Page 66 of Dying Truth

Oh Sadie, I see now that I did you a favour. You were too unhappy to live.

I know you so much better now from reading your innermost thoughts. I understand your pain, and I know that you thank me for setting you free.

And now you’re not alone. You have your good friend Shaun to keep you company.

It wasn’t the same, though, Sadie. You were the first and you were special. Very special.

Shaun fought so much harder than you. He made it so bloody hard. My sense of satisfaction and righteousness, enjoyed and relished after your death, was nowhere to be found. He didn’t follow my script.

If he’d just stayed calm and eaten the fucking nuts – but he clamped his mouth shut. If he’d just chewed them I wouldn’t have had to get rough, but his teeth were welded together because he understood that he was about to die.

He tried to run past me, back into the hall, but I blocked his way and threw him to the ground. I lay across him using my weight to pin him down. I forced a handful of peanuts into his mouth and held it closed, one hand on his head and one beneath his chin.

He chewed and whimpered as the nuts began to go down and he realised the horror that was to come.

And horrific it was. I stood aside as he writhed and shook and dribbled and trembled and tried to crawl towards me, his face contorted with pain and fear. But eventually he stilled.

And as his small body fell against the tiled floor I heard the sound of the gym hall door close.

Someone must have heard us, and I need to find out who.

Forty-Five

Kim parked outside St Paul’s Chambers on Caroline Street in the Jewellery Quarter.

‘I remember it in the old days,’ Bryant moaned as they got out of the car.

She understood what he meant. The area was moving towards urban chic with apartment blocks, cafés and bistros where there had once been craftsmen and artists.

The building they were here for was a new development a stone’s throw from the leafy oasis of St Paul’s Square, the last remaining Georgian square in Birmingham. It housed eight high specification apartments, with the penthouse being a cool 3,300 square feet worth more than a million pounds. And that was the one they were here to visit.

‘How the hell are we going to tell them how their son died, guv?’ Bryant asked as she hit the button on the intercom.

‘All we’ve got is the truth,’ she replied before introducing herself and Bryant to the male voice on the other end. The electronic buzzing signalled their acceptance into a hallway that boasted a very different kind of art to what they were used to seeing in apartment buildings. No crudely drawn genitalia and swastika motifs here.

Kim spotted the camera in the elevator as she stepped in and pressed the button market ‘P’. No number, no floor, just a ‘P’. Kim only knew the elevator was moving once it landed silently on the top floor and the doors opened with little more than a welcoming whoosh.

‘Just like Hollytree,’ Bryant observed, sarcastically.

The lift deposited them in a small hallway with one apartment door and a fire exit escape to the right.

Before she had chance to knock, the door was opened by a man she recognised from the local television news.

AnthonyCoffee-Todd struck her immediately as a man fighting his mid-forties. The depth of brown of his hair contradicted the smattering of grey in his stubble. The slightly receding hairline was not fooled by the forward combing of the hair.

She understood that being in the public eye added pressure to maintaining youthful good looks when your face was being broadcast to millions of viewers, but in the stark daylight in his own home without the assistance of clever lighting and a professional make-up person, his age was staring him in the face.

Unlike LouiseCoffee-Todd, whose youthful skin matched her thirty-four years.

She understood that this was Anthony’s second family. His other son had moved to Australia with his mother when the family had broken up fifteen years earlier. Right around the time Louise had started at the television studios as a runner.

‘Please, come in,’ he said, standing back for them to enter.

She stepped right into a vast open space with stark white walls holding a selection of black and white art. The furniture was placed at the centre of the room on the largest rug she had ever seen. Three sets of double doors stretched across the space that led out onto the roof terrace. Somewhere in the distance Kim spotted an arch that led into a kitchen.

She tried to stop her biker boots from sounding on the wooden floor as she approached the island of carpet in the middle where Mrs Coffee-Todd stood waiting for them.

‘Please sit,’ she said, pointing to one of the four sofas.