Page 25 of Deadly Cry

It was a long job ahead, so he’d already visited the canteen, wolfed down a plate of chips and gravy and brought a muffin back for energy later. Just a coffee to pour from the machine and he was set for the long haul.

He placed his mug on his desk and took the headphones from his drawer as he did when he wanted to be totally focused.

He glanced over at the spare desk where the post had been deposited. Usually, either he or Stacey had opened it by lunchtime.

He placed the headphones over his ears and loaded the first file of footage.

He was sure there was nothing there that couldn’t wait.

Twenty-Three

One of the first things Kim noticed about the Victorian terrace was its tidiness. The properties either side had hanging baskets still holding onto trailing fuchsias that were bending towards the last rays of sunshine. Most of the small spaces in front of the houses had been decorated in some way to personalise the area. The front of Ella’s house was slabbed with no plant pot in sight or hanging basket in front of the plain front door that opened before they had a chance to knock.

Ella was dressed in jeans, a cream jumper and held two carrier bags in her hand.

‘Oh…’ she said, looking from one to the other.

‘May we have a word?’ Kim asked.

‘I’m just on my way to—’

‘We’ll just take a minute,’ Kim said, standing right in front of her.

She hesitated and placed the bags on the floor. Kim guessed they were emergency supplies en route to her brother’s house, although she could think of nothing she could have in those bags that would tempt him right now.

Ella stepped aside for Kim to enter the small reception room, which gave way to an open-plan diner that brought in the light from the back garden.

Kim took a seat at a small, round dining table that seemed familiar. ‘Doesn’t your brother have this exact same table?’

Ella smiled. ‘Mine is solid oak. His is a knock-off from Argos.’

‘Oh, okay,’ Kim said, receiving more information than she’d needed.

Ella pointedly looked at her watch. The gesture annoyed Kim. Her brother wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was his grief.

‘We’re trying to bother your brother as little as possible and were hoping you could tell us more about Katrina. How would you describe her?’

‘Flaky. She was often distracted, glazed, as though she was only half there. I’m not the slightest bit surprised that she wandered off leaving Mia—’

‘We have no reason to believe that Katrina did anything wrong. Mia was never in any danger,’ Kim said, feeling the need to defend the woman.

Ella shrugged as though it mattered not.

‘She suffered from depression?’

Ella rolled her eyes. ‘Yes, different medicines over the last few years, but she wasn’t on anything at the minute. She’d weaned herself off the last lot of pills because of side effects and was trying to manage without the drugs. I thought it was the right decision: all that muck in her system just making stuff worse. I told her to snap out of it, get herself a hobby.’

Yeah, Kim was sure that a bit of knitting would fight the chemical imbalance in her brain.

‘And what was your brother’s view on her illness?’ Kim asked, using the word pointedly.

‘Urghh, he coddled her too much in my opinion. Taking time off work on her worst days, phoning her countless times a day to check on her.’

Sounded perfectly reasonable for a loving husband living with a person suffering from depression.

‘Sounds like a happy marriage?’ Kim stated as a question.

‘To them, perhaps.’