Actually, Twistery and solution all in one today:

It looked like a suicide pact. The 2 bodies lay together. But why the separate suicide notes & why had she shot herself & he taken poison?

Solution.

It didn’t add up.

In suicide pacts, those taking their own lives generally use the same method to do so. We might expect a joint suicide note, signed by both parties, explaining what has led them to this dreadful but mutual decision.

Admittedly, there might be one dominant party, the one who came up with the idea and somehow manipulated the other to join in. Not that much persuasion would be required. The other person was usually weak and passive and highly suggestible. And depressed, of course. Ripe for the act. All it needed was the idea to be put to them. “There is no way out of this, other than we kill ourselves.” Perhaps followed by: “I’ll do you first then do myself.”

And what of love? Didn’t love, in its most desperate, destructive guise, have some part to play in suicide pacts? Wasn’t it always the final act in a tragic love story? Two doomed lovers alone together against a hostile world. If one accepts mutual self-destruction as the ultimate romantic act, then yes, we might say some twisted, deluded version of love is usually at work.

Those who knew the couple were not surprised that there were two notes and that they had chosen two different methods. “They could never agree on anything,” was the generally held opinion.

And, frankly, the idea of them as doomed lovers was laughable. It was not Ginny and Johnny against the world. For as long as anyone could remember, it had been Ginny against Johnny, with the rest of the world called upon to take sides.

One explanation was that they had both had enough of the constant domestic warfare at precisely the same time. They had independently decided to take their own lives. The whole thing was a bizarre coincidence.

It’s true that there was a coincidental aspect to it. But it was not the coincidence of two desperate people deciding they were tired of living at the same moment. It was the coincidence of two people realising their other half had to die, and the best way to achieve that was to fake their partner’s suicide.

So as he wiped the gun for prints and placed it in his dead wife’s hand, the poison that he had already eaten (in the dinner she had prepared for him) was beginning to make him feel nauseous and weak.

As he slipped from consciousness, he couldn’t help smiling. The last thing he saw was his wife’s face. He thought that she had never looked so beautiful. And he remembered why, once, he really had loved her.