‘I-I n-need some air,’ she stammered, making her way towards the door.
DCI Randolf stepped in front of her, blocking her path. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Harlow, but no one is to leave this room until we’ve secured the scene and taken statements from everyone.’
Mrs Harlow’s eyes darted around the room, looking for an escape. I couldn’t help but notice how her hands trembled as she wrung them together.
Miles clutched Callum and Martha tightly to him before clearing his throat. ‘Detective, what if this is an outsider? It is not safe here. I want to get my children away from this place.’
Randolf’s steely gaze swept across the room. ‘I need you all here. I will not leave you alone without an officer present.’
The kids looked at each other, eyes wide. DS Birch stepped into the room, a hard look on her face. She took a seat in the corner and didn’t say anything to us. My gut churned as I saw Ceecee floating face down before my eyes. Sure, it was looking with almost near certainty that one of us in this room was a murderer, but the rest of us weren’t. And the attitudes of Randolf and Birch were kind of making me angry as hell, because I for one was innocent.
My husband and children were going through enough without being made to feel like pieces of shit, too. I fought hard not to cut my eyes at Birch as she sat straight-backed and stoic, looking at us like we were already inmates in the slammer.
The tension threatened to cut off my airways. There was no damn oxygen in this room; it was sucked up by Jeannie’s sobs that had now turned to occasional sniffles. She quickly composed herself, but I noticed that when she took her hands away from her face, her eyes weren’t red or puffy from crying… They were as dry as a bone.
I looked at Birch to see if she was seeing what I was seeing, but her attention seemed to be focused solely on me.
I prowled around the sofa as Miles whispered reassurances to the kids. Perhaps Birch found it odd that their own mother wasn’t sitting there, consoling them and being the nurturing one… But Miles was always the one who was cool underpressure. I had always been the lioness, ready to tear out anyone’s throat who posed a threat to my family.
‘Sit down, Mrs Weiss,’ Birch warned me.
Mrs Harlow had retreated to her chair, her gaze fixed on some unseen point in the distance. I still couldn’t shake the image of the body in the pool. Ceecee. It was her. She’d been missing for days, and now… My mind raced, trying to piece together the events of the past week. Who had seen her last? When? And how did this connect to Fergus’s death and all the others before it?
The grandfather clock tick-tick-tocked as we waited and waited, under what was increasingly looking like our jail cell … or our tomb.
* * *
Eventually, we ordered a takeaway which we ate in silence. It would be Christmas tomorrow and the whole thing was of course cancelled given the circumstances. DCI Randolf kept excusing himself as the phone calls from his wife became more frequent. We finished our food and Randolf warned us that once we went to bed, under no circumstances were we to leave our bedrooms tonight.
Everyone had an en suite, so that side of things wouldn’t be a problem. An officer brought us up a pitcher of water each with glasses. He even demanded access to the keys from Mrs Harlow and locked everyone in their bedrooms come nine o’clock, with the warning that there would be an officer stationed in the hallway and if any of us left, he would take that as an admission of our guilt.
I was pretty sure that this wasn’t allowed, but hey, I wasn’t about to argue with the guy. We had nowhere else to go, and they weren’t going to let us out of their sight.
I could see in Randolf’s eyes that he just desperately wanted to go home to his family, and I couldn’t blame him. He also looked utterly defeated at the fact that he appeared completely incapable of doing his job.
I didn’t even bother to try and sleep– I knew my traitorous brain well enough by now to know that was a futile effort. The events of the day played on a loop in my mind– Quentin the frosty snowman, Fergus’s big blue tongue, Ceecee looking like the girl fromThe Ring. The accusations hanging between our family lay thickly in the air. Miles tossed and turned beside me, his breathing uneven. I knew he was awake, too, likely consumed by the same thoughts.
A floorboard creaked outside our door, and I tensed. Was it just the officer patrolling, or someone else? I strained my ears, listening for any further sounds, but the house had fallen silent once more.
My mind must have plunged into sleep from sheer exhaustion, because at some point I jerked awake to the sound of muffled voices. Glancing at the bedside clock, I saw it was just past three a.m. Through the crack in the curtains, I saw the snow flurrying down outside and heard the wind battering against the windows. I slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Miles, and pressed my ear against the door.
I stayed, straining to hear. I was about to go back to bed when I smelled smoke. With a rising panic in my chest, I looked at the gap underneath the door and saw noxious black plumes wending their way underneath. With a gasp, I banged as loudly as I could on the door. We were trapped, locked inside while someone was trying to burn us in our beds. I shouted and Miles jumped up.
He rushed over to me, as the smoke poured into our room. Together, we pounded our fists against the door. All I could think about was how to get to my children. A terrible fear took hold of me, strangling my voice as we screamed to be let out.
25
ONE MORE FOR THE FIRE
22ndDecember 2025
A busy day for a double murder. Ceecee had been dead for longer than Beebee, Fergus and even Mimi. She’d been with us the whole time, bobbing along right under our noses.
Silly girl should have just left and gone back to University… Not that I wouldn’t have caught up with her along the way. Instead, I found her taking a leisurely morning swim. A pool is not the place you want to be when there’s a psychopath lurking in your midst.
I triggered the pool cover, watching it slowly move across the surface. Ceecee was swimming laps, facing away from the advancing material. She reached the edge of the shallow end, diving under and kicking off the wall. She didn’t even notice me… at first. She resumed her front crawl, her hand meeting the edge of the advancing cover. She looked up in shock and, realising what was happening, turned and made her way to the edge. But yours truly was there. I offered her my hand to help her out, and as she reached for it, I quickly withrew it, letting her fall back into the water. It was quite the struggle to keep her down, but nothing a few good pokes and a smattering of whacks with a broom handle couldn’t solve.
Just goes to show you how little people thought of her– no one really even tried to look.
