Page 64 of Stolen Ones

‘But we don’t have that,’ Penn said. ‘The boss put him in the room and the camera started rolling.’

Alison smiled. ‘Luckily for me your boss decided to keep him waiting for a while in the foyer. It’s not much; I can only gauge some non-verbal behaviours, but it’s enough to detect marked change in his interview demeanour.’

‘So did he do it?’ Stacey asked, leaning forward.

Alison laughed. ‘I’ve been here a couple of hours, watched his interviews once and you want me to answer a question like that?’

‘Okay, is there any question you can answer?’

‘Ask me if there are any particular indicators of deceit.’

‘Are there?’

‘Yep, about ten of them.’

‘And?’

‘So far, our man in there has shown just about every one of them.’

Thirty-Six

‘Who do you reckon Woody had to sleep with to get this through so quickly?’ Bryant asked as they headed to the home of Steven Harte.

‘I think it falls under the don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy.’

‘Do we have one of those?’

‘We’re not the bloody army,’ she said, rolling her eyes.

But she’d thought pretty much the same thing after Woody’s call as they left the premises of Butler Building Limited.

Quite frankly, she didn’t care what body part he’d sold to get the search warrant. He’d assured her it would be at the premises by the time they got there, and right now they were no more than a few minutes away from his address in Wombourne. She used the time to offer up a silent prayer that they were about to find Grace Lennard alive and well and completely unharmed.

‘Bit too easy, guv,’ Bryant said, voicing the nagging thoughts in her head.

‘Shut up, Bryant,’ she snapped.

He did as she’d asked until he passed three police vehicles and Mitch’s van. The gate to the property was already open and their lead forensic tech was already here.

‘How did they get the gates…?Oh, I see,’ Bryant said, taking a better look.

Metal plates had been removed to reveal the mechanism that could be wound manually.

They passed through the gates and stopped as Inspector Weaver waved them down.

‘You’ll be wanting this, I expect,’ he said, passing her the search warrant through the window. ‘We’re cracking on with the external search, but the front door has been accessed ready for you. No one has entered.’

‘Are the dogs contained?’ she asked of Rocky and Tyson, his two Dobermans.

‘No dogs, marm,’ he said, shaking his head.

‘Thanks,’ she said, closing the window. Another lie he’d told her.

Bryant moved forward slowly as Kim thought how strange it was to now be on this side of the wall after trying her hardest to just get a looky through the hedge barrier during the night.

She already knew that it was by far the grandest, most expensive property they’d ever visited.

‘How much?’ she asked her colleague.