Page 125 of 36 Hours

‘No chance,’ she said, quickly taking herself back to her chair. It was worse than any conundrum she’d ever seen onCountdown, and she’d never been very good at those.

‘Doesn’t help that I don’t know what I’m looking for. There are a lot of letters there for a place, so is it an instruction? Is it another twisted clue?’

‘Penn, I honestly wish I had something useful to offer.’

‘Story of my life with this case,’ he muttered under his breath.

She knew he was beating himself up for not getting the clues as quickly as he would have liked. Hiccup had died, and now the stakes were even higher. Not because Hiccup had been homeless, but because they now had two lives on the line.

She wished she had the time to reassure him, but this case seemed to have made them all feel inadequate. She was fighting the frustration of not being able to put her hands on the one piece of information she needed.

Every minute that passed put the life of a little girl in greater danger, and she just needed that one piece of paper that would break this case.

‘Oh, shit,’ she cried, picking up a single sheet and staring at it to make sure she wasn’t mistaken.

‘I’ve got it,’ she said, waving the page at Penn. ‘I have the identity of Jester674.’

NINETY-TWO

5.20P.M.

‘But why?’ Bryant asked as she pounded on the door for the second time.

‘You saw how angry he was with his ex-wife and daughter because of the shame of being connected to him. He was rejected, and now he’s making them pay. Imagine having any link to him now?’

‘You think he wants to be caught?’ Bryant asked before banging again.

‘I think he wants to be known,’ she said, taking a step back and looking at the house.

Stacey’s revelation that Peter Harris was the man behind it all had stunned her.

Initially, their main suspects had been Jared, who wanted to be famous at any cost; Eric, who wanted to win the bitter rivalry between himself and Jared; and Ryan Douglas, who she had suspected wanted to drive up subscription numbers. Since finding out that all the hard work had been done by someone else, the field had been open for their killer to be anyone they’d been in contact with. And they knew they’d been watched at the litter-pick. Peter Harris made sense. He’d engineered it so that he would be there right from the beginning. He’d lied about the van he’d owned and obviously had it stashed somewhere.

‘All locked up by the looks of it, guv,’ Bryant said, reading her thoughts.

She was about to check round the back when the door of the next-door property opened.

‘What the devil is all this commotion? I can’t hear my telly.’

A woman in her late fifties was glaring at them over the unkempt hedge.

Kim held up her identification.

The woman came closer and peered at it. ‘You here to arrest him?’

‘For what?’ Kim asked.

‘Dunno. Anything will do. He gives me the creeps. He’s been inside before, and I reckon he’s up to no good.’

Kim wasn’t keen on such generalisations, but on this occasion, it looked as though she was right.

‘Cats have been turning up dead round here. Gotta be him. There was a burglary around the corner last month. I bet?—’

‘Have you seen him recently?’ Kim asked, cutting her off before she blamed him for every crime in a three-mile radius. Right now, she was only interested in what he’d done with Nazeera Khan.

‘Yeah. I saw him about an hour ago. He locked up and put a large suitcase in the heap of junk he drives. Right bloody eyesore.’

‘The red van?’