already knows.

“Take a look,” he says, and then he sits back in his chair, arms folded. Waiting.

She takes another sip of the coffee, grimaces at the burned, plastic taste. Her chipped nails flash in the stark overhead light as she reaches out and flips the cover over.

Alex can feel him watching her, gauging her reaction, and she has no idea what she’s supposed to do. The folder contains photos, the cheap glossy paper reflecting the same light that caught on her nails. It’s Daniel, lying on the ground, his blood drained out into the snow around him. His forehead is a bright white spot where it reflected the flash of the camera straight back into the lens. His skin looks like wax, pale and blue-tinged from the cold. She swallows, hard.

“What-”

“We found him yesterday,” the detective says, carefully, and she can sense that he’s still watching her. She doesn’t dare look up, can’t bring herself to meet his eye.

“Is he-”

“He didn’t die instantly,” he says. “He suffered a lot of trauma, he lost a lot of blood, but it looks like he died of something much more mundane.”

“What do you mean?”

“He froze,” the detective says, and now she does look up, straight into those unblinking, piercing eyes. She feels ripples of gooseflesh run down her spine and she fights back the urge to shiver. “Official cause of death is hypothermia,” he says. “It looks like he was left there.”

“Maybe it was an accident,” she says, voice low, trying to crack.

“Maybe,” he says. “We’ve found evidence that he wasn’t alone. Somebody was with him when he was wounded. Somebody who could have helped him.”

“Maybe… Maybe they went for help?” she says. “Maybe they tried to get someone and couldn’t? Maybe it was too late.”

“Maybe,” he says, and then he flips the folder closed, pulls it back over to his side of the table. “So,” he says. “Just so I can be clear, for my records. Where did you say you were on the night of the fifteenth?”

“I told you,” she says, feeling like she’s back on firmer ground now. “I was at the party. You even said yourself, someone saw me there.”

He nods. “I did say that,” he says. “That’s the funny thing about parties though, isn’t it?”

“What’s that?”

“People don’t always stay in one place.”

Then

After the shower I threw myself onto the bed and tried to sleep. The party was still going on across the quad, the music still thumping into the night, rattling in time with my pounding head. The adrenaline of the last hour had masked my comedown but now I was alone with it and I was crashing, hard.

I pulled my covers up over my head, curled into a pained ball. I needed water but I didn’t have the energy to go and get it.

“Alex,” I heard, from outside my room, and then someone was hammering on the door. “Alex, open this fucking door.”

I pulled the duvet up higher.

“Alex, let us in.”

I heard low voices, words exchanged that I couldn’t register. Then a click, the creak of hinges. The door opening. I must have forgotten to lock it when I got home.

“Nee, she’s in bed.” Lucas.

“She’s not asleep, though,” Nina said, and then the covers were wrenched off me. I shrieked, and she clapped her hand across my mouth.

“Shut up,” she hissed. “Calm down, it’s just us.”

She let go of my mouth and I sat up, pulled my knees up to my chest. I felt exposed, vulnerable.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“We need to go back,” Nina said. Lucas’ face was grim, mouth set into a hard line.

“Jesus,” I said. “No. I can’t.”

“We have to,” Nina said, and for a second I could see that she wanted to scream it at me. She was teetering on the edge of control, and I suddenly wondered how long she’d been building up to this night in her head. For me this was all sudden, unexpected, a shock to the system, but she’d been planning it.

“Alex,” Lucas said, “we need your help. Daniel… he had something, okay? Something that’ll point the finger directly at us if it’s found. And it… It isn’t in his room, it isn’t where we thought it would be.”

I looked between him and Nina, turning this over in my mind. Realisation slowly dawned on me.

“You went to his room,” I said. “We killed him, and then instead of walking away and leaving it alone, you went and searched his room.”

“Don’t fucking say that,” Nina said, her eyes widening as the words we killed him fell out of my mouth. She looked around at the door, as though expecting to see a crowd of people standing there, listening, hearing our confession.

Lucas sighed. “Yes,” he said. “I know, it was stupid. But we need to find it. And we’re in and out of his room all the time, it’s not like our prints or whatever being in there is evidence. We didn’t fucking toss the place, we were careful. Left it all neat.”

“Did anybody see you?” I asked, and he shook his head. “No,” he said. “Everyone’s at the party. That’s the whole point of doing it tonight.”

“Why do you need me, though?” I asked. “Why can’t you just go and look yourselves? I never wanted to be part of this.”

“It’ll be faster with three of us,” Nina said. And maybe it was the MDMA still in my system, or maybe it was just naivety, but I trusted her.

It had started to snow again, which meant the walk back up into the woods was longer and colder than it had been earlier. Earlier, too, we’d all been slightly buzzed, all carrying the party with us, adrenaline layered on top of it like the world’s most potent cocktail. I barely remembered the journey there, couldn’t recall at all how we’d convinced Daniel - angry Daniel, still bleeding from the cheek where I’d slapped him Daniel - to come away from the party with us. To walk to his death with us.

“We need to be fast,” Nina said, once we reached the place. My eyes kept slipping over to his body, which was already being covered in slow. “Cover as much ground as possible, find it and get back.” Lucas was already kneeling on the ground, running his hands over the jagged rocks, groping in cracks.

“What are we looking for?” I asked, though I think I already knew the answer, had already figured out that the thing we’d trekked out her to find was currently sitting in plain sight on the desk in my room.

Nina turned to me, and for a second I saw naked fear on her face.

“A USB stick,” she said.

Now

At some point in the last hour a second detective has joined the first one, and once again Alex has failed to remember her name. She stands by the door, leaning casually against the wall with her arms crossed, as though she has all the time in the world. Alex wonders whether they’re going to do good cop bad cop, whether that’s actually a thing or just something that happens in fiction. Which one is bad cop? she thinks.

The original detective, the one with the cold stone eyes, leans forward in his chair, elbows on the table again. There’s a pregnant pause, the weight of anticipation thick in the air.

“So I have another question, Alex, and I think this one’s really going to help us with ourt investigation.”

She nods. She’s tired of this whole thing now. She has the sense that they know more than they’re letting on. There’s a very loud voice inside her that wants to just crack, spill everything, lay it all out on the table and take what’s coming.

But there’s another voice, a quieter voice but a more confident, rational one, that tells her that this is the game. If they had anything concrete she wouldn’t be here for a voluntary interview, she’d be here under caution, she’d have been arrested and charged, she’d have a lawyer. They’re digging, and they want to hear something they don’t know. They’re asking her to tie her own noose.

So she smiles, says something saccarine and innocuous like I really do hope I can help you, and waits for the question. It lands between them like a rock dropped onto a skull.

“You left the party at one ay-em,” he says.

“I don’t remember the time.”

“It was one,” he says, “we have a witness. A witness who says that after you left, after you went back to your room, you didn’t stay there like you told us you did.”

“What are you saying?” Her nails dig into her palms, the broken tip cutting a line into her skin.

“You left again, around two,” he says. “Do you want to tell us where you went? And who you were with?”

“I don’t remember,” she says, and wonders how many more times she can say that. But it’s important that she stick to the story, and the story is that she got hammered, went back to her room, slept until the morning.

“That’s fine,” he says. He flips through his papers again, and the other detective shifts her feet by the door. The temperature in the room has dropped a bit, and Alex shivers slightly.

“Let’s go back to your argument with Daniel,” the first detective says.

“I don’t remember aguing with him.”

“I know that,” he says, “but maybe I can jog your memory.” He leans forward again, and she can smell the coffee on his breath and a whiff of mint chewing gum that’s failing to mask the cigarette he must have smoked when he last left the room. She doesn’t even smoke, not really, but she’d kill for a cigarette right now. Although maybe that’s a poor choice of words, given the circumstances.

He opens a folder, runs his finger down a typed sheet that looks like a transcript of an interview. “One of Daniel’s friends told us that he was keeping something safe, something that he said was dangerous. We think he had something incriminating, something he wasn’t supposed to have, and that someone wanted to make sure it stayed buried.” He looks up, and this time she can’t meet his eye, looks away before she can stop herself.

“When he said, I know what they did, we think he said that because you know something about this. Something that you aren’t telling us.”

He sits back, small smile on his lips, crosses his arms and stares at her across the table.

“So, Alex. What aren’t you telling us?”

She looks at the paper on the table, at the detective by the door who’s watching her every move. She watches a bead of coffee make its slow way down the side of the cup to join the brown circle stain on the table at the base. And in her pocket, the lump of the USB drive pulses in time with her racing heart.

Then

By the time we got back from the woods for the second time the party was dying out. A few people were still stumbling around on the quad, singing and shouting. I heard glass breaking in the distance, cheers and laughter drifting across the cold night, the sounds muffled by the snow that was getting heavier by the minute. On the way up to Daniel’s final resting place I’d worried that we were leaving tracks, but now I knew they’d be gone before they ever became a problem.

Once again I left Nina and Lucas, and once again I returned to my room. They hadn’t found the USB stick, of course. Nina had grown increasingly frantic, panic seeping into everything she did. We left only because Lucas said his hands were starting to turn numb.

“We could all freeze out here,” he’d said. “Is that what you want?”

And so we came back, and we went our separate ways. I was tired down to my bones, but I knew that sleep was going to elude me.

In my room I once more stripped off my wet, mud-stained clothes, once more roasted myself in the shower. And then, wrapped in a towel and a dressing gown, I sat down at my desk, and booted up the USB.

I didn’t know what I expected to find on it, just that there must be something cataclysmic on it to drive Nina to do what she’d done. Of course the photos Lucas had shown me were there, as well as a video. The thumbnail showed a single frame, an image much like the photos, and I decided that I didn’t need to watch it.

But that wasn’t all. In a folder labelled “txt” there was a catalogue of emails between Nina and Professor Alden that were benign to start but quickly escalated, until he’d switched away from his faculty email and was talking to Nina exclusively from his personal account, exchanging photos and messages that grew increasingly explicit. They talked about dates they’d been on - stealth dates, they called them - about things he wanted to do to her and she had done to him. Despite everything I found myself growing hot and bothered reading it all. They could both write, it turned out.

Then came the hammer. The photos, and the video, attached to an email and CCing Lucas. The threat that Alden would be exposed if he didn’t do exactly what Nina wanted.

I clicked away, not needing to read more, not needing to know exactly what Nina wanted. Daniel had been right - this was blackmail. This was a crime. And he thought I’d known.

I wanted to throw the USB stick away and pretend I’d never seen any of this. But that wasn’t going to bring Daniel back, and I still didn’t know why he had to die. And there was another folder, a folder marked “Insurance”, that I hadn’t opened yet.

I opened it, and over the next few minutes everything I thought I knew turned inside out.

Voice notes, and videos with thumbnails that looked like the camera was covered with fabric. Maybe taken from inside a pocket, when nobody knew they were being filmed. All of them date stamped, a collection of recordings over the past few weeks, all leading up to a final recording made just a few hours ago.

I plugged in my headphones, opened one at random dated a week ago, clicked play. Daniel’s voice immediately started speaking into my ears, muffled but clear enough to identify.

“I’m done playing this game,” he said. “You two are finished.”

Then another voice, distant but still clear. Nina, her words laced with venom.

“No, Daniel,” she said, and I shivered. “If you breathe a fucking word of this it will be the last thing you ever do.”

I stopped it playing, went to check that my door was locked. My hands were shaking, and this time it wasn’t the drugs or the cold. Back at my desk, I opened the most recent recording, the one made just hours before Daniel had died, before he confronted me in the hallway.

Daniel’s voice wasn’t present in this one, and I didn’t know how he’d made the recording. But Nina and Lucas were loud and clear on it, and my stomach roiled as I listened.

“This is bad,” Lucas said, “he’s not letting it go.” He sounded nervous, his voice low and shaky. Nina, on the other hand, sounded completely unbothered.

“Of course he’s not,” she said. “Daniel’s always thought he’s smarter than he actually is.”

“I mean it, Nee. He has proof. And if he goes to Alden, or worse, the police-”

“He won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” Nina said, exhaling sharply, “I don’t. But I know people. And right now he thinks Alex is part of this. He’d never do that to her.”

My stomach flipped at the sound of my name. I pressed my headphones into my ears, closed my eyes, tried to picture myself into the room with them.

“What are we going to do?” Lucas asked, and Nina’s answering laugh - soft, sinister, a throaty chuckle I’ve never heard her make before - made me shiver.

“We handle it.”

There was a pause, then, and I sat listening to the hiss of the recording, not daring to exhale in the voices on the recording somehow heard me.

“…handle it how?” Lucas asked, finally.

“Oh come on, Lucas. Don’t play innocent now.”

“This was never part of the plan,” he said, his voice cracking.

“Neither was Daniel finding out, or having a spine. But here we are.”

“Look, maybe we can just go to Alden, talk to him. Apologise, tell him it all got-”

“Absolutely fucking not,” Nina said. “We’re too in this now. And we can’t afford loose ends.”

Lucas’ voice softened, and I pictured his face as he pleaded with her, his eyes turning down at the corners. “If something happens to him, people are going to start asking questions.”

“Let them,” Nina said.

“You can’t make it look like an accident,” Lucas said. “That only ever works in stories.”

“No,” she said, “but we can make people look in the wrong direction.”

“Nina,” Lucas said, and his voice was harder now.

“You know Alex is always in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Her voice was casual, like she was giving him the time. My stomach churned, my vision felt like it was hollowing itself out. I felt a creeping sensation at my temples, like spiders walking up my scalp.

“You think she’d take the fall?” Lucas asked, finally. Something in his voice told me he was taking this seriously, and somehow that was the worst part of the whole thing.

“If we play this right,” Nina said, “she won’t have a choice.”

Now

“What aren’t you telling us?”

His gaze is steady, inscrutable, but there’s an expectation in the air like he knows how heavy that stare is, like he’s waiting for her to buckle under the weight of it. The second detective shifts against the door frame, crossing her arms again. Alex doesn’t feel like they’re just fishing anymore.

Under the table her fingers curl around each other. She wipes her palms on the thighs of her jeans, the rasping sound loud in the suddenly quiet room. She feels the lump of the USB drive under her hand, the edge digging into her leg as it shifts under the pressure.

She swallows, wets her lips with her tongue. “I don’t know what you mean.”

The detective exhales, like this was exactly the answer he was expecting. He sits back, bites down on the end of that pen with his molars.

“You were close with Daniel,” he says, “despite what you’ve told us. We know that. He trusted you.”

She says nothing.

“I’m going to put our cards on the table,” he says. “We know he was keeping something secret. We have enough testimony from other friends to piece that together. Something was bothering him, eating him up. We think someone was putting pressure on him.”

He pulls the pen from his mouth and she can see that it’s burst slightly. There’s a small stain of blue ink right in the corner of his lips. It’s all she can look at, shiny and dark, flexing with every word he speaks.

“I think Daniel gave you something before he died,” he says. “Something to keep safe. Like an insurance policy.”

She remembers the word Insurance on that folder and winces, unable to keep the reaction off her face. The detective definitely sees it.

“Is someone putting pressure on you?” he asks, and she shakes her head. “You don’t have to protect them,” he says. “We can help you. All you need to do is tell us the truth.”

He waits. The silence stretches. The worn polyvinyl covering of the seats creaks beneath their weight. The tick of the other detective’s watch is suddenly loud, abrasive. She wonder what they’d do if she pulled out the USB stick right now. Would they make her watch it with them? Would they open that door, bring Nina in, sit her down at the table?

Her heart thuds against her ribs. She’s sure they must be able to hear it. Nina was planning to pin this on me, she thinks. I’ve heard her say that. I know that I’m disposable. And she’s right where Nina wants her to be, in a room with two detectives who are sure she had a part in Daniel’s death. Which she did, just not the way they might be thinking.

She could just hand this over now. But if she does that, Nina is going to know who turned her in. And Nina doesn’t leave loose ends.

The detective is still watching her, eyes sharp, waiting. Her fingers brush the USB drive again. She could take it out, put it on the table, let them see for themselves. Or she could continue to deny all knowledge, keep it hidden, walk out of here. They have no actual proof she’s involved.

She swallows. The USB stick feels hot against her leg. She doesn’t know how to make this choice.

The detective stretches, raises his arms above his head. His shoulder pops, loud in the quiet room, and he glances over at the woman by the door.

“I’m going to step out for a moment,” he says. “Sit tight.”

The two of them step out of the room, and the door clicks shut behind them. Alex looks over to the small window, where outside it’s still unseasonably cold. Snow is falling, soft and silent, coating the early April ground that should be bursting with buds and new life. She wonders where Daniel’s body is now. Is he still in a freezer somewhere, waiting for this investigation to be over? Or are his parents burying him as this exact moment, lowering his body into the cold ground to lie there forever. She wonders if the snow will swallow the sound of their grief, like it swallowed the crack of his death.

On the table in front of her coffee slowly soaks into the corner of the folder that the detective left behind. She reaches out, turns it to face her, flips back the cover, and starts to read.

  

The Interview is copyright © Chris Bissette 2025. All rights reserved.

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