Exclusive Extract: Almost the Whole Truth by Robin Stevens
Introducing…
ALMOST THE WHOLE TRUTH
How do you solve a murder when you’re the number one suspect?
On the 22nd February 2019, Alice Dearlove’s boyfriend Freddie Bradley dumps her for Kate Power, the star of hit TV show Murder and Miss Masters.
18 days later, Kate is found dead in her home in their sleepy Cotswolds village.
One year later, Freddie is charged with Kate’s murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Then years on, in March 2023, journalist Tom Fitch releases the first episode of a podcast that he claims will exonerate Freddie . . .and reveal the real killer.
With all of Tom’s evidence pointed at her, Alice must find out who really killed Kate. Can she prove her innocence before the final episode, or will she become a victim herself?
COMING JUNE 2027. Pre-order now.
Read on for a sneak preview…
2020
1 March
5.13 p.m.
Alice
They’re coming back in.
It’s only been a few hours, so this is either very good news or very bad news. That’s what they always say in books. Alice feels light-headed and faintly unreal, like a photocopy of herself. Like she’s watching the story of her life, and the actor playing her is doing a terrible job.
She’s sweating at the elbows, and in the little dip between her nose and her mouth. She shouldn’t have worn so much make-up. She shouldn’t have chosen the blue dress. She should have woken up this morning and rolled over and gone straight back to sleep. Or run to the station and jumped on a train and gone all the way to the end of the line, and then got on a bus, and when the bus stopped just walked and walked and walked until she got to the sea. She imagines sinking into muscular green water as it wraps around her.
She takes a deep breath and squeezes her left hand around her right wrist, tight enough to make the bones click.
Everyone sits down apart from Freddie, who can’t, and then there’s a pause. Alice watches a man in the first row of jurors tap his fingers against a spot on his neck, a woman behind him with a red scarf rub her bottom lip. Her outfit is distracting. Freddie is staring ahead, his shoulders back and his mouth straight, but Alice can see that he’s fiddling with the cuff of his shirt, the way he always does when he’s worried. Everything is so bright, so immediate. When she imagined this (endlessly, endlessly), there was never this much detail.
‘Have you reached a verdict?’ asks the court clerk, eyeing up the jury.
The foreperson stands up. ‘We have,’ she says.
It’s all so impossible, Alice thinks. None of this can be real. She’s pinching the webbing between her finger and thumb, again and again. The burn of it feels comforting.
‘On this indictment, do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty?’ the clerk asks. He’s so calm. He must do this every day.
The foreperson takes a deep breath. ‘Guilty,’ she says.
Georgia screams. Freddie folds at the knees like a doll, and Alice loses sight of him behind the wooden walls of the dock.
And Alice?
Alice smiles.
2019
13 March
Extract from the statement of Sarah Sykes,
Kate Power’s cleaner
Start by telling us about yesterday morning.
I was late; that’s the thing I feel bad about. I feel just – I can’t, you know. I can’t stop thinking that if I’d been there earlier – if I hadn’t – if I hadn’t had all those drinks with Jake the night before. I know it’s stupid, I know she was – for hours – and it was our anniversary, and we had a sitter, and – I just can’t stop thinking it.
Right, so, the gate to her house – the back bit of the house, where you go in and leave your car – it’s wired up with a keypad. The combo’s 1912, but that morning it didn’t open. And I was so pis— I mean, cross, I had a splitting headache. I got out of my car and I went marching up to it and I shook it. The gate, I mean. It wasn’t closed properly, I saw that. At the time it was a relief. I was worried Kate might have changed the code. She’d been saying she was going to but she kept forgetting. The way she is – was – she either does nothing or gets everything done at once. So I shoved it open, got back into the car and pulled into my usual spot, next to Kate’s car.
Tell us about the cars. What make is yours? Kate’s?
It’s a blue Skoda, mine. Kate’s is some sort of Range Rover thing, green. She’s embraced the posh Cotswolds lifestyle. Why? Is that important?
Just keep going, Mrs Sykes.
Ms, thank you. Right. Keep going. So – so then I got out of the car.
I remember thinking to myself, well, there’ll be extra clean-up to do today.
Why did you think that? Please be specific.
Because Kate’d had guests. I mean – well, I could tell, because when I got out I saw there’d been another car parked where mine was. The gravel was all churned up, and a car had gone into the mud at the side of the drive. It’s tricky, reversing out of Kate’s drive, especially when you’re not familiar with it. I always used to get the car dirty when I first started this job.
Do you know whose car it was?
Obviously not or I’d have told you. Probably one of the TV people – they’ve just wrapped the fifth season of Miss Masters, so it’d make sense. Or that man she’s been seeing.
Who? Do you have his name?
Well, I don’t know officially; Kate keeps her cards close to her chest. But I heard it from Rachel who cleans the Bradley house – it’s Georgia’s son Freddie. It’s still very new – he only just dumped that funny girl Alice who works at the bookshop. I’d thought better of him, personally. And he’s a younger man – he can’t be more than twenty- six, and Kate’s just had her twenty- ninth birthday. But anyway, regardless, I wasn’t worried. I just thought I’d have extra to do because she’d had a guest. So I unlocked the back door of her house with my key and went inside. The lights were still on, so I turned them off – there’s no need in the day, the kitchen’s so bright with those big skylights. Kate always forgets, forgot, forgot, I – oh . . . Then I went around the kitchen tidying – I’m sorry, I didn’t know, honestly . . . It was all so ordinary. There weren’t any breakfast things, but Kate gets up late when she’s not filming. She’s night owl, stays awake until all hours and then doesn’t appear for half the day. So that wasn’t – it didn’t seem strange.
You touched the back door. What else?
Yeah, the back door, the light switch and then the dishes. There were wine glasses and plates and dirty things in the sink. I tidied up and put everything in the dishwasher and started it. Listen, I’m really sorry about that. I didn’t know that it was – I always start in the kitchen, and at that point I didn’t know there was anything wrong.
You mention wine glasses. How many did you see?
I want to say two, but that’s the cliché isn’t it, from these programmes? I watch a lot of Netflix. It might have been three, I can’t be sure – and anyway, Kate never bothered reusing glasses. She’d drink from one and then forget about it and get out another one. So even if it was three, or five, they might all have been hers. I do remember the roses, though. Yellow ones, which made me think they must have been from him. Freddie. They were just dropped into a vase so I cut their stems and put them in water properly. Oh, so I might have touched the vase too. I’m sorry, this is awful, I know how important it is not to touch anything but I just didn’t know. Then I got out the hoover from the pantry and went into the dining room. The lights were on and a few dinner things were still on the table too, so I cleaned those up and put them in the dishwasher. I had to stop it and start it up again and I was so pis— I was so annoyed with her for not tidying up after herself. I’m a cleaner, not her maid, and I’ve told her so a hundred times. That just breaks my heart when I think about it now. Only, that morning, I was still feeling – my head was throbbing. Anyway, then I hoovered the floor and went on into the living room and that’s when I saw her. It’s so stupid because you think you’d never act like those ridiculous women on TV – there are maids in Miss Masters who find bodies and they’re always screaming and being silly when they do it and I told Kate it wasn’t realistic – I mean, like I said I’m not a maid, I’m a small business owner, you can check my Companies House registration, but you get my point – but the hoover bumped into a shoe and then the shoe had a foot in it and there was a whole body on the floor and it felt like I had spiders all over me. I just wanted to not have touched it. I shut the door – oh, I’m sorry, I touched that door handle too – and I sat on the foot of the stairs and I screamed. Not because I thought anyone could hear. Just for something to do. It’s exactly like spiders, when you walk into a web and it gets all over you. You have to scream.
Can you describe what you saw?
No, I – do I have to? You saw the whole thing properly. I just saw her feet, and her face, and that was enough. I know she was still wearing her clothes – I mean, she was fully dressed. I ran out of the room and I didn’t go back in until you arrived. Is that what you mean?
We would appreciate your insight, Ms Sykes.
All right. And – I did go in again actually, when I was on the phone with 999. They asked me to, otherwise I wouldn’t have; I knew she was dead and I didn’t think it’d be much help to touch her when I have seen so much murder on TV. I went in and just looked at her, and she was definitely dead, and it was definitely Kate. And that stupid scarf. She loves projects, she’s always – was always – picking up something and doing it for two weeks and then never looking at it again. She’d just finished crocheting a horribly ugly scarf, and that was the thing that was wrapped right round her neck. So tight she couldn’t get it off, and I could see she’d tried, and – I never
thought a dead person would look so dead. On TV you can see them breathing sometimes. But she was really dead. Fuck. Sorry, I was trying not to swear.
2019
12 March
10.15 a.m.
Alice
‘Have you thought about killing him?’ asks Miles, passing Alice her third cup of tea that morning.
Alice tries to grin. She’s fine. She’s handling things really well actually, except for when she isn’t. It’s been almost three weeks since Freddie dumped her, and she’s over it. Or she should be, except that the pain keeps catching her at unexpected moments, like a nail in her gut. ‘Obviously, but I don’t think it’s a good idea,’ she says. ‘In books, murderers always get caught.’
‘Not always,’ says Miles, and he brandishes a book at her from the pile of green Agatha Christies he’s sorting. ‘In this one he gets away with it.’
‘Spoilers,’ says Alice, even though she’s already read it. There’s a sarky patter that she always falls into with Miles. It’s easy, even when she’s hurting. Their bickering feels safe and familiar. She never actually has to talk about how she feels.
Outside, a police car howls by, sirens blaring.
‘That’s for you,’ says Miles. ‘It’s the mind police.’
‘If they come in, I’ll blame you,’ says Alice. ‘You were the one who suggested it.’
‘You shouldn’t threaten your boss,’ says Miles, rolling his eyes at her. ‘I could fire you.’
They both know that he’s not going to fire Alice. It’s something he threatens roughly five times a week, in the same tone that he uses when he threatens to sell the store and move back to New York. There’s not much money in crime fiction, which is why Alice is the only employee of Mystery Mile – that, and no one else has managed to endure Miles for any length of time.
Mystery Mile is Southmead’s only crime bookstore – and, for that matter, the only bookstore this side of Great Morton. Miles bought the property outright back in 2010
– a lucky windfall, inheritance from his grandfather – and there’s nothing he loves more. Miles is brown- haired, broad- shouldered and short, only a few inches taller
than Alice herself, with big hazel eyes and a scattering of freckles across his long nose, and he’s got a passion for patterned button-up shirts (today’s is a flamingo and croquet- hoop pattern) and experimenting with his facial hair. It’s currently trimmed into a mistake of a toothbrush moustache that Alice has been getting a lot of mileage out of.
Tourists tend to stop and stare when they see him in the street. He’s in his early thirties and looks like someone you’d be more likely to find in Hackney than a small Cotswolds village. But when you walk into the book- lined papery hush of Mystery Mile and see Miles sitting behind the till, a mug of tea in one hand and a book
in the other, he makes immediate sense. He fits in among its shelves like a leopard draped across a tree branch – you think you’d never lose sight of its dots and dashes, and then it drops down and bites your head off before you can even blink.
‘If you did want to kill Freddie,’ he says, ‘I think we could probably work out how to get away with it. Double Indemnity has some useful ideas. Anyway, he’s an idiot. You know I almost ran into him when I was getting into the car after work yesterday, and he didn’t even notice me? Just walked on by blankly. Also, you’re wrong about murderers. In real life, fifty per cent of them are never caught. Fifty per cent! Come on. Would you take that chance? Genuinely.’
Alice pauses, caught by the idea. Would she? No. Probably not.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Not really.’
‘All right, new initiative: I’m going to start firing employees who lie to me.’
‘I’m not lying!’ insists Alice, as a second police car goes screaming past Mystery Mile’s picturesque front window. ‘I just want him to suffer a little. That’s all.’
2019
12 March
Messages from the
OurTown website for Southmead
8.32 a.m. Susan Plant: Does anyone want this jar?
Self- explanatory. I found it at the back of the cupboard yesterday and I thought someone else might be able to use it. Any takers?
Paul Norrell
How big is it? Would it fit 5– 6 sheep vertebrae?
Susan Plant
No
Paul Norrell
I don’t want it thanks Susan
8.31 a.m. Terence Labouchere: Boy racers
Does anyone know if the police are doing anything about the boy racer problem? They were outside the shop for four hours last night, shouting obscenities, and Piotr and I are getting tired of it.
Susan Plant
Can you put on headphones?
Terence Labouchere
I don’t think that’s very relevant, Susan, I’m asking about policing.
When’s our next meeting with the PCSO?
Ganeev Harrison
Next week, isn’t it? I want to bring up the fact that the CCTV camera in the market square has been broken for five months now. I had that ham stolen last month from the restaurant and no one is listening to me about who did it. I’ve had to install extra cameras on the restaurant myself.
Susan Plant
It’s disgusting what they get up to. Driving around without headlights. They’re going to kill someone. I came out of my house this morning and there was a dead cat in the middle of the road. Flattened.
9.05 a.m. Paul Norrell: Does anyone know about mushrooms?
If I found them in my garden, can I eat them?
Susan Plant
It depends on the mushroom.
Ganeev Harrison
DO NOT EAT THEM PAUL
9.07 a.m. Sheila Brockley: Missing cat
My black and white cat, Chicken Pie, is missing. He came in for dinner last night, and then I let him out for one last stroll around the garden around midnight, but he never came back in. He’s very friendly and sweet- natured. Has anyone seen him?
Susan Plant
There’s a dead one outside my house.
Susan Plant
Here’s a photo.
Ganeev Harrison
Please don’t just post photos of dead cats, Susan!
Sheila Brockley
That’s him! That’s Pie!
Susan Plant
Can you come get it off the street? It’s beginning to smell.
Ganeev Harrison
Susan, read your DMs.
Terence Labouchere
Sheila, my dear, I’m so sorry. What a loss.
9.44 a.m. Susan Plant: Road clean-up
Can someone please come get the dead cat off the street? Several cars have now driven over it.
Ganeev Harrison
Susan, I have messaged you!!
10.32 a.m. Terence Labouchere: Police presence?
Does anyone know why there are so many police cars in the village today? Did they read my boy racers post?
Ganeev Harrison
They’re going down toward the church, I don’t know why.
Sarah Sykes
Something’s happened to Kate
Terence Labouchere
What do you mean?
Sarah Sykes
I’ve just seen her. I don’t know what to do.
Ganeev Harrison
Can I help? I’ll come over. You’re at her house, aren’t you?
Sarah Sykes
Don’t come over.
She’s dead. I think someone killed her.
Susan Plant
Sarah, if you have time this morning after you’ve finished in Kate’s house, could you come clean a dead cat off the road?
2019
12 March
12.08 p.m.
Alice
It’s not one moment. It’s a slow creep towards dread. It’s another police car, and another, and the fact that none of them drive back the way they came. For all her jokes about murder, Alice is the kind of person who is always secretly assuming she’s in danger of being arrested (Miss, we have here a receipt from Boots in 2012 that clearly shows you did not pay for that eyeshadow you still have in your bag for some reason ), even though she’s a white woman who lives in amsmall village in the Cotswolds. The police don’t come to Southmead at all, apart from to tell off the boy racers who do donuts round and round the village square. There was also that one time someone smashed the window of the Beagle & Bugle with a cricket bat because Mrs Ptaszynski told them to fuck off home instead of serving them a tenth pint, but that was last year. So what are the police doing here now? What’s going on? Alice and Miles have nervously stopped talking, but sometimes they look up and catch each other’s eye, and Alice assumes they’re thinking the same thing.
What’s happened?
It can’t be – it can’t be what she’s imagining, because real life doesn’t work like that. Just imagining Freddie getting murdered in the most creative ways possible doesn’t actually do anything to the universe. It never happens the way you make it up in your head, so it’s not that. Georgia’s goat probably escaped again. Someone scrumped apples. Someone cut down the apple tree.
Another car goes past, towards the church. Alice catches Miles’s eye again. He makes a face. There’s a pause.
‘You sure you didn’t do anything to piss off any government agencies?’ asks Miles. The question comes out a little shrill. Then he laughs, still shrill. ‘Er – do you want any tea? I’m parched.’
Before Alice can say anything, he jumps up and goes to the kettle, just as another police car goes screeching by. Okay, this can’t be a goat, or some apples. Whatever it is, this is serious.
And yes, if she’s honest, Alice has spent the last few weeks imagining dumping a big bottle of poison into some wine and leaving it on Freddie’s doorstep. Getting a massive bomb and putting it under his bed. Getting some razor wire and stringing it across the trees in his garden and –
Alice has consumed a lot of crime fiction, and even more true crime, and she sometimes regrets that. But other times, it feels like the only thing big enough to fit the enormity of her suffering. She wants to rip open her chest and display her broken heart and have people say, My god! This is a tragedy! Nothing, not the Hindenburg,
not the sinking of the Lusitania, not even the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, has ever been so terrible. She wants five police cars to surround Freddie, dirt flying, and arrest him for the crime of breaking up with Alice Dearlove.
Break- ups make you do terrible things.
Or, at least, think about doing them.
She’d probably never do them.
The door to Mystery Mile opens and Ganeev hurtles in. Alice jumps, shaken out of her thoughts.
Ganeev never goes anywhere slowly, or quietly. She also always assumes that she’s welcome anywhere (or rather, she’s decided she’s going to be welcome no matter how anyone else feels about it). Born in Singapore and brought up in Zurich, Delhi, Tokyo and New York, she was an advertising executive at a top London firm until five years ago, when she came down to the Cotswolds for a glamping holiday with friends and met – and fell madly in love with – a local farmer called Charlie Harrison. She married him within six months and decided to quit her job and become a chef. Now, she owns Cotsworld, the restaurant next door to Mystery Mile. She’s short, round, brown- skinned and has wildly curly hair like a hurricane around her head.
Ganeev does everything very fast and extremely well, and so it is not surprising to anyone who knows her that she graduated cookery school at the top of her class, or that her restaurant (which she opened in 2016, while she was six months pregnant with her first child) has turned out to be very successful. It serves food from all of the countries Ganeev has lived in, it only has six tables, and it’s been awarded a Michelin star.
‘I want three,’ says Ganeev, whenever anyone congratulates her on it. ‘But one’s good to begin with.’
Now, as she makes Mystery Mile’s bell jangle, her face is flickering with an emotion that Alice can’t place. ‘Miles,’ she said, panting, mouth twisting. ‘Alice. Have you heard?’
‘Obviously not, otherwise you wouldn’t be asking us if we’ve heard,’ says Miles, raising his eyebrows.
‘No, no, this is the kind of have you heard that you don’t want to fuck around with,’ says Ganeev. ‘This is serious, Miles. Have you actually heard? You’d know if you had.’
Alice realizes that the expression wriggling behind Ganeev’s mouth is horror, the kind so terrible that it makes you want to laugh. She wants to ask Ganeev to wait, so she can hold on to the last moment of not knowing, but Ganeev’s already pushing on ahead.
‘Kate Power’s dead,’ she says. ‘Murdered.’
And then Ganeev actually does burst out laughing.