‘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.
FIFTY-EIGHT
JUSTINE
‘In another life, I think we could have been a thing, Justine. I might have kissed you back and we could have got married. Pia was never right for me, but you care. You’re all about family. I wanted a family but Pia didn’t.’ He set the hoist contraption that he’d obviously engineered to lift her up. It buzzed until it snapped into place. ‘I knew we kept all this crap for a reason. It’s come in handy thanks to Pia’s poor dead mother.’ He laughed as he turned the main light on.
‘Please, stop this,’ she said with a sob, knowing it was too late. A few bangs in the distance made her jump.
He tilted his head. ‘We’ve gone over this already, Justine.’ He paused. ‘It’s just death. We’re all going to die. I’ll die soon; you’ll already be dead. By fighting death, we’re just delaying the inevitable.’ He scrunched his brow. ‘A diagnosis like mine can make a person pretty philosophical.’
He went on about how he’d dragged Kain to the car, how he’d killed someone called Zavier. He mentioned another man she didn’t know called Briggs. It got harder for Justine to understand what he was wittering on about as he became more erratic. ‘You’re insane.’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe so but that’s irrelevant. Thank you for the insult. Insane is leaving a man who can’t even stand up, high on drugs and drink, lying on his back in a cell, but we don’t talk about that. Insane is putting up with a serial cheat and insane is helping pond scum. Kain was beyond help but you were so nicey-nicey, just because you had a drink problem yourself all those years ago. I hate that no one was there to help me but I won’t go on about that again. When I see you, I hate you. I hate that you couldn’t do a better job of being a wife because if you had, your husband wouldn’t be all over the place like a horny dog.’ He began to turn her in the hoist.
She knew she’d be dangling over the tank very soon. Her eyelids felt heavy as the tablet started taking effect. Tears slipped down her cheeks.
He climbed up the ladder next to the tank and came face to face with her. ‘I wasn’t joking when I said you’d be joining Lindy. Look down?’
Justine opened her mouth to scream. Panicked breaths escaped through her lips. The stench of the slime that had mixed in with Lindy’s floating hair made her baulk. She couldn’t go in the tank. ‘No, no, no, don’t do this to me. I’m begging you, Simeon.’ She grabbed him. ‘One last hug for old time’s sake.’
She sank into his chest, not wanting to let him go because as soon as she let go, she was going to die in the most horrible way ever. Her knuckle brushed the metal of the crowbar. She thought of Danny and the tank in the other room slowly filling up. Had it filled up yet? It was no use pleading with him. She was done with pleading. Simeon wanted both of them dead because he was losing his shit. She couldn’t help the yawn she let out.
‘Time to go, sleepyhead. I’ll see you on the other side, probably in hell. You tried to help scum, you married scum and now it’s time to die in scum and pay your debt in full.’
She reached across and snatched the crowbar at the same time he unbuckled her. She slashed his face before gasping as she hit the cold, slimy water. A huge splash followed as the liquid sloshed over the top. She listened for Simeon but she couldn’t hear a thing. She wanted to scream as she came face to face with Lindy’s dead-eyed stare. It was no good trying to climb out, her vision was already prickling. She let out the tiniest of snores and her eyelids closed. The fight was over.
