Page 12 of Not That Complicated

I sat there gazing into space and drinking my now unpleasantly cool coffee while Detective Nash popped open his laptop and started typing up my statement.

I’d thought that was something that I was supposed to do myself, and he didn’tquitenail my narrative voice, but when Detective Nash turned the laptop to me and asked me to read through and sign it if all was in order, he’d got all the facts straight.

I’d also expected to be signing with a pen on paper, but the laptop had a touchscreen. It was like signing for delivery on one of those little handheld devices that delivery people come with. Except using my finger. The squiggle that came out was utterly unreadable as an actual word or signature, but I supposed it didn’t matter.

“Do you have somewhere you can stay tonight?” Detective Nash asked, adding his own (much more practiced and legible) signature. He tapped at the laptop a few more times before closing it.

“Uh. In my guest room? Or I’ll sleep on the sofa? I hadn’t thought.”

“Somewhere else,” he clarified. “That isn’t here. We won’t be releasing the scene until tomorrow at the earliest.”

“You’re kicking me out of my own house?”

“Do you want to be here?” he countered.

Nope.

I rubbed a hand over my face. I was exhausted all of a sudden. It was late, it had been a shitty day, there was a dead guy upstairs. I really didn’t want to be here.

I was beginning to wonder if I wanted to be in Chipping Fairford at all.

The thing was, when I broke up with Fraser, he pretty much got the friends in the ‘divorce’.

Which was fair. They were his friends to start with. Fraser was a local and I was an incomer. It wasn’t as if I was shunned after the breakup. It was painful, that was all.

They’d known.

I never confronted any of them, or asked them, but they had to have known. Nobody had said anything. And nobody made an effort to keep the friendship alive when I threw Fraser out, or even when Fraser had moved to Wantage.

I’d had trust issues going into that relationship. Finding out that Fraser had been hooking up with people the whole time I thought we were securely coupled up and nobody saw fit to mention it did not make me the kind of person to reach out for help with confidence.

While I did have a couple of non-Fraser-related friends in town, none were close enough that I felt comfortable calling them up and inviting myself for a sleepover.

I could go to my parents house, but I didn’t want to go through the hour-and-a-half drive it took to get there, or the inevitable fuss and questions I’d face at the end of it.

Or the lecture.

My Dad had been against me buying this house in the first place, saying it didn’t have good bones, and it wasn’t a sound investment, and why didn’t I stay closer to home and get more involved in the family business instead?

I didn’t stay closer to home because I didn’t want to join the family business. Which he managed to forget over and over again.

There were more than a few guesthouses and B&Bs around, but this was prime tourist country. I refused to pay through the nose for a twee view that I could get by looking out of my own bedroom window.

Detective Nash was watching me have my personal debate. “How about the Premier Lodge?” he suggested eventually. “One of my cousins works there. They often have late room deals.” He gave me an encouraging nod.

The Premier Lodge was a local chain hotel. It was a big favourite of tourists who needed the sort of large family room which the cute little cottages-turned-into-B&Bs couldn’t provide, and also of people visiting Oxford for the University, or the architecture, or whatever else they kept coming here for.

I wasn’t a fan, but it was a good idea. It was cheap. It was efficient. It would do.

It couldn’t be worse than staying here, anyway, could it?

The short answer was yes.

Yes.

It could be, and indeed was, worse.

CHAPTER FIVE

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