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‘Stace, I’m out of ideas,’ he said honestly.
‘Penn, I know for a fact that you’d keep looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack if someone told you it was definitely in there, but there’s no guarantee here. You can keep looking or…’
‘I can move on to one of the other twenty jobs the boss gave us.’
‘Exactly,’ Stacey said, closing the door behind her.
He decided to focus on the staff. Apparently Lenny Baldwin had hinted that there were skeletons in that particular closet.
He put aside the piles of paperwork that pertained to the boys and grabbed the box filled with his first miscellaneous pile. These documents had been quickly cast aside when there had been no obvious mention of the names he’d been looking for.
A third of the way down, he came across an official report carried out by the Health and Safety Executive. It was a document formed of twenty pages or more and focussed on an investigation into the safety of the north wing staircase. It wasn’t a document he’d expected to yield any results, but now he looked at it a little closer.
He turned over the first page to reveal the name of the prison officer who’d been fatally injured due to falling down the north wing staircase.
He clutched the report, then tore out of the room and down the stairs.
For this he needed his colleague’s help.
EIGHTY
‘You’re not going to tell me why we came here?’ Bryant asked, pulling away from the kerb.
‘Absolutely. Just as soon as you give me your best guess as to how Vik missed the Stacey shrine at Birch’s house.’
Silence.
‘Thought so. We’ll just accept it was a welfare check, eh?’
‘Good luck with getting anyone who’s met you to swallow that one.’
Kim was saved from answering by the ringing of her phone. She held her breath. Anyone other than Keats was welcome.
‘Go ahead, Stace,’ she said, letting out the breath.
‘Just been doing some further checking on the guys you’re going to see, boss. Nothing new on Elliot, but his mate, Gordon Banks, seems to have disappeared from all the social-media platforms he used to be on. It’s like he was never there.’
‘Okay,’ Kim said, frowning. She’d barely given the quiet guy in the Angels office a thought.
‘Thanks, Stace,’ she said before ending the call.
She turned to Bryant. ‘How the hell did this guy escape our attention?’
‘Cos his only crime was to not be very talkative in your presence. If we questioned—’
‘Bryant, shut up,’ she said, lowering her window.
The stench of burning had seeped into the car. They were less than half a mile away from the headquarters of the Black Country Angels.
‘Just a coincidence, guv,’ Bryant said, putting his foot down, belying his own words.
The smell grew stronger the closer they got.
A cordon was set up at the end of the road.
‘Shit,’ Kim said, jumping out and heading towards the police officers with her ID in her hand. She didn’t need it, as they immediately stepped aside.
Two fire engines were aiming their hoses towards the premises of the Black Country Angels.
