Dead Memories (D.I. Kim Stone #10)(87)

And yet, there was something about it that demanded his attention. Not least because he was in awe that the mangled cube of man and metal he’d seen just a couple of days ago had been reduced to this. For that, the woman responsible could call him anything she liked.

Almost against his will he pushed back his chair and moved over to the spare desk.

He took a moment to assess the contents and pushed aside items he felt could not help him, which were three short pieces of wire, a couple of bent coins that must have been in the victim’s pocket, four buttons and a zip.

That left three pieces of card, approximately two centimetres square, a clip and three pieces of blue fabric.

He took these items from the tub and lay them on the desk. He used a pencil to push them around for a better look.

The blue fabric pieces were slivers approximately 10 cm long and 1 cm wide and ribbed, the fibres woven tightly for strength. He moved them around to see if the frayed edges matched each other like bin bags ripped from a roll. They did not, meaning that pieces of the fabric were missing and therefore the whole had been longer than the 30 cm he had in front of him.

He pushed them aside and turned his attention to the flattened clip. The mechanism for opening the clip had been broken and the little pincer teeth were jagged and worn. He pushed it aside towards the blue fabric and pulled the three pieces of card closer. He moved them around with his pencil as he had done with the fabric to see if any of the pieces fitted together, but couldn’t find a match.

All three pieces were plain on one side.

He looked more closely at each piece individually. The first had a snatch of grey at the top left. To the right he could make out three letters. He grabbed a notepad and wrote down the letters ‘REN’. He put it back and reached for the second. This too had a couple of letters between the tears in the card. He wrote down the letters ‘IC’ and went for the third. On the last piece there were no letters but what looked like part of a white arc that grew thicker as it travelled up and across the paper. It reminded him of an artistic dab of sauce at a fancy restaurant.

He sat back and looked at what he had. It wasn’t much but it was something and now it was up to him to make it count.





One Hundred Eleven





Stacey approached the glass partition. ‘Excuse me, you said it might be a while until someone could speak to me but it’s been almost half an hour since…’

‘Officer, when I said a while I meant you might have to come back tomorrow and the next day. This is Children’s Services and we don’t sit around eating pasta salad all day.’

‘What if I wanted to report a child in danger?’ Stacey asked, unable to believe getting a quick meeting was so difficult.

‘Do you?’ she asked.

Stacey shook her head.

‘Then rest assured that the people you’re here to see are either taking new reports or dealing with existing cases.’

‘Who deals with all the old cases?’ Stacey asked. ‘Say from thirty years ago.’

‘Well no one,’ she said frowning. ‘Because they wouldn’t be children any more, would they?’

‘I mean who looks after the records for old cases,’ Stacey clarified while trying to keep the impatience out of her voice.

‘They’re kept in a central archive. All social workers would have access.’

‘Would there be a record of who had recently accessed a file?’

‘From thirty years ago?’

Stacey nodded.

‘Wouldn’t be electronic, not that old, but personnel have to swipe into the archive room, so there’s a record of who accessed the room but not which records they looked at while they were in there.’

Damn, Stacey thought, biting her lip.

As she’d looked at the board with Penn, Stacey had been struck by the level of detail Duggar had gone to in recreating these events. The exact location of the assault, the reference to the pop bottle, the ripped-up five pound note. None of these things had made it into the book because the author hadn’t known. His account had covered the past, the death of Mikey and the couple of years following the boss’s entrance into the care system.

She doubted very much that these were details the boss would have chosen to share with anyone. Ever. So, she suspected they could only have come from the file.

She had hoped that someone would be able to log into their mainframe and tell her who had accessed any electronic record for the boss in the last few months and give her a lead she could follow.

‘And if that’s what you want to talk to one of the social workers about I’d bring a packed lunch tomorrow. You could be waiting weeks.’

‘Yeah, I know. They’re busy, we’re all busy but we don’t keep banging on about it,’ Stacey said, turning away. Her time would definitely be better spent back at the station, answering the boss’s questions on the board.

‘Thanks for your time,’ she said, heading to the door. She paused as her phone began to ring.

‘Wood,’ she answered.

‘Stace, you still in Dudley?’ asked Penn.

‘Just leaving. Getting nothing…’

‘Can you see a staff member?’

She turned. The woman was back on the phone. ‘Errr… yeah.’

‘Is her identification card white and grey?’