Page 50 of First Blood
No shock. No surprise. No response.
Kim finally got it. ‘Mrs Bywater, this is not news to you, is it?’
The woman shook her head.
Kim lowered her voice to little more than a whisper.
‘Lisa, were you your brother’s first victim?’
Chapter Forty-Four
Dawson glanced across at his colleague and had the distinct impression he was in a race.
Stacey had not looked up as her fingers flew across the keyboard as though she was in some kind of hypnotic state.
Personally, he’d never understood police officers who got fired up data mining. To him, being a detective meant being out there, talking to people, reading expressions, voice patterns, looking for little tics that indicated lying or hiding, looking people straight in the eye and making judgements. He had never done his best work from behind a computer.
So far all he’d managed to find out was that the woman who had lived with Luke Fenton was possibly called Hayley and that was after making twenty calls to local shops and businesses that she might have frequented. For the last half an hour he’d been searching social media for a woman with a birthmark called Hayley. Surprisingly he’d had no luck so far.
A small part of him was tempted to ask the woman sitting across from him if she had any ideas as to where to go next, but there was something inside him that kept the question firmly behind his lips.
So far, he’d found himself two lines of enquiry with the nail and the woman and couldn’t seem to move forward on either of them. He’d asked for help once and had got more than he’d bargained for and he wasn’t going to ask again.
He knew his colleague was working frantically on the background of Lester Jackson while also looking to interrogate the phone records of Luke Fenton. He knew he could offer to help but he didn’t like picking up the slack of someone else’s work. He preferred to find his own leads and what he needed right now was a flash of inspiration; a short cut of some kind so he could get ahead of the woman tapping furiously in front of him.
Suddenly, she sat back and stared at her screen as though, somehow, she’d surprised herself.
‘Damn, I think I need to call the boss,’ she said, and Dawson had the feeling that whatever race he was running, he’d just been lapped.
Chapter Forty-Five
‘You meantheMarianne Forbes is his niece?’ Bryant asked, as they headed towards Dudley.
‘So Stacey says. She went to live with him when she was nine years old after her parents died in an avalanche. She was away at boarding school at the time and Lester Jackson was her only living relative, her mother’s brother and an ex-minister for the Methodist church.’
‘Did you see her in the paper last week?’
Kim nodded. It had been a double-page spread about her fourth shelter being opened in the area. This one in Walsall.
The woman was a local legend, fighting every woman’s cause imaginable, appearing on local news to discuss any subject that concerned women and children, from domestic abuse to equal pay.
From what Kim had read about her, she had used a chunk of her trust fund to open her first shelter, formed a charity or foundation and was highly skilled in securing donations and free services from local businesses and tradesmen.
Her facilities were located in Dudley, Willenhall, Bilston and the latest in Walsall.
Dudley was the registered address for the charity so they had decided to head there first.
‘Am I missing something?’ Bryant said, as they reached the end of Furlong Road.
‘I’m looking for number 94 and we end at 93.’
Kim looked with him as they passed slowly through the road formed of three-storey high Victorian houses.
‘Hang on, what’s that?’ she asked pointing to a double metal gate at the end of the row. The entrance was flanked by a tall, dense conifer hedge that completely hid whatever lay behind. There was no sign, no number, no identity.
‘Aah, you see it?’ Bryant asked, driving forward.
On the right-hand side of the gate was a brick pillar housing an intercom.
