“What the hell is she doing here?” Eric's greeting left an awful lot to be desired by way of hospitality.

He was waiting outside by the gatepost when Jesse and I pulled into the driveway of the large, modern semi. Waiting with some anxiety if the tension in his jaw and the way he hissed his words was anything to go by.

“As charming as ever I see,” I said, the slamming of the car door masking my mutterings.

“You want me to get this done today, I'm gonna need some fucking help. Somehow didn't figure you'd be the first in line for getting your hands dirty,” Jesse spat as he locked the car and stomped towards the gate. Eric barred the way through to the house so Jesse stopped, leaning his hands on the low wall that marked the boundary of the property, and stared Eric down.

I could see the man wanted to protest, to complain; a test of just how much he wanted this little job done quickly, not to mention for free. He may not have ever realised it, but his desperation for this job to be done, to get his house on the market and sold as quickly as possible spoke volumes. As did his reluctance to spend any cash on it. Sure everyone likes a freebie when they can get it, and it was Jesse's mother's idea that he do it, but would he protest hard enough for Jesse to refuse the job?

A scowl on his face, Eric bit his lower lip as if holding back the words he really wanted to let slip. “Fine!” he eventually said, “Just don't make a mess, and stay out of the house.”

“Right, so what you want me to piss in the flowerbed? Don't think that'll help with your prospects of selling this place much.”

“Whatever, but like I said don't make a mess, I've got enough to deal with without cleaning up after you. I've got to go to a meeting with my lawyer, and I'm already late thanks to waiting around here.”

With that Eric pushed past Jesse and jumped into his top of the line Audi he'd already parked by the curb in anticipation of our arrival and his imminent departure. “I mean it about the mess!” he yelled out of the open window before he sped off down the road, leaving us to stand open mouthed in disbelief at his behaviour.

“Wow, so ever the conversationalist I see,” I said, sarcastically. “What the hell was that all about?”

I was as confused as ever by Eric's behaviour. I'd only met the man twice so far but couldn't figure him out at all – and I liked to think I was such a good reader of people. All I did know, was there was something so very off with him and while a day of watching Jesse work sounded far from fun – although there were a few perks obviously – a chance to snoop around Eric's house while he was out was too good to pass up. I'd just have to be careful not to make a mess, as he seemed rather pedantic about that.

“The fuck if I know.” Jesse shook his head then gestured for me to follow him. “C'mon, better go see what kind of state he's left me out the back. Then I'm probably gonna need a trip to the trade depot, not counting on Eric actually having the stuff I need to fix this thing.”

We followed the gravel path around the side of the house and through a tall gate into the back garden. Jesse led the way, I wondered how many times he'd visited the house before, perhaps the atmosphere was much more inviting when his sister was alive. The well mown, luscious green lawn was the first thing that met my eyes, edged with beautifully tended flowerbeds, a wooden arbour set against one fence surrounded by a huge trailing grape vine. The garden was someone's pride and joy – maybe Jesse's mother tended the place as well as her own, or had Jen inherited her mother's green fingered talents – there was even a brick barbecue set on the edge of the patio in question, which was the only part of the immaculate garden that felt like it didn't fit.

At first glance it didn't look so bad, I couldn't quite tell what all the fuss was about; surely it wouldn't inhibit the sale of the house in its condition? But as you looked closer the reality of it became much more clear. It hadn't been finished properly for starters and a mass of weed grew between each of the square slabs where the pointing had deteriorated, or not been present at all. A lot of the slabs were loose and wobbled as you stood on them, but it was a patch in the middle, just outside of the large French doors that led into the living room where the most work was needed. The slabs there weren't just loose, but cracked and broken and large dark stains marred the smooth yellow surface.

“Shit,” Jesse hissed the curse as he reached the patio. He dropped to his knees and traced the dark brown marks with delicate swipes of his fingers. “What in the hell happened?” The disbelief was plain in his voice. Knowing what happened and seeing evidence of it with his own eyes were on two very different scales. This day was not going to be an easy one, and with the funeral looming ahead of us, it wasn't about to get any easier.

“Is this where...” Jesse nodded without me even needing to finish my thought.

The cracked paving stones, the pools of old dried blood that had been left to seep into the porous material for so long that no amount of cleaning would wash away the stains; it was relatively easy to see how they'd thought it had been an accident.

“Mum said she was up a ladder, at the window boxes.” He pointed up above us where there were two long terracotta trays filled with an array of bright flower, though there was a gap at the centre window where another pot should have rested. The windows on the upper floors were long and encased by sturdy metal bars; I guessed that explained why she needed the ladder.

“She fell, we all thought it was an accident, and by the time Eric came home she was already dead.”

“But now the police think someone pushed her?” I frowned, it was certainly a good set up for an accident, but there had to have been a flaw in the big plan somewhere.

“Yeah, something about the blood pattern, and the final cause of death. I never really got a whole lot of the details from Mum, she gets kinda hysterical about it all, but they determined the injury that killed her shouldn't have been caused by the fall.” He traced the strains once again as if trying to picture those final moments, decipher some truth from all that was left behind, but the blood wouldn't talk to him.

He got to his feet, knees crunching as he stood, “Well, I better get to work. I'm going to have to replace those tiles, I guess it's the blood that will be a problem when it comes to selling.”

Jesse put his business face on, pushed the thoughts of his sister's tragic death to the back of his mind – at least as much as he could – and managed to focus on the job at hand. He did a quick survey of the patio, jotting down a few notes on a little scrap of paper before he tucked the pencil behind his ear and announced he needed to head off to buy the stuff he needed from the trade depot. He asked that I stay behind at the house; after testing the rear doors it was clear that Eric had left the place unlocked, whether for us – he had been rather begrudging about us going inside the house – or through some distraction and forgetfulness I wasn't sure, but I had to agree that the house had seen more than enough crime for one lifetime. So he left me there alone. I didn't know how long Jesse might be on his errand, but it would surely be long enough for me to have a quick snoop around inside of the house without anyone there to witness it.

The house itself was immaculate and beautifully presented, as was probably to be expected given the eternally primped and refined way in which Eric seemed to present himself, and big too, much bigger than it appeared from the outside. It looked like the ideal place for a couple to settle down in, room to start a family, though there was no visible evidence that Eric and Jen had such plans. I'd bypassed most of the downstairs and headed for the top floor, I had it in my mind to search for paperwork. If Eric had killed his wife there would have to be a damn good reason for it – at least what he thought was a good reason – and men like him, professional, legal minded, calculating usually kept nice orderly records of pretty much every important detail of their lives; carefully filed away for future reference, and I couldn't help the grin that spread across my face when I found the office, just as neat and organised as the rest of his life.

Sure he might have done away with anything incriminating, but it was worth a look; especially if the police weren't considering him a suspect he may well feel safe keeping a hold of all his records. A large, leather topped desk took up most of the room, two tall filing cabinets stood sentinel on either side, the shelf above it laden with heavy textbooks concerning marketing and sales strategy, advertising, and even a few legal volumes scattered amongst the titles. One such volume sat on the desk alongside some paperwork, so this was where I looked first.

Marking the spot where the document lay open with one finger, I flipped to the front of the file and read the heading. It was a contract in Eric's name, the name of the company he worked for emblazoned across the top, at the back it was signed and dated some years back; he'd obviously been working there for quite a long time. I let it fall back open to the pages someone he had been studying, 'Misconduct, disciplinary procedures and grounds for dismissal'. Was Eric concerned for the safety of his job? It might explain his sudden fixation on finances – life insurance, house sales etc – but would fear of losing his job be enough to motivate him to kill his wife? I didn't think so not in any normal, sane relationship anyway, there had to be more to it than that.

I set the contract back on the desk where I had found it, the page laid open exactly as it had been before I'd arrived. My attention was then turned on the filing cabinets. The top drawer on each was locked and there was no obvious sign of a key laying around, not knowing how much longer Jesse, or even Eric, were going to be gone for, I didn't really want to start rooting around looking for one. The drawers that did open mostly contained bank and credit card statements, mortgage papers, expense accounts from work, nothing of particular interest. At least not until I came across a file amongst the others detailing his company expenses – Jesse had said Eric travelled a lot for work, it made sense the company would pay his expenses for him – the tab at the top labelled it from November the previous year, and it was completely empty.

A frown furrowed my brow, it was strange seeing that empty file there messing up the quiet order of all the others. I took a moment and traced the expense files back through the year, other months were missing, he must not have travelled during all of them, but their files were omitted from the sequence rather than laying empty; a perfectly good file put to waste. Even more curious. I slid the drawer shut and my attention was immediately drawn to the large paper shredder that sat beneath the desk. On a whim I pulled off the lid to inspect the contents, I don't know what I'd been expecting to find but my stomach dropped when I found it empty. Whatever had been hidden in those expense accounts, Eric had already disposed of them.

Still, I didn't think my time searching the office had been entirely wasted. Something at work was bothering Eric, something that warranted him disposing of expense records and searching for some kind of loophole in his contract, concerned about dismissal. It still didn't give me any kind of motive to go on. If Jen knew something about her husband's activities, perhaps it was something illegal, would that be just cause enough for him to do away with her?

But again, all my thoughts were speculation only, the only way I was ever going to know for sure would be to get the information straight from the horses mouth. Given Eric's wonderfully chatty and friendly nature, I was sure that would be as painless as pulling teeth. Still, I was going to have to think of something.

Giving the office one last cursory glance, checking that nothing would reveal my presence having been in the room, I then headed back down the stairs to wait for Jesse out the back. As I passed the front door at the bottom of the stairs the letterbox rattled and a small pile of letters slapped onto the floor. Curiosity drew me to them, I couldn't help myself. I reached down and rifled through the pile, discarding each that displayed Eric's name until I came across one addressed only to Jen, a stamp of blue ink on the top showed the acronym NHS and the name of the local hospital. My fingers had slipped beneath the seal and started to tear open the envelope before I'd even realised what I was doing. Eric probably wouldn't miss it, knowing my luck it would be a reminder to attend a routine smear test or something, but I couldn't help but wonder if it would contain something interesting, something significant.

I unfolded the paper and started to read, it was an appointment reminder but not for a smear test. Tuesday, 2:15pm with Sr. Wallace for a booking in appointment, “Huh, Jen was pregnant? And not very far along, I wonder if Eric even knew.” I muttered to myself as I folded the letter along with the envelope and slipped it into the pocket of my jacket, zipping it closed. Dumping the rest of the post back onto the doormat I stood back up and headed into the kitchen. I grabbed the kettle and put it on to boil, might as well have a cup of tea waiting for when Jesse got back - builders liked tea while they worked I had heard.

The kettle had just finished boiling when I heard the crunching of gravel in the driveway as a car pulled in, would it be Jesse or Eric? I hoped very much it would be the former, being alone with Eric wasn't exactly high on my list of priorities I didn't trust what the man might be capable of, especially when I knew I couldn't hurt him not if I wanted Jesse to get his revenge. Boots crunched up the path and the gate into the back garden slammed shut as Jesse strode in.

“Heather?” he called out, not seeing me out in the garden.

“I'm in here,” I replied, waving through the open French doors.

“What are you doing in there?” he asked, sounding mildly panicked. He might have argued with Eric about us being allowed inside the house, but that didn't seem to mean he wasn't still afraid of the consequences.

I shrugged, “Nothing, I got bored so I came in to make a cup of tea. You want one?”

“Ah, yeah, I guess. Though we better wash up when we're done. Don't want Eric on the warpath when he gets back.”

“No problem, I'll just hunt out the mugs. How d'you take it?”

“White with two please, I'll just bring all this stuff round back. Thank God Jen had a wheelbarrow!”

Jesse worked and I mostly watched, cleaned up and made the tea from time to time for the rest of the afternoon. He'd been almost reluctant to start at first, going back to those bloodstains on the stones and looking at them, wistfully, perhaps wishing he could see her once more, or that it might have been Eric's body that had fallen from the ladder and bled out on the tiles. During his moment of contemplation I studied the bloodstains a little closer, the police were right, the pattern was weird.

A small pool and some spattering surrounded the cracked tiles that had to have been from the impact of the ladder and her fall, but then a small trail of drips edged away from it until a much larger pool had seeped out onto the ground, the place where she had died. What I couldn't understand was why, if she manage to move even just a little after that fall, would she crawl away from the house? Away from the phone where she might have been able to dial the emergency services. Was it just an instinctive movement, her mind too disoriented from the accident to come up with such a logical idea? Or was it because there was someone else there, blocking her way to possible safety?

It was more food for thought as Jesse finally took the sledgehammer to the broken tiles. It didn't take much work for him to tear them up, leaving clean lines to lay new ones in their place. He pulled up the loose tiles that were still in good condition and set them aside to relay with some firmer foundations then set about mixing the concrete. It looked like such hard work, mixing the thick grey, sticky mass up in a bucket and I could hear him muttering something about wishing he had his mixer with him.

The light was starting to fade from the sky as Jesse lay the last stone in its place. “That'll have to do. The weeds need to be pulled out of the gaps before it can be pointed, and I'm no fucking gardener. He'll just have to put up with it as is.”

Eric still hadn't returned. I was pretty sure a lawyer didn't keep office hours that late in the day, so where he had gone afterwards would remain a mystery; perhaps he was just waiting for us to be gone so he could return to a quiet home without any more drama. We packed up, made sure the kitchen was left as clean as we'd left it then headed back for Jesse's car.

“Nice that he's here to say thanks for all my hard work, wanker!” Jesse cursed as we climbed into the car.

“You know he wouldn't say thanks even if he was here.” I slid in beside him and slammed the door. “Come on, let get back to the B&B, you got this funeral to go to tomorrow. Something tells me you're going to need a decent nights sleep to be able to handle it.” And I had plans of my own that involved Eric. He was going to spill the beans whether he wanted to or not.