Free one-hit wonder by Lisa Jewell Page B

very beautiful young men in this city, you know.”
    “Really?”
    “Oh yes. I see them all the time. Every day. Everywhere I look. Beautiful young men and so well dressed these days.
    Men seem to be paying much more attention to their grooming and their appearance, more like they used to in my day. Still—I must stop talking like this. I’ll get myself all excited, and there’s nothing much an old woman like me can do about it when they get themselves into that state.” She winked at Ana, and Ana nearly fainted.
    “Anyway,” Amy said, picking up her snoring dog and rearranging her fluffy gown, “it’s been very nice to meet you, Ana, but it’s way past my bedtime, and if I don’t get myself off now, I shall fall asleep here on the sofa and you’ll be stuck with me! But thank you so much for inviting me in. People don’t tend to do that in London these days, you know. They don’t invite you in. I think they’re all too sacred you’ll never leave.” She laughed sadly. “And I’m sorry we had to meet under such dreadful circumstances. Your sister was a true original, Ana. A one-of-a-kind. I miss her very much.” Ana led Amy toward the door, wishing she wouldn’t leave but knowing that she had to. “Can I ask you one more question?” she began with one hand on the door. “About Bee?”
    “Certainly.”
    “You know—you know on the Tuesday? You know when you had to go to the hospital and—you know—identify her.
    Well, what, er . . . what did she look like? I mean—did she look peaceful, or . . . ?”
    Amy put a hand on Ana’s arm and smiled at her. “Ana,” she said, her blue eyes twinkling, “she was smiling. I swear on Freddie’s life. Bee was smiling. She looked tired, but she looked beautiful and she was smiling. She didn’t look like a woman ravaged by life and disappointment, a woman so unimpressed by all the world had to offer that she decided to take her own life. She looked like a small girl who’d just been told a wondrous bedtime story and drifted into a sweet, untainted slumber.”
    “Thank you”—Ana smiled with a strange sense of relief—“thank you very much.”
    And then Amy Tilly-Loubelle gave Ana’s arm one more squeeze before letting herself into her flat next door, and fastening about twelve different locks and chains against the world.

    Ana flopped onto the sofa, poured herself yet another glass of champagne, and forced her pissed mind to try to make sense of everything she’d discovered:

    A. Bee was away most weekends and lied about where she was going.
    B. She generally had no visitors to her flat.
    C. She had a cat called John whose whereabouts were unknown.
    D. She’d gone out at nine o’clock on the night she died.
    E. There was a vague possibility that she might have been a lesbian.

    Ana got to her feet and marched back into Bee’s bedroom.
    It was now nine-thirty. She wasn’t going to bed until she’d discovered something significant. She threw things desperately into cardboard boxes, reading them for clues, but they told Ana very little other than that her sister was a woman who looked after her clothes, her skin, and her hair much better than she looked after her health or her home, that she dressed in a bold and theatrical style, and appeared to have shunned entirely the casual/sporty look so fashionable for the past few years. She didn’t even own a pair of trainers.
    It appeared that Bee smoked, ate, drank, read, and watched TV in bed. It was likely that she spent most of her time in this room, evidenced by her tentative attempts to “decorate” it with colorful chiffon throws, lights, etc. And it was possible, by the sound of it and by the look of it, that toward the end of her life Bee spent rather too much time in this room. . . .
    However, Ana did manage to uncover a couple of slightly more interesting things:

    1x crash helmet
    suitcase with Virgin Atlantic tag, unopened but stil 1x ful
    1x smal silk-covered notepad

    It seemed that Bee