Page 69 of Child's Play
‘You mean like birth, marriage, kids, that kind of thing?’
‘Anything at all,’ Stacey answered. She’d already checked and there was nothing there but it would keep the girl busy until the boss sorted this mess out.
In the meantime, she tried the contact number again for the Brainbox organisers, Mr and Ms Welmsley. She banged the phone down in frustration. The mobile number had gone from voicemail to permanently engaged. She’d left two messages already and a third would have bordered on restraining order territory.
Okay, so the rest of her work involved the Brainbox website. She clicked the tab with the website already open and began to explore.
Everything about the site appeared friendly, accessible and inviting.
She began noting the facts.
Brainboxes had started in 1961 and was a small collection of gifted children coming together for friendly games and competition.
Popularity grew and then fizzled in the 1970s and ’80s but burst back with new vigour in the mid ’90s with a new two-day programme, entrance fee, prizes and a minimum IQ score to gain entry.
Hmm, Stacey wasn’t sure how she felt about that last bit. She understood that the event was for child prodigies but not all kids were good at tests and, in all honesty, she hated anything for kids that excluded other kids. However, it was a private event and there was little anyone could do about it.
Looking over the years since its reinvention Stacey could see that the numbers grew steadily every year. In 1995 thirty-one children had been registered to attend but last year the number had risen to sixty-four. Clearly, gifted children were on the up.
She went to the gallery and saw that recent events had a mixture of photos and video, while the older ones had photos only.
She clicked on the images from the event the year before.
Beaming faces shone at her from the photos that had been staged in groups: all children, and then the ones taken throughout the events in different areas. Stacey saw chess, piano, a mental arithmetic competition, a spelling bee and then finally the big quiz at the end which featured the winners of all the smaller divisions.
Seemed to her like an awful lot of competition for kids in just two short days but the photos showed a lot of fun too.
Finding the attendance of Barry Nixon was easy enough. Each year had a list of event staff like a cast list and Barry was listed as event counsellor from 2003 through to last year, missing only one event a few years earlier which she suspected was when his wife died.
Stacey wrote all the years down on her notepad and then paused as an unwelcome sound punctured the silence.
‘Are you whistling?’ she asked Tiffany across the room.
The girl smiled. ‘Yeah, show tunes. Learned when I was a kid. Fills the silence. I don’t even know I’m doing it most times.’
Stacey offered her a tight smile. Just go with it, Stace, she told herself. The boss would sort it. She just had to tune herself out and she’d be fine.
Marrying up those dates with Belinda Evans was not going to be easy, and she briefly wondered if the boss had got it wrong. Belinda Evans had never been on the staff list and appeared to have attended the event in no official capacity whatsoever.
She put Belinda’s full name into the website search engine and thanked God for photo tagging.
She matched up the data she could find from photos, blog posts and mentions and when she looked down at her notepad realised that the two of them had attended the event together at least ten times.
Forty-Eight
Bryant managed to park between the skip and the cleaning company van. Kim spied Veronica’s car parked on the drive of Belinda’s second home next door.
‘Well, she didn’t waste much time,’ Bryant observed.
‘She didn’t waste any bloody time. Property was only handed back a couple of hours ago. She must have had all these folks on standby at the top of the road.’
Mitch had texted her to say they were complete at 6a.m. having found no evidence to link the property to the actual crime scene miles away.
Kim walked up the path sideways as two cleaning operatives passed her carrying boxes to the skip.
‘No, no, clear one room at a time,’ Kim heard as they entered the property.
Veronica was standing in the middle of the living room in a square of clear carpet a metre wide.
