Chapter 57
FIFTY-SEVEN
Gina stood back as PC Ahmed bashed the door open with the battering ram.
O’Connor and Wyre stood back and Jacob kept close.
Several uniformed police officers proceeded.
As they stormed in Gina shouted, ‘Police,’ several times.
PC Ahmed found the light switch. The vinegary aroma hit her straight away.
She gazed around the small unit, and saw several kombucha tanks.
‘Check them all. He likes to drown his victims,’ Jacob yelled as O’Connor and Wyre began to climb up the ladders attached to the framework.
‘What’s in there?’ Gina ran towards the door that one of the PCs had come back through.
‘An office and a toilet. They’re clear.’
Gina hurried through and spotted a phone on the floor.
She reached down and picked it up. ‘It looks like a burner phone. There’s only a couple of numbers in it.
’ She ran over to the desk and glanced at a letter in a tray.
‘Simeon Yates is sick. He has stomach cancer.’ She popped the NHS letter back down.
‘Guv.’ Wyre hurried in to her. ‘We’ve checked all the tanks. It’s just kombucha at various stages of fermentation. There’s nothing else in there.’
‘Where are they?’ Gina did a three sixty degree-turn, taking everything in. She’d been sure that Simeon had to have brought his victims here. ‘Justine’s messenger told her to come here for midnight. We’re too late.’
O’Connor hurried in. ‘Guv, you have to see this.’
Gina darted into the kombucha room and stared at the barely noticeable streak of blood leading from the middle of the room to the door.
The blood streak continued to where Simeon’s car would have been parked.
‘Where the hell has he taken her?’ She called Kapoor.
‘We’ve just gained entry. They’ve gone. Is there another premises attached to the business? ’
‘Not that I can see, guv.’
‘Go and ask Pia. We need her to speak. There are lives at stake.’
As Kapoor left the call on hold, Gina took her phone back with her to the office where she began to search through all the paperwork with Wyre and O’Connor.
‘Guv.’ Kapoor was back on the call. ‘She said they only have the one premises but Simeon had been looking into another. It’s close to where their unit is but she doesn’t know where. He was going to take her next week.’
‘Thanks.’ Gina ended the call and addressed the room. ‘He has another premises. Keep digging through these files. There has to be a record of this other place.’
Wyre tried to turn the computer on but the password box came up. ‘Damn.’
O’Connor began rooting through the desk drawers.
Gina opened the filing cabinets and nothing was marked up. She grabbed the thickest folder and a flurry of debt collector letters from Fabien’s company spilled out. ‘Their kombucha business is on its knees. Simeon Yates had a reason to set up both Fabien and Kain.’
‘Guv.’ O’Connor held a piece of paper up. ‘The other unit is on Herald Road, about a quarter of a mile away from here.’
Gina ran to her car with Jacob. The others followed. Her heart banged at the idea of turning up to find more dead bodies.