Dead Memories (D.I. Kim Stone #10)(47)

‘Oh, now that’s a different story,’ she said. ‘No one wants to live there but there’s a morbid fascination with going and having a look.’

‘Can’t I get a list?’ he asked, hopefully.

She pointedly looked behind him to a queue that now stretched out the door.

‘Just point me in the right direction,’ he said, offering a smile as he stepped to the side.

She considered for a moment before pushing the chair away from the desk. He’d expected her to tap a few keys and for the printer to spur into action. Not the case.

Instead she reached for a lever arch file that appeared to have been relabelled a hundred times.

She placed it before him.

‘They go in number order of the property,’ she said, turning the file his way.

He thanked her but she was already listening to someone talk about rent arrears.

He opened the folder to find a good old-fashioned key register. Property, key number, name of key taker, signed out and signed back in. Simple and effective. This office was not going paperless any time soon.

He wet his finger and flicked through until he found the address he wanted.

The records dated back to the late Nineties but he moved forward to the period of seven years where the property had been occupied by the paedophile. The keys had been returned to the council five months ago and quite a few people had viewed it since.

He caught the eye of the blonde lady, who pointed to the photocopier.

He removed six pages from the folder and headed to the machine. And with roughly twenty-five entries per page he was looking at around 150 people who were on the list.

And any one of them could have copied the key to the murder scene.





Sixty-One





‘Guv, I like the Cotswolds as much as the next person but is there no way we could have just called?’ Bryant asked, as she put her phone back into her pocket. Her second message of the day from Frost who really wasn’t getting that this time around she’d been gagged by her boss and that she could not talk to the press.

‘I considered it,’ she said, as Bryant negotiated the traffic lights in Stow-on-the-Wold. They were just five miles away from Bourton-on-the-Water, and the home of a man she’d never met, a man she knew nothing about but who had taken the time to find out an awful lot about her.

‘Did he ever speak to you?’ Bryant asked.

She shook her head. ‘I knew nothing about the book until I was about fifteen and a social worker mentioned it.’

‘You ever read it?’

‘Why would I? I was there,’ she answered.

‘I meant for accuracy. Weren’t you curious to know how much he’d got right?’

She shook her head. ‘What would it have changed?’

All she’d known was that the man was a reporter trying to make money off everything bad that had happened in her life.

She hadn’t thought about him for years until, three years ago, when Alexandra Thorne had tried to glean everything she could from the man to try and weaken her. She’d considered confronting him but had ultimately decided that any trips back to her past would do nothing to change the fact he’d exploited her story for money and that she’d been powerless to stop it.

‘It’s a left here,’ Bryant said, turning into a single-track lane. Solitary properties were dotted on either side as they wound around a few tight bends that led to a row of stone cottages with a pull-in just beyond.

‘Middle one,’ Bryant said, as they got out of the car. A bicycle was propped up beneath the front window.

She took a deep breath before knocking.

The door was opened by a rotund man a couple of inches beneath her own five foot nine height, with a skirt of hair running around the back of his head from ear to ear.

He wasn’t exactly what Kim had been expecting, and he didn’t have the word opportunist tattooed across his forehead.

‘Henry Reed?’

‘May I help you?’ he asked, pleasantly.

‘Hopefully, my name is Kim Stone and you—’

She stopped speaking as he took a step back and all colour drained from his face.

Yes, as she’d suspected. He’d never expected this day of reckoning. He’d never expected to be confronted by the damaged child he’d exploited to make a few quid. And right now, he had a hell of a lot of explaining to do. Oh yes, he was right to look scared.

‘Forgive me, my dear,’ he said moving back towards her. ‘But I’ve dreamt of this day for the last thirty years.’





Sixty-Two





Alison returned to her notes, trying to make sense of what she’d learned.

Nowhere could she find any mention of a missing earring.

She had learned many years ago about criminals being so enamoured of their own crime they took souvenirs from their victims. Often a piece of clothing or jewellery, an item easily detached from the person. It wasn’t always valuable or obvious items, but normally something the victim was wearing or had on them at the time.

Sometimes the trophies were more gruesome.

Ed Gein, a serial killer in the Fifties, had made furniture from human skin, bowls made of skulls, a corset made of a female torso, a belt made of nipples. Alex Mengel from New York kept the scalp of his victim. A Texas serial killer kept his victim’s eyeballs. Yellowstone killer, Stanley Dean Baker, kept finger bones.