‘Tell her why,’ Lucinda urged.
‘I got home early one night. Just a feeling in my stomach. Abby had tied a noose to the ceiling fan in the bedroom and sat the boys in front of it.
‘The stage was set for another suicide attempt to be rescued from. She’d have the attention she craved. But the boys would have seen everything, so yes, I punched her. Yes, I knocked her out and then spent the next six months in anger management therapy. It’s not something I’d ever do again.’
Lucinda squeezed his arm, but Kim wasn’t so easily convinced. His rage sometimes reached a level that was beyond his control.
‘Thanks for sharing that. I still need to know where you were on Sunday night.’
‘I was here.’
‘So was I,’ Lucinda said, even though Kim hadn’t asked her. ‘I mean, I can confirm that,’ she corrected herself.
‘Is there anyone who can corroborate that?’
They both shook their heads.
Kim thanked them for their time and headed for the door, not convinced by either them or their alibi.
There was a lot of anger around that kitchen table and not all of it came from Joe.
The man had already shown he was capable of violence against women, and Lucinda would follow him wherever he led. Maybe Penn’s two-person theory held more weight than she’d thought.
Twenty-Eight
Penn would swear there was some kind of vacuum device at every entrance to the Hollytree Estate. It had been bad enough in his early police days, a time when idealistic council workers had still felt that there was a point to throwing regeneration money at it. When every attempt to improve the estate was met with vandalism, graffiti and anti-social behaviour, those schemes had died away.
By the time he returned to the force from West Mercia, it had turned into the area that time forgot.
The shops on the east side were now all boarded up, and that was the better part of the area. As you travelled west into the estate, it was like moving further away from civilisation, until you reached the furthest point where the maisonettes backed up to the railway tracks, by far the roughest part.
And that was where he was headed now as he felt those vacuums sucking out every ounce of light and hope from his body.
He drove towards the West End, as the locals called it, trying not to look too closely at the stray dogs milling around or the school-age kids playing in groups, wearing shorts and tee shirts despite the December chill. In this part of Hollytree, few parents sent their kids to school and very few teachers argued with them. They simply gave them a piece of paper to sign which absolved them of responsibility and thereby widened the crack that many of these children were allowed to fall through.
Despite their young ages, every single one of them eyed him suspiciously as he passed by. Distrust of unknown vehicles and especially police was cultivated early on Hollytree.
He found the address he was after in the end block of maisonettes with the rail track less than twenty feet away. He really was at the furthest point away from civilisation in a place where no one would hear you scream. The words ‘and he was never seen again’ went through his mind as he got out of the car and locked it.
The path from the car park to the block was littered with black bags dumped in the general area of the bin store. Nothing another ten paces wouldn’t have fixed. More hazardous than the bags were the piles of faeces, and he wasn’t willing to bet that it had all come from the dogs.
Warren and Lyra Chance’s place was the second dwelling along. Three rusty bikes leaned against the wall between their property and the next. A carrier bag of rubbish had been tossed out of the front door. The smell of old meat reached his nostrils.
As he knocked on the door, he had never been more thankful for the childhood he’d had and the life he led now.
The door was opened by a man a good five inches taller than him and probably twice as thin.
Penn’s first thought was that his height would have made him quite the imposing figure, demanding money in the darkness. The man pushed his greasy black hair behind a pierced ear before folding his arms.
‘If you’re here to tell us Ash’s dead, we already know. Saw it on the news.’ His stance said that if that was his only order of business, Penn wasn’t getting in the door.
‘I’m sorry for your loss, Mr Chance, and I don’t want to intrude on your grief, but could I ask you…?’
‘Fucking hell, me dinner’s getting cold, so you’d best come in,’ he said, leaving the door open.
Penn closed the door behind him and followed the man into a room that had left no surface uncluttered.
Lyra Chance more than filled the single armchair where she sat with a KFC bargain bucket on her lap. Warren took a packet of fries from the bucket before sitting on the only other seat empty of clothing.
