Sitting with a cup of coffee and looking through whatever I can find about Avril Ryan on my computer is making me anxious because I know this is not just some news story I can close down, then move on to the next. This could ruin my life. The autopsy has confirmed what the evidence found at the scene was suggesting. The body of thirty-five-year-old Avril Ryan who went missing in September 2016 was found in suspicious circumstances. Which I’m pretty sure means murder. It says that the body was found in a disused pit at the bottom of the garden during recent renovations. The pit was ten foot deep with two big heavy steel doors covering it over.

I remember that pit. The owner warned us it was there. Otherwise you’d never notice it. He said it was dangerous; we were advised to keep away from it. Which was easy to do because it was surrounded by brambles and twigs and impossible to get at. Or so I thought. But obviously I was wrong because someone got at it. But who?

I stare at the screen. Huntley Lodge. It all seems so long ago. It’s only three years since I lived there and yet so much has changed. Mam is dead. I met Lucas. I’m moving to Australia. I’m no longer glued at the hip to Faye. I never could have imagined any of these things back then. I thought I knew what was coming down the line. Not that I thought about it often because back then I very much lived for the moment – the party at the weekend or the guy I fancied. But when I did think about the future I never considered the loss I would experience or the strength I would find buried deep inside me.

Faye hasn’t been in touch for a few days so I’m guessing that if the detective did get to talk to her, it mustn’t have alarmed her. Maybe they have an idea who killed that poor woman and left her to rot at the bottom of a pit. Her family must be devastated knowing she was lying there, all alone in the cold and the damp. A shiver runs through me when I think about it. Hopefully she was already dead before her body was put into that pit.

The police have to know it’s possible she was killed somewhere else and just dumped in there… but not many people knew that pit was there. You would have to be told. But there were other people renting the house before we took it over. They would have known about the disused pit. And even though it was hidden below a lot of brambles, it is possible someone who partied at Huntley knew it was there. In fact, come to think of it, lots of people could know about it. Those detectives will have their work cut out for them.