Borrowed Light by Graham Hurley Read Free Book Online Page B

search. According to Stanley, it was still in progress.
    ‘Anything so far?’
    ‘Not much. A couple of cans of Stella out in the fields. The remains of a kite. It’s still early days though, like I say.
     We live in hope.’ She flicked through the paperwork on the desk and extracted a sheet of paper. ‘You might want to take a
     look at this. The estate agency that sold them the house faxed it over this morning.’
    Faraday found himself looking at a layout plan of the property. Upstairs there were five bedrooms and a bathroom. Downstairs
     there’d been a kitchen/diner, a long sitting area that served as a lounge, a lavatory and a largish room at the other end
     of the building that the previous owners had used as a kind of workshop. Scattered across the ground floor were four pencilled
     question marks, two in the lounge and two in the kitchen.
    Faraday raised an eyebrow. Stanley was beside him. She had beautiful hands, very pale. No rings.
    ‘This is our best guess as far as the bodies are concerned.’ A perfectly manicured nail tracked from pencil mark to pencil
     mark. ‘The upstairs floor collapsed under the weight of the fire and the bodies were buried beneath the debris. It’s just
     possible that the bodies fell vertically but none of them were in or beside the beds. We can’t prove it but this is where
     they appear to have been ante-mortem.’
    Before death. Faraday nodded. It was a logical supposition, carefully hedged.
    ‘So the balance of probability …?’
    ‘Would put them downstairs.’
    ‘Where they were killed?’
    ‘Impossible to say. They may have been killed downstairs, like you’re suggesting. We might be looking for one perpetrator
     – two, three, who knows? They may even have been killed off site and brought to the farm for disposal.’
    Disposal. Yet another line of enquiry.
    Suttle asked her about two shotguns registered to the premises. Yesterday’s house-to-house enquiries had turned up a neighbour
     who used to go rabbiting with Holman. The licence demanded that the shotguns be kept in a locked steel container.
    Stanley shook her head. So far, on site, no one had found any kind of safe. She was looking at Suttle. She wanted to know
     what kind of lives the victims had led.
    Suttle produced notes he’d made earlier, the intel harvest from the local enquiry teams.
    ‘I’m getting the impression these were party people,’ he said. ‘We know Holman was a drinker, big style. Apparently they had
     a thing about candles.’ He looked up. ‘Candles?’
    ‘Night lights.’ Stanley nodded. ‘A fire like this, all you get left are the little metal discs in the middle.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘Lots of them. Lots and lots.’
    ‘What about mobiles? Laptops? PCs?’ It was Faraday this time.
    ‘One mobile so far. It survived pretty much intact. It’s pink. We think it may have belonged to the older daughter.’ She consulted
     her notes. ‘We sent it over to Newport this morning. It’s bagged and tagged. You haven’t seen it?’
    Suttle shook his head. With the investigation still in local CID hands, the mobe had probably found its way to their own intel
     cell. He made himself another note, checked his watch. He had to get Faraday to Ryde within the hour for yet another meeting.
     He folded his pad and stored it away. By tonight, he said, he might have another couple of blokes to help him pull the intelligence
     together.
    Faraday said he’d make it happen. The more he looked out of the window at the remains of the farmhouse, the more he sensed
     that Operation
Gosling
’s best lines of enquiry probably lay elsewhere.
    ‘So what’s the intelligence telling you?’ Meg Stanley was talking to Suttle.
    ‘Holman’s Pompey through and through,’ he said. ‘A lot of hismates go way back and some of them are persons of interest. I’m not sure how much you know about Pompey, but the place is
     tribal. Blood ties, often literally. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover and not a lot