Wendy Wrigley was long gone. Callintree had had to scramble the RNLI and a police helicopter to find the Hearsts’ bodies, but the darkness – at high tide, at the foot of a sheer rockface – would make the search nigh-on impossible.
‘They can’t have survived that drop. How do you live here, Edward?’
Normally Edward would have responded with a joke about the sketchy estate agent who sold him the house, but right now he had no brain to form a sentence or voice to shape the words.
‘Someone must have moved, the garden went.’
‘What do you mean, “the garden went”?’
‘I have sensors at the far end to pick up movement. Just cheap ones. Three of them have disappeared. I think I lost a yard of garden. And,’ he added quickly, ‘very sadly, those two.’
Kim looked at her feet and repeated: ‘Sadly, did you say? Hey, I was tied up. I was gagged for a bit. Edward was hit on the head. At the end they must have moved back a little and put too much weight on the most unstable part.’
‘How did you not go over yourself, Miss Sinker?’
‘By a miracle,’ said Edward.
Jordan Callintree asked, ‘If they tied you up, who set you free?’
‘Stevie did,’ Kim murmured. As soon as the brothers had fallen, Wendy had shrieked, and then there’d been the sound of running. Stevie had been down in a flash but Wendy had already disappeared.
‘I see,’ Jordan said, looking stern. ‘And you were stabbed, Ms Sinker?’
‘It was Wendy Wrigley who did that.’
Edward said: ‘Wrigley and the Hearsts. They’re the ones you want.’
‘I found a syringe at the end of the garden. I left it.’
‘Stay well clear,’ said Edward. ‘Actinium-224.’
‘Good God. Will do.’ Callintree breathed in, shaking his head. ‘It won’t be hard to find Wrigley. Credit to your pal.’
‘She took her time,’ said Kim.
‘Aye, time well spent,’ said Stevie, approaching in the dark. ‘It wasn’t easy, getting the mic into that stereo and moving it to the window without anyone hearing. And then the spotlight—’
‘The laser pointers too. Genius.’
‘You can give me details later,’ said Callintree. He looked up. A helicopter was moving in the distance. ‘I hope that’s ours.’
‘I don’t think the twins will have made it,’ said Edward.
‘I think that’s an understatement,’ said Jordan Callintree.
Kim started weeping. As Edward held her, he felt tears on his own face as well.
Callintree looked at Stevie. ‘I have quite a lot of questions for you, Miss Mason, since you watched all this. Meanwhile, I have to find Wrigley and bring her in. Assisted dying, you say? We are going to need to reopen a lot of inquests. This lot might go down as Sidmouth’s first serial killers.’
Chapter Forty-Eight
Kim had been taken into hospital for checks and they said she needed forty-eight hours. The police guard at her bed was a novelty. She got back to her flat two days after the violence at Edward’s house. Her mother rang as she opened the front door. ‘I cleaned it top to toe.’
‘Okay, Mum.’
‘You can’t just go missing.’
‘Busy with the police.’
