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

She looked over at the window still, her eyes looking Billie over from head to toe until she turned back, satisfied. “She was in the fridge?”

“She was,” I confirmed.

“Clever girl.”

“We had our doctor give her a little look over,” I reassured her. “Other than some rest and some food, she’s fine.”

“I tell you; I’ll have to force-feed that girl one of these days,” Agnes said exasperatedly. “Ready when you are then, Sergeant Mills.”

He smiled at her and led her over to a quiet table, leaving me to deal with Mark Helman as he walked out of the office, standing a bit taller but also looking sheepish.

“My apologies,” he said as he reached me. “For wasting your time.”

“You were acting in the interest of your daughter,” I replied coldly. “It’s an understandable course of action. Though I’d advise you not to do so again.”

He nodded, rubbing the back of his neck. “I never thought she did it,” he told me. “I just wanted—I wanted to be useful for her for once.”

I looked over to the doorway where Billie now stood, watching him. “I think showing up was a nice thing to do. But maybe next time, you could just buy her some lunch or something.”

He chuckled, nodded and offered me his hadn’t. I looked at it for a while, then shook it. Mark looked back at Billie once, then ambled to the stairs and went down. As soon as he was gone, she joined me.

“I told him to go to AA,” she said. “He looks like he needs it.”

“What about you? Will you need help?”

Billie cast me a sideways look. “You’re worse than Agnes.”

“She’s here,” I said, pointing to the far room where Agnes sat with her back to us.

“Is she mad?” Billie asked quietly.

“Not in the slightest,” I assured her.

Billie sighed, relieved, and looked at me again. “You have a lot of pictures in there,” she said, “on the board. You took them from Edward’s room?”

I turned to her, surprised. “You recognise some?”

“A few,” she shrugged, grimacing slightly.

“Mind if we go and take a look whilst we wait for Agnes?” I asked. I didn’t want to push her on any of it, but we had no clue where to begin looking for Freya, and if Billie could pull out a few details from the photographs, at least we might get a starting point.

“Sure.” Billie shrugged, following me into the office. She placed Cat down on Mills’s desk chair and positioned herself in front of the board, skimming over the photos of herself, Edward, Freya and Stella, and focused on the little mosaic of things I’d taken from Edward’s room.

“Plautus,” she muttered, looking at the quote that Mills had identified. “He always preferred Roman to Greek.”

“It’s a thoughtful quote,” I remarked, and Billie smiled at me.

“He wrote comedies,” she said. “Pioneered the genre, in a way.”

“Really?” I asked, looking back at the quote.

“Guess it’s part and parcel, isn’t it? Comedy and tragedy.”

“So, I’ve heard,” I remarked. I sat myself down on the desk, letting her look it all over in peace and quiet.

She tapped a postcard. “I got him this one. Dad took Stella and me to London one weekend. Before. Thought he’d like it.”

“Did he?” I asked.

“Must have done if he kept it all this time. He wasn’t very sentimental,” she told me. “He’d keep something if he liked it, but if he hadn’t, he would have just given it back to me.”

Sounds charming, I thought to myself.

“These he took,” she said, pointing to a few. “I was with him for some of them. This is from Bronte country.” She tapped one of a winding river. “I made him take it. I love the Brontes.”

I nodded, recalling seeing the three sisters on the shelf in her living room.

“This one’s from the Viking centre, the little village,” she said, smiling at one. “We went, all of us, one weekend.” It was of a bonfire, the smoke curling languidly into the air. The door shifted, and Mills walked in, looking expectant. He noted Billie, then myself, and walked inside, sitting next to me on the desk.

“Billie recognises some of these,” I told him. “I wondered if they might be useful. Freya knew about the studio, so she might know some of the other places Edward liked to visit.”

“He had a few,” she said dryly. “Depending on his mood, the drama queen. The ruins at St Mary,” she nodded to the black-and-white image of the crumbling abbey. “Bit wet out there for that, and he always went alone.”

Mills leant forward and held up a hand to the window, to Agnes, who nodded and settled herself down on a chair. Smith appeared by her side, a cup of tea in hand, and the two of them got to chatting as she waited.

“Lendal Bridge,” Billie murmured.

“What about the one underneath?” Mills asked, eyes narrowed as he tried to make out the picture. “Where’s that?”

Billie reached for it, hesitated and glanced over her shoulder. “Can I?”

“Go ahead,” I nodded.

She pulled the photograph of the board and held it closer to her face. “One of the little bridges,” she said, “over the Foss.” There were several of them, I was aware.

“Do you know which one?”

“Monk Bridge, I think. It’s,” she broke off, frowning deeply.

“What is it?”

“It’s not far from the park,” she told us. “The one Stella saw him in.”

The one he might have been at when Freya was with him. I sat up straight.

“How often did he go there?”

“Fairly often. Whenever his dad was winding him up, really. More often than he’d care to admit.”

I looked to Mills, who shrugged. “It’s as good a place to start as any,” he said. At this time of day, though, with the night drawing in ever faster, we’d need to be quick.

“Let’s go and check it out. Billie, unless there’s anything else there that strikes a bell?”

“No, nowhere that springs to mind. He was there, or he was at the studio,” she said. “Why would Freya go there, though?