Page 70 of Not That Impossible

“Yes?”

“Weirdly deep underfloor.”

I nodded, eyes on my notebook as my hopes of a good story withered.

Other than the tub, I had a homemade sealant, unusually loose nails, and an extra-deep space under the floorboards.

And Kevin dropped his end of a steamer trunk and nearly manslaughtered the unsuspecting Ray.

I really hoped Craig was being theatrical and saving the good stuff to last, because none of this was really going to blow Mrs Strickland’s breaking-news article out of the water.

I sighed, realising that I had a whole lot of nothing.

And I wouldn’t be able to afford the coffee shop for a month.

“That’s when Ray spotted the tub,” Craig said. “Just think. If he hadn’t poked his head in the hole and had a quick look around, I’d have re-seated the boards, and he’d have spent the rest of his life sharing his room with that dead guy lying there not four feet from his bed.”

I shuddered. “Can you describe the tub?”

“Big, obviously. I didn’t see the full length of it, but it was big enough to stuff a body in. With a bit of folding, of course. It was opaque, too. Kind of yellowed. Looked old. You could see something was in there, but not what. Ray thought it was Christmas decorations.”

“Who opened it?” I asked.

Kevin sat up. “Oh! Me! That was me. Ray and Craig were talking about what was in there and Ray was leaning toward leaving it, and I thought it’d be a shame not to know. So I popped the lid.”

“Thenyouwere the one who technically discovered, it, Kev,” I said. “Tell me—”

“Iknew at once,” Craig said loudly, “what I was smelling. In my line of work, you come across more than a few corpses.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Mostly cats and birds, though. Couple of squirrels. Nearly always up chimneys. This was my first person.”

“Kev?” I asked. He was looking vaguely miffed at Craig.

“Bat,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Found a little mummified bat once. Cute little thing. I felt really sorry for it. I buried it in a shoebox at the bottom of my dad’s garden.”

I smiled. “Was it one of those pipistrelles, or—”

“Mummified,” Craig said, “is exactly how I’d describe the body.”

Okay. This was news! Finally! I knew the victim hadn’t been murdered recently, but mummified was something else.

“Oh, yeah,” Craig leaned back, relaxed now that he had my attention again. “Yep. It was all leathery and withered. Dried out. It was not fresh, is what I’m saying. It wasn’t, y’know. Oozing or anything. My guess is, any oozing it did would have been soaked up by the cat litter.”

“…cat litter?”

“I didn’t really notice it at the time, what with the dead body and all, but there was other stuff in the tub. Whitish-grey stuff. We were talking, me and Kev. We think it was cat litter.”

My stomach rolled uneasily and I took a couple of deep breaths. “Okay.” I cleared my throat. “If you had to guess, how old would you say the body was? Would you say it was ancient, like an Egyptian mummy from a museum, or…?”

“No, no. Couldn’t be that old. It was wearing jeans. Now I come to think of it, though…” Craig scratched his jaw. “Maybe it isn’t old at all. That thing looked like the apricots my wife dries in her dehydrator. Would a dehydrator work on a body? If you built a big one? The murderer could have done that for storage purposes. Dry the victim out, pop him in some Tupperware. Keep for a good long while like that.”

I wasn’t squeamish. I wasn’t. Especially when it comes to the human body. Exercising doesn’t always go without a speed bump here or there, especially for the elderly. Accidents happen. I’ve seen bodies in distress. I’ve helped calmed things down and sort things out. It’s part of my job.

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