Page 93 of Dying Truth

Stacey hesitated and then began calling out instructions.

‘Hang on, Stace, let me put you on loudspeaker so I can hypothetically do it while you talk.’

Stacey started from the beginning and spoke slowly.

Four instructions later and the screen burst into life.

‘Stace, that was worryingly easy,’ Kim observed.

‘Only if you know what you’re doing,’ Stacey said. ‘Hypothetically, of course.’

Kim smiled and ended the call.

‘Nice to see,’ Bryant observed.

‘What?’

‘A smile on your face. First one today.’

‘Yeah, it was wind,’ she said.

‘Ha, it was because you’re doing something you shouldn’t be.’

She had to concede he had a point.

Kim wasn’t surprised that Joanna’s wallpaper was a gorgeous woman in a bathing suit. She went straight for the internet search engine, which clearly Joanna didn’t clear out very often.

‘She was on Tinder,’ Kim observed.

‘Who isn’t?’ Bryant asked.

‘Me,’ she said.

‘Or me,’ he answered

She continued to scroll and spoke as she went. ‘Darts tournaments, Airbnb in Fife, how to cook a perfect beef Wellington and—’ she stopped speaking.

She turned to Keats as he entered the room with three cups.

‘Keats, could Joanna have been pregnant?’ she asked, unlikely as it might be.

He frowned. ‘I can’t say for sure, but my initial examination didn’t offer any indication. No noticeable bulge of the tummy.’

Kim shook her head. ‘Not her then,’ she said, handing Bryant the phone.

His eyes widened. ‘She searched seven different sites about illegal terminations. But why…’

Kim shook her head as she looked from the phone to the piece of paper. There was something here that she was missing.

Why had Sadie written this poem? What exactly had she been trying to say?

Sixty-Four

‘You know, guv, this might be a good time,’ Bryant said as they got back in the car. ‘Just while we’ve got a spare minute.’

‘For what?’ she asked.

She had put the copy of Sadie’s poem in her pocket. She had read the words so many times she was no longer even seeing them.