‘You’re not right so don’t celebrate just yet. I’m just figuring out how I’m going to prove you wrong.’
She came to a halt in the upper hallway.
‘Right, let’s play this through. We don’t know if the deadbolts were on all the doors when he came in. Not as important. More important is how he left the house to be sure it looked locked up tight.’
‘He?’ Bryant questioned.
‘An assumption for the purpose of the exercise,’ she said as her mind started racing ahead. ‘He gets the gun, loads it as he’s walking. He shoots Lewis and then Rozzie,’ she said, moving from room to room.
She closed her eyes as she visualised the scene. ‘He pauses to reload the gun. Both Helen and William are getting out of bed. He shoots William. Helen keeps coming at him. He grabs her wrist and forces her to the ground. He shoots her under the chin and wipes his prints off the gun. He wraps Helen’s hand around the handle and allows the gun to fall from her grip. He goes looking for what he came for. Takes him a while to find the diaries. He takes them downstairs and puts them in the bin. He sets fire to them and then he…then he…’
Kim narrowed her eyes and charged across the hallway and down the stairs. At least four officers moved aside as she stormed to the kitchen.
She opened the door to a store cupboard that held a vacuum and a couple of mops. Everything had been pushed to one side.
‘He lights the books on fire by the open window and waits for someone to raise the alarm. He stays perfectly still until the fire service have put out the fire and go searching for victims. He lets himself out of the cupboard, slips out of the back door and vanishes silently into the night.’
The three people who had followed her regarded her silently until Mitch broke the spell.
‘Aww, shit and for once I thought I was right.’
TWENTY-THREE
It was almost eight when Bryant pulled up outside her house on what had been another thirteen-hour day.
She’d spent most of the trip back from Pedmore on the phone to Woody who, understandably, wanted to see her first thing in the morning. Neither he nor the press office were pleased with her last-minute press conference cancellation. She was pretty sure they’d be even less pleased if she’d allowed Woody to declare to the world that Helen Daynes had murdered three people, only to rock up the next day to say ‘Oops, sorry, no she didn’t’. She had no idea how many heads would roll on that one.
‘Have a good night,’ Bryant said with a twitching lip as she and Leanne got out of the car.
Kim managed to offer her colleague a withering look before he pulled away with a smile on his face.
Kim walked up the driveway.
Her heart leaped into her mouth as a shadow appeared to her left.
‘What the—?’
For the second time in as many hours she felt herself being pushed to the side as Leanne knocked the lurking figure to the ground.
Kim looked down at the tangle of female limbs on the ground. A familiar voice sounded from underneath Leanne.
‘Get this bloody woman off me.’
Kim stood back and folded her arms. ‘Frost, what the hell are you doing here?’
For a second, she couldn’t help the amusement she felt at the sight of Leanne sprawled all over the reporter, pulling Frost’s arm up her back.
‘What the fuck is going on here?’ Frost asked as Leanne got off her and offered a hand to pull her up.
Frost offered her a filthy look before pushing herself up from the ground.
‘A bloody reporter knows where you live?’ Leanne asked.
‘It’s a long story. Go inside, I’ll—’
‘Err…no. I think we’ll all go inside,’ Leanne said, looking around as Kim unlocked the door.
‘What the fuck is going on?’ Frost asked, closing the door behind her. Leanne had already started her sweep of the house.