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chapter 71
quinn
Quinn chucks her phone onto the sofa with an exclamation of disgust. The most basic of errors, right at the very start of the police investigation. Christ on the cross.
Those so-called detectives should be strung up.
It’s not Penny Williams.
The last official sighting of Lottie Martini, talking to the quote-unquote bride’s mother on the beach at the end of the wedding ceremony?She wasn’t talking to Penny.
Quinn knew there was something off when she read the woman’s interview transcript. Mrs Williams remembered verbatim her banal discussion with the hair stylist the morning of the wedding, and every word of the debate with her daughter about the teal nail varnish. But she’d forgotten her entire encounter with a child who’s been at the centre of a global manhunt for the last two years?
Nope. Quinn wasn’t buying it. So she went back and re-read the interviews with the four wedding guests who’d said they’d seen the little girl talking to Mrs Williams.
They’d all described an older woman with dark hair, wearing a pale blue dress, whom they’d taken to be the bride’s mother. But when Quinn tracked them down and spoke to them herself, she discovered not one of them actuallyknewPenny Williams.
All had made an assumption based on the woman’s age and the colour of her outfit. And the Florida police had never questioned that assumption by showing any of the witnesses a photo of Mrs Williams, to be sure they were talking about the right woman. Every line of inquiry since the very beginning has been based on the same faulty information. And despite millions of pounds spent by the Met, no one had ever thought to go back and actuallycheck.
So Quinn emailed the four witnesses a photo of Penny Williams in her wedding outfit. She’s just got off the phone with the last of them.
And now she knows for sure.
Penny Williams doesn’t remember her conversation with Lottie becauseshe wasn’t the woman the little girl was talking to.
The dark-haired woman they saw chatting to Lottie was about the same age as Penny Williams, and her dress was a similar colour. But now the witnesses have seen a photo of the bride’s mother, they realise the woman they saw was much more tanned, and thinner. They feel terrible, they justassumed…
Quinn makes herself some more of her fabled Panamanian coffee and goes back to her computer. She’s got a sense she’s running out of time. Not to rescue Lottie, but to save Alex.
It’s clear the woman’s on the edge of a nervous breakdown. And Quinnowesher. If she’d answered her phone when Alex called instead of going on a six-day bender, she might’ve been able to talk her off the ledge. At the very least, she’d have persuaded Alex to get hold of a DNA sample from the girl she was so sure was her daughter and wait for the resultsbeforetaking the law into her own hands. Like it or not, she feels responsible for what happened. The two of them are in this together.
Quinn has skin in this game.
She spends the evening poring over every photo and video clip submitted by wedding guests and tourists to the Florida police department when they made their first appeal for help. She didn’t exactly come by them legally, exploiting a source within the police investigation, but in her view the ends justify the means.
She’s no idea if the mystery woman Lottie was seen talking to has been captured in any of the photos, but she won’t know till she’s been through every frame to check. The woman isn’t one of the wedding guests; she’s already established that. But the beach was open to the public during the wedding ceremony and there are any number of tourists and other hotel guests hovering in the background of photos, enjoying the spectacle from the water’s edge. Perhaps she’ll get lucky.
Perhaps not.
By 3 a.m., she’s been at it for sixteen hours. Her head aches and her back is sore.
She’s been through thousands of photos and found nothing.
She goes into the kitchen and grinds yet more beans, wondering if she’s reached the end of the line. She’ll loop the Met investigation team in tomorrow and let them know what she’s learned but, without a photo of the woman, she’s not sure what good it’ll do.
The trail is over two years old and this is likely to be another red herring, anyway. The woman’s probably got nothing to do with the inquiry. Just a sweet old grandma who stopped to tell a bridesmaid how pretty she was and moved on.
Quinn takes her coffee back to her computer and keeps looking.
