Tic Tac Toe by Emmy Ellis

Author:Emmy Ellis [Ellis, Emmy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

“You are bloody kidding me!” Bethany stared at her desk monitor. It wasn’t on, and with the three o’clock sun coming in through the window behind her, her reflected shape on the screen was a silhouette. She pressed the phone closer to her ear and wished she hadn’t heard what she had. It was going to be one of those days.

“Not kidding, sorry. Wish I was,” Rob said.

Going by the drumming sound, she imagined him tapping his fingers on the front desk, and he was probably wondering whether to crack a joke or behave himself.

“Right,” she said. “Why the change of time? They’ve been killed at night before. Why…? Don’t answer me. Talking to myself. Okay, we’ll go there now.” She put the phone in the cradle.

Isabelle’s going to lose her shit. She hasn’t finished at Keith’s scene yet.

Bethany strode out of her office, glad she’d at least done all her to-do list and eaten some lunch. The chat with her team had basically been going over everything and, like in the tent earlier, waffling a lot of supposition and not enough fact.

She barged into the interview room. “We’ve got another one.”

“I knew it,” Leona said. “I had a bet going with Fran that this’d be a serial. That’ll be you making me coffee all day tomorrow, my friend.”

“Bugger.” Fran feigned being distraught.

Bethany shouldn’t laugh about bets like that, but she did, and some of today’s tension seeped away. If she could get to bed early tonight, she’d catch up on the lost hours and be a kinder bunny tomorrow.

“He was found by some children, unfortunately. They’d gone to the copse behind an allotment to play ‘dens’.” Bethany gave them the allotment address. “Okay, Fran, Leona, get on with digging—and I don’t mean for vegetables.”

Groans went round.

“You didn’t find that amusing? Shame. The victim is a Bert Yawling, sixty-three. Lives on Broadland Road, number ten. Glen, Talitia, door-to-door in Broadland, please—sorry, I know you’ve only just got back from doing Keith’s street. I want to know what this man was like, where he went, his patterns, the lot. Did he have a routine? Is that why someone knew where he’d be today, because, quite frankly, to casually bump into a man in a small copse behind a sodding allotment is a bit of a stretch for me—unless these murders are random and the killer just happened to be there, as did Bert. Doubtful. Check if this fella is a member of the library.” She directed that at Fran and Leona. “Ring the book clubbers and ask them if they know him—don’t let on why you’re asking, for Pete’s sake, although they’ll probably catch on.” She clapped. “Right, let’s get to it.”

“Before you go, you need to know something.” Leona grimaced.

“What?”

“Peter Uxbridge has let the cat out of the bag. He’s even spoken to Susan’s neighbours. Plus…”

“Show me, quickly.”

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