The Official Book Club Guide: The Colour of Bee Larkham’s Murder

Jasper reports David Gilbert’s parakeet threats to the police before helping Bee clear up the mess from her party. As Jasper disposes of the ‘plastic sweet wrappers’ he finds in the bedroom, he hears Bee talking to a mysterious visitor with a ‘pale red’ voice. The visitor has brought Bee flowers and is clearly apologising but Bee remains angry. She tells the visitor that if he continues to bother her she will go to the police with her diary. Jasper assumes that Bee is talking to David Gilbert and that she has also been keeping note of his movements to protect the parakeets. When the visitor has gone, Bee runs upstairs and drops one of the china ladies out of the window.

14 February to 11 March

Jasper continues to leave Bee’s packages for Lucas in the allocated drawer of the science lab. As well as letters, the parcels often contain money, cigarettes, or Xbox games. Although uncomfortable with the arrangement, Jasper goes along with it, desperate to see the first baby parakeets from Bee’s window. On his visits to Bee’s house, Jasper notices further ‘sweet wrappers’ on the bedside table and a white rabbit notebook. He also notes that Bee’s china lady collection is shrinking as she knocks them out of the window one by one.

12 March

Jasper knows that the parakeets are feeding their babies in the eaves of Bee’s house but has not yet caught sight of one. His deepest fear is that he will stop being useful to Bee before this happens. When he sees someone wearing a navy baseball cap entering Bee’s back garden, Jasper dashes over to find Lucas retrieving Bee’s key from under the stone flamingo. Lucas tells Jasper that he is paying Bee a surprise visit.

24 March

Jasper hears the parakeets screeching in Bee’s garden. He goes to investigate and finds a dead baby parakeet on the ground. Unable to rouse Bee by knocking on her door, Jasper lets himself into the house. He bursts into the bedroom to see Bee bouncing on top of a naked Lucas. Horrified, Jasper runs back home with the dead parakeet and buries it. Later that day Bee calls round to the house and Jasper overhears her tell his father that he was a ‘one-night stand’.

Friday, 15 April

Ed breaks the news to Jasper that a woman’s body has been found in woodland and the police suspect that it may be Bee. Jasper asks his father why he doesn’t know for certain that it is Bee’s body when he was the one who disposed of her. Annoyed, Ed grabs his son but Jasper runs away and locks himself in the bathroom. Despite Ed’s profuse apologies, Jasper calls the police and claims that his father is trying to kill him.

31 March

From his bedroom, Jasper sees the first baby parakeets emerging from their nest but cannot hear them clearly. He knows he could hear them properly from Bee’s bedroom but has been avoiding her since the day of the baby parakeet’s death.

2 April

On the day of Mrs Watkins’ funeral, Jasper and his father watch as a hearse pulls up outside Number 18. At the same time, Bee opens her windows and begins to play loud music. Jasper believes the gesture is intended for him and interprets it as an apology. He decides to go over to Bee’s while his father attends the funeral.

Bee apologises to Jasper for being unavailable when he called round to break the news of the baby parakeet’s death. They go over to Jasper’s house to see the parakeet’s grave and Bee reads a passage from Alice in Wonderland from her white rabbit notebook. Bee asks to see Jasper’s notebooks and then claims that she is feeling nauseous. Jasper goes to fetch her a glass of water and, when he returns, notices that Bee is no longer holding her white rabbit notebook. As they watch the parakeets, Bee reminds Jasper that the view is much better from her bedroom. She gives him an envelope to deliver to Lucas and he takes it.

Friday, 15 April

Jasper has been sent to stay with emergency foster carers. Meanwhile, his father has been arrested for assaulting the police officer who attended Jasper’s removal from the family home. Overwhelmed, Jasper barricades himself inside his new bedroom.

5 April

Jasper delivers another envelope to the science lab and notices that Lucas has failed to pick up the last one. Bee asks him to deliver another letter promising that, in return, he can watch the parakeets from her bedroom four times a week. As Jasper delivers the new note, he is confronted by Lucas who orders him to stop delivering Bee’s messages. Lucas asks Jasper to tell Bee that he is ‘too young’ and that their relationship is over. When Jasper later repeats this message to Bee she is distraught. Jasper fears that he will not get to see the parakeets again.

6 April

Bee asks Jasper over to watch the parakeets. In her bedroom, he notices that there is only one china lady remaining. Bee then begs Jasper to deliver one last letter to Lucas and, when he refuses, threatens to stop allowing Jasper to visit.

Jasper goes to Lucas Drury’s house, as Bee has instructed, but is overwhelmed by fear when the door opens and a barking dog leaps out at him. He shoves the letter into the boy’s hand and runs off, realising, as he does so, that he has given the envelope to the wrong brother.

The next day, at school, Lucas tells Jasper that his father read the note but fortunately did not know who it was from. He instructs Jasper to tell Bee that they will get into terrible trouble if she contacts him again. Jasper does not want to tell Bee about the mistake he made in delivering the letter, as he wants to protect the parakeets. He decides not to pass on the message from Lucas.

Saturday, 16 April

Jasper is taken to the police station by a social worker. Here, free of his father’s restraining influence, Jasper confesses to everything he remembers. He tells Richard Chamberlain that he stabbed Bee to death with the same kitchen knife that she used to cut up a pie. He then took his paintings and the knife and ran home. When his father came home from work and discovered what had happened, he disposed of the knife and Bee’s body.

8 April

Despite Jasper’s attempts to avoid Bee, she intercepts him, claiming that the parakeets are in real danger because David Gilbert has reported them as a pest to the council. Telling him they need to come up with a plan, she invites Jasper over for tea. Jasper explains that he always eats chicken pie on a Friday and Bee promises to make him her own home-made version.

When Jasper goes to Bee’s house that evening, she is clearly in an agitated state. Although she asked Jasper to bring his paintings over, she shows no interest in seeing them. Jasper also becomes agitated as he wants to lay his canvases out on the kitchen table, but it is too dirty. Bee attempts to clean the table but accidentally splashes water on one of Jasper’s paintings, upsetting him further. Bee becomes quarrelsome when Jasper insists that the painting is ruined. She says she cannot understand why Lucas has not replied to her and asks if Jasper made a mistake when he delivered the note to Lucas’s house. Jasper reluctantly admits that he might have given the note to Lee by accident.

Bee presents Jasper with a large slice of home-made chicken pie and says she would like to keep the water-damaged painting. She then asks Jasper to deliver another note to Lucas’s house the next day. When Jasper refuses and announces that he is going home, Bee becomes furious. She tells Jasper that she had sex with his father on the night of her party and that Ed told her how difficult it was to have a son like Jasper. She threatens to tell the police that Ed raped her, warning Jasper that, if she does so, he will be taken away by social services. As Jasper tries to leave, Bee tells him that he has just eaten parakeet pie. To prove it, she shows him a recipe for a pie containing one dozen parakeets. Jasper vomits but feels as if the parakeets are trapped in his body. He grabs the kitchen knife and slashes his stomach. Bee apologises and tells him that she was lying about the pie. She grapples with Jasper, trying to grab the knife and they both fall over. Bee hits her head on the floor as Jasper lands on top of her.

Saturday, 16 April

In the police interview room, DC Chamberlain presents Jasper with the parakeet paintings that he took to Bee’s house on the night of her death. The detective constable points out that, as there is no trace of blood on the paintings, it is highly unlikely that Jasper took them straight home after stabbing Bee. Chamberlain also tells Jasper that his water-spoiled painting was found hanging on Bee’s kitchen wall, indicating that someone hung it there after Jasper left. They continue with the interview as Jasper recounts what else he can recall about that night.

8 April

Leaving Bee on the floor, Jasper runs home and hides in his den. When Ed returns from work, however, he immediately knows that something is wrong as he sees Jasper’s blood on the stairs. Jasper tells his father that he has stabbed Bee. Ed treats his son’s stomach wound before giving him a painkiller and a sleeping tablet. He says that he will go to check on Bee and, by the time Jasper wakes up in the morning, everything will be sorted out.

Jasper wakes up a few hours later and remembers that he left his paintings at Bee’s house. He returns to Bee’s kitchen and believes he sees his father wearing a navy baseball cap kneeling by Bee’s body. Jasper asks if Bee is dead and his father confirms that Jasper killed her. Jasper notices that the china dancing lady is now in the kitchen. He grabs the paintings and runs home.

Saturday, 16 April

DC Chamberlain asks Jasper if he touched Bee’s neck when he killed her. Confused and overwhelmed, Jasper throws a glass of water at the detective constable. Chamberlain announces that Jasper is free to go as they do not believe that he killed Bee. A post-mortem has revealed the cause of her death to be strangulation.

Jasper’s father is also released without charges and they return to Vincent Gardens. In his room, Jasper is disturbed to find that his notebooks and paintings are all out of order. His father explains that the police searched the house for evidence and have taken away Bee’s kitchen knife, which he had hidden in the cutlery drawer.

Monday, 18 April

Jasper and his father both write a list of ‘Important Facts’ about the night of Bee’s murder. When they compare them, they offer completely different versions of events. Ed’s list claims that he did not kill Bee, that he was not in her kitchen on the night she died, that he was not wearing his baseball cap that night and he did not take her body to the woods. It also states that Bee was still alive at 9.30 p.m., as he spoke to her outside her front door. Jasper’s list states that he did not kill Bee after all and that he saw his father in Bee’s kitchen with Bee’s dead body.

Jasper decides to paint the events of the night of Bee’s murder on two separate canvases: one depicting the scene of Bee’s stabbing, the other portraying the moment when he returned to the kitchen for his canvases. In doing so, he remembers that, when he returned to the kitchen, Bee was wearing different clothes, her hand was bandaged and her position on the floor had also changed.

Jasper realises that Bee must have still been alive when he first left her. After he had gone, she must have got up, dressed her wound and got changed. Jasper’s father confirms that when he went to check on Bee at 9.30 p.m. her hand was bandaged. The version of events that she gave was that Jasper had lost his temper and slashed himself to make it look like she was responsible. Bee had also advised Ed not to go to the police or the hospital as social services would inevitably become involved. Jasper’s father adds that Bee was alive until the early hours of the morning, as David Gilbert later called on her to complain about her loud music.

Jasper finds Bee’s white rabbit diary hidden amongst his own notebooks. Written when she was nine years old, the diary reveals that Bee was frequently punished by her mother for being ‘bad’. One entry, however, recounts Bee’s excitement at the prospect of her mother and Mrs Watkins going to an evening prayer meeting together. In their absence, Bee’s babysitter had promised her a Mad Hatter’s tea party

Tuesday, 19

April

Having read more of Bee’s diary, Jasper has learned that her babysitter sexually abused her. Although Bee told her mother, Pauline Larkham refused to believe the story and continued to let the ‘Mad Hatter’ babysit her daughter. With no one to turn to, Bee wanted to die.

Concerned that Bee’s bird feeders are empty, Jasper persuades his father to accompany him to Ollie’s house. When a man answers the door wearing a grey sweater and jeans, Jasper accuses him of failing to feed the birds. He is thrown into confusion, however, when the man speaks in a red voice, revealing himself to be David Gilbert. Jasper accuses David of being in the wrong place and wearing the wrong clothes. He is further disorientated when Ollie Watkins appears wearing uncharacteristic red trousers and speaking in a voice tinged ‘with strange coloured streaks’. It emerges that Ollie has a chest infection which has changed the colour of his voice.

Jasper picks up some china animals from Ollie’s dresser and notices that, like Bee’s china ladies, they are made by Royal Doulton. David tells Jasper that both Lily Watkins and Pauline Larkham collected Royal Doulton and admits that he is a big fan of it himself. Jasper also examines an Alice in Wonderland