Page 19 of 36 Hours
He looked past her, towards the reserve. ‘Clearly there’s no ongoing incident, and it doesn’t appear to be a crime scene, so on what grounds do you want me to cancel?’
Jesus, Fred was serious about protecting his litter-pick.
‘There’s an item in there that’s of interest to us,’ she said, giving him as much information as she had herself.
He waited for more.
There was no more.
He shook his head. ‘Sorry, Inspector, but that wasn’t a compelling argument. We’re going to carry on unless you have some kind of paperwork.’
His unspoken words were that there was nothing she could do to stop it.
And he wasn’t wrong. She had no authority to close down his event based on the information she had.
For just a minute, Kim wondered what the hell they were doing.
She had no body, no missing person and she was looking for the first clue in what had been threatened as a thirty-six hour game. She was standing here arguing with the organiser of a bloody litter-pick, and she was half expecting someone to charge out of the bushes and announce she’d been pranked.
Part of her wanted to throw her hands in the air and go home. She could still salvage the rest of her weekend and pretend Frost had never come to her door. But she had to weigh up her gut feeling that bad things would happen if she did that.
Standing before her was Fred, an immovable force who was sending his litter-pickers in whether she liked it or not.
She sighed heavily. ‘Okay, Fred, let’s look at this another way.’
FIFTEEN
10.55A.M.
It wasn’t only the police team that was uncomfortable with Frost’s presence in the squad room. She herself wasn’t exactly chilled about it, and the mention of Ryan Douglas had done little to relax her.
It was a name she’d worked hard to forget over the years, and just hearing it had transported her to the darkest time of her life.
She had been seventeen when she’d fallen for the charms of the twenty-one-year-old man who had seemed both sophisticated and worldly to her young mind. He had a good job in software programming, a nice car and his own flat. She’d just dropped out of college and was struggling to exchange one civil word with her mother. After exactly five dates, she’d moved in with him, and very grateful she was to have done so. At first.
Initially, she’d ignored the subtle hints about her not contributing to the bills, and she’d tried to stick to the many rules he imposed.
No food in the car.
No shitting in the en-suite bathroom.
All opened food in the fridge in Tupperware.
The rules went on and on, and sometimes she’d had a hard time keeping track of them. And then one day she failed.
The first time she broke a rule, he started calling her Peggy and asked her to limp less when out with him in public. The second time, he pushed her against the fridge, and the third time, he punched her in the jaw.
There hadn’t been a fourth time because she’d packed her bags and left the following day. Her mother had refused to have her back, and after sofa surfing for a couple of months, she’d landed a job as general dogsbody at theDudley Starand managed to rent a room for a hundred quid a month.
It had been the darkest, most lonely time of her life and not a period she chose to remember. But a small voice kept nagging at the back of her mind. Could he be behind this? Was he planning to use them in some way to rustle up more business? But why now? He’d probably made a killing during the pandemic. He owned the company, so he couldn’t need the money, but could there be some other motive? He’d been an arrogant, controlling dickhead when they’d been together, and she had no idea if the intervening twenty years had altered that.
She pulled herself back to the present and focussed on the job at hand. The man had taken up enough of her time.
Even though she was under strict instructions not to speak, which was hard for her, obeying the instruction not to listen was even harder. She didn’t really want to be privy to the inner workings of a police investigation though.
She understood the irony of that fact given that she was a reporter and many of her colleagues would sell their granny to be in her position, but she was unable to use anything she saw or heard for fear of her life. Even if she had been able to use her observations, she still wouldn’t want to. It was like sausages. They tasted good, but you didn’t want to see how they were made.
Like regular members of the public, she too wanted to believe that the greatest minds in the country were in these offices, solving crimes, catching bad people. She wanted to hold on to that image so she could feel safe in her bed.