158 Hanover Street was the last house in a long row of terraces. The front was obscured by overgrown rosebushes and Japanese knotweed. Like a couple of the other houses on the street, there was a skip in the small front garden filled with broken pieces of plasterboard and wood. To the left-hand side was a wooden door with peeling black paint which Henley guessed led to the back garden. Even though it was now the early hours of the morning, the street was not silent.
‘What do you think?’ Ramouter looked up at the house.
‘Let’s take a quick look around,’ said Henley.
‘You don’t want to wait for back-up?’
‘They’re fifteen minutes away. We’re just looking,’ Henley repeated, not sure if Ramouter believed a word of it.
The garden wall was at least six feet high and there was no way that she could see over it, but she noticed an alley running behind it. Ramouter followed her as she walked through the alley, disturbing a fox who stared at them for a few seconds before running off. She stopped at the wooden gate. The back garden wasn’t as overgrown as the front. She peered through the slats and could see the rear of the house. The kitchen window and back door were covered in sheets of newspaper. To the right she could see the roof of a shed. She tried the handle on the gate again and could hear a metal padlock on the other side, knocking against the wood. As she did so, she thought that she heard the sound of banging.
‘Did you hear that?’ Henley whispered to Ramouter. He shook his head.
She pulled at the handle again and this time they both heard it. The sound of banging and then a dull thud coming from the shed. Just then a light switched on inside the house. Henley could see the faint outline of a figure in a frosted first-floor window.
‘Someone’s in,’ Henley said to Ramouter. ‘Knock on the door and see if he lets you in.’
‘But what do I say to him. If it is him?’
‘Tell him the truth,’ Henley replied as the light upstairs switched off. ‘Tell him that Michael Kirkpatrick has gone missing. We’re checking up on him, and then lie. Tell him that Olivier has been seen in the area.’
Ramouter pressed the doorbell. As he waited, he checked his watch and listened for the tell-tale signs of back-up, but there were no sirens or flashing blue lights in the distance. He felt nervous as he rang the bell again. He hoped that it had been Henley’s mind playing tricks on her when she had pointed someone out in the windows. He felt his throat constrict slightly as he placed his hand on the door and it gave way. The hallway was dark and he could hear the sound of a ticking clock. The bare floorboards creaked. The house smelt of damp and sawdust. At the end of the hallway, the light from the kitchen spilled out onto the floor. He thought about turning back. To wait. Instead he carried on.
The kitchen had been gutted. There was a sink and the walls showed the markings of where the cupboards should have been. The space was empty except for a microwave, which sat on top of a fridge. Ramouter sneezed as the dust from the old plaster that had been ripped from the walls tickled his nose.
There had definitely been someone in the house. But the door had been left open, which meant that someone had obviously left in a hurry. That should have settled Ramouter but he couldn’t shake off the feeling that something wasn’t right. He spotted shoe prints on the exposed concrete floor that didn’t belong to him. He crouched down and tracked the wet bloody swirls left behind from the soles of a pair of trainers that led into the kitchen, circled around and went back out into the hallway, but there were no blood-stained prints leading towards the front door.
Henley found a small table that had been dumped in the alley next to a broken lamp and a rusty barbecue. The gate was secure and there was no way that she would get through it without bringing a lot of attention to herself and alerting Dominic Pine. She carried the table to the gate and steadied herself as she felt the metal legs bend. She placed her right foot on the edge of the wood panel and pulled herself up. She could feel splinters pushing into the palms of her hands as she gripped the top of the gate harder.
The loud engine of a car passed by. Once the car turned a corner and the engine grew quieter, she pulled herself over. She searched blindly with her foot for somewhere to grip and felt thorns from a rose bush attach itself to her jeans. There was nowhere solid for her to place her feet and she dropped onto the hard concrete. She winced and grabbed her elbow as a shooting pain coursed through her arm. She rolled over, stood up and placed a hand against the wall of the shed. It felt solid, not like the flimsy sheds normally used to store lawnmowers and broken hoovers.
She stopped as the light on the ground floor turned on, illuminating the newspapers. While the garden was overgrown with grass and weeds a trampled path led from the back door directly to the shed. The one window, on the shed, that faced the house was blacked out. Henley kicked the bottom of the door twice and then placed her ear to the door. This time she heard it louder. The sound of something falling to the ground. And muffled screams.