Welcome back to The Murder Coat, a serialsed fiction series. In this chapter, we meet Evie’s inner circle — the women who know her best, drink the most wine, and wield the sharpest needles (and tongues). What starts as an ordinary Thursday night of wine, wool, and menopausal rage takes a darker turn when an old classmate appears on the evening news… and a forgotten coat brings back more than just memories.
Buckle up for Chapter Two…
📖 Catch up on all chapters here
The Stitch & Bitch Coven
We’d claimed the back booth at Barb’s Café before it became cool – back when the coffee was burnt, the wine was cheap and cheerfully terrible, and no one had ever uttered the words beetroot latte without irony.
Now it was all reclaimed timber, mood lighting, and man-bun hipster energy, but Barb still let us take over the corner on Thursday nights, didn’t blink when we brought knitting, and had the good sense to top off the pinot without asking.
Kate held up her latest project with a frown. “Is this a sock or a deeply cursed puppet?”
“Why not both?” I said, sipping my wine.
Bernadette, halfway through something cable-knit and ambitious, glanced up with a smirk. “Better than that thing you made last month. Looked like a woollen cock with an STD.”
We cackled like a coven of old hags.
Which was a pretty accurate description of us. To the people outside our circle, we were a bunch of frumpy, soft-bodied, double chinned hags. Some of us might even have the odd rogue chin hair.
And Zero fucks did we give. We’d reached that sacred stage of life where male eyes slid away from us, as if we were magic objects their Muggle eyes lacked the ability to see.
Actually, we were glad not to be noticed. Years of being objectified, ridiculed, and then passed over, had left us pretty disappointed by the bulk of the male species, and now we revelled in our invisibility. It was in fact a blessed relief.
I glanced over at a guy around my age who stood at the counter. He’d been a couple of years ahead of me at school and had once groped me at a school dance. He barely noticed me now, his eyes repeatedly flicking over to a pair of Instagram skinny women who sat by the door. They would have been all of 23. Gross.
“God,” I muttered. “That guy once grabbed my arse at the senior ball. Now I could cartwheel past him naked, and he wouldn’t blink.”
Kate didn’t even look up. “Not unless you were holding a mirror so he could watch himself watching those girls.”
Bernadette topped up our glasses with a practiced flick of the wrist. The conversation lapped at familiar shores - hot flushes, dickhead managers, daughters ghosting us on WhatsApp, the cost of grapes, and that strange little thrill of not being looked at anymore.
Kate caught the eye of the man at the next table, or tried to. He was valiantly pretending we didn’t exist.
She narrowed her eyes at him, then raised her voice just slightly. “So anyway, I told the gynaecologist, if I wanted a second-degree burn down there, I’d use my hair straightener.”
The man flinched, adjusted his cutlery, and stared harder at his menu.
Kate smiled sweetly. “Funny,” she said, taking another sip of wine, “we’re invisible and still somehow too loud, too much, too opinionated.”
“Middle-aged women,” I said. “The one group society expects to vanish politely… and is deeply offended when we don’t.”
Kate tipped her chin toward the counter, where Frankie was wiping down the espresso machine in slow, distracted circles.
“How’s that going?” she asked under her breath.
I followed her gaze, sighed into my wine.
“She’s… nocturnal. Obsessed with conspiracy podcasts. Leaves weird things in the fridge.”
“Like what?”
“Pickled eggs and a bag of googly eyes. I didn’t ask.”
Kate grinned. “You like her.”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
Frankie glanced over, as if she knew we were talking about her. She raised one brow, then returned to her espresso steaming like a barista in a noir film.
Bernadette smirked. “Speaking of not disappearing quietly, you know who’s back in town?”
We both looked up.
“Lila Bennet.”
I blinked. “As in…?”
Bernie nodded. “Yup. Detective Know-It-All. She’s head of a new cold case task force. Got some big PR thing going. Murder podcasts, media appeals, all very ‘help us bring justice for forgotten victims.’” She said the last bit in a mock-heroic tone.
Kate, blinking between us, frowned. “Who’s Lila Bennet?”
Before Bernie could respond, I caught her eye with a look that very clearly said shut your face, Bernadette.
She caught my look, registered the meaning, and gave a breezy shrug. “Evie and I went to school with her. Lila was like Hermione Granger, but smugger. No spells, just spreadsheets.”
Kate grinned and leaned forward. “I’m intrigued.”
Bernie was already scrolling through her phone. “They just released a clip of her this week. Something about new forensic evidence reopening a case from the 80s. Supposed car crash.” Her tone turned dramatic. “Except… turns out it wasn’t.”
She tapped, and a press video started playing. Lila’s face appeared, polished and precise in a navy blazer, flanked by the New Zealand Police insignia.
Frankie, who’d clearly been eavesdropping from behind the counter, wandered over with a rag in one hand and a cup of tea in the other.
“Lila Bennet?” she asked, voice casual. “Is that the cold case chick who did the talk at Victoria Uni last year?”
Bernadette beamed. “Yes! That’s her. She’s all over the place at the moment — new task force, podcast circuit, media darling. Bit full-on, but sharp as hell.”
“I liked her panel on forensic gaps in the 80s,” Frankie said, pulling up a chair without asking. “Kind of intense, but not wrong.”
“I love this one,” Bernadette said, already playing the clip again, delighted to have an attentive audience. “She’s reopening the Godfrey case.”
“Melanie Godfrey?” Frankie asked, frowning slightly. “Wasn’t she the one they found in a burned-out car?”
That’s when the chill started climbing my spine.
I felt the breath hitch in my throat.
She’d aged, of course. We all had. The hair was shorter now, still dark but now shot through with silver strands at the temples, and her face was taut in that tight-but-not-too-tight way that spoke of a skincare regimen she probably researched with a spreadsheet. But beneath all that was the same Lila: self-possessed, watchful, a jaw that could slice carrots.
As always, she looked like someone who was used to being listened to. Back in high school, that had driven me absolutely spare.
Even now, after decades, something about her voice still rubbed against my nerves like sandpaper on skin. Calm. Controlled. Instructive…and still fucking annoying.
She was appealing for any information about a young woman called Melanie Godfrey. I frowned as that named niggled at me, but my bloody memory refused to co -operate. I focused on what Lila was saying.
“…new forensic results now point to suspicious circumstances,” she said, her voice clipped and cool, “and we’re urging anyone who may have seen her that night to come forward.”
The footage cut to two photos.
The first was a smiling school portrait, all uneven fringe and braces.
The second was a candid shot. Melanie, a few years older, standing near a windswept bit of coast, hands jammed in the pockets of a dark olive coat.
The coat.
The chill hit me low in the spine. The scent of wet concrete and blood rose all around me.
Kate must’ve seen my face. “What is it?”
I didn’t answer straight away. My eyes were fixed on the photo – not on the girl, but the coat. Something was rising up from the back of my mind, slow and cold.
“That coat?” I said, my voice thinner than I meant it to be.
Both Kate and Bernadette looked at me.
I swallowed. “I’ve seen it before.”
A pause. Just long enough to make my skin crawl.
“It’s in a box,” I said finally. “Out the back of my shop.”
➡️ Cold cases, old friends, and one detective I’d hoped to never see again… [Read Chapter Three: Guess Who’s Back →]
Missed the beginning? Start with Chapter One. It all starts with a mysterious coat and a weird vibe in the pit of Evie’s stomach.
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