Page 113 of Deadly Cry
‘Eating now, so that’s one less worry.’
‘Ella must be such a help to you, but we could still arrange for a family—’
‘It’s fine. I don’t want strangers around Mia at the minute. Ella is indeed a great help, but there are times when I really wish she’d just leave.’
‘Older sisters mean well, but—’
‘They always know best, Inspector. They can do everything better,’ he said with an edge of bitterness in his voice.
‘Like with Mia?’
He rolled his eyes. ‘With Mia, with everything. She knows everything; she’s always right, always does better. If I buy something, she buys the same but better. She’s a competitive person.’
‘Even as kids?’ Kim asked.
It might appear to Andrew Nock that they were making idle conversation, but Kim was getting to ask exactly what she wanted to, given everything that Alison had told her.
‘Hell, yes, Mum was a single parent and pretty much left us all to get on with it. We never found alternative ways to find resolutions and just fought for what we wanted. Bless her, our mum compared us all the time. I don’t think we ever did a lot together as a family.’ He smiled. ‘Mum always said Ella didn’t get enough time in the cot.’
‘Sorry?’
Kim hoped that the conversation and memories were distracting him from the amount of time Bryant was out the room.
‘As she had us, Mum would keep us in a cot in the bedroom with her. As another came along, the last one would be moved to the second room.’
Kim wondered if something that happened so young could affect a child for life. Was it perceived as rejection, causing a wedge of resentment between the eldest and the next in line?
‘And what kind of things did Ella do to you when you were children?’ Kim asked, trying to keep her tone light.
She was trying to prolong the time until Andrew realised the conversation had nothing to do with the case.
At that second, Bryant entered the room and offered a brief shake of the head to say he’d found nothing untoward in the time available. Her gut wasn’t telling her that Archie was here either.
‘Oh, she was bossy and controlling. Wanted all the good toys, wanted to be in control. Anything anyone else did had to be done better by her.’
He rolled his eyes fondly, and Kim’s stomach began to turn. This man did not hate his sister. She annoyed him and frustrated him, but she was sensing there was a deep layer of love beneath his irritation. This man was not taking lives in a sick, twisted rivalry with his sister. Their whole theory had been blown to smithereens.
‘Okay, Mr Nock, thanks…’ her words trailed away as something occurred to her. ‘You said something about “all of you”?’As opposed to just the two of them, she thought. They had made a foolish assumption. ‘How many siblings are there?’
‘Four altogether. Ella’s the eldest and I’m the youngest, so I wasn’t really on her radar. If you really want to know how bad she can be, you should talk to my older brother. He hates her guts, and the two of them haven’t spoken for years.’
Ninety-Five
‘Nothing upstairs,’ Penn said, meeting Stacey in the hallway, ‘except a master bedroom, a comfortable guest room and a small boxroom for anything that doesn’t fit in the other two rooms. Guest room shows no evidence of being used recently.’
Penn had trailed his finger through a very light layer of dust on the bedside cabinets.
‘Nothing in any of the rooms downstairs either that I can see,’ Stacey said. ‘No sign of a child having been here, no wrappers or anything in the bins and they’ve not been emptied for a couple of days.’
Penn tried hard to quell the unease in his stomach. He remembered one time he’d been driving his mum and Jasper to a hospital appointment when his brother had an ingrown toenail. His mum had directed them by memory to the hospital, and despite her insistence he’d felt they were going the wrong way. Every metre he’d driven, he’d known he was going in the wrong direction and moving away from the destination.
That knowledge had stoked a fire of aggravation in his stomach, knowing they had an appointment to keep, that they were running out of time. And that’s how he felt now.
Somehow, somewhere they had taken a wrong turn; despite all the clues and pointers, this dog was barking up the wrong tree.
‘We have to be right, Penn,’ Stacey said, reading his expression, ‘Nothing else makes any sense.’
He knew Stacey was speaking with her brain and not with her instinct, but he couldn’t quieten his own.
