Free Murder Vows (Storage Ghost Murders Book 4) by Gillian Larkin

people with his boasts but, of
course, I completely agreed with him. If I had a daughter like Jessie I’d hate
the man who tried to take her away. Also, he never really liked me, I could
tell.” He paused and then nodded again. “I think we’ve found our murderer.”
    “You
could be right. Now, we need to find the evidence to convict him. That’s not
going to be easy, he’s obviously covered his tracks or the police would have
arrested him.”
    “I
wonder what he told them,” Archie mused.
    “Oh!”
Grace threw her hands up. “Now my brain is turning to mush! We should have done
this first.” She turned towards her laptop and started to tap the keys.
    “What
are you looking for?” Archie asked.
    “Newspaper
reports about your death. We can see what the official version was. Are you
ready for this?”
    “As
ready as I’ll ever be.”
     

Chapter 18
     
    Grace
typed in the date of the wedding, Archie’s full name and ‘death’. A few entries
came up. Grace and Archie scanned them.
    Grace
pressed her lips together, this wasn’t looking good for Archie. After a while
Archie seemed to have digested all the information in front of them. He said,
“Well, I wasn’t expecting that.”
    “Neither
was I. The reports are saying the same thing, that you were the victim of a
break-in at the wedding.”
    “It
doesn’t make sense. It says that I went to my room to have a lie down, I fell
asleep but then apparently woke up when I heard someone inside the room. The
police have assumed that a robbery was taking place and the thief, or thieves,
panicked and killed me.”
    “Killed
you by putting a pillow over your face. It seems a feeble reason to me. If you
woke up and disturbed the thieves would you just lie on the bed and wait for them
to come over to you? I would have thought you’d leap out of bed, maybe grab a
weapon and then attack. It says in the report there were no signs of a struggle
although the drawers had been opened.”
    Archie
frowned. “Unless, as that other report said, I was totally oblivious to the
break-in and the thieves decided to do away with me anyway. That doesn’t make
sense at all. And how did they get on to the balcony and break through the
French doors? Was there any evidence to back that up? This sounds suspicious to
me, someone is covering their tracks well.”
    Grace
nodded. “Perhaps it was a member of staff who knew about the dodgy lock on the
honeymoon suite door. They could have thought you’d be away from the room for
hours and they decided to steal your belongings. They could have gone out
through the French doors.”
    Grace
and Archie suddenly looked at each other. Archie said, “That girl! In Jessie’s
dress! Do you think she had something to do with it? She might have had an
accomplice and the robbery thing went wrong.”
    “That’s
a possibility. She’s showing up for a reason.” Grace sighed. “These reports
don’t tell us anything, they don’t even mention what everyone was doing at the
time of your murder. How are we going to find that out?”
    “I
suppose you’ll have to find a way to talk to them,” Archie said.
    Grace
sighed again. “That’s exactly what I’ll have to do. I think I’ll start with
Gordon, ask him to come round to the shop to price up some work. It wouldn’t be
a lie, we do need some alterations doing.”
    “Then
you can ask him if he did away with his wonderful son-in-law,” Archie said with
a poor attempt at a smile.
    “Archie,
you don’t look good.”
    “I
don’t feel good. I feel cold all over, like I’ve been betrayed. Would you mind
if I disappeared for a while? I don’t want to bring you down with my miserable
face.”
    “No,
I don’t mind, and you haven’t got a miserable face. Where will you disappear
to? I know Pearl goes away quite often but she never tells me where she goes.”
    Archie
gave her a genuine smile. “Pearl’s a good woman. We had a long talk when we
were alone, she’s had a tough