‘Yes, I’ll make sure he’s okay then I’ll get back here.’
‘No, you can go to the station and start looking at everything we have. Usually I’d ask Amy to do it. Someone should go through Lynsey’s social media. Can you do that for me? See if she has any weirdos stalking her page, talking crap that kind of thing.’
‘Yes.’
She looked at Cain. ‘I’ll take him home.’
‘Do you want a hand?’
Morgan shook her head. ‘I’ll be fine, I need to go back and start a deep dive through all of the stuff anyway.’
‘Ring me if you need me, okay?’
‘I will.’
He passed her the car keys, and she got into the driver’s seat, glancing at Scotty in the rear-view mirror. ‘Let me know if you’re going to be sick or anything, I’ll pull over.’
‘I’m okay, it’s just the shock.’
She nodded. ‘I can’t imagine how you’re feeling.’
Scotty didn’t answer and she didn’t push him to keep talking, but wondered how close he was to the Williams sisters.
As she drove into Rydal Falls, she asked, ‘Where do you live?’
As if waking him from a trance he looked out of the window. ‘Not here, out of my price range. I’m on the old council estate on the outskirts.’
Morgan laughed. ‘Sorry.’
He shrugged. ‘My fault, I didn’t even realise where we were.’ He gave her the address.
‘Do I need to type it in the satnav or can you direct me?’
‘I’ll tell you; it’s a bit awkward as it’s a narrow little street. You can drop me off at the top of it and I’ll walk down. The fresh air will do me good I think.’
She drove to the main road that led her back and followed Scotty’s directions until she finally reached the end of the road he lived on.
‘You can stop here, I’ll jump out.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Will you be okay?’
He laughed. ‘I think so. How do you do it, Morgan? Honestly, I’ve never really had to think about it before but now that I have…’ He stopped talking.
‘I know what you mean, but I do it for the families and loved ones that get left behind.’
He nodded. ‘Thanks for the lift, at least I’m home to let the dog out.’ Then he walked away, shoulders slumped, head down, in full uniform, and she wondered if his neighbours knew he was a copper. If they didn’t, they would now.
She drove away, still feeling sorry for him but determined to find out why someone would want to kill an entire family, because the more she thought about the car accident that had taken the lives of Mr and Mrs Williams, the more she wondered if it had been the beginning of this reign of terror and if they had been killed on purpose.
TWENTY-THREE
Morgan felt a little guilty making herself a coffee and sitting at her desk in the empty office when the others were still at the crime scene. It was heaven though; it gave her a chance to think without the constant banter of Cain in the background. She loved it, but now and again a bit of solitude was nice. She was struggling with this case, but she closed her eyes and thought back to all of the past cases she’d solved. All of the killers she had tracked down and put behind bars where they belonged.You can do this, Morgan, you really can. Focus on the facts and save the guilt for later, feeling guilty won’t catch whoever this is.
Firing up her computer, she stared at the knackered old whiteboard with pictures of Lydia, Sharon, Jack and Lauren sellotaped to it. She stood up and peeled off both Jack’s and Sharon’s pictures, moving them to the left side. Beth Montgomery had confessed to killing her daughter, Sharon, and Lydia and Jack before killing herself, but there was far more to this than they ever could have anticipated. Beth was mentally unwell, that much was certain, her NHS records had confirmed that she was under the mental health team and on an assortment of meds to help her that she had hidden from everyone in her family. But someone knew about it, someone knew she wasvulnerable, and Morgan thought that whoever it was had played Beth in the cruellest way possible. Convincing her to kill her own daughter, or to at least pretend that she had to cover up the real killer’s motive of wanting to wipe out the entire Williams family. Sharon and Jack were red herrings to throw the police off the real purpose of the murders, she could see that clearly now. So, who had access to Beth, who would know she was struggling? Morgan began searching through Beth’s intel file, which wasn’t very long because up until that awful morning when she’d attacked Morgan and taken her own life, she hadn’t been in trouble. Morgan wondered if the housekeeper, Marie, knew any of this; she would be a good person to talk to off the record maybe. There was nothing in Beth’s file, no previous arrests, no reports, but someone had influenced Beth. They had to have, so how was she going to discover who it was? The high-tech unit hadn’t sent a report over yet after Beth’s mobile phone and iPad had been seized for evidence. She picked up the phone and rang Bev, her old friend, who had transferred to work up at headquarters.
