Lava is a 30-year-old singer-songwriter who has built an impressive career. It started when she was still a teenager and continued in her 20s. Her last album, "I'm Not Your Magma," featuring the hit single "The World Is My Home," is on top of all of the charts and one of the most streamed albums on streaming services. But all this fame could never bring her the one thing she missed the most: her daughter.
Lava gave birth to a girl on a wonderful spring morning on 2 May 2008, when she was only sixteen years old. She was all alone since she lost both of her parents when she was a child and at the beginning of a successful musical journey, she wasn't ready to be a mother. Fortunately, her cousin Martha, who was ten years older than her, wanted a child more than anything and offered to adopt the girl and raise her as her own. Lava was happy with the proposal and left her baby Daisy with Martha while she moved to London to pursue her musical career. They agreed to keep the adoption secret from Daisy as well as the rest of the world. Nobody knew that Lava was ever pregnant, not even her older half-brother Jeremy.
Lava shared the same late father with Jeremy. He was living in Manchester at the time and had an experimental electro duo, the Zookeepers, with Lisa Guin. The key element of their public image was keeping their identities hidden; they performed with animal masks on their faces.
When Lava was nineteen years old, Jeremy proposed to have her as a guest singer on one of the songs on the Zookeepers' upcoming album. Lisa wasn't really enthusiastic about this, but she gave in to keep Jeremy happy. The album didn't have a huge success, but Lava liked the collaboration with Jeremy and asked him to produce her next album. Jeremy quickly saw that this project had a much brighter future than the Zookeepers and left the group to work with Lava. Lisa never really forgave them; she stopped every contact with Jeremy, put her guitar in the case, and started to work as a sound engineer.
Lava's voyage to stardom wasn't simple, but years of perseverance and her undoubted talent eventually paid off. Eleven years later, she finds herself booking a world tour promoting "I'm Not Your Magma". She is so famous that she even received her first stalker fan mail, containing a puzzle in the form of a poem. She is living the life of her dreams, partying like a music star should, but still missing her beautiful baby girl. Well, a teenage girl, to be precise, since Daisy was now fourteen years old.
She decided to contact Martha after all this time and ask her and Daisy to join them on the tour. Martha was surprised at the beginning but finally accepted the invitation. She didn't want to stand between a mother and her daughter and was ready to eventually tell Daisy the truth about her if Lava showed a real interest in becoming a part of Daisy's life. But, to Martha's surprise, Lava was living a type of life that Martha didn't want Daisy to participate in.
Partying every night, experimenting with drugs, excessively spending, and seeing nothing of the world she was travelling through except the hotel rooms and clubs was the way that Lava spent her time on tour, and Daisy was fascinated with it. She was rapidly falling under Lava's influence, and Martha had to react if she wanted to keep the modest and quiet girl she raised. She told Lava that they would leave the tour with the first flight she was able to book and that she didn't want her contacting them anymore. They were supposed to leave on 10 July from Amsterdam Airport. Lava had only a few days to do something so that she wouldn't lose Daisy again, possibly forever this time.
Furious from this conversation with Martha and still not in her right mind from all the alcohol she drank earlier that day, Lava came up with a devious idea. She remembered the puzzle poem she received earlier in the year that implied that the author would meet her on 8 July. She also thought of the few times during the tour when being too wasted to walk straight, she asked Martha to dress like her and pretend to be her in front of the paparazzi so that she could sneak out unseen. Martha shared a striking resemblance with Lava and agreed to the scheme only to protect Lava's image in the media. She was her daughter's biological mother, after all.
With these two key elements in mind, Lava planned to kill Martha on 8 July and make it seem as though she herself was the real target. The main suspect, of course, would be the unknown obsessive fan. The plan was to do it in the music hall, where they were supposed to come for the sound check at 17:45. She suggested to Jeremy to take Daisy for a stroll before the sound check, making sure that Martha would arrive alone. She called Martha and told her to meet her at the music hall, where she wanted to talk to her about Daisy. To make sure that Martha would arrive when everybody was already on stage for the sound check, thus minimising the chances that she would meet somebody before meeting Lava in her dressing room, she told her cousin that the sound check was moved to 18:15 and to come at 18:00. She herself arrived earlier, with big sunglasses on her nose and a huge hairdo, hiding her face as much as possible.
As she entered the music hall, she took a microphone cable from the sound engineer's stash that she would later use as the murder weapon. All that was left to do was go to her dressing room and wait.
Lava didn't know that her fan was actually a maintenance person working at the Brick Club, only a few metres away - a fact she could have discovered had she compared the handwriting in the letter with his signature in the staff schedule. The sound engineer was no other than Lisa Guin, now a transgender man David Norman, who might have been waiting for years for revenge. And, of course, Jeremy didn't know that he wasn't Lava's next of kin and therefore thought that he would get all the royalties from Lava's music if she was gone. So, he had a strong motive for Lava's murder. At 17:54, Martha arrived at the music hall and went straight to Lava's dressing room, following the instructions Lava had given her earlier. Lava waited for her there, and before Martha even had a chance to speak, she strangled her with the cable. She switched their clothes as quickly as she could, put a wig on Martha's head, and made sure to put another wig resembling Martha's hair on the floor as if she dropped it when she saw Martha's body. She put Martha's wallet and phone in her bag and threw it on the floor. To make things even more complicated, she took a small piece of medicine packaging she found in the hallway and planted it in the room to bring another potential suspect into her scenario. In all this, she made only one mistake: she didn't switch the bracelets she and Martha were wearing.
Not all actions that come from love are justified, and Lava learned this the hard way. The tragedy she caused will haunt her forever.
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