‘I’m Detective Owen Bates. Let’s go sit in the car. If you’d like me to take her …?’
But Ellie, for all her inertia, clung on to Ronan with a grip far in excess of either her age or her size.
‘No, I’m fine. We’ll be fine, won’t we, kid?’ he said, trying to make light out of something that was deathly serious, and he was telling a blatant lie to boot. They’d never be fine again.
He huddled in the back of the Honda, ignoring his mother who’d slipped into the passenger seat. Ellie’s sobs slowly subsided as she fell into a semi-comatose state.
It was only then that he met Owen’s eye and whispered the question that had been tearing at his mind ever since he’d entered Ellie’s home.
‘Where’s her mother?’
Chapter 51
Gaby
Tuesday 4 August, 2 p.m. Colwyn Bay
Anita Fry was nowhere to be found. There was blood in the kitchen, lots of blood, along with broken crockery and overturned chairs. Jason was on his way, along with a full complement of CSIs, but it would take time to puzzle out what had happened, and time was the one thing that they didn’t have. Ellie was the key here, the little girl sitting in the back of the car with both Owen and Ronan watching over her.
Gaby, for all her calming presence and organised mind, was in shock. Not to the same level as Ellie but enough to start tearing herself up about what they could have done differently. No. What she should have done differently. If there was any blame to be apportioned, she knew she had to be the one to step forward. She should have worked it out sooner or even if she hadn’t she could at least have listened to Owen’s suggestion about flagging down the car. But what-ifs and maybes wouldn’t help Ellie’s mother, not now. Gaby had to make the girl talk. It wouldn’t be that difficult, she reasoned, heading out to the car. After all, she had a fair idea as to what Ellie was going to say. As soon as she’d seen the full list of Anita’s cleaning jobs a picture had started forming in her mind, the three cases converging. Katherine Jane and Barbara Matthews. One dead. One missing and presumed dead. And finally, Ellie. A little girl beside herself with grief.
The car was quiet, too quiet. Owen lifted his head from his phone and where he’d been most likely alerting the team back at the station as to what was happening. That’s what Gaby would have done in his shoes.
She turned her attention to Ronan who looked worse than she’d ever seen him, his jaw covered in a straggly mess of what might pass for a beard in a few years. His eyes were red-rimmed, the whites bloodshot, his skin dry and coated in dark shadows. There was also a smell, the smell that accompanied the homeless whether they were aware of it or not. But underneath the grime, he was still the scared little boy she’d met all those months ago. A boy who’d had his world torn up into tiny shreds only to find it impossible to match up the pieces and all because of one vital missing part: his father.
‘Hi Ronan.’ She would have liked to add that it was good to see him. In truth, she meant the sentiment perhaps more than anything that had gone before. Instead all she said was, ‘I need to speak to Ellie. You can stay if you like?’
He met her gaze, his own hardening, his meaning clear.
‘I’ll go easy, I promise.’
Ronan eased his arm out from behind Ellie’s shoulders, rotating his own, which must have been aching from the time spent crushed under the weight of her body. ‘Ellie, come on now. We need to find your mum. The detective here is going to help us but you do need to speak to her.’
Gaby crouched down beside the open car door, feeling the strain against the seam of her trousers and hoping against hope that she wouldn’t be left with her knickers on show.
‘Ellie, I know this is hard for you but we need your help. Will I tell you what I think, then all you have to do is nod or shake?’ she said, her voice continuing in a soft whisper at the slight inclination of Ellie’s head. ‘We think that, as it’s the school holidays, your mum couldn’t always find someone to mind you and that sometimes she took you with her when she went to work. Is that right, sweetheart?’ She only continued when Ellie nodded a second time. ‘We also think that during one of those times you saw something. It must have been boring trying to stay out of your mum’s way?’
Gaby was no expert in the interview of child witnesses. The truth was, she knew she should wait for the assistance of a police social worker before even attempting any kind of questioning. But there wasn’t time.
‘I’d finished my book.’
‘Exactly. You’d finished your book and wanted to find something else to do?’
‘There was a large shed in the back garden …’ Ellie stopped, her mouth quivering, her eyes filling with tears. Gaby noticed Ronan tense but all he did was place his hand over hers and squeeze gently, his face deathly pale under the grime.
‘I thought I could sneak an ice cream as there were no toys, only rusty old tools. But when I pulled the door open to the freezer …’ She scrunched her eyes closed, a stream of tears pressing their way under her lids before starting a relentless trail down her cheeks.
‘Go on, sweetheart, you’re doing fine. There was something in the freezer that shouldn’t have been there?’
‘A row of heads. Their eyes open and bulging out through the plastic—’
Chapter 52
Gaby
Tuesday 4 August, 2.10 p.m. Colwyn Bay
The arrival of Amy on the scene was fortuitous. She quickly took charge of the sensitive dynamics between Ellie, Ronan and his mother and, within minutes, had them agreeing with her suggestion of accompanying them to the station to await news.
Gaby and Owen sat in the front of the car, where it only took a couple of minutes for Owen to shift the pieces in her mind into place. His hands clenched and unclenched as the story came out in fits and starts. A missing girl. A missing octogenarian. A handful of prosthetic hips when there should only have been a maximum of two. A distraught parent trying to scrabble together an existence by taking on cleaning jobs that paid well simply because of no one else wanting them. Three cases and one link: Anita Fry.
‘That bloody pen. I should have known from the start that it was out of the ordinary. All shiny black and flashy gold – too good to be true just like her. It even had the f’ing school crest on the lid. If only I’d looked at the list before rather than after visiting the farmhouse, we might have been able to prevent …’
‘Now now, Owen. No good can come from blaming yourself. How were we to know that Ms Fry’s main source of income came from providing a cleaning service to undertakers? It’s more than likely that she got her clients word of mouth and who do undertakers talk to mainly? That’s right. Other undertakers. It makes a strange sort of sense, as I’m betting it’s not the most popular of places in which to work,’ she added, restraining the shudder careening across her skin.
‘Yes but I still can’t in a million years think that Hayley Prince is involved.’
‘Owen, you’ve been on the exact same courses as I have. You know the drill,’ she said, buckling her seatbelt and adjusting the sun visor only to realise that she was still wearing his daft hat, which she flung in the back with far more force than was warranted. ‘No matter how stupid and unlikely you might think the clues are, if they fit then you are duty-bound to follow their lead to the ultimate conclusion. Did you manage to get her home address?’
‘Of course.’
‘Hold on, ma’am. Wait up a second.’
The sight of Jax racing towards them had Owen shift the car out of gear and pull up the hand brake.
‘What is it. We don’t have time to …’
‘J-j-just that I questioned the next-door neighbour. She was peering out the lounge window waiting for her Tesco order and she saw Ms Fry being helped out to a car.’
‘Helped?’
‘That’s the word she used.’
‘What about the person with her?’
Jax shook his head. ‘She didn’t take any notice. A posh car though, James Bon
d like, she called it.’
‘Okay, thank you. Carry on with the interviews and let me know if you come up with anything, even if you think it’s not important.’ She turned back to Owen. ‘Put your foot down; we may be in time to save a life.’
He shifted into gear. ‘I still don’t reckon you’re right about Hayley Prince. She couldn’t have been more helpful when I met with her yesterday at the funeral home.’
‘Because she’s what? Young? Pretty? Dresses well? So what and who cares? Except you, it seems. You concentrate on driving and I’ll see if I can find her on the system. While I’m searching her up, tell me everything you can remember.’
‘Smartly dressed in a grey two-piece business suit, similar to yours but …’
‘But what?’
He cleared his throat. ‘High-end.’
Gaby rolled her eyes. ‘So she has money to burn, excuse the pun. What else?’
‘Married.’ He paused a second. ‘That’s right. Something about having a brother in the force. Whitstable, off the top of my head.’
‘Okay, here she is,’ Gaby said, peering down at the screen. ‘No priors. Hayley Elizabeth Prince, widow. An only child.’ She paused, sending him a look laden with sympathy. He wouldn’t be the first man to be taken in by a pretty face but Owen would take the slip-up personally. ‘Prince inherited the business from her husband five years ago,’ she continued, tilting the phone in his direction briefly to share a photo of the grieving widow. ‘There was a spread in the Llandudno Chronicle. Apparently she’s done wonders in turning the funeral home into a flourishing business with her PAYG model, even so far as being nominated for North Wales businesswoman of the year on three separate occasions. Oh, this is interesting.’ Her finger slid over the screen as she read further. ‘Her father used to be headmaster of St Gildas, retired three years ago when presumably …’
‘Paul de Bertrand took over. A coincidence that consecutive headmasters are both tied up in murder inquiries.’
‘And St Gildas is also the place Miss Jane worked as a teacher – you know how I feel about coincidences, Owen.’
‘Have you heard anything from the de Bertrands, by the way? Having your wife wake up beside the dead body of her flatmate appears to have been the glue needed to repair the fractures in their relationship. I was surprised that the school didn’t offer him his job back in the end. After all, none of it was their fault.’
‘They did,’ Gaby said, checking her phone for messages only to return it to her lap, her fingers resting on top. ‘I’ve had one or two postcards. They’re travelling around Europe at the moment working from dig to dig. A middle-aged gap year is how she put it.’
‘Lucky them!’
‘As if you mean that. You’re more than happy with your little family.’ She scowled, unwilling to compare her own relationship failings to both Owen’s and the de Bertrands’. No one, least of all her, knew what would happen between her and Rusty but, if history was to repeat itself, it was a disaster in the making.
‘If it wasn’t for the fact that Prince lied to you about having a brother,’ she said, forcing the conversation back on its tracks, ‘I’d have had to agree with you about her being an unlikely candidate for a double murder but she has so …’
‘She’s played me for a complete fool,’ he said, adding in a curse for good measure, which was so unlike him that Gaby’s eyes widened in surprise.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Owen. Turning on the womanly charm in order to get what you want has been around since the very start of time. It would have taken a better man than you to suspect what she was up to but it was pretty stupid of her to make up a fictitious brother to put you off the scent, when you had no reason to suspect her in the first place.’ She lifted her gaze from her phone, her brow lowering. ‘Hey, where are you going? This isn’t the way to her—’
‘No but it’s about time I used my head for once,’ he interrupted. ‘It makes no sense to take Ms Fry back to her house when she has a perfectly legitimate means to dispose of her body at her place of work.’ He indicated right at the traffic lights up ahead before taking a sharp left and squeezing in between two cars with the expertise of someone who wasn’t even thinking about what he was doing: a reverse parallel park of such precision that Gaby smiled, deciding to hold her tongue. No point in congratulating him on something she often struggled with, she thought, again blaming her lack of height for her inability to skilfully manoeuvre a car into any space that wasn’t the length of a bus.
‘What now?’ She glanced across the road at the shiny plate-glass window featuring a tasteful display of headstones, a wreath of red and white flowers the only thing to offset the scene.
‘You stay in the car while we wait for backup, bearing in mind that they currently think that we’re going to Prince’s home. In the meantime, I’ll head round the rear.’ He unclipped his seatbelt or at least tried to. Gaby’s fingers suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
‘Oh no you don’t. And have all the fun while you leave me hanging around for the boys in blue?’ She released his hand only to work on her own seatbelt, remembering to position the ‘officer on duty’ card in the window.
‘Gaby!’
‘Don’t you “Gaby” me in that tone of voice, Owen,’ she said, climbing out of the car. ‘You need to remember that while I might be your boss, we’re also a team and a bloody good one at that. We go in together or we wait for backup. It shouldn’t be long.’
She watched him raise his eyes heavenward, his reluctant shrug of acquiescence telling her everything she wanted to know.
The back of the property was exactly how she imagined, her recent experience at the Memorial Gardens a sharp reminder that the glamorous frontage would only go so far – as far as the customer’s inquisitive eye. The business end was a concreted forecourt hidden from view with three polished hearses and a bright red Porsche.
‘Bingo. Not quite James Bond but near enough.’
Chapter 53
Owen
Tuesday 4 August, 2.25 p.m. H Prince and Sons
There was no one Owen liked to work with more than Gaby Darin. She had quite a few faults, more than a few. But she said it how it was, which meant that the team always knew where they stood with her. She also never asked her colleagues to do anything that she wouldn’t gladly do herself if she had the time. Usually one of the first in the office in the morning and the last to leave, she had exacting standards, which she expected her team to live up to.
But – and there was a big ‘but’ coming – she was impulsive, an impulsivity that got her into tight corners and Owen, as her mainstay, got dragged along with her. She’d nearly died a few months ago … He squeezed his eyes tight not wanting to relive even for a second what had happened to Kate and the debt he owed Gaby for saving the life of both his wife and his child.
Owen didn’t want to be here with Gaby simply because he didn’t want to go into an unknown situation with a partner who had more guts than sense and a severe allergy to anything more energetic than turning the page of one of those romance novels he’d spotted in her glove compartment the last time he’d been rummaging for a packet of mints. He also didn’t need to be reminded that, with a less-than-two-week-old baby at home, he wasn’t on par. He was so below par as to feel sick with tiredness – trying to compensate with a mixture of caffeine and chocolate had only made his head buzz and his legs shake. But with Gaby marching towards the rear of the building, he had little choice but to follow.
‘Hey, hold on a mo.’ He ran to catch her up, the sound of his shoes against the concrete drive causing him to slow his stride. He couldn’t do much, only try to contain her enthusiasm by touting a cautious note. ‘How do you want to play this? Remember, she knows me but …’
‘But not me. Good point.’ Gaby stepped away from the door and back towards the gate and the street beyond. ‘I’m going to head into the shop and see if I can’t distract her while you sneak in the back and try and find Anita.’
Owen
opened his mouth to reply but it would have been like speaking to a brick wall, which was the only thing he could see now she’d walked through the gate, around the corner and out of his line of vision.
Bloody women and bloody Darin in particular. One of these days …
His hand on the door, he tried to push on the wood only to lift it to his head instead and slap his forehead in disgust, his attention on the small keypad to the left of the frame.
Of frigging course it’s locked. Security is bound to be high with all those dead bodies.
He looked over his shoulder and the direction Gaby had gone before turning back to face the door. There was nothing he could do other than follow her but that might mean putting her in danger.
The clock ticked, seconds passed while he considered his options, seconds that seemed to travel the same distance as minutes or even hours. The truth was he didn’t have any choice. Decision made, he pulled out his phone and told the team that he was going in. He only hoped that it wouldn’t be too late.
Chapter 54
Gaby
Tuesday 4 August, 2.25 p.m. H Prince and Sons
The front door was open but there was nobody at home, which set all the alarm bells ringing inside Gaby’s skull as she took in the mahogany reception desk and mushroom-coloured carpet. Everything was coordinated with no expense spared. Her attention was drawn to the crystal vase of fresh cream lilies and small dish of mints that would have looked more in place in an upmarket beautician’s than an undertaker’s.
She hurried across the small expanse of floor and through an arch at the back of the room. The carpet carried on throughout, something she noticed without being aware of it, interior design not even making the list of her current concerns. There were two offices up ahead, both doors open and both empty, her breath leaving her body in a whoosh of relief that was quickly stemmed. The open front door worried her more now that she was in the heart of Prince and Sons. No one left a reception area unmanned unless there was a crisis and what better crisis than an unexpected dead body?
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