Tom’s face went through something that took a moment to complete. Mrs. Clark had been part of the Morrison household since before Tom and Victoria had married. She’d been there when Sienna and Clive were born. She’d been at every Christmas and every family gathering and every ordinary Tuesday for decades.
“How?” Tom asked. “What happened?” His breathing became more rapid. “Was it murder?”
“We’re still establishing the full details,” Holt replied carefully. “Lucy is conducting the examination tonight.”
Tom looked at his hands for a moment. Then he looked back at Holt with the expression of a man arriving at a conclusion he didn’t want to arrive at.
“So you do suspect murder, and I’m guessing your number one suspect is Victoria,” Tom guessed.
Holt didn’t confirm or deny it. He held Tom’s gaze and let the silence do what it needed to do.
Tom was quiet for a long moment.
“It looks that way,” Holt told him honestly.
“What do you need from me?” Tom asked, finally.
“We need access to the full security system,” Holt told him. “Everything the house has recorded. Not just the garage footage, Sienna provided. The complete system, every camera, every log entry.”
Tom nodded immediately. “Of course.” He stood. “I’ll take you to the control room. It’s off the kitchen corridor.”
He led them through the house, and Holt noted the details of the space as they moved through it, the rooms that had been put back to rights after the forensic team, the surfaces that were clean but still carried the faint, chemical trace of examination.
The security control room was a small space, fitted with a monitor bank and a central console, neat and organized, like a system that had been properly maintained. Tom entered the access code and stepped back, and Holt settled in front of the console with June beside him.
He pulled up the camera index first. There were quite a few that covered nearly every room. They were positioned at the front entrance, rear garden, pool house, garage, kitchen corridor, main hallway, east and west exterior walls, the driveway approach, and three covering the upper floor landing and bedroom corridor.
Holt opened the recording logs.
He scanned the entries.
Then he went back to the top and scanned them again, more slowly.
“When is the last recorded entry?” June asked, reading the screen beside him.
“The day Victoria left,” Holt replied. He kept his voice even. “The morning of the storm.”
He clicked through to the footage archive and ran the retrieval for the forty-eight hours preceding that date.
The screen produced a loading indicator.
Then an error message.
Holt sat back.
“What does that mean?” Tom asked from behind them.
“It means there’s no footage,” Holt replied. He navigated to the system diagnostic log and opened it. The entries were there, clean and timestamped, recording every access and every system event going back months.
The last entry was timestamped the morning Victoria had left.
After that, nothing.
“The system hasn’t been recording,” Holt said. “Even though the logs show it running, and every diagnostic check passes. Every camera shows as active.” He looked at the monitor bank, where the feeds displayed their current live images without issue. “But there’s no stored footage. Nothing. The entire system has been wiped clean.”
“Impossible,” Tom said, stepping around Holt to try a few things, but all the files were empty. “No. That’s impossible.”
“I’m afraid not,” Holt said, his jaw clenching. “Someone didn’t want any of us to find what was on your security tapes.”
