Page 87 of Three Widows

‘Stop, Lottie. We have to call this in, before we disrupt anything else.’

‘She could be lying injured or… I have to look.’ Taking careful steps, she backtracked and made her way around the breakfast bar to the door Boyd had indicated.

‘Gloves,’ he said, and handed her a fresh pair in a packet he’d taken from his jacket pocket.

‘Bit late now.’ But she tugged them on over her sweaty hands with some difficulty and depressed the handle.

‘It’s a utility room all right, but it’s empty. More blood here too. I’ll have a look upstairs. You call it in.’

Without listening to his protestations, she backed out, careful to walk only where she’d already done so. At the top of the stairs, she found four doors.

The bathroom door was open. She glanced inside. Nothing to note. The box room seemed to be used as a storage space. The next door was shut tightly, and when she tried to enter, she found it locked. Interesting. She moved to what she supposed was the biggest room, which looked out over the front garden. A large double bed, unmade. Clothing littered the floor. A bloodied cloth was scrunched up in a bin under the dressing table. It was hard to tell if a struggle had occurred, such was the disarray around her feet.

Standing outside the locked room, she called to Boyd. ‘Need you up here.’

‘Find anything?’

‘Nothing much other than an untidy bedroom with a bloody cloth in a bin. Can you open this door?’

‘We need probable cause to break it down.’

‘We got a key from her mother to enter the house. We believed Helena might have been taken by someone who has already murdered two women. With the blood downstairs, we have more than enough cause to enter this room.’

He huffed, and she knew he wasn’t happy.

‘Just do it. Please.’

He moved back a few steps, then hefted his shoulder against the light wooden door. It crashed open with negligible resistance.

She found herself in a child’s room. Toys, cartoon quilt on the bed and Winnie-the-Pooh decor on the walls. And a half-empty bottle of vodka on the floor at the foot of the bed.

‘Didn’t her mother say she had no child?’

‘Something weird is going on in this family,’ Boyd said.

‘One of them is lying. This room is obviously a child’s. The garden also has stuff relevant to a child. Why the lies?’

‘We need to find out. And it’s likely Helena is injured.’

‘Try her phone again.’

He did. ‘It’s dead.’

They left as Lynch turned up to take control. A meticulous search of the house got under way while SOCOs examined the blood.

‘Fuck, Boyd,’ Lottie said. ‘I don’t like this one bit.’

56

Kirby had taken the call from Lottie about the Keating house, and he cursed the amount of work he had piling up. He banged the photocopier lid in irritation and wandered over to Martina, who was tapping loudly on his computer keyboard.

‘Who does she think I am?’ he grumbled. ‘Of course the house was searched.’

‘She’s just being thorough, now that we’ve found Tyler’s car in a lock-up used by a murder victim.’

‘I can’t figure out why the car is there, or for how long.’ He moved away and sat at Boyd’s desk, marvelling at how his friend kept it so neat and clean.

Martina added, ‘It wasn’t there since the day he disappeared, because Jennifer only rented the unit eleven months ago.’