The Fall Girl by Kaye C. Hill

pressing task. She needed to search Four Winds Cottage from top to bottom for whatever it was the Gallimores wanted to get their hands
on.
    Lexy started upstairs, in the fateful front bedroom. She’d already checked the patio and windows. Now she carefully went through the dark wooden wardrobe, tallboy and
dressing table. Kinky sat in the doorway, watching her solemnly.
    All contained clothes, good quality, nothing flashy. Lexy went through all the pockets she came across. All empty. No shopping lists, receipts, jotted down phone numbers, suicide notes...
    Even the underwear drawer, that most obvious place of all for a woman to keep secrets, contained... underwear. Mostly the serviceable type, but there were, Lexy noticed, a couple of black lace
numbers. Looked like Elizabeth still had her moments. And why not? Although it wasn’t the why? that interested Lexy so much as the with whom?
    She checked out the photo of the stern-looking young man in army desert fatigues on the tallboy. Took it out of the frame. Nothing written on the back. No date. Looked a little faded. Lexy got
the feeling it hadn’t been taken during one of Britain’s current desert conflicts. She replaced it, wondering who this soldier might be. He seemed out of place in this laid-back,
feminine house.
    Lexy pulled back the quilt on the bed, and looked under the pillows. Nothing. She got down on her hands and knees and peered under it. Nothing.
    “What do you reckon, pal?” she asked the chihuahua. Again, he was sniffing the bedroom carpet with peculiar concentration, tail well down.
    It couldn’t have been vacuumed for at least six weeks, ever since Elizabeth’s fall, in fact. Here and there lay tiny scraps of dried grass, and a couple of those little goose-grass
burrs that stick resolutely to clothing, shoes and hair, hitching a hopeful ride to the next growing spot. At first Lexy assumed she’d brought them in the day before. Then it struck her that
goose-grass would have pollinated a good month or more ago. These barbed seed heads had dried and turned brown – meaning they’d been there for a while.
    She collected them up, noting their position, then searched the landing and stairs. She found two more burrs, and several pieces of grass. The trail led through the living room, which yielded
another three burrs, tangled in a furry rug by the patio door.
    Lexy considered. Someone had come in from outside, having first brushed up against goose-grass growing along the footpath. The burrs had attached themselves, with their usual blind hope, to
trouser bottoms or shoe laces. Had this unwitting carrier then made his way up to Elizabeth’s bedroom?
    Could have been Elizabeth, of course, although judging by the clean state of the house, she didn’t seem the type to walk through it in outdoor shoes.
    Or it could have been her killer.
    Lexy felt a thrill of fear, mixed with exhilaration.
    Of course, she thought, plummeting back to earth again, it might just have been Milo’s police colleagues who had been there carrying out their investigation. But they would have approached
the house from the front, and were unlikely to be garnished with burrs of goose-grass.
    “Let’s work on the assumption that someone planned to do away with Elizabeth,” she said to Kinky. “Someone who’s been secretly observing her routine for a while. He
gets into the cottage on the morning in question, sneaking in through the patio doors while Elizabeth is in the kitchen.”
    She traced the imagined footsteps, talking all the while. “He nips upstairs to the front bedroom, slips on some gloves...” She mimed this. “Quietly opens the windows wide...
” She unlocked and pulled them open. “Then waits behind the door, here.” She stood in position. “When he hears her come up the stairs, he makes some kind of sound to lure
her into the room...” She cast around. There was a book on the bedside table. Lexy slid it across the carpet so it hit the opposite