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She watched Charlotte disappear from sight.
There were questions she’d have liked to ask, but she hadn’t bargained on how emotional this identification was going to be. She needed answers that could help clear up what had happened to Terence Birch on Monday night. But the chat about the small blue car would have to wait for another day.
SEVENTY-TWO
It was no secret to anyone that Penn loved a puzzle. He’d always been the same, even as a kid. Sometimes the harder it was the better. When he was a child, he’d loved doing jigsaws, but he’d never seen the end result of one of them. He’d never done them with the picture facing up. He hadn’t wanted the help of the image. Instead he’d focussed on shapes, edges and holes. In any puzzle there was a moment, a lightbulb second where you knew you were on the right track and the puzzle would be solved.
As yet he had no such feeling with the records that had been sent from Welton Hall.
Four boxes were full to the brim with single-leaf pages, as though every file and folder had been deliberately emptied and spread between all the boxes.
He’d taken over the meeting room on the third floor and had paced the space many times to work out how to sort the documents in order to find anything. His logic was to go big pile, little pile.
By grouping everything into big piles, he could then do sub files for each big pile. The only alternative was to read every single piece of paper as he came to it.
So far, he had a pile for inmates, staff, medical records, court information, incident reports and miscellaneous.
He took the pile dedicated to inmates and quickly made two piles, one for the Psycho Six and another pile for anyone else.
He then divided the pile so that each of the six had their own stack.
He knew that the boss was keen to learn about Lenny Baldwin’s involvement with their release dates, so he went through each pile looking for the recommendation report from the youth service officer and grabbed a piece of scrap paper.
Eric Gould – Yes
Paul Brooks – Yes
Nathan Yates – Yes
Leyton Parks – Yes
Dean Newton – Yes
Ian Perkins – Yes
Okay, perhaps he was just a lenient kind of guy. Maybe he thought every kid deserved a second chance.
He pushed the piles aside and reached for the stack containing the records of other inmates during the same period of time.
He found a total of twenty-seven names,
Not one of them had been recommended for early release.
SEVENTY-THREE
Kim hadn’t expected to be knocking on Lenny Baldwin’s door again so soon. He appeared equally surprised to see her.
‘May we come in?’ she asked as he stood in the doorway.
‘I don’t see how I can help you any further.’
‘Just follow-up,’ she said, taking a step forward. It was either move or she’d just walk straight into him. ‘We’ve received the files from Welton. They make for interesting reading.’
He stood aside, and she pushed past him, heading into the lounge.
‘I should imagine so. It wasn’t a place to house choirboys.’
Kim sat where she had on the previous visit. ‘Judging by your early release recommendations, you had a lot of faith in those six boys to turn their lives around.’
