Child's Play (D.I. Kim Stone #11)(48)

She shrugged and then bit down on a thumb nail.

‘Aside from that, why did you lie about him being gone?’

Again, she shrugged. ‘I don’t know, I can’t explain but I’m telling you the truth now.’

‘How the hell am I supposed to believe you, Irina?’ he asked, as the confusion mounted in his brain.

She fixed him with a stare that although full of fear was naked and sad.

‘Because I swear it on my children’s lives, that on the night of the murder my husband was at home with me.’

Penn sighed heavily and looked away.

God help him, he really believed her.





Fifty





Stacey sat back and stretched her neck, suddenly aware that the tune being whistled was a different one.

‘Got anything?’ Stacey asked, mainly to shut the girl up. Please save me soon, boss, she silently prayed.

‘Not a dickie bird other than Belinda’s photo and bio on the college website, which isn’t really a biography at all, it’s very strange. I’m looking for birth records now as a starting point.’

Yes, that’s exactly what she would have done.

‘I mean I wouldn’t expect to see them all over social media cos they’re like, too old for that, but—’

‘Hey,’ Stacey said. ‘Our victim may have appeared too old for many things but it didn’t stop her doing them. Don’t underestimate folks because of their age,’ she warned, wondering when being taught to respect your victims had been missed from the training curriculum.

Tiffany smiled doubtfully. ‘Okay, cool. Anyway, I can’t even find anything in education, so whether or not they moved around a lot or…’

‘Keep going,’ Stacey advised, realising she probably preferred the show tunes.

But she had to admit that the lack of information on the sisters was indeed strange. In this day and age it was growing more and more difficult to avoid a digital footprint. Especially as archives were uploaded all the time.

Stacey almost felt there was a whole section of the internet they were missing. That the two sisters were hiding out in a dark corner of cyberspace.

But right now, she had the opposite problem to Tiffany. She had too much information.

If the boss was right and the murders were linked to the Brainbox event, there were a lot of people to investigate.

So far, she’d made two lists: the children and the staff and combined there were over three hundred names.

She’d pretty much exhausted the whole website but clicked on the last tab entitled ‘Hall of Fame’. The page appeared to be a still photo taken at the final event each year: the quiz. The photo showed each team behind a panel bearing their first names opposite the other team with a quizmaster in between.

Stacey smiled at the change in fashions as she scrolled through the years but the format of the photo always stayed the same. The teams of three sitting primly, hands folded behind a nameplate.

Her finger paused above the mouse button as she scrolled past the last but one photo.

Her eyes widened as she looked more closely at the screen.

‘No bloody way,’ she said, reaching for the phone.





Fifty-One





‘I swear to God, for being insufferable, unyielding and stubborn that woman makes it to the top of my list,’ Kim said as Bryant pulled out from the kerb.

‘She’s second on mine,’ Bryant offered, as he pointed the car towards Dudley.

It wouldn’t hurt to drop in on Keats to see if he’d found anything further during the post-mortem of Barry Nixon.

‘You’re not even a bit funny,’ Kim snapped. ‘I just want to wipe that bloody look off her face. I mean how quickly does she want her sister gone?’

‘To be fair, she’s never pretended they were best buddies.’

‘But they spoke a dozen times every day, so there was some kind of connection.’

‘Or control,’ he offered.

Kim hesitated and turned to her colleague. Now and again his observations were insightful and relevant.

‘Go on.’

‘Well, so far, Veronica has shown no emotion for the loss of her sister, but she lived close by and they spoke all the time. Normally you’d think all this was because they were close, but Veronica could have maintained this proximity to make sure she had control of her sister.’

‘Bryant, I’m not sure?…’

‘Okay, when I was a kid we had to take it in turns to take home the school pets over the holiday period. My mum wouldn’t hear of it. She didn’t want what she called rodents in the house. I was twelve at the time—’

‘Bryant, your retirement is growing closer,’ she moaned.

‘Well, I took one home anyway. This was before all the Health and Safety and permission slips for everything. Teachers took your word for it that your parents had said yes.’

Kim banged her head against the passenger window.

‘Anyway, I sneaked Rupert the guinea pig into my room, thinking it’d be easy to just leave him there and feed him when I went to bed.’

‘And?’ Kim asked, with no idea where this was going.

‘I couldn’t sit still. Every time I went downstairs I pictured someone going into my room and finding him. He was my secret, so if I wasn’t in my room I was hovering around close by so that Rupert didn’t get discovered.’