Just before eight, they left the car and walked through Borough High Street to the offices of Genesis, where Bryony Wilson had worked. It was a tall brown brick building about three hundred yards down from the market. They joined a group of bleary-eyed office workers trudging up the steps to the main entrance. They went to the front desk and had to deal with an overzealous head of security, but when they produced their warrant cards and explained that they were investigating the murder of one of the company’s employees, she called the manager of Human Resources.
They were instructed to go up to the sixth floor, but mistakenly came out onto the fifth floor with a group of office workers. When they saw the floor number written on the wall, they were about to go back to the lifts when Moss noticed a collage of staff photos on the wall. Under some of their names were gold stars. Bryony was pictured with hunched shoulders and a manic gummy smile. Under the photo were three gold stars.
‘Excuse me,’ said Erika to a dark-haired girl about to go into the office. ‘What do the stars mean?’
‘Commendations,’ she said, pulling a security pass from her bag. ‘Overtime you get one; the company emails you a twenty-five quid iTunes voucher.’
‘Does Bryony Wilson work on this floor?’ asked Erika.
Moss and Peterson gave her a look; they were supposed to be going up to meet the head of Human Resources.
‘She’s my Team Leader,’ said the girl.
She put her pass on a sensor and opened the door. They followed her inside and along the large open-plan office. She stopped at a desk towards the end divided into partitions.
‘This is her desk, if you want to wait for her…’
Bryony’s partition was tidy with a pot of pens topped with Trolls of varying coloured fuzzy hair. On one side of her computer was a plastic M&M Yellow figure, smiling with a thumb up, and under her desk was a footrest and a spare pair of smart court shoes.
‘She walked to work,’ said the girl, following Erika’s eyes to the shoes. ‘Sorry, who are you?’
Erika took out her warrant card and introduced them all.
‘Why are you looking for Bryony?’ asked the girl, sitting in her chair warily.
‘We’ll need a warrant if they don’t want to play ball with the computer,’ said Peterson, peering at Bryony’s desk.
‘This was Bryony’s permanent workstation?’ asked Moss. The girl nodded. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Katrina Ballard,’ she said, tucking a long strand of hair behind her ear.
Erika, Moss and Peterson moved around the desks, adorned with mess, paperwork and family photos. Erika came to a stop at a desk where a photo of a large white-faced dog was pinned below a computer monitor. It was an unusual breed. With the wide face of a Staffordshire bull terrier, but with black spots like a Dalmatian.
‘Excuse me,’ came a shrill female voice. ‘EXCUSE ME, officers?’
They looked up, and a small woman with poker-straight dark hair and a pinafore dress was striding towards them.
‘I’m Mina Anwar, I’m HR manager.’ She reached them and her eyes darted around them, attempting to work out what they were doing.
‘Thank you. We must have come out on the wrong floor,’ said Erika, giving her a disarming smile.
‘If you’d like to come up to my office,’ she said, putting out a small arm to scoop them up and away. Other members of staff were arriving and had noticed the commotion.
‘Lead the way,’ said Erika.
When they came out onto the communal corridor by the lifts, Erika’s phone rang. The lift doors pinged and opened. It was John on the phone.
‘Boss, we’ve been working through the night following up the CCTV. We managed to get more footage of the blue car from a traffic camera near the South Circular, and we have a full number plate: J892 FZD.’
Erika held up her hand, and they all stopped outside the lifts.
‘That’s fantastic, John!’
‘The car is registered to a thirty-seven-year-old white male called Morris Cartwright. He’s a farm labourer, and he has two convictions for assaulting women, in 2011 and 2013. And, get this, he lives in a village on the outskirts of London called Dunton Green. It’s near Sevenoaks.’
Erika quickly relayed the information to Moss and Peterson. Moss punched the air, and Peterson put his hands to his head and closed his eyes.
‘Yes!’ he cried.
Mina waited by the lifts, her hand being buffeted by the doors as they kept trying to close.
‘Officers, I have a lot to do this morning, can you please explain what is happening here?’ she asked.
‘Boss, you and Peterson go,’ said Moss. ‘I’ll stay here and get as much info as I can about Bryony.’
Erika and Peterson took the waiting lift and, just before the doors closed, Moss gave them a smile.
‘Good luck and stay safe,’ she said.
As it started to descend to the ground floor, Erika hoped that they weren’t too late. That Beth was still alive.
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Darryl had started throwing up in the early hours of Sunday morning, and then a dull headache had crept up from the base of his neck to a stabbing pain in his temple. At lunchtime, his mother had made him a sandwich, but when he’d taken a small bite, it had come straight back up again. The pain and a sense of doom continued, until he came down to the living room in the evening. John and Mary were watching an episode of Inspector Morse.
‘Mum, I don’t feel well,’ he said.
‘You must be coming down with something, just get a good night’s sleep,’ said Mary, studying him over the top of her drink.
‘You should get the hell out of here, is what you should do,’ said John, not taking his eyes off the television. ‘I have to get up for work in the morning, and I don’t want to catch whatever it is.’
Darryl had left the living room, and as he’d started upstairs he’d had to grab the bannister, feeling dizzy, and a tingling sensation had begun down his left arm. He went to bed, and as he lay there the pain increased.
He drifted off to sleep in the early hours of the morning, and began a cycle of dreams which repeated over and over.
In the dream, he would wake on a bright sunny day still in his bedroom, with the light streaming through the curtains. He’d get up and be relieved to see that the bed sheets were dry. Then he would hear it: the ting ting sound coming from the wardrobe, a hanger lightly brushing the wood. Then a tight creak of taut rope, and as he approached the wardrobe door, the key would begin to spin, until the door swung open to reveal Joe hanging inside, his feet swinging in mid-air, trembling.
‘You’ve pissed the bed, baby,’ Joe’s voice would say, but his lips weren’t moving. His purple bloated face was fixed in a smile with the eyes open.
Finally, Darryl would feel the warm liquid splashing on his legs.
The dreams seemed to go round in circles, over and over, and every time he thought he was awake, the same would happen over again. The sunny room, the ting ting sound of a hanger in the wardrobe…
The pain grew intense in his side throughout these dreams, and the final time he’d come to, the room was dark. He’d climbed out of bed and felt the sheets. They were dry. He’d moved to the curtain and seen that it was dark outside: a large bright moon hung in the clear sky.