Chapter 55
FIFTY-FIVE
The team had already started on the search while Gina had attended the briefing. PC Smith stood outside Pia and Simeon’s house, keeping the neighbours away. Jacob peered through the front door at all the police officers searching.
‘How’s it going?’ Gina asked.
‘You’re needed upstairs, in the spare bedroom at the far end of the house.’
Jacob ran behind Gina, straight up the stairs.
The crystal chandelier above them began to sway as a breeze whipped through the open doors.
She hurried past the huge suite to her left, spotting more police officers going through the wall of wardrobes and searching under the bed.
She passed another two rooms; one almost filled with cans of kombucha and another full of mobility aids, including a motorised scooter and a Zimmer frame.
Then she reached the room at the end, that would sit above the garage.
PC Benton had her back to them as she tended to a box full of bags ready to take in to the station.
‘What have you found?’ Gina spotted a toffee-flavoured disposable vape in a box, the same as the one found close by to where Kain’s body was discovered in the boot of Maura’s car.
PC Benton turned. ‘There is a loft hatch in here, guv. It looks like this suite was added on as an extension and the roof was extended too. After shining a torch up there, I found a box marked Baz.’
‘What was in it?’
‘You can see here.’ She began pulling the clear evidence bags out. ‘A blister pack of sleeping tablets.’
‘What else?’
Jacob moved in a little closer to see what PC Benton had found.
‘There’s an empty night-vision goggle box. Several photos of two boys. There are files of notes on Fabien Stone and Craig Crawford. They were being stalked by the looks of it. There’s also a small key ring with a blue teddy bear on the end. It looks really old and stained.’
‘That’s where the teddy bears came from. Also, there’s an empty bag with a picture of those bears on the front. It looks like he ran out of blue ones and moved on to pink. There are only three of each colour.’
‘I suspect he intended to use only three until everything grew out of hand.’ Gina flinched as her phone rang in her pocket. She pulled it out and held it to her ear while Kapoor reeled off the Yates’s business premises.
‘Guv,’ PC Smith shouted from downstairs. ‘We’ve been looking at a tablet that was on the stairs and it appears to belong to Justine Crawford. There’s a message with an address on it. We know where’s she’s going and she’s already there.’
‘Where?’
‘The kombucha factory on Stokes Lane.’
‘That’s where Kapoor just said to go.’ Her heart began to thrum as she and Jacob ran as fast as they could back to her car.
As she pulled out of the road, Jacob called Wyre to arrange for a team to head there now. He ended the call and frowned. ‘Why now? Simeon Yates knew that Zavier Sellers, Kain Pickering and Briggs had been brought up during the inquest for his brother’s death. Why did he wait so long?’
Gina was as puzzled as Jacob when it came to that question. Only Simeon could answer that question and they needed to find him before he killed again.