Play Dead (D.I. Kim Stone, #4)(31)

Dawson smirked. ‘You snooze you—’

‘Both get a kick up the arse if you don’t stop it.’

Kim continued speaking, after her look had the desired effect. ‘So does the fact he needed her pliant mean anything, Stace?’

‘He knew exactly where he was going to dump her?’

‘Bingo,’ Kim said.

‘I had that one too,’ Bryant mumbled.

Kim ignored him. ‘That’s what I think. There are much easier places to dump a body. To get there he had to drive narrow lanes across two fields and then haul her up a hill. Why?’

No one answered. They knew when her questions were rhetorical.

‘Stace, I want you to find out everything you can about the land around Westerley. I want to understand the significance of the dump site and I want to know more about Catherine.’

Stacey nodded.

‘Also, the last document of Keats’s email is a photo of the hairpins. Do some digging and find out just how common those things are.’

‘Will do, boss,’ she said, making a note.

Kim used her phone to flick along to the second report sent by Keats. ‘Next – stomach contents. A mixture of sausage, beans, pastry and custard.’

‘Easy to get?’ Stacey offered.

‘And?’ Kim pushed.

‘Easy to cook?’ Dawson said.

‘And?’ she said, a little more forcefully.

‘He gave her dessert,’ Bryant answered.

And there it was. The man who had abducted, beaten and killed Jemima had also given her dessert.

‘A little bit weird,’ Dawson observed.

Kim reiterated. ‘So our kidnapper subdued her, snatched her, kept her, undressed her, fed her and then smashed her face in.’

‘Like I said – weirdo,’ Dawson said.

‘One weirdo or two?’ Bryant said, as though asking about sugar lumps.

Kim thought for a moment. ‘I still think just one,’ she offered. ‘Jemima was chosen for a reason. She is not some random victim discovered by chance, which means it has to be someone she’s been in contact with at some stage.

‘Kev, I want you on that. I want you to go to her old address and see if anyone remembers the incident before she left for Dubai. We don’t know if it’s linked to her murder as it was so long ago but Sara said that Jemima felt she knew the person concerned. We need to follow it up.’

Her mobile phone rang. She frowned when she saw the name of the pathologist at the top of the screen.

‘Keats?’ she said. He rarely contacted her by choice.

‘Inspector, we’ve had the results back from the soil that was forced into Jemima Lowe’s mouth.’

‘Go on.’

‘It definitely matches the soil at site,’ he said.

She had worked that much out for herself. ‘And?’

‘There are traces of blood. Well, more than traces to be accurate.’

Kim pictured the killer forcing dirt against the soft gum line. He could easily have caused a small injury. ‘The inside of her mouth could have been—’

‘Too much blood for that, Inspector,’ he said, cutting her off.

Kim stood. ‘Are you saying it could be from our killer?’

‘Not unless he cut off a digit during the course of the crime…’

Kim stopped listening as her heart began to hammer in her chest. She knew what he was going to say.

The blood in Jemima’s mouth was not her own. The blood had not come from the killer – which could only mean one thing.

Someone else had been killed in that spot.





Twenty-Three





‘Sir, we need to get a team out to Westerley.’

Woody didn’t even chide her for her failure to knock.

His eyebrows narrowed. ‘What are you talking about? Forensics have just stood down from the site. They’ve been there all night and found a total of nothing.’

He thought she meant a team of techies. He was going to have to dig deeper into his annual budget for what she was about to request.

She shook her head. ‘No, sir, I need detection equipment, probably extraction and I need a full team of forensic—’

‘Calm down, Stone. What’s the development?’ he asked calmly.

Sometimes she wished he would just act before asking her twenty questions. It reminded her of calling an ambulance in an emergency situation. You wanted to shout, ‘Just get it on its way – then I’ll give you the details.’

‘The sample taken from the soil in Jemima’s mouth. It was scraped up from the scene and forced in. The dirt contains traces of blood that do not belong to Jemima.’

‘The killer?’ he asked.

Kim could swear she’d just had this conversation. ‘Unlikely. Too much of it and it’s been there a while.’

‘You’re sure?’

She nodded. ‘Keats tested the soil with luminol and, to use his phrase, “it glowed like a beacon”, sir.’

‘Any indication how old the blood is?’

‘No. Keats is doing further tests, but he said it can be detected for years, at least six to eight,’ she said, sharing with him something she hadn’t known before the phone call.