Page 10 of Not That Complicated

“Ray.”

“Hmm? Sorry, what?”

She was gripping my shoulders. “Are you all right?”

I stared at her. “No,” I said indignantly. “There’s a dead man in my house.”

Her grip fell away and she took a step back.

“I didn’t kill him,” I told her.

“That’s good.” She took another step back.

“I have to call the police,” I said. “Excuse me.”

I darted into the house and grabbed my phone from the office, sidling past the bottom of the stairs like the dead man was going to climb out of his tub and come down to say hi if he heard me. I scrambled back out and shut the front door behind me. Mrs Hughes had disappeared. I sank to sit on the cold front step. The stone was vaguely damp but my legs didn’t seem to want to hold me up anymore.

I made the call and sat there primly, knees together, until a patrol car pulled up at the bottom of the drive and blocked my car in.

A couple of uniforms strode up the path. They stopped in front of me.

“Ray Underwood?” one of them asked.

In my experience, police officers either looked twelve, or too old for this shit.

The one asking was the twelve-year-old. She had red hair, freckles, and a thousand-yard stare.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s me.”

And the day got worse from there.

CHAPTER FOUR

I held the oversized cupof chamomile tea to my lips. I didn’t drink any; I was having trouble swallowing anything. Even water tried to come back up. The warmth from the cup and the lightly fragranced steam was nice, though. It wasn’t doing much to calm me down, but then, short of a Valium, I didn’t think anything could.

“All right, Mr Underwood. Take me through it one more time.”

My eyes slowly focused over the rim of the cup on the man sitting on the other side of the kitchen table.

Detective Chief Inspector Liam Nash was large and solid, with a shock of sandy blond hair, cool blue-grey eyes that seemed to look right into my soul and didn’t think much of what they saw, and an annoying habit of asking me the same questions over and over again.

I sighed. “I spilled a curry and ruined the carpet. I bought a new carpet. I hired Craig Henderson to come and lay the new carpet. I asked him to reseat the creaky floorboards while he was at it. We found a tub under the boards. Kevin pushed the lid off. There was a dead guy in the tub and Craig threw up. The end.”

Detective Nash’s lips tightened.

I dropped my gaze to the table. “That’s really all there is to it,” I said. “You can interrogate me another three times if you want, but I don’t have anything to add.”

Now he sighed. “I’m taking your statement, Mr Underwood, not interrogating you.” He gestured at the laptop he’d pulled out of the smart black rucksack he’d brought with him.

“Right.” Yes. He’d said something about that earlier, hadn’t he? I put my chamomile tea down and got to my feet. “I’m going to make a coffee,” I announced. “Would you like one?”

“I’ll stick with tea, thank you. Can I convince you to do the same?”

Nope. If I couldn’t sedate myself, I may as well try to gain an edge. I felt as if I was coming off a three-day weekend in Brighton, and I mean that in the bad way. Like it was a shitty weekend, everyone else had a great time but me, and I regretted everything. It was shock, probably. And maybe pouring caffeine on top of that wasn’t my brightest idea, but I’d rather be wired than woolly and disconnected.

He waited while I fought my Nespresso machine. On a normal day, it was a straightforward process. Insert pod. Press go. Not today, of course. I somehow managed to get the pod in at ninety degrees and had to winkle it out with a butter knife, I forgot to fill the tank so it sputtered to an angry stop with the cup halfway full, and when I triumphantly turned back to Detective Nash with coffee in hand, a floorboard upstairs where the forensics team were moving about creaked particularly loudly. I flinched, and splashed coffee over the rim.

Great. I carried the cup over to the table and sat down. It was almost to my mouth when a crash from upstairs made me twitch again. At least the splash hit the table and not me.

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