Page 30 of The Girl in the Grave
‘Yes, they did. Excellent cameras, better than the ones the constabulary paid a small fortune to have put up around the town.’
‘How did you know it was me?’ He hadn’t meant to ask that, he’d promised himself not to antagonise him, but it just slipped out.
Barker thrust his phone towards his face and there he was, a crystal-clear still taken from the CCTV system. Damn, he was right, it was an excellent quality photo.
‘Sam had nothing to do with it. She didn’t know I was going to go looking. She left me in the car whilst she went in.’
‘Why were you there in the first place?’
Josh felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Why did hethinkthey were there? Was he for real?
‘We have a high-risk missing person, which you know about, yes?’
Barker nodded.
‘We also have a body of a girl who was found underneath a coffin pulled up for an exhumation. The post-mortem provided by Doctor Adams concluded that the woman inside the coffin died of natural causes. Which leaves the question: who demanded she was exhumed in the first place? The killer of Chantel Price and Annie Potts’s abductor is more than likely the same person, we believe. We recently discovered they left a calling card under the missing girl’s bed: it was a photo of Chantel Price along with what we can safely assume are the three fingernails missing from one of her hands. The chance of having two different predators stalking the streets of Windemere are highly unlikely, don’t you think? Sir.’
‘I still don’t see what the funeral home has to do with it.’
Josh sighed.
‘It was a hunch. Doctor Adams’s findings at the post-mortem of the mystery girl, now known to be Chantel Price, suggest the victim tried her best to claw her way out of a box, possibly a coffin or some kind of tomb. Dean&Sons had dealt with the burial of Florence Wright, who was exhumed on the say-so of some distant relative who is now nowhere to be found. I’m in the process of getting a search team together to go and locate that so-called relative. Call me whimsical, but I thought it was a good shout, that it was worth checking the undertaker’s. Whoever this is had no qualms about being around death or dead bodies.’
The hostility left Barker instantly as he flopped down on the chair behind his desk. He looked at Josh. ‘It would have been better if you’d come to me and asked for a search warrant. We’re not going to get one now, are we? Did you find anything to make it worth the risk?’
It was Josh’s turn to sit down, deflated. He shook his head. ‘No, but I didn’t go inside the main building. It’s a huge house, as you know. There could be any number of places to conceal a missing person.’
‘It’s a huge house that belongs to the chief super’s best friend, Harry Dean. I’ve had it in the neck off the boss, so now you’ve had it in the neck. He’s warned us to keep well away from there.’
‘He’s warnedyouto tell me to keep well away from there, but what if you hadn’t found me to tell me yet? Just because he’s best mates with the chief it doesn’t make him exempt from the law.’
Barker rolled his eyes at him. ‘Doesn’t it?’
‘No, not really. Especially for someone like me who isn’t, and doesn’t, give a shit about who he might be upsetting.’
‘That’s the thing, Josh. I admire your commitment to the job, I really do, but our hands are tied.’
‘Unless I can find some hard evidence to get a search warrant?’
‘Yes, and you find a judge who agrees with you.’ Barker shrugged. ‘I thought you were bringing in the gravedigger anyway?’
‘He’s done a runner. Paton spoke to him earlier and asked him to come in for a chat. He decided against it and now we can’t find him.’
‘Guilty?’
‘Guilty of something, I’m not convinced it’s murder.’
‘No, maybe not. But let’s focus our media attention on him. Give the outraged public a name to focus on, and maybe they’ll lead us to him. You and Sam concentrate on finding our missing woman.’
‘You mean, hang him out to dry?’
‘He did that to himself when he didn’t play ball with us. If he’d come in like we’d asked, we wouldn’t have to do this, would we?’
Josh nodded and took the silence that followed as a cue to leave.
Walking out of the office, he went to the car park to find Sam, who was sitting in the car scrolling through Facebook. He opened the car door. ‘Busy?’
‘Actually yes, I am. I was just checking out Jason Thompson’s list of friends to see if any of them are linked to Dean&Sons in some way.’
