Guilty Conscious by Oliver Davies (best ereader for students .txt) 📗

“We’ll run them through the system,” Mills said brightly. “Maybe we’ll get a match.”

“Wishful thinking,” I muttered.

“Better than nothing,” Crowe pointed out. “And you’re lucky to have any prints on that thing, let alone such clear ones.”

I looked down at the image, nodding. She was right. The fact that the killer hadn’t bothered to clean the weapon, not the blood, their prints, was telling. As Mills had suggested earlier with Sharp, our killer was in a hurry, stashing the trophy and leaving it there, maybe forgetting about it. Someone who knew about the studio, though. From what Billie had said about Edward not sharing that place with anyone else, that didn’t leave us with a huge list of people to go through. Mills was frowning at the prints, and I wondered if he were thinking the same thing.

“Let’s run them through.” I clapped him on the shoulder and turned to the door. “We might get lucky. Thank you, Dr Rand,” I called behind me as we walked into the corridor. “Ta, Lena!”

She waved as the door slid quietly closed, and I turned around, walking back to the stairs with much less gusto than I had come down them with.

“At least we can rule out Billie and Mark,” Mills offered. “Though that leaves us with a grand total of zero suspects.”

“A bittersweet resolution,” I agreed, silently pleased about it. For Billie’s sake, I told myself, nothing about proving my own instincts right and all that, certainly not.

We jogged back up the stairs, beelining for our office, where I slumped down in my chair and woke the computer up.

“I feel like we haven’t sat down in here for ages,” Mills muttered.

“I think it was this morning,” I told him.

“Ages,” he repeated, dragging his chair over from his desk and depositing it next to mine. He fished out two granola bars from his desk drawer and handed me one. I tore into the wrapper as the computer loaded and grumbled under my breath about getting some upgrades sometime this decade. Wasco wouldn’t hear of it, the paranoid weirdo.

I ate the bar in three bites, chewing it down as I opened up the database and put our fingerprints through, then I sat back, letting my head drop over the back of the chair as we waited.

“Any word on Elsie getting out from hospital yet, or is it too soon?” Mills asked.

“Too soon, I think. Though I doubt she’ll stay long. She’ll pester them into letting her go if she has to,” I said with a grin, running my hand through my hair. “Should make sure her house is ready for her actually, get Sally to help, I know how much she loves dusting.”

Mills chuckled, and I peered over to look at him. “How are things with Susanne?” I asked.

“Good,” he said, beaming. “Really good. If we’re still good to go,” he said with a nod to the computer, “she’s coming to lunch at my mum’s on Sunday.”

“Ah, very good,” I said, nudging him with my elbow. “Meeting the infamous Mills matriarch. I’d like to meet her,” I informed him.

“I’ll bring you next time,” he told me with a joking grin. “Make sure you bring chocolates.”

“Only the fanciest,” I muttered back, looking at the screen as a box popped up in my face. I shot upright, blinking at it. “We’ve got a match.” I couldn’t hide my disbelief as I clicked on the box, which took me to a case file. I looked at the name that came up and froze, my fingers stilling over the mouse. Mills leant forward, eyes scanning the screen, and he swore.

Freya Fox. A picture came up of a much younger Freya Fox. An old case, then. But still her, her fingerprints on our murder weapon. I was confused enough, shocked enough, that I just sat there for a moment, staring at her name.

“Was she arrested?” Mills asked quietly, jolting me back into the present.

I shook myself and scrolled down, making myself focus on the case file, looking at how she had ended up in our database. Not an arrest, not of her, anyway.

“No. It’s from about five years ago. Christ almighty,” I sighed. “A sexual assault allegation. Man involved got away scot-free, like someone else we know.”

I had no memory of the story, must have been handled somewhere else. Perhaps Fitzsimmons had been the one to deal with this gritty side of the job. Freya would have been fifteen, only a bit older than Stella. She and her mother had made the report; the man had been arrested, trialled, but had only been sixteen himself, so there were little consequences for him.

Things started to click in my head, the strands we’d picked up tying together as I imagined Freya in all of these situations instead of Billie. Freya, who had been at that party, who had known all of them, probably fancying Edward when he was with Billie. Who’d helped her look for Stella, who’d stuck up for Edward. She was with him after he’d seen Billie in the street that day, maybe had cleaned up his bloody nose for him. Believed him to be innocent, only to find out that he wasn’t.

“Freya’s prints are on the trophy,” Mills muttered, letting it all spell out aloud as he liked to do. “She’d have access into the building, probably knows about the basement, knows Edward’s schedule, knew about the studio. Hell, she told us about the bloody thing!” He blew out an irritated breath.

“She gets assaulted, then learns that one of her closest friends did the same thing to another girl. A friend that she defended and stuck by,” I said darkly, looking at the file. It’d be a horrible thing to live with, and to not help another girl that it had happened to. To not believe her, to side with him. It must have knocked the air from her lungs to realise all that.

“Finding out that he was guilty,” Mills said.