BLOOD STAINED an unputdownable crime thriller with a breathtaking twist (Detective Claudia Nunn Book by Rebecca Bradley (whitelam books .txt) 📗

the interview room. Harrison was as she left him — hunched in his chair, still in his jacket, his body screaming tension at her. His glasses that he used for driving were on the table in front of him. Claudia placed his coffee next to the spectacles.

‘Thank you.’

She sat on the chair opposite. ‘You know I’m only here to help, don’t you?’ How could he believe otherwise?

‘That’s what you think, is it?’ He tipped his head to the side as he looked at her.

‘What do you think?’ she asked, genuinely interested in how he saw this. Surely her level of concern was obvious; she would do everything in her power to locate his wife.

He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Like I said earlier, I don’t care as long as we find Ruth.’

Claudia crossed her legs, started to make herself comfortable. ‘But you don’t think my being here means we’re taking it seriously?’

‘That’s not what I said. I think it means they’re taking it very seriously, but in what way, I’m not sure. Help certainly doesn’t spring to mind.’

‘Why wouldn’t we help you, Dominic?’

‘Look, instead of going around in circles and dissecting what’s happening here, can we get to the meat of the matter, please? Can you start asking questions that are actually relevant?’

She could see that he was more worn out than she first thought. There was a hint of a salt-and-pepper, five o’clock shadow shading his cheeks and jawline and darkness smudged underneath his eyes.

‘You don’t think assessing our situation as you see it is relevant?’

‘For fuck’s sake, Claudia, do you have to answer everything with a question?’

‘It’s kind of why I’m here, and I’m interested in why you see me being here as such a threat.’

She was settling in now and was getting into her stride.

Harrison rubbed at his face, his large hands hiding his feelings from Claudia momentarily, before he spoke.

‘I don’t see you as a threat. Far from it. Why would I?’

She waited him out. It was one of the tools of interviewing; interviewees hated silence. They had a need to fill the void. But DS Dominic Harrison used this tactic as much as she did. He was good at his job, and he worked well when interviewing either witnesses, victims or offenders. She might not work with him now, but she’d worked with him in the past. She’d observed his techniques. She was here to help him but she was also here to get as much information out of him as possible and she would do her utmost to ensure that happened.

Harrison crossed his arms. ‘You know it’s likely to be something to do with the job, don’t you? That’s why they’re so twitchy. They’re afraid they’ve put her in a position where she’s at risk. One of their own and now she’s missing. It doesn’t look good.’

This was sensitive; she didn’t need telling. They wouldn’t have let her anywhere near it unless they were worried. The fact that they had thrown the rule book out of the window proved just how worried they were. It didn’t sit well with her. She liked the rules. Surely there could have been another way to do this without using her? She leaned forward, her voice quiet.

‘Tell me about last night, the night Ruth went missing, Dominic.’

He scratched at his head. Waited before he spoke. Used his own silence. Claudia didn’t know if he was even going to respond. Then, with a deep sigh, he began.

‘You know the case we’re working on, the one they’re calling the Sheffield Strangler?’

Claudia did. Everyone in the force knew the Sheffield Strangler case as more and more staff had been seconded onto it with each subsequent murder. It had consumed South Yorkshire Police for the last six months. She knew Dominic was a part of the investigation team. ‘You know I do.’

He continued. ‘It had been a long day. Management were stressing. There were more meetings about the case than I could count on my fingers. All we wanted to do was catch the bastard. Yesterday we were looking at a potential new witness around the latest abduction site. I’m responsible for a small team of four DCs and Rhys Evans had taken a statement from a guy who, though he hadn’t seen anything himself, said there was another man loitering on the street corner where the last victim was taken from. He was eating a bag of chips and trying to hold a conversation on his phone at the same time. It was the reason our witness remembered him. This is the closest we’ve come to the Strangler. We’re so close we can taste it. We’re exhausted after six months, but it feels like it’s in grabbing distance now. We just have to track down this unidentified guy eating chips. Ask him what he saw.’ The excitement and fatigue of the investigation lifted Dominic’s voice. He was connected to the case. ‘We were closing in on him but I told my team to go home in the end.’ He let out a sigh.

Claudia had been in this situation often enough with her own teams. Cops got tunnel vision when information started to come in; sometimes they forgot they had homes to go to and needed to be sent away. For all the flack the police received in the media, they really were good men and women, working around the clock to help the people who needed it.

‘It didn’t take long for me to get home. When I did, the house was in darkness. That in itself wasn’t unusual, we’re both working hard at the moment, but Ruth’s car was on the drive. I couldn’t remember whether she’d driven to work or if she’d been picked up by a colleague that morning.

‘I entered the house, flicked the lights on and closed the curtains. I