Jayne was in Dan’s apartment, using his desktop PC to research Dominic Ayres. She needed to go home and get some fresh clothes, but she was enjoying the greater luxury of Dan’s flat, with the view along the canal. She looked for Lucy first though. Whatever Dan wanted to know about Dominic Ayres, everything started with Lucy.
Lucy’s profile from her law firm came up at the top of the search.
Jayne recalled her casual clothes from the police station. The media images showed her in a scarf and coat, her hair blown in the wind. Her professional profile was much more as Jayne expected, a picture of self-confidence. She was the newest member of the team and, standing in front of a bookcase filled with law books, she oozed arrogance and conceit and self-assuredness. Everything expected of a lawyer in one photograph.
Jayne went to the social media sites next, but the privacy settings were too high to let her browse properly. She could look at the profile pictures, but no more.
It was the search results further down that she found most interesting: the reports from the newspaper websites from around the time of Mary’s murder.
Although much of the reporting was on what had happened to Mary, many had focused on Lucy and Peter’s behaviour as they loitered near the scene. There was a picture of Lucy with Peter, her arms around him, but it wasn’t a picture of two grieving people looking for support. It was a photograph of a young couple in love, smiling and kissing as if they were enjoying a sunny afternoon in the park. Just behind them, the crime scene tape was visible across the alley.
As she looked, Jayne knew she was right about seeing Peter outside the police station the day before.
The comments below the articles slammed them, calling them inappropriate. Jayne had thought the same at the time, but if nothing else the images had kept the story in the media.
One of the later reports showed Lucy with her father, Dominic. She smiled to herself. She’d found him, described as a successful local businessman, standing with Lucy’s mother in front of a large house in the countryside, both sporting stern faces, going public with his defence of his daughter, explaining how people react differently to shocking situations. All the press had seen was their daughter trying to put up a brave front.
As she kept searching, letting the coffee bring her round, she found more news stories, except this time they were about Dominic’s business empire. Or, rather, his property empire.
The stories were mostly complimentary, portraying him as someone who’d rescued part of the town.
According to the press reports, in the nineties huge swathes of the town were derelict, with whole streets of terraced housing standing empty, people leaving the area for opportunities elsewhere and the young house buyers preferring the shiny new estates built on the sites of cleared away industry. They were offered for sale at bargain prices and Dominic Ayres bought up two streets.
He was the local hero, lauded for his enterprise, for saving part of the town that was going to be demolished. That’s how he’d pitched it to the press, how he hated to see the heritage of the town lost to the bulldozers and was determined to regenerate the area.
He made the houses habitable and offered them out for rent, and soon the streets were full again, no longer the long lines of steel plates over windows and ripped out piping.
Time hadn’t been kind to the regeneration and Jayne knew the part of the town they were talking about. It was bleak and barren, with isolated strips of housing facing each other over open patches of rubble and land where some streets had been knocked down. She’d served court papers around there and it had been scary, groups of kids circling her as she tried to find the right house. The doors were plywood sheets and some of the windows were broken.
As she kept on looking, she found a source for more information: a local residents action group was featured in the local paper, complaining about the condition of the properties. The picture showed three women in front of a pebble-dashed terraced house with graffiti daubed next to the window, along with a name. Alison Reed.
She had somewhere to start.
Then Jayne remembered the areas of law practised by Lucy, spelled out on the firm’s website. Civil litigation and landlord and tenant disputes, acting for the landlords.
Jayne wasn’t sure how relevant it would turn out to be, but it was important to know your adversaries.