Kim couldn’t help but wonder who had brought the price comparison to William’s attention, but it was an interesting lead all the same.
‘He made threats?’ Kim asked.
‘Over wood?’ Bryant asked.
Daryl nodded.
‘What exactly did he say?’
‘He said that William would be sorry and that he should be prepared to lose everything.’
THIRTY-EIGHT
Penn smiled as Stacey wriggled her fingers at the appliances now on her desk.
‘Okay, let me at it,’ she said, opening the lid of the laptop, her eyes alight with the challenge.
His own package was nowhere near as impressive.
From what the boss had said, the bin had held quite a few books and diaries. He understood that both the fire and water would have caused substantial damage. He’d hoped for a little more than what he was looking at now.
Percy had explained that the drying out and separating process had been largely unsuccessful due to the sheer volume of water. The only thing remotely salvageable was a few pieces of paper from the book at the lowest point of the bin. He had seven pieces of paper all held individually in their own plastic wallets.
Like someone who had won the star prize and felt sorry for the loser, Stacey peered over.
‘You gonna be able to get anything from them?’
‘Not sure,’ he said, taking a magnifying glass and his headphones from the drawer.
He looked over all of them quickly to see if there was anything obvious. One of the sheets stood out from the others. Six of the seven were on lined paper but the seventh was lighter paper, white, unlined with washed-out black ink. A typed letter.
He put the others aside and focussed on the one that was different.
At the top right of the page, he could just make out a date which was one week earlier. The whole first paragraph was completely washed out, but the heading of the letter had been typed in bold and underlined. Some of the letters were legible.
He took a pencil and notepad and began playing his own form of hangman.
L t ill an T me t
He left that to the side as he held the paper in front of his desk lamp. It did nothing to highlight the text in the body of the letter, but it did show something he hadn’t noticed earlier.
An icon.
He stared at it and tried to recreate on his notepad what he could see.
His pencil formed the shape of a shield, with a plant sprouting from a black line beneath it. The shield was divided into four – two sections black on white and two white on black. Two squares had a letter inside and the other two had motifs that were too small to fathom. Some kind of jewellery sat above the shield.
Plants, a shield and jewellery. What the hell?
‘Stace?’ he said, holding up the piece of paper.
‘Sex,’ she shouted out.
‘What?’ he asked, looking at what he’d held up. Where had that come from?
‘Isn’t that what crazy folks shout out when being shown those weird pictures?’
‘No idea, but what do you see?’