Free Murder on the Hill by Kennedy Chase Page B

I was told. Behind that was an old Citroen 2CV in bright yellow, large rusted parts colonising the doors and roof.
    “Aunt Maggie’s witch-mobile,” Cordi said, nodding to the out-of-place car. “She uses it to fight crime. And by fight crime I mean nag anyone and everyone.”
    Cordi locked the car and walked around the front.
    The door to her house was ajar. I heard voices coming from inside. One in particular caught my attention: Alex’s. Deep and resounding, he commanded someone to leave the mess where it was.
    When Cordi led me in, the place looked even worse than it did before.
    Books and broken shelving barred the hallway. To our immediate right, the doorway led into the living room. That was much the same, though it was difficult to say how much of that was due to the break-in and how much was my fault from the cat-plus-bookcase incident.
    Alex stood in the middle of the mess, a notebook in one hand and a pen in the other.
    Next to him, hunched over and almost half his height, was an old lady with her white hair in rollers and pink-framed bifocals resting on her hooked nose.
    She looked up at Cordi and sneered.
    “Oh, so you’re finally here, then,” she said with a nasally voice, adjusting her beige cardigan around her skeletal frame. “You took your time. As though I don’t have enough to do with your uncle needing me to care for him, you’ve let this happen. Look at the state of this place. You brought this on yourself, Cordelia. How many times did I tell you to improve the security, eh? I feared for my life working here on my own. A gangster could have beaten me to death; you know what it’s like these days.”
    Alex was smirking, trying not to laugh.
    He still wore his biker’s jacket and looked entirely too casual, and too hot, for a regular cop, but beneath the jacket I could see his badge hanging around his neck on a chain. A uniformed officer appeared from the back of the room. Maggie fixed him with a stare, freezing him to the spot as if she were Medusa.
    “Auntie, I got here as soon as I could. I don’t control the traffic, you know.”
    “Excuses, Cordelia. Always with the excuses. If you weren’t gallivanting about the town with your”—she looked at me with a beady, scrutinising eye, and her face took on an expression of disapproval. I knew that look from experience—“young punk friends, maybe this place wouldn’t have been targeted. Your mother and father, God bless their souls, didn’t die and give this place to you for it to become a drug den for riff-raff.”
    Alex placed a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, Maggie. There’s no risk of riff-raff here.”
    “It’s not the point,” she said.
    Cordi sighed loudly and shook her head. “For a start, this isn’t my punk friend. This is my new employee. Your more-capable replacement.”
    Oh great. ‘Aunt’ Maggie’s gaze bored right into me like some kind of heat ray, pinning me in place. Perhaps she was a witch after all.
    She raised an eyebrow and looked me up and down.
    “Before you say anything that you regret, Auntie, can you please just tell me what’s gone on? Actually, don’t, you’ve said enough already, and unless you want me to throw you out, I suggest you let Alex tell me.” Cordi crossed her arms in front of her chest.
    Maggie opened her mouth to retort, but Cordi glared at her. “I mean it. Alex, what the hell happened here?”
    Alex stepped over a collapsed pile of debris and stood in front of Cordi between her and Maggie. He consulted his notebook. “Mr. Crawford, the neighbour, called me an hour ago to tell me that a locksmith was working on the front door.”
    “Wait, what? Locksmith? And why was Crawford calling you?”
    Alex shrugged. “We’re friends still. He thought it looked suspicious and gave me the heads-up.”
    Cordi’s nostrils flared. “Just how much spying on me has that old fool Crawford done for you?”
    “None. Cordi, please, this isn’t about us. It’s about someone breaking