Page 93 of Murder on the Upper East Side

Finally, she leaned in. ‘Yeah, I knew.’

‘And if Oliver didn’t kill Madison, then he certainly didn’t kill Mr Harris. He didn’t have a motive. But you did.’

Hannah tensed, waiting for Gemma to lash out or run for the door.

To her surprise, she did neither.

Gemma gave her a small smile. ‘You wanted to know why I came to the gala. I went to confront Paul.’

‘You came a long way. How were you certain he’d be there?’

‘The ticketing website posted a list of everyone who’d RSVP’d. “See who’s coming to the gala!” When his name showed up on the RSVP list, I bought my ticket and booked a flight.’

Hannah nodded. Her boss had bought her ticket. She’d never visited the site.

‘Anyway,’ Gemma was saying, ‘I never heard from Paul again after I left school. No apology, no quick note to see how I was doing,nothing. Now that we’re the age he was then, it’s impossible to ignore how very fucked up the whole thing was. I wanted somethingfrom him – an apology, an acknowledgement that he’d messed up. I needed to hear him say it.’

‘So you asked him to meet you on the roof?’ Hannah said carefully.

‘I didn’t know he’d killed Madison. Or that she’d kept blackmailing him, after the first time. But when we got up there, he went instantly into defence mode. He tried to blame me for ruininghislife – because I was careless with the photos. As if it was perfectly fine to be fucking a seventeen-year-old, as if the single problem with our bedroom shoot, with the whole affair, was that the photos got out. Photos that no one linked to him, mind you. Except Madison.’

Hannah was desperate to knowhowMadison had figured it out, but that was hardly the most important detail right now. She bit down on the inside of her cheek.

‘There must have been a dozen pictures in that envelope,’ Gemma said, clocking Hannah’s confusion. ‘Paul was in at least two of them, head on. Madison knew it was him from the start, but she only sent a select few toThe Upper Edge.’

Hannah sat back in her seat. ‘Because she had her own agenda – breaking up Elle and Theo.’

‘Guess so.’ With one fingertip, Gemma traced the rim of her glass. ‘Anyway, I asked him to meet me on the roof. I’d seen theNo Admittancesign coming out of my interview in the Caraway Room, so naturally I’d gone up to peek. It was private up there, no one would hear our conversation. And when I saw youand Theo disappear from the hallway behind reception, I went exploring. Once I found that secret stairwell, I slipped Paul a note with instructions for how to get to the roof unnoticed.’

Hannah grimaced. It was her tryst with Theo that had given Gemma the access she needed to get Mr Harris alone.

‘I was terrified to see him again, after all this time, but he looked awful. Puffy eyes, beer belly – you could tell he’d turned into a drinker. He wasn’t the cute young teacher I’d fallen for, and that gave me a much-needed dose of courage. But right away, he lit into me. It was hard to tell who he hated more – me or Madison. He said she’d taken a sick kind of joy from making his life miserable. She was the reason his novel still hadn’t found a publisher, the reason he was still single, the reason he was still at Prescott, not some bestselling author with a teaching post at Vassar or Bard.’

Hannah’s stomach clenched. She’d had a similar thought the night of the gala, then dismissed it. She’d been so close to putting it all together, but she’d let Elle get into her head.Fuck.

‘But he refused to take responsibility for his own role in his fate – railing against Madison, then tracing it all back to my “carelessness”. Forget the fact thathewas sleeping with a high school student, thathetook those photos. It was all “woe is me, my life is ruined”, and never “guess I’m paying for my sins”, you know?’

Hannah’s heart slammed against her ribcage. ‘What an egotistical asshole.’

‘Precisely. We’d been talking for five minutes, maybe ten, when it hit me that he’d done it. Killed Madison, hoping everyone would assume it had been the work of one of her former classmates. That’s when I knew I was in danger.’

‘You thought he was going to kill you too?’

‘I knew he was. He was talking about her latest offensive, how she’d sabotaged his relationship with some big deal literary agent, and I could see it in his eyes. He knew that I knew. And he wasn’t going to let me leave that roof.’

Hannah’s mouth was dry. She gripped the stem of her empty wine glass. ‘So, you pushed him?’

Gemma shook her head. ‘I’ll get to that. First, I tried to convince him that no one would believe me if I told the truth. The detectives were fixated on that emerald green tux jacket; everyone was talking about it. I knew they’d zeroed in on Oliver.’

A theory Hannah had helped lock into place. ‘But it was Mr Harris wearing the jacket,’ she said slowly. ‘Of course. When Oliver came up to me just minutes after Madison’s murder, he’d taken his jacket off. Mr Harris must have slipped it on before following Madison down the hall, knowing that if anyone glimpsed him in the dark, they would assume they were seeing Oliver.’

‘That tracks,’ Gemma said.

‘And the remote in the pocket.’ Hannah continued.‘Mr Harris left it there on purpose, knowing it was so small Oliver probably wouldn’t notice it, but when the detectives searched the jacket, it would lead to his arrest.’

Gemma nodded. ‘He set it all up. And he got lucky. If it wasn’t for me, the Lenox Club wouldn’t even have a smart lighting system.’

Hannah’s eyebrows arched.