We Know What You Did, Kirsty Lockwood, Orion, £20
At first glance, We Know What You Did resembles any number of police procedurals, but former Herald columnist Lockwood’s debut turns out to be an unexpectedly uncomfortable psychological ordeal that lingers in the memory long after you’ve put it down.
When eminent psychologist Amos Michaels is killed at his home in the outskirts of Glasgow, there’s no doubt who’s responsible. Nineteen-year-old Odette Adin was livestreaming it to her TikTok followers around the world. Police are on the scene immediately and Odette is brought in to the station, but refuses to explain her actions to DI Roger Cleeves or to her lawyer.
Outside, the station is being besieged both by Odette’s supporters and those who want to see her strung up. Everyone has seen the video and knows where they stand. The international attention is putting DI Cleeves under huge pressure. And still Odette won’t speak a word.
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We readers, though, have the benefit of being able to go back and see the events that led up to Amos’s death. We find Odette, unemployed and ill-equipped to cope with adult life, living on benefits in temporary accommodation. Her only friend is Toni at the job centre, who can see how eager Odette is to find work and get on in life but can’t do much to help her.
Odette had a bad start. She never knew her father and is coming out from under the influence of a recently-deceased mother who was simultaneously neglectful and over-protective, and who drilled it into her to consider all strangers a potential threat.
Consequently, her social skills are underdeveloped and she often forgets to think before she speaks. One of her most endearing traits is the way she tries to educate herself, memorising facts from varied magazine articles so that she can contribute to conversations she will sadly never have.
Everything changes when she starts chatting to an 80-year-old man in a museum. Retired psychologist Amos is friendly, charming and well-off. Divorced and no longer in contact with his children, he warms to Odette and takes her under his wing, gifting her a phone and inviting her to come and live in his grand Victorian villa when she is evicted from her flat. She’s elated to have made a friend, and hopes that their friendship will come to mean as much to Amos as it does to her.
Armed with her new phone and desperate to make more connections, she comes up with the idea of making TikTok videos showing the two of them enjoying their intergenerational friendship, guessing, rightly, that people will be charmed by them and share them with a wider audience. The insecure Odette does start to worry that she might be using Amos as a “cash cow”, exploiting their relationship to promote herself. But the mercurial Amos’s intentions are not always easy to fathom either, especially when he pressures her to have therapy sessions with him and wear the old-fashioned clothes he’s picked out for her.
To say any more would be giving away too much, but anyone who’s been in a comparable position could find it a very disturbing read. The fact that we know from the start that Amos will end up dead only whets our curiosity, and Lockwood fuels the intrigue by alternating between present and past viewpoints, gradually whipping up a suspenseful atmosphere shot through with menace. It’s an absolutely chilling story and an accomplished first novel, one I wolfed down in one long sitting, kept aloft by two very vivid and memorable central characters.
