Page 115 of 56 Days
Karl closes the laptop and they sit in companionable silence for half a minute, digesting everything.
“How did she find him?” Lee asks then. “Who was her secret tipster? That’s what I want to know. Oh.” She’s remembered the chocolate. She pulls it from her pocket now, grimacing at the soft substance she can feel give way to her fingers through the foil. She holds it out to Karl. “Sorry. You might want to—”
“Give it to me. It’ll taste the same going down.”
They lapse back into silence—or near silence, since Karl is a noisy chewer even when there isn’t that much to chew.
Then something occurs to Lee.
“Which one is theotherKB Studios apartment?”
Karl says something that sounds like, “What?” distorted by a mouthful of food.
“Which one is the other KB Studios apartment?” Lee repeats. “They rent two, remember? Which one is the other one? What number?”
“Dunno. Why?”
“Because it’s owned by Oliver St Ledger’s brother’s friend’s neighbor’s dog or whatever it was. A connection going back years, potentially. Maybe even...?” She waits for the penny to drop with Karl.
“All the way to 2003,” he finishes. “Clever girl.”
“Was there anything in thedoor-to-doors?”
“I can check.”
“Why don’t you call back your buddy? Kenneth Balfe. Ask him, it’ll be quicker.”
Karl wipes his sticky fingers on his trousers—“Next, we solve the case of why you’re still single,” Lee says wryly, to which Karl snaps back, “And then after that, why you are, too,”—before taking his phone from a pocket, tapping the screen, and putting it to his ear.
The device’s volume is loud enough for Lee to hear without thespeaker-phoneoption.
“Hello? Yes?” a voice says.
“Mr Balfe, it’s Detective Sergeant Karl Connolly again. No further news, just a question for you, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Oh. All right.”
“We were told that KB Studios rents two apartments in the Crossings. Obviously, we know one of them is apartment one. Would you happen to know the number of the second?”
Kenneth Balfe answers right away.
“Number fourteen,” he says. “Although it’s not one of our employees that’s in there at the minute, it’s a friend of the family’s. Well, my wife’s friend, really. She’s a nurse, but she lives with her elderly parents who are supposed to be cocooning, so we offered to let her stay there since it was empty anyway. Well, my wife offered and I do what I’m told. Happy wife, happy life, you know yourself.”
Karl is grinning at Lee.
She mouthsnameat him.
“Would you happen to have her name?” Karl asks.
There’s a rustling noise on the other end of the line.
“Let me just ask my wife, she’s in the other room. But I think she said it was Laura something...”
61 Days Ago
Ciara is dreaming of Mill River. She doesn’t have many clear memories of the place but her subconscious fills in the details, making the river more of a trickling stream, lining its bed with tiny pebbles, and clearing its banks of trees, so you can see the water from the estate, and you can see right through the water to the pale limbs that lie—
Her phone is ringing.
