Kith and Kin: A DI Mills Yorkshire Crime Thriller by Davies Oliver

Author:Davies, Oliver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

MILLS

When we got back to the station, I took the Parma Violets from my pocket and placed them by Greer’s bag, over on a table near the wall. I wondered how many of them she had in there, if she’d kept some back so that she and Hamish could have a few to eat just in case. Children didn’t hand over sweets easily, in my experience, though none of the children I had ever met were leaving a little trail of breadcrumbs so that someone would come and find them.

Fry came into the office from the kitchen, two mugs of tea in hand, and she put one down on my desk before coming to stand beside me.

“It’s a shame we don’t know where to look next, Greer’s probably left another little clue for us, wherever that is.”

For the first time, the children really felt lost to us. We didn’t know what the car looked like, we didn’t have its number plate, and we didn’t know who Mr Pickman was. All we had was a frog backpack and a small packet of sweets. There were no more clues for us to follow, so it was back to the usual approach. I’d sent word to transport to get them looking through the area around the car rental place for a black 4x4 with a tent on the roof. If it had passed by a camera at some point, maybe we could find its plate and track it. It was a long shot, yet again, but it was one we were going to take.

I took a seat at my desk and slowly leaned back in my chair. “Let’s go over everyone’s alibis from yesterday,” I decided. “Someone else was there, driving that car.”

“Mr Pickman,” Fry said as she sat down with a sigh, “whoever he is. Shall we ask them?”

“We should, but I doubt that any of them will know him. A smart kidnapper doesn’t go around using his own name, and given the amount of planning that seems to have gone into all of this so far, I’d say they’re fairly smart.”

“The amount of planning also shuts down Ralf Holzfäller’s theory,” Fry added.

Ralf was of the opinion that this was all Nora’s doing, that his sister had taken the children as a result of losing the custody battle. But that hadn’t happened until yesterday, and as clever as Nora seemed to be, I didn’t think this was the sort of plan that had been put together in a handful of hours. She hadn’t been at the house long before the children slipped out.

“If it was planned,” Fry began to ask, “how did they know the children would go to the library? How would they even know that the children were going to leave?”

That had stumped me, too, and I had yet to find an answer to it. They had left because of the arguing. It wasn’t in their daily schedule to be leaving the house, and their own siblings hadn’t even pegged onto the thought that they would have gone to the library.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.