How To Solve Your Own Murder: An unmissable mystery with a killer hook! (The Castle Knoll Files) by Kristen Perrin

Author:Kristen Perrin [Perrin, Kristen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2024-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

I walk around to the front of the house again. The police cars and ambulance are still parked in the driveway and the horror of finding Emily’s body comes flooding back. I sink down onto the gravel and pull my knees up to my chest. I rest my chin there, and focus on the strange ripple of the undulating hedges.

I can hear determined footfalls on the gravel behind me but I don’t turn around. My impulse is to keep the house at my back, but even so I catch the gurney coming through the front door in my peripheral vision. They’ve put the whole trunk on it and covered it with plastic, presumably to preserve whatever forensic evidence might be left.

A phrase whispers through my mind – Your future contains dry bones.

‘Oh God,’ I moan to myself. I sent her that body. Thankfully I don’t say the second part out loud, because just then, Detective Crane sits down next to me.

‘How are you doing Annie?’ he asks quietly.

‘I mean . . . I’ve been better?’ I say. There’s a lilt to my voice that threatens hysterical laughter, or tears, or a combination of the two.

The detective looks at me for a long moment. ‘Did you know about the body in that trunk?’

My head finds my hands. ‘What makes you ask that?’

‘Your name’s on the invoice stuck to the top of it.’

I look back up at Detective Crane. ‘No, I didn’t know. I know that sounds insane, but Mum asked me to help clear out the basement in Chelsea and it was all a bit rushed so I didn’t look in every trunk. There were just so many of them, and after finding the first few were filled with old papers and junk, I asked the removal men to take them all away.’ I swallow hard and try not to think about how for all those years of my childhood I’d spent playing in that basement, I’d never been more than a few feet away from a dead body.

‘And do you think your mum knew that there was a corpse in that trunk? No one noticed any odd smells?’

‘Of course not! That trunk was in our basement for years, and we moved in after I was born. Emily Sparrow went missing in 1966, right? So, she must have been down there for decades before we arrived!’ I was breathing hard now, disbelief coursing through my veins. I’d been trying to write books about murder while there was an actual dead body in my basement.

‘OK, OK. I believe you.’ Crane isn’t facing me; he’s let his gaze follow mine, down the rest of the gravel drive, out of the gate, and into the patchwork of fields and hedgerows stitching together the countryside below. To our right, I can just make out some of Archie Foyle’s polytunnels.

Crane’s body language has become distant, and I watch as his mouth opens and then shuts again, reconsidering whatever words he’d nearly said. When he finally does speak, it surprises me.

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