Page 135 of Stolen Ones

‘I’m not saying that for sure. I’m saying that it didn’t happen in the way he described.’

Kim felt the dread forming in the pit of her stomach. ‘What about sexual assault?’

‘Harte didn’t do that.’

‘But someone else might have?’

Alison shrugged. ‘It’s possible.’

‘Boss,’ Penn said. ‘What if Harte and Butler really were in it together? Maybe Harte abducted them and once he’d had his fill of looking at them, he allowed Butler to abuse them and then kill them.’

‘Given Harte’s reasons for taking the girls in the first place, that doesn’t add up. I know he’s just admitted to killing them but in a very quick, clean way. I’m just not sure about him allowing anyone to defile their beauty.’

‘But it would explain why he’s not giving a very convincing account of the murders,’ Alison argued.

Kim’s own sense of his warped integrity did not agree with the evidence, and she didn’t like where that thought led.

‘Shit. You know what this means, don’t you, guys?’ she asked, grabbing her jacket.

‘Boss?’ Stacey asked.

‘It means that Grace Lennard isn’t as safe as we thought.’

Eighty-Two

‘Is she okay?’ Penn asked, overtaking a bus that had pulled in to pick up passengers.

The boss had asked them to keep Grace on screen while he and Stacey headed over to Butler’s builders. The boss and Bryant were heading straight for the property.

‘She’s pacing at the moment,’ Stacey said. ‘I wish I could reach in and reassure her that everything is going to be okay, that she’s being watched by the good guys now.’

He nodded. He felt the same way.

‘I just have this awful feeling that we’ve missed him, that he’s on his way and—’

‘Stace, stop it. Just focus on the fact that right now we can see her and she’s safe.’

He had the same feeling, and although he kept telling himself that by using the M5 and M42 Alvechurch was only about twenty-five minutes away, it felt a long way the boss was travelling right about now.

‘What happened when you called his phone?’ Penn asked.

Before they’d left, Stacey had tried to make contact with Butler, to ask him a couple more questions to gauge if he was in the car or somewhere other than the office.

‘The first time it rang out until it cut off, and second time it went straight to voicemail.’

He really didn’t want to speak to them right now.

‘What about the landline to the business?’

‘Answerphone.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Penn said, wishing the car would eat up the miles to Quinton a bit quicker.

Stacey put Grace on her lap as she reached for her own ringing phone.

‘Go ahead, boss,’ she said after putting it on loudspeaker.

‘You got him yet?’