Murder on the Dancefloor: The BRAND NEW instalment in the laugh-out-loud, gripping crime series from Katie Marsh for 2024

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JEANIE

Even before she tripped over a dead body, Jeanie’s hen weekend hadn’t exactly been going according to plan.

‘Are you having fun?’ Her sister Nicola spoke in the most military of tones, her voice clear above the Spice Girls’ zig-a-zig-ahs. She held out a bright red drink, her expression as joyful as a nurse dispensing a methadone shot. ‘You must have fun.’

‘Yes. I’m having a great time.’ Jeanie wondered if she should salute to make the lie more convincing.

‘Come on. Drink.’ Nicola stood, a menopausal Mary Poppins, head on one side as Jeanie dutifully swallowed.

‘Good.’ Nicola took the glass, exuding all the party vibes of someone facing a firing squad. She grimaced. ‘God, it’s hot in here.’ She glared at Jeanie, recrimination in her ice-blue eyes, as if it had been her choice to come here. ‘I’m getting a headache.’

‘Um. Sorry?’ Once again, Jeanie regretted capitulating to Nicola’s suggestion that she should ‘take the hen weekend in hand’. She had known she’d made a terrible mistake as soon as she had spotted Nicola googling fun on her phone.

Now her sister stood in front of her, apparently waiting for something. Jeanie presumed it was gratitude, and dutifully complied – over forty years of sisterhood had proved this to be the wisest course of action.

‘Best hen weekend ever, Nic. Thank you so much.’

Had anyone ever sweated to death in a polyester My Little Pony costume? If not, then Jeanie feared she might be the first. She patted her furry pink pockets, checking that the wedding rings she had picked up from the engraver’s earlier were still there.

She exhaled. There they were, snug in their box, ready for the wedding in one and a half days’ time. She and her fiancé Tan didn’t need anything else to go wrong, given the way things had been over the last few weeks.

‘Thank you. I do think organised fun is the best, don’t you?’ Nicola folded her arms, not a hair of her severe blonde fringe daring to fall out of place. Somehow, on her, even the sparkly pink Jeanie’s Last Fling Before The Ring T-shirt looked cowed. Nicola liked to be in charge. Aged eight, she had alphabetised her book collection and had never looked back. Now the headteacher of a flourishing secondary school in Bristol, she was used to being obeyed.

Jeanie surreptitiously unzipped her costume as far as her collarbone, desperate for air. She supposed it would be worse to be dressed as a My Little Pony on the glamorous streets of Barcelona, the original hen weekend destination. But still, she would rather be there than back here in Sandy’s nightclub, revisiting the scene of so many teenage nightmares. Bad kisses, bad drinks, bad dancing, bad men. But thanks to her little sister Pen’s football training schedule, they had been forced to change dates and location. So rather than Las Ramblas, now she and her hens were in her home town, forced to stay in a creaking local hotel so they could ‘bond’, clustered on the sticky dancefloor of a club famous for precisely nothing except its overpriced entry fee and the number of fights that took place there every Saturday night.

Jeanie’s phone pinged. She delved back into her pocket and discovered several messages from Tan’s mum, Takako, visiting from Japan for the wedding, asking questions about how best to look after Jeanie’s one-and-a-half-year-old twins. As she tapped out answers about Jack’s nappies and Yumi’s sleepsuits, she wondered why her young children were still up this late and why Tan wasn’t there, when he had promised faithfully to stay at home. Jeanie felt a bit more of her soul dying as she thought about how absent he had been recently, about how many ‘work’ calls he had taken at strange times of the night, about how little time they had spent together. He was avoiding her. A day and a half until ‘I do’ and it felt like he couldn’t even bear to be in the same room as her.

Nicola passed her twin sister Charlotte as she bustled back towards the bar, the latter holding another shot glass – this one bright green. Thinking of Tan, and of how much she missed him, Jeanie downed it in one as the opening to ‘Ice Ice Baby’ banged through the speakers. Instantly, a stag party wearing matching masks depicting what must surely be the stag’s face, started to dance in some kind of coordinated routine. Their white Game Over, Tyrone T-shirts glowed, and the air was thick with Saturday-night spirits and aftershave. Beneath the huge glitter ball, a pack of teenagers were videoing each other doing a dance-off, while behind the bar, Jeanie could see a girl with long dark braids trying to keep up with demand. Limbs were flailing, heads were up, feet were jumping and here Jeanie was, feeling two hundred years old, unsure whether or not her wedding would actually take place.

‘Are you OK?’ Charlotte’s fierce eyes were intent on Jeanie’s face. As ever, her presence made Jeanie feel about as relaxed as a prisoner in the dock.

‘I’m fine.’ Jeanie’s scalp was damp with sweat. Charlotte’s short blonde hair was slicked straight back from her face, and her gaze was so forensic she could be examining a crime scene. Charlotte’s ex-husband had once said she was as relentless as a dentist undertaking a root canal, and right now Jeanie could see why.

‘Are you sure?’ Charlotte’s hand was on Jeanie’s elbow, long red nails sinking into the polyester fur.

‘Yes.’ Jeanie shrugged. ‘It’s all good.’ Charlotte’s nostrils flared, and she was starting to speak again when someone nudged her, pushing her sideways.

Jeanie grabbed her hand and pulled her upright. ‘Char? Are you OK?’

‘Of courshhh I am.’ Charlotte sniffed dismissively. She swayed slightly in her high heels. ‘Are you OK though? Nothing you want to talk about?’

Charlotte appeared unaware that she had literally just asked Jeanie this question.

Jeanie replied again, wondering if she had ever seen Charlotte this drunk. ‘I’m fine, Char. There’s nothing I want to talk about, I promise.’ This, at least, was not a lie. Charlotte exuded as much empathy as a boxer delivering a killer punch – she had never been at the top of Jeanie’s list of confidantes. Truthfully, it was unlike her to even care enough to ask questions – Charlotte was too busy wowing clients, winning high-profile cases at the High Court in her barrister silks.

She and Nicola were the golden twins. They had apparently fought a fierce battle to come out of the womb first and hadn’t stopped since, their ferocious rivalry spurring both of them on to stratospheric heights. Childhood family games of Trivial Pursuit had frequently led to fisticuffs and Twister was banned in the Martin household for fear it would lead to a repeat of The Great Battle of Christmas 1990. In the aftermath, a chunk was missing from the kitchen wall and Nicola and Charlotte had been forced to wear beanies for months while their hair grew back.

A gun went off.

‘What the…?’ Jeanie dropped to the floor, looking around in panic as screams filled the air. Was her mum OK? Clio? Amber?

There was another shot. Then another.

‘Shit.’ Jeanie grabbed hold of Charlotte’s hand, trying to pull her down to the floor. ‘Charlotte. Get down!’

‘No need.’ Charlotte staggered as she pulled Jeanie up again. ‘It’s just Pen.’ She rolled her eyes, pulling the sleeve of the hen T-shirt down over her lean, muscular forearm. She pursed her bright red lips. ‘Apparently, her pink cowboy hat came with a free pop gun and somehow the bouncers didn’t care about her bringing it in. Someone’s probably just dared her to fire it on the dancefloor. See?’ She tutted loudly. ‘She’s waving it around now, and she’s got one of the stags to film her doing it for TikTok or whatever. Pathetic, really. You wouldn’t know she was nearly thirty.’ She sighed. ‘She’s hammered already, of course.’

Jeanie took a breath, trying to get her heart rate under control. She had faced a real gun only months before, and the shots had brought it all back; the fear, the shock, her life flashing before her eyes.

She did her best to block the reel playing in her head. Distraction. That was the key. ‘Well, it’s nice Pen can take some time off from training, for a change. It’s good to see her having some fun, isn’t it?’ Pen tipped her head back, a glass in hand, the gun passed to one of the stag party. ‘Normally she’s on orange juice and low-fat stir-fries.’

Charlotte frowned. ‘I suppose so.’ Charlotte wasn’t the sort of person who had time for frolics of any kind, dashing around London from courts to meetings to her chambers, any spare moments spent checking that her son had done his Mandarin homework or written the next chapter of his dystopian YA novel.

Pen was different. Jeanie smiled as she watched her youngest sister, her long blonde ponytail curving through the air as she joined in with the stag do’s routine. Her baggy navy Adidas tracksuit bottoms led down to white trainers, the hen T-shirt tied up in a knot above her slender waist. She glanced across at Jeanie, giving her a thumbs up and a grin.

Jeanie returned her smile with a jaw so tight it ached. She loved Pen, just as she loved Nicola, Charlotte and her younger sister Emma too, but the fact was that being around all four of them at once only reminded her of how insignificant they made her feel. Nicola the headteacher; Charlotte the criminal barrister, one of the youngest women ever called to the bar; Emma the portrait artist, already so busy she was turning down celebrity commissions; and Pen the WSL footballer. They shone so bright Jeanie dwindled to nothingness. The middle one. The nondescript one. The fat one.

When she and Tan had got engaged, Jeanie hadn’t wanted a big hen weekend. Instead, all she had hoped for was a night out with her two best friends, Clio and Amber. But the Martin sisters never took no for an answer, so now she had all four of them here, and none of them appeared to want to go home as much as she did.

Her mum, Theresa, was another matter, weathering tonight just as she had weathered every single day since Jeanie’s dad, William, had died over five years ago. Tonight was yet another thing for her to survive.

She was sitting resolutely on one of the red banquettes at the corner of the dancefloor, greying blonde hair lank around her shoulders, golfing umbrella at her side as always ‘in case it rains’, and a packet of Kleenex sticking out of the pocket of the muddy gardening jeans she hadn’t bothered to change out of. She had her blue ear defenders on, a legacy of Nicola’s fanatical drumming practice as a teen, and was glued to yet another Dickens novel on her Kindle. She said they made her think of her William, and Jeanie could remember him too, chuckling as he turned the pages of The Pickwick Papers on Christmas Eve.

Her mum was minding the bags, despite numerous invitations from her daughters to come and dance. ‘No. You girls do your thing,’ she had said. ‘You don’t want me holding you back.’ Jeanie sighed. At least her mum had made it out of the house. Silver linings, and all that.

Amber appeared beside Jeanie, watching Pen shimmy across the dancefloor before turning and encouraging the stag party to do the same. ‘She’s still got moves, hasn’t she?’

Jeanie relaxed. She knew where she was with Amber. ‘She sure has. Unlike me.’

‘You’re a great dancer!’ Amber gestured towards the dancefloor, which was about the size of a tennis court. Current population: approximately one hundred and fifty. ‘Get out there and show them how it’s done.’

‘I’m not sure I can.’ Jeanie pouted. ‘I’m 90 per cent sweat.’

‘You’ll fit right in then.’ Amber sipped her margarita. ‘Go on. Do your duty.’

‘But I’ll look ridiculous.’

Amber grinned. ‘You’re a forty-five-year-old woman dressed as a My Little Pony. I think you’re way beyond ridiculous.’

Jeanie felt the beginnings of a smile. ‘Good point.’

As if sensing her distress, her other best friend Clio appeared, her red and gold tiger-striped hair glinting in the disco lights. On Clio, the pink hen T-shirt gleamed, married with a silver feather boa, a short black leather skirt and stiletto boots. She wore a black patent leather rucksack on her back, given to her by her daughter, Nina, when she had left for uni a week before. Clio had barely removed it since. Clio pretended she wasn’t missing Nina at all, but Jeanie knew how much Nutella and wine she was getting through. She could read the signs.

Clio cupped her hands around her lips, yelling over the opening chords of ‘Lambada’. ‘They’re playing our song, baby.’ She grabbed Jeanie and pulled her onto the dancefloor. Resistance was futile. Clio sashayed ahead of her, her moves too big for the tiny space, despite the fact that she only came up to Jeanie’s chin. They found a spot in the middle of the stag party, who seemed liberated by the tequilas they were slamming and the fact that their matching T-shirts and masks meant no one could tell them – or their questionable hip thrusts – apart.

Jeanie was just getting going when someone slammed into her from behind. She spun round, an apology on her lips despite the fact that it hadn’t been her fault. She didn’t get a chance to voice it. The girl who’d jostled Jeanie narrowed her brown eyes beneath thick eyebrows and a curving dark fringe. ‘Bloody old hens. Just get out of my way.’

She shoved Jeanie aside, sending her falling to the ground, narrowly missing a cider bottle, and landing heavily on her elbow.

‘Hey.’ Above Jeanie, a spitting Charlotte appeared, holding her pink penis cocktail straw high and stabbing it into the girl’s face. ‘Who do you think you are?’

Clio helped Jeanie up. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes.’ Jeanie rubbed her elbow, hoping there wouldn’t be a bruise flowering beneath the sleeve of her wedding dress on Monday.

Clio took a step towards the girl. ‘What the hell were you doing, hurting my friend like that? You should take more care. She’s getting married on Monday.’

‘So?’ The girl’s eyes flashed. ‘Why should I give a shit about that?’

Jeanie put a hand on her arm. ‘Clio, please. It was an accident.’

Clio reluctantly turned away, only for Charlotte to step forward again. ‘It wasn’t an accident.’ Charlotte’s straw was perilously close to the girl’s eyes. ‘You pushed her on purpose.’

‘Oh, fuck off.’ The girl’s red lips drew into a sneer. Jeanie saw that her necklace spelt out Talia in golden letters. ‘It’s impossible to avoid her with an arse like that.’

Jeanie felt her cheeks burn. She moved away as Charlotte screeched something above the Lambada accordions. It was true she hadn’t followed the traditional pre-wedding trajectory of losing a stone and a half, but also this costume definitely wasn’t doing her any favours. She had a tail, for goodness’ sake.

She stood still, knowing only that she wanted to leave. She didn’t belong here, with people half her age, on a dancefloor that was too hot, too loud, too much. She belonged in a static caravan with Clio and Amber and their ancient karaoke machine.

Behind her, Charlotte was still arguing with the girl, her teeth bared.

The girl’s voice rose. ‘Hurt me and I’ll get you kicked out, you bitch!’

Jeanie’s ears pricked up. Being kicked out sounded like heaven. Jeanie could be back at the hotel with a cuppa in half an hour’s time. Bliss.

Nicola appeared before her again, this time with Emma, the fourth Martin sister, in tow. Emma’s long loose honey hair looked windswept even in here, and she had on flip-flops and a green maxi skirt beneath the hen T-shirt. There was a cluster of silver bracelets on her wrists and paint spatters on her fingers, as if she should be wielding a brush rather than a cocktail. In her other hand was a sketchbook and a pencil, and she hugged it to her chest, clearly wanting to spend more time with it than with Jeanie. It had always been this way. Art first, family second. Tantrums if any of her art things were disturbed from their incredibly inconvenient locations around the house, and a sense of entitlement that saw her painting a neon mural on the front door one Christmas, followed by outrage when her parents had made her paint over it.

‘Jeanie,’ she slurred, slender arms wrapping around her. ‘You look so cute. I want to paint you.’

Dear God no. Jeanie had no desire to end up immortalised in oils as an overweight children’s toy. She submitted to her younger sister’s embrace, even as her body temperature rose dangerously high. Emma smelt of patchouli and paint, even in here. Growing up, she had sung in choirs and quoted poetry, and around her wrist was inked her favourite line from Emily Dickinson: ‘I dwell in possibility.’

When she eventually let Jeanie go, Emma’s wide blue eyes gazed at the gyrating dancers as dreamily as if they were daffodils bobbing in a hilltop breeze. Then they returned to Jeanie, and she put her glass down on a small table, found a fresh page in her sketchbook and started to draw.

Oh God. Jeanie turned away, to see Nicola tapping the yelling Charlotte on the shoulder, giving her a meaningful glare. Charlotte pulled a face and then piped down. The girl sneered, before swaying off through the crowd towards the cloakroom.

Charlotte walked towards her fellow hens, limping slightly. ‘Good riddance.’

‘Did she hurt you? You’re walking funny.’ Pen appeared, speaking with her customary tact.

‘Of course not.’ Jeanie saw a muscle flicker in Charlotte’s cheek.

Nicola checked her black wristwatch, and Jeanie’s insides curdled. That watch meant schedules. That watch meant it was time for ‘fun’ to be prescribed. Please, no. Jeanie had already endured getting a random man’s phone number and doing the Macarena on her own.

‘Swapsies.’ Nicola gestured to the stag party. ‘Swap an item of clothing with a stranger.’

Jeanie stared at her. ‘But I’m wearing a onesie. This is a joke, right?’

‘Certainly not.’ Jeanie should have known. Nicola didn’t approve of jokes. ‘Go on then.’ Nicola clapped her hands, as if summoning students to assembly. ‘Clock’s ticking.’

Jeanie slunk her way across the dancefloor, head hanging. It was all very well for Nicola. She was married with three children, a perfect lawn and a walk-in wardrobe with at least twenty pairs of sensible court shoes. Her bachelorette had consisted of a tour of the art galleries of Paris and a wine-tasting session halfway up the Eiffel Tower.

Jeanie braced herself for another humiliation. Maybe the point of hen weekends was to make you so scared of facing another that you would never get divorced.

‘We’ll help.’ Amber and Clio flanked her.

Clio nudged her in the ribs. ‘Look, that girl’s arguing with someone else now.’

Jeanie followed her friend’s gaze and saw Talia yelling at a man with closely shaved dark hair, wearing a dark hoodie and baggy jeans. ‘Well, at least her evening’s going worse than mine.’

Jeanie took a deep breath and launched herself towards the stag party, her sparkly pony ears headband in her fingers. It was the only part of her costume that she could swap without committing a public indecency offence. The music pumped. Jeanie sweated. Clio bumped hips with her, raising her arms in the air as ‘Jump’ started to pound through the speakers.

Jeanie approached one of the stag party. He was so tall she had to stand on tiptoes. She felt ridiculous. She was ridiculous. ‘Um. Would you mind if I…?’

‘What?’ He put a hand to his ear.

She tried again, honestly wishing the ground would swallow her up. It was a feeling she had experienced on this dancefloor before, now she came to think of it. School Leavers’ Disco, 1998: a split pair of jeans, pink pants underneath. Memory Lane really wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

‘Can I swap this with you?’

His masked face swivelled towards her. ‘I can’t hear you!’

‘Swap?’ She held out the hairband, her cheeks starting to burn. His friends were gathering around him now, jeering and jostling.

‘Why not!?’ He nodded, putting the headband on, above the mask, which depicted a tanned face beneath an almighty beard. He pretended to preen. ‘It suits me, don’t you think?’

The rest of the stag party roared with laughter, while Jeanie wondered which item of his clothing it would be the least embarrassing to take. Not the shirt. Definitely not the jeans. A sock?

She turned her head to see her sisters giggling, heads thrown back, having the time of their lives, Pen merrily recording it all for one of her ‘fun’ family movies. Jeanie had featured in them before, an object of mockery at so many family celebrations. Suddenly, she missed her dad so much it hurt: the only one to understand her, the only one to make her feel that she mattered.

She blinked the tears away as the man pulled off an old pink festival wristband and handed it over. ‘Here you go.’

‘Thank you.’ Jeanie realised a tear was sliding down her