‘Same on this side,’ Keats said, putting the razor down.
Penn waited for Keats’s explanation.
‘Not attempted suicide marks at all. These are restraint scars, and they were made a long time ago.’
TWENTY-TWO
Stacey had received two emails within seconds of each other.
The first was from Beth Denton with signed permissions and passcodes into their bank accounts. The second was from Mitch with the personal details of their second victim.
Sarah Laing. Age 22.
A photo of her driving licence was attached.
Stacey zoomed in and did a double take, wondering if there had been some kind of mistake.
The girl in the driving-licence photo had long brown hair that draped over her shoulders. A thick, blunt fringe ran across the top of piercing blue eyes. She had a slightly hooked nose that gave her face interest and intrigue instead of natural beauty.
Stacey had already glanced at the preliminary photos Keats had taken of the body but she looked again to be sure. The young lady on the table had bleached-blonde hair, short and severely cut over her left ear. It hung fuller and longer on the top and over her right ear. Stacey counted seven hoop piercings down the length of her left ear and a single stud in the nose.
At first glance they looked like two completely different people, but the tell-tale signs were there: the shape of the jaw, the cheekbones, the full lips, the nose. It was definitely the same person but a very different attitude.
Stacey got up and moved around to Penn’s desk where she could reach the wipe board easier. She breathed a sigh of relief as she wiped away the words ‘unknown female’ and replaced them with Sarah’s actual details.
She was already intrigued with the difference between the two photos. The bank details of Gabe Denton were forgotten while she focussed on the main case.
‘Okey-dokey, Sarah, let’s find out a bit more about you,’ she said, pulling the keyboard towards her.
She put the name into Instagram and came up blank. Nothing on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat; and TikTok was a bust too.
She tried a general Google search and came up empty.
Stacey tapped her fingers on the desk. It wasn’t that this hadn’t happened to her before but not normally for someone in their early twenties.
She went back to Mitch’s email. The only other attachment was a copy of a recent phone bill. She printed out the email and immediately sent a message to the provider requesting full details.
Perhaps the woman used another name. She typed in the phone number which came back as registered to Vodafone, which she already knew.
‘What next?’ she said, narrowing her eyes.
‘Ah,’ she said, focussing on the only thing she had left to try.
She took a screenshot of the photo from the driving licence and fed it into the face-recognition software.
Nothing.
She groaned out loud. Not something she wanted to do but she’d been left with no choice. She accessed the photos from Keats and took the headshot. For some inexplicable reason it felt intrusive. With the first photo Stacey knew the girl had been alive and so felt fine to use it, but the second photo, taken after death, felt like a violation.
‘So sorry, Sarah,’ she said as she dragged the photo into the box. She hit the search again and watched as the screen loaded the results.
‘Oh my jolly good graciousness,’ she said as she reached for the phone.
TWENTY-THREE
‘We will get to leave this car in a minute,’ Kim said as her phone rang again. They’d pulled up outside the office of Megan Shaw in Whiteheath. A red door with a nameplate was nestled at the edge of a carpet warehouse. It hadn’t been too hard to find the woman Jamie had been seeing. Of the three psychologists listed in the Rowley area, only one listed sexual identity counselling.
The second they’d pulled up, Penn had called to update them on the post-mortem progress of Jamie Mills. The reason for those restraint marks on his wrists was something she intended to bring up with the counsellor, if she ever got in there.