The Dinner Guest by B Walter (best short books to read txt) 📕

he told you how I knew what he’d done. How I’d photographed him. It was an accident, actually. I was very lucky to have been gifted an exceptionally good camera, by 2005 standards, by my partner at the time. He was keen for me to get back into photography. So while I was in Norway, I took photographs in the forest surrounding the hotel accommodation. And thanks to its then pioneering full-frame sensor and 12.8 megapixels, I could make a very close extraction from the digital image in Photoshop and blow it up to fill the screen. I probably don’t need to tell you what it showed me.’

Her eyes fix on mine meaningfully. I nod. ‘Matthew,’ I say, my voice croaky from not speaking for so long.

She nods back. ‘Matthew. Standing there. Holding Titus in his arms. Watching my brother in the hot tub. You can see he’s asleep in the photo. And Matthew does nothing. Doesn’t try to wake him. Doesn’t try to save him, to lift him out of the pool. Johnny was smaller than Matthew. The drugs had made him thin and wiry. It would have been nothing for Matthew to save his life. But he didn’t. He had the chance and he left him there to die alone.’

‘How do you know Johnny wasn’t already dead? Maybe Matthew simply saved Titus from drowning in the arms of an overdosed corpse.’

She doesn’t look impressed with this. ‘Because in spite of the heroin and cocaine in his bloodstream, my brother managed to inhale quite a bit of water before his heart stopped. Corpses do not try to breathe under water.’

She pauses for a moment, as if to let this sink in. I take advantage of the pause to ask another question. ‘Why didn’t you just go to the police? Or track down Matthew then and there?’

She sighs. ‘Because my mother died. Literally the next day, after I found the photo. And it took it all out of me. For a time, at least. But in the years that followed, an obsession started to grow. I kept an eye on any news I could find about him, which wasn’t much. Just his work and graduation. The internet was a much smaller place, back then. Before we put every single little thing online, as people do today. It seems strange, but I was a lot more fixated on hating him and wishing him dead than I was on checking my own nephew was OK. But I knew Titus was living a happy life. I found a photo a few years later of him on the Eaton Square school website playing a tambourine. He looked happy. I only stopped obsessing because I fell in love. A guy I’d been friends with for years. The guy who’d given me the camera, actually. Kevin, his name was. He was insistent that I let the past go. He said it was unhealthy me obsessing about the Joneses, although he never knew about what I’d seen in the photograph. He just thought I hated them because of Collette’s influence on Johnny and their snobbish attitudes towards him. He said he’d support me if I wanted to try to re-enter Titus’s life, but he thought my burning hatred towards them needed to either be cleared up or let go. So I let it go. In theory. I moved on with my life the best I could, although it never quite worked out between him and me. It felt weird, us being intimate like a couple, since I’d regarded him as a platonic friend since I was, like, seven. We pretended there weren’t any problems for years, until he eventually said he wanted children with me. I knew then that things needed to end. So we parted and left the flat we were renting together.

‘Even though I’d started up my photography commissions again over the years, I couldn’t support myself on them alone, not without Kevin’s income. So I got a job at a garden centre. And it was when I was working there that, on a fucking miserable day, I came across your Instagram account. It was on my “recommended” feed. A charming photo of two men and a boy standing around a cake they’d just baked. I can’t even describe to you the effect the photo had on me. After all those years of burying that side of my life and trying to move forward, to be confronted with it again … well, it was like someone had started choking me. And everything sort of imploded from that moment onwards.

‘It became absolutely clear that I needed to find Matthew and make him pay for what he did to my brother. I suppose I was depressed, not in my right mind, but I genuinely welcomed the purpose it gave me. It was as if I’d been sleepwalking through my life in black and white and suddenly someone had turned it into Technicolor. It was astonishing. I’d wanted Matthew Jones dead for so long that to finally give myself permission to go after what I’d wanted was like one of those moments religious people talk about – an epiphany. So when I saw him lying there, saw you’d got there first before me, it felt like the most natural thing in the world to confess to the crime. Because it was what I had come to the house to do. I don’t consider myself a Christian or anything, but sitting there, with the knife, waiting for the police to arrive, I felt calmer and more content than I had ever felt before. I felt close to God, or what people call God. I don’t have a name for it myself, but you can call it what you like – the creator, the universe, destiny. It’s probably too much for you to understand. But it’s genuinely how I felt.’

I stare back at her. I’m both terrified and impressed. Impressed at her description of the experience and her ability to