Page 73 of Child's Play

Stacey almost felt there was a whole section of the internet they were missing. That the two sisters were hiding out in a dark corner of cyberspace.

But right now, she had the opposite problem to Tiffany. She had too much information.

If the boss was right and the murders were linked to the Brainbox event, there were a lot of people to investigate.

So far, she’d made two lists: the children and the staff and combined there were over three hundred names.

She’d pretty much exhausted the whole website but clicked on the last tab entitled ‘Hall of Fame’. The page appeared to be a still photo taken at the final event each year: the quiz. The photo showed each team behind a panel bearing their first names opposite the other team with a quizmaster in between.

Stacey smiled at the change in fashions as she scrolled through the years but the format of the photo always stayed the same. The teams of three sitting primly, hands folded behind a nameplate.

Her finger paused above the mouse button as she scrolled past the last but one photo.

Her eyes widened as she looked more closely at the screen.

‘No bloody way,’ she said, reaching for the phone.

Fifty-One

‘I swear to God, for being insufferable, unyielding and stubborn that woman makes it to the top of my list,’ Kim said as Bryant pulled out from the kerb.

‘She’s second on mine,’ Bryant offered, as he pointed the car towards Dudley.

It wouldn’t hurt to drop in on Keats to see if he’d found anything further during the post-mortem of Barry Nixon.

‘You’re not even a bit funny,’ Kim snapped. ‘I just want to wipe that bloody look off her face. I mean how quickly does she want her sister gone?’

‘To be fair, she’s never pretended they were best buddies.’

‘But they spoke a dozen times every day, so there was some kind of connection.’

‘Or control,’ he offered.

Kim hesitated and turned to her colleague. Now and again his observations were insightful and relevant.

‘Go on.’

‘Well, so far, Veronica has shown no emotion for the loss of her sister, but she lived close by and they spoke all the time. Normally you’d think all this was because they were close, but Veronica could have maintained this proximity to make sure she had control of her sister.’

‘Bryant, I’m not sure?…’

‘Okay, when I was a kid we had to take it in turns to take home the school pets over the holiday period. My mum wouldn’t hear of it. She didn’t want what she called rodents in the house. I was twelve at the time—’

‘Bryant, your retirement is growing closer,’ she moaned.

‘Well, I took one home anyway. This was before all the Health and Safety and permission slips for everything. Teachers took your word for it that your parents had said yes.’

Kim banged her head against the passenger window.

‘Anyway, I sneaked Rupert the guinea pig into my room, thinking it’d be easy to just leave him there and feed him when I went to bed.’

‘And?’ Kim asked, with no idea where this was going.

‘I couldn’t sit still. Every time I went downstairs I pictured someone going into my room and finding him. He was my secret, so if I wasn’t in my room I was hovering around close by so that Rupert didn’t get discovered.’

‘You think Veronica was staying close by to guard a secret?’

‘Well, it certainly wasn’t for sisterly affection. She won’t breathe a word about their past, so there’s something she doesn’t want the world to know, and we’ve established that Belinda was given to impulsive behaviour, so maybe Veronica stayed close by to keep her under control. There’s no way she didn’t know where her sister was going, but why so important to hide it from us? She’s made a non-thing into a big thing.’