The Number One Insta Detectives Agency

Please note these are uncorrected pages and is not final. 

Prologue 

I stare down at the lifeless body.

Blood seeps through her pale pink shirt, a dark stain spreading across her ample chest.

A knife juts out from her ribs, its wooden handle slick with red.

My hands shake. My breath comes in quick snatches.

I pull out my phone and snap a photo.

Shock, pride, proof. Call it what you like.          

Satisfaction roars through me as I study the image captured on my screen.

I did it. I actually did it.

The whore is dead.

And I killed her.

Chapter One

Olivia

Olivia pulls the metal drawer towards her, her next subject sliding out of the coolroom in a gust of frigid, disinfectant-laden air.

Grace Orchid, 27 years old. Cause of death: homicide.

She shivers at the sight of the young woman in front of her, despite the extra layer she’s learnt to wear under her uniform of a surgical gown, paper booties, gloves and a face mask. The temperature in the brightly lit, white-tiled preparation room is cool, but she’s used to it.

What she will never get used to is seeing women arrive here after their futures have been stolen from them.

Grace, only a year younger than Olivia, murdered by her husband, is particularly harrowing. Olivia’s gaze drifts to the white sheet pulled up to Grace’s shoulders. She knows that beneath it lies the cause of Grace’s death – a stab wound in her chest, the point of entry no longer a ragged, gaping hole, but a roughly stapled line that now sat alongside other wounds the coronial examiner had needed to create to conduct her autopsy.

The person who’d split her body open with the steel blade, piercing her heart and killing her almost instantly, had been the very same person who’d sworn vows to love and protect her for the rest of their lives.

Olivia sucks a quick, deep breath in through her mouth. The mask follows, clinging to her nostrils and lips, blocking both her airways. She panics immediately, pulling the mask away from her face before silently chastising herself.

Get a hold of yourself, Olivia.

In her half a dozen years working at The Final Tribute, she’s prepared thousands of bodies for their funerals. Grace shouldn’t be any different.

Olivia straightens her shoulders and mentally scrolls through her Spotify playlists. She always chooses music from the deceased’s era when working on them. It’s respectful, she feels. One last courtesy extended to the person before they’re taken away for their eternal rest in the earth or cremated in the retort. And it beats spending hours hunched over the deceased in dead silence. Pardon the pun.

She asks Siri to play her ’90s playlist. Grace was born the year after Olivia, so the music is familiar and nostalgic to her as well. It’s almost incomprehensible to Olivia that she’ll go on living her life while someone even younger than her has had theirs cut short.

‘Let’s get started then, Grace,’ she murmurs, as Backstreet Boys’ ‘Backstreet’s Back’ blasts from the speakers. It’s more upbeat than she feels, but she needs something to ease her mood.

She begins by replacing the sheet with a towel and brushes a disinfectant solution onto Grace’s body to kill any germs, adjusting the towel to protect the woman’s modesty at all times.

Olivia treats all the people in her care gently and kindly. To her, being trusted to prepare the deceased for viewing by their loved ones is the utmost privilege. She still remembers seeing her mum’s face at her funeral, when she was just ten years old. Her mum had looked so beautiful, so real, as if she was going to open her eyes at any minute and give Olivia that special smile she reserved only for her daughter. Olivia had been almost overcome with gratitude that the mortician had brought her mum back to her. The mum she wanted to remember – kind, dignified, loving – not the mum whose twisted death mask had haunted her ever since she’d stumbled across her cold body on the kitchen floor.

Washing somebody’s body is an almost meditative process. In those moments it’s just her and the deceased; the outside world, with all its problems and hardships, is very far away.

After she’s cleaned Grace’s entire body, washed and blow-dried her hair and set her features to ensure her eyes and mouth stayed closed, she’ll slowly, carefully work her limbs into the outfit her family chose. Then she’ll apply make-up, meticulously restoring Grace to the daughter, friend, nurse and sister that her loved ones knew her as. This is the part Olivia takes the most time with – the part she’s proudest of. She knows the importance of preparing the deceased’s face for their loved ones to see one final time. She knows firsthand what it means to them.

‘The follow-up meeting with the family was horrible.’

The voice makes Olivia jump, and she whirls around. Emery has walked in, holding a dress. ‘Grace’s family was so distraught they didn’t bring in any make-up or jewellery for her to wear; they’d barely managed to pick out an outfit. It was all I could do not to burst into tears alongside them.’

Emery is her brother from another mother. Just like her, he’s interested in everyone, even people he barely knows.

‘I can imagine.’ Olivia finishes washing Grace’s body, and Emery automatically moves to help her pack up the equipment.

His family have owned The Final Tribute in Marrickville for generations, and he’d grown up in the funeral parlour. The pair had clicked the very first time they’d met, when Olivia had come in for an interview for the mortician position. He’d been behind the desk, looking faintly bored, while she’d been nervous out of her brain. She’d blurted out how much she wanted the job; how she’d been helplessly obsessed with death since her mother died unexpectedly when she was a kid. How she’d only considered becoming a mortician after the first four years of medical school had bored her to tears, and she’d remembered how she’d spent every lunchtime at high school in the library researching death.

‘You must have been fun at parties,’ Emery had said with a slow lift of his brow.

She’d loved that he’d gone with it, rather than apologising about her dead mum, which was what most people did. Those apologies never failed to annoy her. It’s not like it was anyone’s fault that her mother had been born with a faulty artery in her heart, one that hadn’t been discovered until her post-mortem.

‘I wasn’t invited to them,’ she’d shot back before she could think better of it. ‘High school wasn’t my peak era.’

‘Mine either. No one wanted to hang out with the freak being raised in a funeral parlour.’

‘You live here?’

He’d nodded his head glumly. ‘Sometimes I was so lonely I used to talk to the dead bodies.’

‘Really?’

His cheeks had flushed. ‘Yeah.’

‘Well, I was so lonely I used to talk to the bodies in my research books.’

Matching slow smiles had broken across their faces and they’d dissolved into laughter. She got the job, and only a few months later, Olivia moved out of her dad’s place into a tiny, two-bedroom apartment with Emery, just a short walk from the funeral parlour. These days she can barely remember what life was like without him.

‘Tomorrow is going to be tough,’ Emery says now, bringing her back to the present. He knows Olivia’s process by heart and hands her Grace’s outfit: a swirly, brightly coloured dress. It’s high-necked, so thankfully Olivia won’t have to try to make the wounds on her chest as unobtrusive as possible with flesh-coloured tape.

As she takes the dress from him, the scent of perfume rushes through her mask. Light, zesty, a touch of vanilla, still lingering from the last time Grace had worn it.

Her throat tightens, and she swallows hard, forcing the emotion back down. ‘I’m dreading it. There’s no celebration of life with murder victims.’

Emery squeezes her hand, then melts back out of the room the way he came, leaving Olivia alone with the young woman once again.

She leans in close to Grace and gets to work.

Chapter Two

Juniper

‘The body had been mutilated, symbols carved into the victim’s skin. Forensics are still trying to decipher if these symbols were made before or after she was murdered, but they all agree the symbols are cult related.’

Juni rests her head against the train window as the hosts of True Crime Daily begin to pore over the evidence of yet another cold case. She listens to half a dozen different murder pods, but this one is her favourite as they discuss a combination of current and historical crimes. The hosts are as much a part of her morning routine as choosing her outfit and picking up her boss’s coffee.

Her phone vibrates, and she glances at the screen to see a message from Micah.

Please, give me another chance. I don’t even understand what went wrong? xx

Juni’s stomach swoops. This is the tenth message from him in the almost forty-eight hours since she dumped him.

She can’t ignore him forever, but nothing she can say will ease his hurt.

Her fingers hover over her phone screen as the train pulls into Circular Quay. Usually she gets off at Wynyard – it’s closer to the art gallery where she works in The Rocks – but today she stands and joins the stream of commuters pouring onto the platform by the harbour, following the throng towards the exit. The fresh air and extra few minutes’ walk will help her try to work out how to reply to Micah before she’s consumed by the crazy demands of rich art collectors while also politely trying to stop tourists from touching the art.

‘Sorry’ won’t cut it, but she can hardly tell Micah the truth!

The truth would likely leave him with a lifelong complex about the way he runs.

She feels bad – of course she does – but she doesn’t want to get his hopes up that there’s any chance of them getting back together. He’s a nice guy, fairly good-looking, perhaps a tad too obsessed with technicolour movies, but that wasn’t the problem. She likes people with passion, but she also knows from past experience that once The Ick takes hold, there’s nothing she can do about it.

‘It’s not you, it’s me’ is another option but sounds like bullshit, even if it is painfully true.

Because there is something fundamentally broken in her.

Juni sighs as the tide of people emerges from the station and breaks apart – office workers stride purposefully towards the city, while tourists gravitate towards the harbour, already snapping selfies in front of the billowing white sails of the Opera House. Her phone feels as if it’s burning a hole in her hand as she skirts the harbour, watching the green and gold Manly ferries glide across the shimmering water. A silver gull lands on the iron railing, ruffling its feathers in the morning sun and beyond it, the iconic bridge arches across the skyline, its steel spine connecting the CBD to the North Shore.

The podcasters are still talking in her ears, but while she’d usually be mentally solving the case alongside them, today their voices blur into background noise as Micah’s unanswered message loops through her head.

On autopilot, she heads up the sandstone steps to The Rocks, weaving through the winding laneways and two-hundred-year-old buildings until she reaches the café just a few doors down from the gallery. She silences the podcast and pops her earbuds in her bag as two men in dark suits step up to the counter ahead of her.

‘Morning, detectives. The usual?’ the barista asks, barely looking up from the counter. The coffee is so good here that customer service is optional.

The men pay and move to the side to wait. As Juni orders her boss Ingrid’s extra-hot, extra-large, skinny oat-milk flat white, she can’t help catching a snippet of the detectives’ conversation. Did one of them really just complain about only earning a hundred and fifty grand a year?

Juni can’t even imagine what she’d do with such a salary. Move out of the little studio above her family’s laundromat, that’s for sure. And pay off her credit card. It’s not her fault it’s always maxed; there’s just so many cute slow-fashion labels on Insta. She briefly loses herself in a daydream where she’s able to buy every colourful jumpsuit or pair of handmade earrings she wants without feeling an ounce of guilt.

Maybe she should have gone into law enforcement instead of art.

Focus, Juni.

What is she doing thinking about alternate careers when A, she loves her job, and B, she needs to solve the Micah problem?

She needs advice. Juni pulls out her phone and opens the group WhatsApp chat with Olivia and Emery. She starts to type out a message, then pauses. She knows what they’ll say. Olivia will just reassure her that she’s doing the right thing, and Emery will probably ask her to sneakily film Micah running for the lols or something. Sometimes her besties are anything but helpful.

By the time she arrives at work, she’s still no closer to knowing what to say to him. She should be an expert at this by now. It’s not as if it’s the first time. Sadly, poor Micah is just the latest in a long line of mostly lovely men felled by The Ick. No matter how much she wants love, marriage, babies, the whole shebang—

She halts, all such thoughts evaporating as she walks into the gallery to find Ingrid – the most unemotional, unsympathetic person on the planet – sitting on the long wooden bench positioned in the heart of the space, where clients can take in almost every piece at once. As if this isn’t odd enough – her boss never stops long enough to sit down – she’s sitting beside someone else, her arm around a dark-haired woman who is sobbing into Ingrid’s designer silk blouse.

Ingrid looks up, meeting Juni’s gaze with thunder in her eyes and, as she does so, Juni recognises the distraught woman.

She almost drops the coffee right there on the polished concrete floor.

Oh God, no. This cannot be happening.