Nothing they’d done had contributed to this situation. The Chances had taken an opportunity to feather their own nest even if it meant breaking up a truly special bond. Unknowingly, she’d kept him here to face this, but the Chances would have done it anyway, and then he’d have been on the run.
But at least they would have been together, said a voice inside her.
‘I can’t even contact her, can I?’
Kim shook her head. The investigation had to take its course, but she was no longer convinced that Ava would be returned to him whatever they found.
‘Do I need to get a lawyer?’ he asked with a fresh wave of hope. As though doing something proactive would change the eventual outcome.
‘It wouldn’t hurt to consult one,’ Kim advised. ‘Get expert help on where you stand.’
He nodded his understanding before his thoughts returned to Ava. ‘She’s going to be so frightened and I can’t even comfort her.’
‘If it’ll help, we’ll try and check on her later,’ Kim offered.
‘Thank you,’ he said as her phone began to ring.
She excused herself and headed into the hallway. Her stomach lurched when she saw the name of the caller.
* * *
‘Stone,’ she answered. ‘And please tell me you’re calling with Ashley’s toxicology reports.’
‘All clear,’ he said. ‘Nothing to report.’
Her stomach returned to its rightful place.
‘But that’s not why I’m calling.’
‘Fucking hell, Keats,’ she snapped, heading out of the house. She knew that Bryant would make their apologies.
‘I request your presence. Behind the Dog and Duck, Brettle Lane.’
Kim ended the call as Bryant appeared.
She knew why she’d been summoned by Keats, and it wasn’t because he wanted to buy her a pint.
Thirty-Five
Stacey wasn’t sure what was causing her the most frustration. That she was spending time on a task she felt was pointless or that she wasn’t getting the results she needed to put this thing to bed.
She’d opened her laptop and waded through the various templates for forming a family tree. Finding one that was easily readable, she’d begun by putting in the information that was readily available. First she’d plugged in the information for Martha’s children, then Martha and her husband, before using the other computer to conduct searches on sites such as Ancestry.co.uk, MyHeritage.com and FindmyPast.co.uk. She’d felt like a hamster running from place to place getting a bit of info from here and then a tiny bit of data from somewhere else. But eventually a tree had started to form, with names tracing back to the late nineteenth century.
Next she’d trawled through records of births, marriages and deaths to add dates to the names she’d collected. And she had established an interesting timeline.
The Stout family had apparently been cursed in 1910. The following year, Evelyn’s husband, Edgar, the cause of the curse, died, aged forty-nine, in a public house from a timber beam falling on him.
Edgar and Evelyn had one son. Their son had two sons, and he died in 1940. The oldest son died in 1970 in a motorbike accident, leaving no children. He’d been thirty-seven. The younger son had twin boys before taking his own life aged forty-two. One twin died before the age of five, and the other was Samuel Stout, who had married Martha. He died in November 1999, aged forty-nine, leaving behind terminally ill Martin Stout, now aged thirty-nine; William Stout, who was now thirty-three; and Donna Stout, who was twenty-seven.
Stacey did the maths and realised that Samuel Stout had died when his youngest child was only two years old.
There was no pattern to the deaths of the Stout men. There were road accidents, sudden illnesses and one suicide.
There was no way Stacey was going to change her entire belief system because of a family who made decisions based off a century-old superstition… but one thing she now knew for sure.
Since the curse, no Stout man had ever lived beyond the age of fifty.
Thirty-Six
