Erin helped me limp down the stairs, to the protests of the others, who insisted I keep resting. But my mind was alive, firing on painkillers and adrenaline. There was a cold breeze through the foyer, bright flooding lights; I wasn’t sure what they were, glittering through the frosted front windows. The door to the Drying Room gave a familiar phuck. Rubber-sealed. Airtight. Which was why, until I opened the door, I couldn’t smell that the air inside was strange. Thick with ash.

MY AUNT

CHAPTER 27.5

This is not a spoiler.

The observant reader may have deduced that the section headings here dictate that Marcelo, my stepfather, must have killed Michael, whose corpse I’ve just discovered in the Drying Room. It makes sense; I’ve set the expectation that there will be a death in each section and, trust me, there has been.

I’ve always believed that there are more clues in a mystery novel than just what’s on the page. A book is a physical object, after all, which can betray a few secrets the author does not intend: the placement of section breaks; blank pages; chapter headings. Even a cover blurb suggesting there’s a big twist can, in revealing a twist is present, ruin an otherwise well-executed one. In a mystery like this one, there are clues in every word – hell, in every piece of punctuation. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, think about the device in your hands. If a killer is ever revealed and your ‘percentage read’ isn’t at least in the high eighties, they cannot be the real killer; there is simply too much of the book still to be read. This works to spoil films too: the highest-profile actor with the fewest lines is always the villain, and a sudden wide-shot of a character crossing a road means they are about to be hit by a car. A good author must not only wrong-foot the reader within the narrative, they must do it within the form of the novel itself. There are clues baked into the very object.

I have to be aware that you’re aware I’m writing this all down, is what I’m trying to say.

Before you get a big head over it, you haven’t caught me out. While there is something to be learned from this book’s internal logic, it is not that. I may as well come out with it, spoiler and all. Marcelo did not kill Michael. He is not the Black Tongue.

I have not been dishonest, and neither is this a plot hole, although I promised there’d be one. As it happens, that was in the previous section too. If you recall, I said there’d be a hole in the plot you could drive a truck through. I meant it literally.

CHAPTER 28