Interview 4: Hannah — June 30th (Friday)

HANNAH D401: A cup of tea would be good thanks. Just the one sugar.

Hi, Hannah.

We don’t exactly know how Hannah liked her tea earlier, but “just one sugar” — if it’s about reducing the usual amount of sugar in the tea — might be a subtle hint of Eve’s personality taking over Hannah. Or not, and she always liked “just the one sugar”.

HANNAH D402: Well, fine. Considering. I got back into the house today and that was weird. Knowing your people have been there been through my things… It’s like I’ve been burgled. Worse. Obviously worse. I don’t know. I haven’t looked in the cellar yet. They sent a cleaner in. As good as new he said. But they had to throw some stuff out. Couldn’t get the blood out. And I’m still waiting to hear from the coroner so we can get a date set for the funeral. It’s going to be a cremation. So?

When she says jokingly “It’s like I’ve been burgled”, it’s another example — after the mirror — of Hannah not really grasping the gravity of the situation. She quickly corrects herself but that does not really undo the damage. And then she smiles randomly during her speech, as if she did not just lose her husband and found his bloodied corpse.

It seems like when Hannah says “couldn’t get the blood out”, she means the cellar. It makes sense. If she meant the living room — where the murder allegedly happened (EVE D765) — surely the police would have arrested her on the spot. No way an innocent woman lived for a week in a house with the bloodied living room and somehow forgot to mention it to the police.

Did the blood leak through the bin bags? If so, I guess it’s possible that the cleaner could not get it all out — it corroded the cellar for quite a few days — but it must have also gotten the police wonder of Hannah living in the house with the smelly corpse rotting in a pool of blood for nine days.

Initially, any amount of blood in the cellar was highly suspicious to me, and made me question the murder scene.

You see, later Eve will say: “[…] I walked in. Saw Simon. He was on the floor of the living room. His throat had been cut. There was a lot of blood. He was dead.” (EVE D765).

She will also say: “She was sat behind him. She had my wig on. And she had been there all day. And she had blood on her. And she was in shock.” (EVE D766)

When Hannah and Eve finally moved the corpse to the cellar, Simon was long dead, then. He was obviously not bleeding anymore. And he was wrapped in bin bags. How did the blood get on the cellar’s floor, then, and in a way that made it impossible to “get it out” and forced the cleaners to “throw some stuff out”?

And what about the blood in the living room? Didn’t Hannah have any carpets in the house? “[…] We cleaned up. We bagged up the broken mirror, her clothes. They’re gone.”, says Eve (EVE D768), but no mention of any carpets or any other decorative elements of the house.

If the murder happened in the living room, it’d be destroyed: a man with a slashed throat would not die instantly, the blood would be everywhere if he fought for his life, and Eve does mention that “there was a lot of blood”. Also, why would there be any blood in the cellar? Sure, the blood could have gotten on the bin bags when Hannah and Eve were wrapping them around Simon, but it was dried up at this point and I can hardly imagine it would be able to do such damage to the cellar as Hannah reports it.

If the murder happened in the cellar… Why? What would it change in the story, how would it change our perception of it? And why would Hannah and Eve put Simon in the bags? Just so he smells less? But then why not clean up some blood in the cellar in the first place?

Ultimately, though, after some very unhealthy research, I think I can explain it all.

A person with a slashed throat dies both from the blood loss and suffocation when the blood fills the respiratory track. I can imagine Simon going into shock, sitting on the floor, holding his throat, dying more from the suffocation than leaking gallons of blood. The blood would have stopped flowing when his heart stopped, leaving the living room damaged, but not beyond repair.

That would make it possible for Hannah and Eve to clean up the presumably carpet-less floor, bag Simon up and move him to the cellar. After livor mortis fully kicked in and the gravity made all the blood settle in the lower part of the corpse, the later tissue decomposition let the blood out, flooding the cellar through the leaky bin bags.

You’re welcome.

Of course, there is a fairy tale background here as well. It comes from Grimms’ Fitcher’s Bird I mentioned earlier when discussing the finding in the cellar. “Couldn’t get the blood out” is described in the tale this way: “She […] washed the blood off, but in vain, it appeared again in a moment. She washed and scrubbed, but she could not get it out.”

HANNAH D403: Fingerprints?

Here we go.

HANNAH D404: No. No one has been in the last few weeks. We had a plumber come in. Three, four weeks ago. Someone Simon knew from the Rock.

Roger that.

HANNAH D405: In the bedroom?

Uh oh.

HANNAH D406: I hoover, I dust. Every week. Maybe less. I once asked Eleanor how often I should dust and she said: “If people ask tell them you do it once a week. But every few weeks is OK.” I think she was just trying to make me feel better. When I was there, she was hoovering every day. You know, ran an ordered house. You know how that generation is. Putting on a brave front. She has secret stashes of cigarettes. Doug doesn’t even know she smokes. When I was there, I saw her. She has these sort of porcelain vases. Ornamental. Next to the Reader’s Digest books. Cigarettes inside. And she still has them. I mean last time I was there I looked in a vase. There was a fresh pack. I mean all those years of marriage and she still has a secret like that.

Two things to learn here. First, that Hannah was not exactly a devout cleaner. Second, people can have pretty big secrets even when they are living together for years. Like she in her marriage with Simon.

We will get to the fingerprints and the wig analysis soon enough, but let’s role-play the detectives for a moment.

When was the last time you cleaned the house?

HANNAH D407: A week or so ago. It would have been the Saturday before my birthday? You know I get like that on the weekends. Have a lie in and then want to get up and blitz the house.

Would you have cleaned the beds?

HANNAH D408: Yes. Yeah. I would have cleaned them. I changed the sheets too. Were there fingerprints in all those places?

Yes.

HANNAH D409: Could they be my parents’ fingerprints? I’m not sure how long they last for but… Is that possible?

Well, we also found these fingerprints in your bedroom.

HANNAH D410: That can’t be right. In the bedroom?

Yes. Which side of the bed is yours?

HANNAH D411: I sleep on the right side of the bed as you come in from the door. You can tell because I have two pillows and he just has one.

We ask because we found some unknown hairs there as well.

HANNAH D412: What kind of hairs?

From a wig.

HANNAH D413: A wig? You mean… Well, what type of wig?

Do you wear a wig?

HANNAH D414: No. I’ve never worn a wig. What kind of wig?

A blonde wig.

HANNAH D415: Could the hairs have come from somewhere else? I mean… Could they… We have a lot of dolls in the attic. There’s a Rapunzel doll with long blonde hair. Could they have come from there?

All right, so enough role-playing, and let’s talk about the fingerprints and the wig.

Without going into obsessive detail — like Hannah’s hostile reaction to the mention of the hairs or the Rapunzel doll — unknown fingerprints were found in Hannah’s house. Particularly the bedroom is of interest to us: it’s not just the fingerprints anymore, we need to add hairs from a blonde wig into the mystery mix.

The last time Hannah cleaned the house was a week before Simon’s death. Then the police CSI-ed the house over a week later. That gives us a window of over two weeks for the fingerprints and the wig hairs.

Since Hannah and Eve are the same person, the unknown fingerprints must belong to someone else. We do not know how many different fingerprints were found: just one, or more than one? It’s possible it was the latter. Hannah asks “Could they be my parents’ fingerprints?”, and not “Could they be the fingerprints of one of my parents?” — although of course that’s nothing decisive.

Who could these fingerprints and hairs belong to?

The blonde wig hairs are easy, they’re from Simon and Eve having a good time.

As for the fingerprints… Note that Hannah only gets agitated about the wig, the fingerprints do not move her that much. Still, we need to explain them. I can offer three hypotheses, including two reasonable ones and one bordering on insanity, but really fun to spin.

What the heck, let’s start with the crazy one. Hannah in Eve mode, with the blonde wig on — slept with some random men in Hannah’s house.

What is this hypothesis based on?

As I mentioned it earlier a few times, we need to think of the detectives too, not just about Hannah and Eve. The policemen realized during the last interview that Hannah was telling them lies. For this interview, they had already checked her financial records, possibly analyzed the fingerprints, asked around about Hannah, and gathered some evidence, like the mirror and …the guitar. They have nothing concrete, though, and for now their only hope is to keep Hannah talking and revealing herself.

Here is one of the things that the detectives found out: later in this very interview, Hannah replies to their question in this way: “No! You’re talking to the wrong person if you think I’m some kind of slut. If you think I’m the kind of person that would have had sex with all those guys.” (HANNAH D430).

Now, what “all those guys” did the detective mention? It is possible they talked about some specific people (not necessarily by name, but still, an identifiable group). Doesn’t the fact they mentioned them at all suggests they learned something about Hannah’s secret, her second life (which would also explain the guitar taken as evidence)? Of course, Hannah could also have just slipped here and say “all those guys” thinking of Eve’s boyfriend she was aware of (even if through the diary).

We know that Eve slept around in the past — that’s how she got the STD ten years ago — but we also know she never stopped. In her final interview, Eve says, “[…]. I told her it was one of my boyfriends, someone I had met in a bar.” (EVE D759). That is just a lie she claims to have said to Hannah, but for such a lie to work it needed to be plausible. Since Hannah easily believed her, we can assume that Eve possibly never changed her lifestyle.

So, sometime in the last two weeks, Eve slept with one (or more) of her “boyfriends” in Hannah’s bed. Does not really matter if this was before or after the murder — she was not the killer, remember — although the psychological evaluation of the act would be different depending on the case. Personally, I think it was before the murder, and right before she found out she was pregnant. After realizing she’s bearing Simon’s child, she probably wouldn’t risk sex with strangers anymore.

There is even a Grimms’ fairy tale support for this hypothesis. It is the only — I think — fairy tale that features a bedroom in an important role, and it is called The Frog King or Iron Heinrich. Here is the relevant fragment:

Finally [the frog] said, “I have eaten all I want and am tired. Now carry me to your room and make your bed so that we can go to sleep.” […]

She picked him up with two fingers, carried him upstairs, and set him in a corner. As she was lying in bed, he came creeping up to her and said, “I am tired, and I want to sleep as well as you do. Pick me up or I’ll tell your father.”

With that she became bitterly angry and threw him against the wall with all her might. “Now you will have your peace, you disgusting frog!”

But when he fell down, he was not a frog, but a prince with beautiful friendly eyes. […]. Then they fell asleep.

Both a frog and a prince in one bedroom can be read as Eve sleeping in Hannah’s bedroom both with a prince (Simon) and a “frog” (random man or men).

And now let’s return to planet Earth, and take a look at two more reasonable hypotheses.

When discussing the mystery of colors, I mentioned that Homicide: Life on the Streets TV Series was a major inspiration for Sam Barlow. Created by the author of the book that the TV series was based on, The Homicide Lexicon, a set of informal rules that apply in the majority of homicide cases, is something that Sam has undoubtedly studied well, e.g. Hannah’s behavior when she is left alone at HANNAH D437 is taken straight from the fourth rule of the lexicon.

Here are these rules:

Everyone lies. Murderers lie because they have to; witnesses and other participants lie because they think they have to; everyone else lies for the sheer joy of it, and to uphold a general principle that under no circumstances do you provide accurate information to a cop. The victim is killed once, but a crime scene can be murdered a thousand times. The initial 10 or 12 hours after a murder are the most critical to the success of an investigation. An innocent man left alone in an interrogation room will remain fully awake, rubbing his eyes, staring at the cubicle walls and scratching himself in dark, forbidden places. A guilty man left alone in an interrogation room goes to sleep. It’s good to be good; it’s better to be lucky. When a suspect is immediately identified in an assault case, the victim is sure to live. When no suspect has been identified, the victim will surely die. First, they’re red. Then they’re green. Then they’re black. (Referring to the color of an open case on the board, the money that must be spent to investigate the case, and the color of the solved murder as it is listed on the board) In any case where there is no apparent suspect, the crime lab will produce no valuable evidence. In those cases where a suspect has already confessed and been identified by at least two eyewitnesses, the lab will give you print hits, fiber evidence, blood typings and a ballistic match. To a jury, any doubt is reasonable; the better the case, the worse the jury; a good man is hard to find, but 12 of them, gathered together in one place, is a miracle. There is too such a thing as a perfect murder. Always has been, and anyone who tries to prove otherwise merely proves himself naive and romantic, a fool who is ignorant of Rules 1 through 9.

And so we can have two hypotheses based on the first two points.

Based on the second rule, the hypothesis is that the fingerprints were basically from one of the cops or whoever else was there when the police raided Hannah’s house. As simple as that.

Based on the first rule, and on general knowledge of police investigative techniques, the hypothesis is that the cops simply lied to Hannah. They know she is lying, they learned a lot about her life already, they started suspecting infidelity. They found suspicious wig hairs, and now they simply want to overwhelm Hannah with “evidence” of “this other person” existing (EVE D521), push her in order to get Hannah crack and spill the beans.

This hypothesis is strengthened by Sam Barlow’s eternal praise for “Three Men and Adena” episode of Homicide. It’s a “one room” episode, in which two detectives try to get a confession out of a man accused of a horrible crime. At one point, the detectives lie to the man, in order for him to crack and admit his guilt.

Everybody lies.

HANNAH D416: OK. I parked up on the street. It was busy so I had to park down the end of the road. Walked up. Knocked on the door. No answer. I took my keys out of my bag and unlocked the door. The main lock was unlocked. You can tell because the key doesn’t turn when you try to turn it to the left. I walked in. Simon’s coat wasn’t on the peg. I couldn’t see his shoes in the shoe rack. I shouted out. I walked straight into the kitchen because he usually sits in there to have a cup of tea and read his paper. But he wasn’t there. I touched the kettle. It was cold. I looked quickly in the living room. Nothing. I walked upstairs to the bedroom. He wasn’t there. I didn’t search for him because it was pretty clear he wasn’t there. I had a shower. The phone rang whilst I was in the shower. I didn’t answer it. I think it was Eric. Then I was just exhausted so I lay down on the bed and I fell asleep though I didn’t mean to. I woke up a couple of hours later and I was surprised to see no one in the bed next to me. And then I remembered where I was and what had happened. That’s was when Eric called again. This time I spoke to him. Then I called Doug and Eleanor. And then I decided to come and see you. That enough?

The infamous rehearsed statement that Eve will later repeat almost word for word (EVE D502). The major differences are the way the lock is described and the way Hannah and Eve address Hannah’s parents (both discussed before).

One possible extra here is Hannah falling asleep even though she “didn’t mean to” and that odd addition of “then I remembered where I was”. Earlier, she fell asleep during her Glasgow trip. Such sudden sleep attacks may be when the Eve persona kicks in. But we are probably dealing with a good old sleep here. After all, Hannah/Eve was exhausted after the all night drive to Glasgow, and then after the seven-hour drive back home.

HANNAH D417: Yes, this is it. He made it himself. It’s a special one off. He made it. He decorated it. That’s his thing. Where did you find it?

The mirror was most likely put away by Eve, when cleaning up the crime scene. Eve lied about it earlier (EVE D350: “The mirror? I can’t remember. I put it somewhere safe. Upstairs, I think. I haven’t looked at it since”) but her final interview suggests she was the one who hid it. That is why Hannah is surprised when the police present the mirror.

HANNAH D418: Silver leaf? No. He normally silvers them properly. This mirror, it’s supposed to look antique. The reflection isn’t as good. It’s the perfect mirror for someone who doesn’t like to look at their own reflection.

Compare Hannah’s “The kind of mirror a princess would have in a story.” (HANNAH D212) with the above “[…] It’s the perfect mirror for someone who doesn’t like to look at their own reflection.” I don’t know of many princesses who — unless turned into a frog — would enjoy a useless mirror. Most likely the princess mirror is the description of the mirror before the glass was shattered, and the above reflection is Hannah’s dislike either of Eve, or her illness.

Here is the mirror in question (as the MITT cards, taken from the game’s backgrounds pack):

Note how the mirror lacks any silver-like surface that would make it, you know, a mirror as we know them. Hannah claims that it’s on purpose, that the mirror did not feature the silver leaf because “it’s supposed to look antique” and as such is unable to offer a reflection of modern quality.

I mentioned earlier that Hannah seems to be oblivious to the mirror’s baggage, plus she claims not to remember when she put it away. Her odd behavior is visible in other clips too. In this one, she goes from informative to sad to happy with the speed of light. All pretty creepy, considering the context, and suggesting a severely damaged empathy. For a moment, we see Hannah as the witch from Little Snow-White, admiring herself in the mirror.

We have a couple of mirror hypotheses to discuss here. Was the mirror really a present, and then the murder weapon, or is it all a story that Hannah and Eve made up? Possibly. Was there ever a second mirror? Unlikely.

For the sake of space, I’m just going to roll with Ockham’s razor here, and assume that the mirror is indeed the murder weapon. It’s a fairly clean hypothesis. What happened, then?

It’s actually quite simple. Originally, the mirror did have the silver leaf. To create a faux-antique mirror, sometimes a silver leaf is applied to the back of a pane of glass, which is then inserted into the mirror’s frame.

When she was arguing with Simon, Hannah broke the mirror in anger, then grabbed a piece of glass and swung it to scare Simon away, but ended up accidentally — or “accidentally” — slashing his throat. Then she got rid of all pieces of the glass, including the piece she killed Simon with. Hannah/Eve kept the mirror, as it was of great sentimental value. She is now pretending that the mirror never had the silver leaf, and the fact it sucks as a mirror is because “it’s supposed to look antique”.

HANNAH D419: Well, on his clothes? That would make sense. He made it. By hand. I mean he brushes the silver onto the glass. It’s not how they make mirrors these days. I mean, he made the mirror… He gave it to me.

The sentimental, emotional value I just talked about. As it almost always the case with her, Hannah is less focused on Simon, and more on the fact someone made something special just for her.

HANNAH D420: In his throat? How?

Hannah puts away the mirror is if it suddenly started burning her hands. She is finally in synch with reality.

As noted earlier, the silver particles in Simon’s throat were most likely from the mirror’s glass with the silver leaf applied to the back of the pane.

HANNAH D421: An affair? Simon wasn’t having an affair.

True. Simon knew his “affair” was with his wife.

HANNAH D422: No. Simon wasn’t seeing another woman.

True again. Note how cold Hannah becomes when stating the above.

HANNAH D423: Good. Happy. I mean ups and downs like any couple, I guess, but we’ve been married for over ten years.

Roger that.

HANNAH D424: I don’t know if anyone really changes. You just become more yourself. Simon was my prince and that hasn’t changed.

Hannah did become more herself, meaning her MPD became obvious to Simon. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when Simon realized that Hannah suffers from the MPD, though. It could have been years ago, it’s just that the problem became more noticeable last few years or even months, when the marriage stopped working and Hannah brought Eve back.

This is the best Simon gets from Hannah when it comes to her display of affection. On every other occasion she mentions him, Hannah is either talking more about herself, or plain simply states “it’s always been complicated between me and Simon” (HANNAH D226).

But whenever Eve talks about Simon — pretending to be Hannah, or being herself — her affection is much stronger, up to “I loved him!” scream in EVE D520.

It’s possible, then, that Simon was Eve’s true love, but Hannah married Simon mostly to prove something to herself and Eve. That she also can get a boy.

HANNAH D425: Really? You’re going to ask me about my sex life? I mean isn’t that private?

Ah, 1994, the time before Snapchat.

HANNAH D426: Are you married? How is your sex life?

We have noticed it earlier that Hannah should know the answer to the first question, as Eve already asked it before (EVE D114). However, I think the detectives realized they might be dealing with two person(a)s earlier, e.g. when one thing — the MITT — led them to believe that Hannah was lying about the murder, but another thing — the Glasgow trip — suggested that Hannah had an alibi. That, and the investigation between the interviews.

HANNAH D427: Well, there you go. How many kids?

And here we go with another one of these, but this time Hannah asks the question first, and then Eve repeats it later (EVE D507: “You have children?”) unaware she should already know the answer.

HANNAH D428: So our sex life is probably fairly average for a couple after ten years of marriage.

So, like, once a month?

HANNAH D429: No! I have never been unfaithful. I’ve never cheated on Simon.

Infidelity is the motive that the detectives are after. But note how they look at both sides of that coin. Earlier, they asked if Simon ever cheated on Hannah. Reasonable, as such betrayal could have been what pushed Hannah to murder her husband. But now they’re asking if Hannah ever cheated on Simon, as this could also lead to a fight between the spouses.

HANNAH D430: No! You’re talking to the wrong person if you think I’m some kind of slut. If you think I’m the kind of person that would have had sex with all those guys.

Discussed the mystery of “all those guys” earlier. And yes, they are talking to the wrong person indeed.

HANNAH D431: Not really. He would go to the pub. He had his drinking buddies there. But no one ever really came back to the house. Sometimes Eric, his boss, and his wife would come over for dinner. That would be us returning the favour. Diane is a really good cook, into her trendy ingredients. The last time, Simon cooked something off Masterchef. He got the recipe off Ceefax. And I did my Lloyd Grossman bit commenting from the sidelines. I had to find fennel from the supermarket. Have you ever eaten fennel?

Ah, fennel, the reason behind sleepless nights of many armchair detectives. Or just me?

There is some speculation online about fennel being possibly a cause of miscarriage, but I don’t see how it’s relevant here. First, you’d really have to eat a lot of fennel, far beyond a dinner with friends. Second, Hannah emphasizes “the last time”, as if the dinner happened quite recently — so the story is not about the miscarriage she had ten years ago.

The real reason fennel is featured in the story is because it’s an Easter Egg. Rapunzel, the skeleton of Her Story, is known to us from The Brothers Grimm’s books, but there are multiple versions of that fairy tale around the world. One of them features fennel instead of the rapunzel plant, and is called Fenchelchen, i.e. Little Fennel. Ta-dam!

Encyclopaedia Britannica ran an educational series once, called Britannica’s Fairy Tales From Around the World . Its goal was to “bring classic fairy tales to life in a new way, by pairing them with similar stories from all over the world.”, and Rapunzel was paired with Fenchelchen (Malta) and The Princess in the Tower (Israel). But of course you can find Fenchelchen in other places, too.

I think it’s worth adding at this point that the game is filled to the brim with both fairy tale parallels and Easter Eggs. Basically, every time a sentence or a word feel just that tiny little bit off — like fennel, or chips on the beach, or Paddington Bear coat — you can be certain there’s a fairy tale behind it. Of course, the Easter Eggs are just the icing on the cake. Sam Barlow went much deeper than that, and made fairy tales the core of the story.

I spent countless hours figuring out and digging up these references, but I am sure I missed quite a few. So even though I think I found enough to make the fairy tale layers of the game obvious, if you find something I missed, let me know, and I will be happy to update the post.

HANNAH D432: Hurt someone? Yes. But everyone thinks that from time to time, right? You just want to lash out?

Yes.

HANNAH D433: Well, my friend Eve. I mean she was a friend when I was a kid. She was always more popular with the boys and I used to hate her for it. I mean, really hate her sometimes.

Simon was the only boy that chose Hannah for being Hannah, and the recent Eve’s affair with him — that is how Hannah saw it — was the reason why Hannah went berserk and killed him.

This clip also shows the mixed feelings Hannah has towards Eve. Sometimes it’s love, as when she says LOVEU in the Knock Code. But sometimes it’s pure hatred. It’s confirmed in the next clip, when Hannah directly talks about “love/hate relationship”.

Another example of Hannah/Eve nervously playing with the wedding ring.

HANNAH D434: Yes. We’d fight. We fought on the beach once and I held Eve’s head underwater. There was no one else around, it was at the far end of the beach, and I held her head under and I kept it under. And for a moment I just wanted to kill her and watch her drown. But that was it. It was just a moment. We made up afterwards. It was a love-hate relationship.

A pretty creepy delivery of that recollection…

Hannah tried to drown Eve, but couldn’t. Being the same person, her survival instinct kicked in and Hannah stopped the murder-suicide attempt. But this is another example of Hannah’s murderous tendencies. As in the “bizarre and violent” fairy tales, taking a life is often her solution to a problem.

“We’d fight” is something that happens to people with multiple personalities (more on that during the final interview). It explains the bruise, but here we learn it’s not the first time the personalities fought.

HANNAH D435: A police station? Yeah. When I was young. We ran away on my birthday. Bob Dylan was playing in London and we thought we could break into his tour bus and have him take us with him. The taxi driver we paid to drop us off, I mean, we’d saved money pinched a bit here and there to pay for the fare. He was suspicious because we were so young, so he told the police. So they came and picked us up and took me back to Portsmouth. My mum picked me up from the station. But I blamed everything on my friend Eve so my parents let me off.

WHY NOT TWINS? The police picked up both twins, identical ones at that, but then only drove one back to Portsmouth? Come on. I mean, picture this: the cops have two identical girls at the station — fans of the game calculated that Hannah was twelve years old at the time, hence “so young” — and then deliver only one to her parents? What happened to Eve? There’s just no way this could have ended without Hannah’s parents learning about her twin.

And, by the way, if your twelve years old daughter carelessly ran away from home to see a rock concert in another city, and then blamed it all on “Eve”, wouldn’t you, if you were the parent, like to have a little talk with Eve and her parents? /END

What really happened, then, is that Hannah — as Eve — ran away to see Bob Dylan. The taxi driver got suspicious, called the police, the police picked up Hannah, returned her to her parents. Hannah explained “…but it was Eve!”. Hannah’s parents might have suspected their little girl has some mental health issues, but they also could have just blamed it all on her vivid imagination. After all, Hannah did love reading, watching, and making up fantastical stories, and the parents knew about her imaginary friends already (EVE D738–741).

HANNAH D436: Maybe a fresh cup of tea?

Hannah being Hannah.

HANNAH D437: Hannah, Hannah, Hannah. What are you doing talking about Eve? Poor Simon.

When left alone for a second, Hannah uses the knock code…

…to send a message: LOVEU. It’s more likely that the message is addressed to Eve than to Simon.

Note that Hannah (and then later Eve) uses both hands for the code. This can either be interpreted as a symbolic act in favor of the MPD hypothesis, or can be something more trivial: in real life, the actress playing Hannah/Eve is also a drummer in a band.

The fact she taps out the code to herself is not necessarily a proof of the MPD. She might just be reminiscing her past (same for Eve in her final interview), going back to a safe place.

Hannah seems genuinely unaware of the camera. If the police informed her — except it was Eve — at the first interview that all interrogations are recorded, Eve did not pass that info on to Hannah.

“Poor Simon” suggests that Simon’s death was really an accident or that Hannah may be regretting the murder. One other option, and that is my take, is that after the Knock Code message, Eve started to emerge, and “Poor Simon” is actually from her. The abrupt return of the detectives made Eve slide back into Hannah’s mind. The next time the Knock Code is used, Eve seems to be content that Hannah is not reacting to the message (she’s gone).

Going back to Homicide and its Homicide Lexicon, let’s look again at the fourth rule:

4. An innocent man left alone in an interrogation room will remain fully awake, rubbing his eyes, staring at the cubicle walls and scratching himself in dark, forbidden places. A guilty man left alone in an interrogation room goes to sleep.

While Barlow could not have Hannah go to sleep (the detectives just left her for a minute or two to get her a cup of tea), we still see the guilty man’s behavior at work. At the end of the clip, only the loud sound of the door opening pulls Hannah out of her “sleep”.

HANNAH D438: Just the one sugar. Thanks. Is that camera recording?

Hannah realizes that the police might be now even more interested in Eve.

HANNAH D439: Nineteen eighty four. It was an awful year in the end. We were living at Doug and Eleanor’s. I lost the baby at the end of spring, and my parents died in the summer. It was a hot summer, a heat wave. So when they discovered the bodies, it was just awful. Because of the circumstances, them dying together like that, they brought in a lot of police. A forensic entomologist. I had to look that up. It was because of the heat. It was just awful.

In case you wonder, an entomologist is a scientist who studies insects.

HANNAH D440: They said it was food poisoning. There was something in the food they ate. My dad liked to pick mushrooms, grow them too. They said it was the mushrooms. It was hard to believe. Death Caps. They have a skirt around the cap. My dad taught me that. But, I mean the police had no reason to think it was suspicious. They lived alone. And no one had any reason to hurt them.

Notice how Hannah smiles when she says: “It was hard to believe”.

HANNAH D441: Yeah. They’d gone to bed feeling ill, thinking it was flu or something. The neighbour called me and I had to use my key to let them in. We found them dead in their bed. They’d been there for days. No one had noticed. Just awful. It was so soon after my miscarriage. The worst year of my life. I’d been so happy to get married and after that it was just like: fuck.

I guess now, the fan of Her Story that you are, you expect me to analyze whether Hannah killed her parents or not. Very well, then.

No one knows for sure. Except Sam Barlow. We just don’t have enough information. So there. We should stop now and move on.

Nah, just kidding. Circumstantial evidence, and certain story logic and themes suggest that Hannah did poison her parents.

It’s not the fact that Hannah’s father knew everything about the mushrooms and thus would never poison himself and his wife. What, oddly enough, Hannah and Eve both emphasize during their interviews, suggesting foul play for some reason. Anyway, the world is full of knowledgeable and then dead mushroom pickers. It happens. It’s actually the whole reason why the police did not push for the murder angle.

I also wondered what Hannah meant by “They’d gone to bed feeling ill, thinking it was flu or something“. How would Hannah know that? But then I guess either she might have read about the effects of food poisoning in a book, or such information was passed on to her the police.

The other odd thing was: why did the neighbor called Hannah? She says just a bit later that “no one had noticed”. But I guess it could be that the neighbor was just generally concerned, and the “noticed” remark was about the parents being dead and rotting in their bed.

And what about the “just don’t poison the kids” (HANNAH D226) joke?

What can actually point us to the potential murder is when we compare Hannah’s statement of “We found them dead in their bed. They’d been there for days.” with the later one from Eve: “I was living in the attic. […]. Then I came down one morning and they were dead. […] And I’d slept through it. […]” (EVE D748).

WHY NOT TWINS? Hannah says “they brought in a lot of police”, and then Eve claims that the police “never even looked in the attic” (EVE D748). That just does not compute. Even if the police ultimately did not go for the murder angle, they would have surely looked around the house. Before they knew it was food poisoning, what they found were just two rotting corpses, and it’s an obvious routine to see if a third party was involved.

The other thing that does not compute is Eve living in the house for a few days — in the summer “heat wave”, no less — with two corpses. Why didn’t she notify Hannah immediately? How did that conversation go when she finally did? “So, Eve, I get it. Obviously I know you live in the attic, so you must have seen our parents dead days ago. I think the fact you did not let me know is not weird at all.” — something like this? /END

I mentioned the possibility that the sleep is when sometimes the switch happens, and here we have another example — when Eve says “I’d slept through it”. It’s possible, then, that it was Hannah who, after the trauma of stillbirth, poisoned her parents to free the house and move back to the comfort and fantasy of her old life. “[…] I inherited it from my parents so it made sense to move back. Me and Simon. Felt like going back to old ways before the pregnancy. Reminded me of being a girl. The dollhouse in the attic, old things. […]” (HANNAH D225)

Also, note how Hannah played nervously with her wedding ring when she, and not Eve, talked about her parent’s death (HANNAH D224).

As for the thing that does not work for the twin hypothesis — the “a lot of police”, but somehow they “never even looked in the attic” — that’s just stating the fact they never suspected Hannah. Alternatively, Eve, in her delusion, was surprised they did not find her.

The poison flows in The Brothers Grimm’s tales. The infamous apple is not the only example of evil witches trying to eliminate people with food. Here’s a fragment of The Riddle that involves sleep, poison and broken glass resulting in death:

The old woman was sitting in an armchair by the fire. She looked at the stranger with her red eyes. “Good evening,” she croaked, pretending to be quite friendly. “Sit down and rest.”

She blew into the coals on which she was cooking something in a small pot. The daughter warned the two to be cautious, to eat nothing, and to drink nothing, for the old woman brewed evil drinks. They slept soundly until early morning.

While they were getting ready to leave, and the prince had already mounted his horse, the old woman said, “Wait a moment. Let me give you a farewell drink.”

[…] But that instant the glass broke and the poison spilled onto the horse. It was so strong that the animal immediately fell down dead.

HANNAH D442: Yeah. I was infertile. Thought I was. They told me I was infertile after the miscarriage because of complications.

Understood.

HANNAH D443: I would have been a good mother. I was young, but I would have been a good mother. She was a girl, by the way. The baby. We were going to call her Sarah. Simon wanted to call her Ava after his nana, but I didn’t want her to have a symmetrical name.

Sarah is Eve’s daughter, even if Eve is Hannah. The reason why Hannah did not want her daughter to have “a symmetrical name” was the fear of the MPD curse. It stands in contrast to Hannah being proud of her palindrome name in the first interview, but we know it was actually Eve who said it.

“I would have been a good mother” is not true, despite Hannah insisting on it twice, as if she was trying to convince herself, not the police. It’s the reason why Eve decided to protect the baby by taking over the Hannah personality (or why Hannah decided to disappear).

HANNAH D444: It’s all that matters, really, the baby. Simon’s dead. But the baby… That’s how he will live on. Our baby.

The baby is the priority for both Hannah and Eve. The way Hannah speaks at the end suggests that when she says “our”, she does not just mean Simon and Hannah, but also — or maybe exclusively — Hannah and Eve.

As I mentioned it in the comment to the previous clip, Hannah considering the baby as her priority might explain her will to disappear later.

HANNAH D445: No. No, Simon didn’t play guitar. He wasn’t very musical. He liked to listen but he was tone deaf.

Here the detectives play it smart: first they just ask about Simon, and only after the confirmation he was “tone deaf”, their next question is a direct one about the guitar belonging to Hannah.

The police must be suspecting something at this point. Otherwise they wouldn’t just randomly ask about one of the hundreds of objects from Hannah’s house. It’s possible they heard something about Hannah’s blonde wig gig in a bar, and, with all other discoveries made during the interviews, started considering the existence of twins.

HANNAH D446: Yes. Yeah, it’s my guitar.

WHY NOT TWINS? The police found the guitar in Hannah’s house, it’s one of the items from the crime scene. What was Eve’s guitar doing in Hannah’s house? Did Eve bring it with herself for the confrontation with Hannah on the day of the murder? But why would Hannah keep such a revealing item, why wouldn’t Eve take it back to her bedsit? They get rid of the blonde wig, but not the guitar? /END

When I first played the game, the guitar — and then the ballad — felt random. And why don’t they ask Hannah to play the instrument right away?

Even though it’s all still a bit silly, I realized the answer is dead simple: we do not see the guitar in this clip because the police just do not have it with them yet. It may have been collected from the house, but is just not brought in from the storeroom to the interrogation room yet. It’s a bit of a lousy police work — why ask about potentially important evidence without being able to push further? — but at least it explains the chain of events. Even if it does not explain why Hannah is not surprised about the question or why Eve later agrees to play the ballad like it’s something totally not weird, considering the context.