Page 137 of Dying Truth

‘Yeah,’ they all said together.

Dawson detected not one ounce of regret amongst them. To them it was a staple of school life, go to lessons, go to lunch, bully the fat kid.

‘Listen here, you bunch of little shits,’ Dawson said, turning on them all. ‘Dismiss him all you like right now while he’s the fat kid and the butt of your jokes, but some day that kid is going to do something amazing with his life and boy will you wish you’d given him a chance. You poke fun at him to take attention away from yourselves in your pathetic little clan. Oh, and just so you know, this week he got the ace of spades, so someone else thinks he’s pretty special too.’

He now had the boys’ full attention, speaking a language they could understand. If nothing else, they knew how influential a club member could be. He chose not to add that the kid had refused. The shock on their faces was enough reward as they all wondered what his new-found power could mean for them.

‘So, where is he?’

‘Sports hall,’ the iPad kid spluttered. ‘He said something about the sports hall.’

Dawson turned and headed out of the room. A sense of urgency in his step.

Ninety-Eight

‘Should I come too?’ asked Mr Coffee-Todd as Mr and Mrs Winters got to their feet.

Kim opened her mouth to advise him when Winters’s shake of the head and warning glance told him no.

The three of them headed down the aisle together. Kim slowed to accommodate Mrs Winters’s four-inch heels.

Thorpe appeared in the doorway, resplendent in his tuxedo.

Seeing her face, he frowned. ‘Inspector, is everything—?’

‘Saffron Winters has gone missing,’ she said. ‘No one has seen her for hours.’

His face relaxed. ‘Officer, amongst the chaos of a big production it’s understandable that people get mislaid for a short while. She’s probably off somewhere composing herself.’

‘Thank you,’ Kim said, stepping around him. He really had nothing useful to offer.

‘Should we try her room first?’ Mrs Winters asked, holding her gown a few inches from the floor to keep up.

Kim stopped walking and shook her head. It was the first place Bryant would go. There was no point them all looking in the same place.

‘Try her phone again,’ Kim said, moving aside for more couples to enter the room.

Mr Winters did so and put the phone to his ear.

‘Continually ringing out,’ he said, after about fifteen seconds.

‘Damn it,’ Kim said, trying to think above the noise.

Although Lorraine Peters died before Saffron was even born, Kim knew that something about the girl was connected to the death of her own sister, Shaun, and probably Joanna Wade.

Kim toyed for a minute with the ethics of sharing what they’d learned, but the situation warranted it. She turned to the parents of the missing girl. ‘I’m sorry but I have to ask, are you aware that Saffron recently had a termination, an illegal one?’

The initial shock on their faces was not at the information. It was atherhaving the information.

‘We know, Inspector. She asked us to arrange it; but how is that connected to—’

‘Sadie knew,’ Kim said. ‘She was angry; she wrote poems about it and tried to confront her sister.’

‘But we kept it away from her,’ Hannah said as her hand rose to her mouth.

‘I’m afraid you didn’t,’ Kim said.

Right now, she had no clue how it all related to the death of a pregnant girl twenty-five years ago, but somehow she knew it did.