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“Well, I’m screwed.” I sighed. “I’ve watched enough mystery shows to know that’s always the case for the innocent party.”
“On the bright side, it won’t be difficult to get the spotlight off you,” Ash said happily. “Declan Tierney must have pissed off so many people that there’s going to be one hundred motives for his murder.”
“You just said the police are going to focus on me because I’m the easy option.”
“Exactly. That’s why we have to find out who else would want him dead.”
“I didn’t want him dead!” I stopped. “Wait—no. We’re not playing Sherlock Holmes.”
Ash pouted. “I was thinking a bit moreRosemary and Thyme, myself.”
“Mystery-solving gardeners? Do I look like I’m used to gardening?”
“You’re going to have to get used to it. Have you seen how much garden the bed and breakfast has?”
“Ash, think about this. We can’t solve a murder. I can’t solve a sudoku.”
“Nobody can. Sudokus are mini mathematical torture devices. The average person burns their sudoku puzzle books after ninety seconds.”
“Now you’re just pulling facts out of your arse,” I replied. “There’s absolutely no way we can figure out who killed Declan Tierney.”
“Oh, come on. Have a bit of faith.”
“If I wanted to have faith, I’d go to church every weekend.”
“If you went to church, you might not be accused of murder.”
“I’m not accused of murder.” I pursed my lips. “Yet. Technically.”
Ash laughed and put her glass on the coffee table. “We don’t need to solve the murder; we just need to come up with other viable suspects we can put to my brother.”
She’d lost her mind.
“And how on Earth do you propose we do that?”
If I was considering this, so had I.
“You might have forgotten what it’s like living in a small town, but everyone knows everything about everyone else.” There was a knowing, mischievous glint in her eye. “It won’t be hard to find anything out. Everyone is going to be talking about his murder, so we just need to ask the right questions.”
“That’s great,” I said flatly. “But right now, I’m the one who’s most likely to have killed him. Is anyone really going to talk to me about him?”
“Probably. Your grandpa might not have lived here for a few years, but he was a staple of the community. A lot of people hold respect for him and will probably help you out of a sense of loyalty to him.”
“Great. So, it’s a misguided sense of obligation I have to rely on to clear my name.”
“No, stop. Like I said, everyone is going to be talking about Declan, which means this town is going to be renamed Gossip Point for the next week at least. We just have to be in the right places at the right time to hear it.”
“And how exactly are we going to do that?”
“Well, I have a ceramics class for the pensioners every Monday evening,” Ash said with a grin. “Granny comes with her friends, they paint ceramics, drink wine, and talk shit. Actually, they mostly just drink wine and talk shit, but that means those four women knoweverythingabout everything, even stuff that isn’t worth knowing.”
“You have a ceramics class?”
She blinked at me. “Oh, shit. Yes. Remember that old art store on the high street?”
I frowned. “The one with all the weird pictures?”
“Yes. Grandpa—Dad’s dad—died a few years ago, and he left all the grandkids some money. Noah used his to buy his house, and I bought the art store. It’s an art and ceramics store, technically, but I run some classes. It’s booming during the summer. It’s amazing how many parents are happy to pay me twenty quid per kid to amuse them for ninety minutes so they can sit on their phones or pee in peace.”
