Dead Memories (D.I. Kim Stone #10)(46)

‘Mitch…’

‘I know,’ he said, smiling.’ You love me too.’

‘Not as much as the doc,’ she said. ‘But you’re on the Christmas card list.’

‘Well, that’s…’

His words trailed away as her phone began to ring.

‘Stace,’ she answered. ‘You get the email from the doc?’

‘Yeah, boss, gonna look at it in just a minute but need to run a couple of things by you. Still trying to find next of kin for our car victims, but there’s something else.’

‘Go on,’ Kim said, moving back out to the corridor.

‘The cracker wrapper in Mark Johnson’s throat. I don’t get it. I’ve been through every news report, twice, and I can’t find mention of it anywhere.’

‘Trust me, it’s significant,’ Kim said, quietly.

‘Exactly. That’s my point,’ the constable argued.

‘Stace, you’re not—’

‘If he didn’t get the detail from the news reports then where did he get it from?’

Shit, she saw Stacey’s point. Where else was there a wealth of information on her childhood?

Kim ended the call with a pretty good idea of where to go next.





Sixty





So far Penn had waited in the stuffy council office for twenty minutes for one of the two women behind the desk to become free.

The blonde, who seemed to be sorting two people to the brunette’s one, occasionally glanced at him in a ‘shouldn’t be too long now’ kind of way.

He had watched people pay their rent, report blocked pipes, shout about neighbours, collect keys and one woman had made an urgent request for money to buy sanitary towels. The blonde had taken a couple of pounds from her own purse and handed it over.

‘Sorry to keep you,’ she said as his turn finally came.

‘No problem. I’d like to talk to you about a property on Hollytree.’

‘Hollytree?’ she asked with surprise. Obviously not that many people expressed an interest in moving to that particular estate.

He shook his head and held up his ID. ‘I want to talk about the flat where the two—’

‘I know the one,’ she said in a lower voice as she looked behind him to the queue continuing to form. It appeared her colleague had only one speed and it wasn’t in the higher numbers.

‘It’s yours, isn’t it?’ he asked.

She raised one eyebrow. ‘As opposed to?’

‘It’s not housing association?’

Penn knew that most councils had sold off property to housing associations to fund other projects before finding themselves woefully short of social housing just a few years later.

She shook her head. ‘There are no properties on Hollytree with a housing association. They’re all still council owned,’ she said. Penn could hear the silent ‘lucky us’ attached to the statement.

‘So, what’s the history with the place?’ Penn asked. Few council properties remained empty for long. Even ones on Hollytree.

‘Don’t even ask,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Last occupant was a fifty-six-year-old man on the sex register for kiddy porn. Got a lot of shi… trouble from the neighbours and played the ‘I am innocent victim’ card for all it was worth until a guy two floors below couldn’t find his seven-year-old and broke down the guy’s door.’

‘And?’ he asked.

‘Kid was sitting on the sofa with his top off eating a bag of Haribos.’

‘Jesus,’ Penn said, feeling sick to his stomach.

‘Dad rounded up some mates and gave him what for.’

‘Dead?’

She shook her head. ‘Not quite but it’s safe to say he’ll never live independently again.’

Understandably there was little sympathy in her voice.

He considered for a moment. He’d established there was no housing association linked to the property despite the brief lucid moment he’d shared with the neighbour. So, had he been wrong to listen to her, to trust that the police officer guarding the door had been wrong? To pursue something guided only by the ramblings of a seriously ill old lady.

He remembered a time when he was seventeen and Jasper was only two.

They had both been in the lounge, he watching telly and his brother staring around the room as usual. He had become very agitated pointing to a corner of the room above the dog’s toy basket. Both his mother and father had searched the corner and had eventually given up and left the room.

Jasper had been distraught and had continued to point, until Penn had gone over to the corner himself and started to look. Like his parents he had found nothing but had figured the kid had to know something. One at a time he took the toys out of the dog’s basket and showed them to his brother who had watched intently. The last but one item, a Kong toy designed to hold treats for their springer spaniel, had contained a trapped, angry wasp. Had the dog gone near, most likely it would have been stung. Penn had taken the toy to the window and had shaken the wasp free. His brother’s smile had said it all.

So, no, he didn’t think he was in the wrong for pursuing the woman’s lead.

‘Has anyone taken the keys to look around the property?’ he asked.