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Penn laughed.
‘Dan was a gambler. He couldn’t help himself. He’d offer a bet on anything. I watched him lose his shoes on a bet with one of the others on which raindrop would travel down the glass quickest. He bet a meal on whether the next person to give Reggie a quid would be a man or woman. He lost and had to sit and watch Reggie polish off two portions of hotpot,’ he said, nodding inside. ‘He couldn’t help himself. I mean, he won sometimes as well. I saw him earn himself an overcoat and two pound coins. It was some kind of compulsion. He had to be betting on something.’
‘Anything else?’
The man shook his head.
‘Thanks, Jericho,’ Penn said, rising to his feet.
‘You’re welcome.’
Penn started to walk away and then walked back.
‘And there’ll be a breakfast bap waiting in the morning at Merry Hill Costa.’
‘Cheers, man,’ Jericho said as his face lit up.
The least he could do was offer the man a meal he didn’t have to worry about.
He now knew that John Doe had likely been wealthy and two years ago he’d lost it all. He also knew that the man was a hard-core gambler.
He didn’t yet have an identity for the boss, but he did have a place to start.
FIFTEEN
It had taken Stacey a while to throw off the unsettled feeling she’d had following her meeting with Terence Birch. She’d gone to see him as a ‘rule out’ exercise. A precursor to rubbing his name off the board. What had unnerved her the most was the speed with which his rage had accelerated from zero to sixty in less than a second. It wasn’t hard to imagine him snapping and stabbing someone repeatedly. Perhaps he’d fixed his attention on to Sandra Deakin, and she’d rebuffed him, bringing back his constant rejection from Charlotte. And that was why his name remained on the board.
Penn’s entrance distracted her from her thoughts. ‘Hey, buddy, didn’t realise you’d taken the day off.’ He’d left just before nine. It was now after five thirty and the boss had already thrown an extra couple of names at her.
He smiled as he whipped the tie from around his neck and placed it in his drawer. It was like he couldn’t be held within its constraints for a minute longer than necessary. She sometimes felt the same way about her bra.
‘Tell me about it, Stace. Not the most productive day. Nothing new on Sandy and still no name for the John Doe, although I do have a lead from a guy called Jericho.’
‘Jericho?’
‘Just his street name,’ Penn said, logging into his computer. ‘And how’s your day been so far?’
‘Bit weird. Our Terence Birch is a stalker, hard core, with a quick, fiery temper.’
‘Possible suspect?’ Penn asked.
‘Person of interest,’ she said. No blood had been visible on the man at the scene and he was the one who had raised the alarm, although it wouldn’t have been the first time that the person calling the police and the murderer were one and the same.
‘Where’s the boss?’
‘Return to the start. Do not collect two hundred pounds.’
‘She’s playing Monopoly?’
‘Good guess but no. She’s on her way back to the first woman she spoke to, who appears to have been less than truthful.’
‘Shocker,’ Penn said, starting to type.
‘Hey, you gonna get into that laptop of Sandra’s?’ Stacey asked.
‘Yep, in a bit. Just gotta check out this lead on our dead guy.’
‘The one that died of natural causes as opposed to the murder victim who was stabbed eleven times.’
