Page 52 of First Blood

She held out her hand and Kim shook it.

The grip was dry and firm.

‘Mrs Forbes, could we?…’

‘Marianne, please,’ she said, nodding for them both to take a seat.

Jason, the security guard, closed the door to the handsome office that Kim guessed might previously have been a library.

‘We’d like to talk to you about your uncle.’

Her face tightened slightly and Kim noted that she worked hard to relax herself.

‘Isn’t the case being dealt with by a different force? I’ve already spoken to detectives from West Mercia.’

Kim suddenly thought of Sergeant Greene, the first officer on the scene. And now it was a West Mercia case.

‘We’re investigating what we feel might be a similar crime.’

‘There are two…’ she interrupted and then stopped herself.

‘Two?’ Kim asked.

She shook her head. ‘Never mind I haven’t seen my uncle for years, as I told the other officers, so I’m not sure exactly how I can help.’

‘It was a particularly brutal murder, Marianne.’

‘So I was told but I’ve had no involvement with my uncle since I was sixteen years old.’

‘Didn’t you live with him after the death of your parents?’

She nodded. ‘My uncle took me in for his own reasons, some of which were financial. My mother and he came from humble beginnings, but my mother married well. My uncle never did anything to help himself towards a better life and their deaths were quite fortuitous for him.’

Kim was surprised at the bluntness of this woman’s words.

‘But surely there were some people that liked him?’ Bryant asked.

‘If there were I don’t know them. Just as I don’t know who would do this to him. I hadn’t seen the man for over thirty years.’

Kim was sensing a strange dynamic here. What she wanted to find out was whether his murder was in any way connected to her own case, but something in this woman’s manner was tinging the alarm bells in her head.

‘But weren’t you grateful to him for taking you in when you lost?—’

‘I am grateful to him for nothing although many people here are,’ she said, rising from her seat. ‘Come with me.’

Kim was confused but followed anyway.

Marianne led her across the hallway to the security room next door. Of a similar size to Marianne’s office this room would once have been a small drawing room. Marianne’s office still held some of the period features of the property but this room was all business.

Jason sat at a curved desk surrounded by computer screens, each showing a quad display. The first covered the outside of the property: front and rear. Kim saw that the camera they had shown their identification to was actually installed within the gate.

The cameras at the rear looked on to a walled garden and were sweeping the entire area.

Marianne stood to the side of her.

‘Obviously I’m not going to let you through to the house as that would only unnerve the women but I just want you to see what we do.’

She pointed to the kitchen.