And it had. The effect was immediate, and life was never quite the same again. Olly Bishop was getting a taste of what Bliss had experienced all those years ago – only these days the responsibility and accountability went even deeper. He’d seen it in his friend’s desperate eyes, heard it in the cracked voice.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Chandler asked. ‘I can smell the gears burning from here.’
It took a while for Bliss to respond, but when he did his voice was imbued with defiance. ‘I need to clear my head when it comes to our original case, but I’m not going to do that until I know Abbi Turner is safe and this madman is tucked away in a cell.’
Chandler turned her head away and forced out a long, steady sigh. ‘I don’t have a good feeling about this one, Jimmy. His MO suggests he keeps the girls for between seven and ten days. We’re a week in, give or take. I can’t help feeling this might be the one we can’t turn around in time.’
‘I can’t say I disagree.’
‘You think we might find something at her place?’
Bliss gave the question a moment of thought. ‘What I think is this: if she fell for this man, if he meant something to her, the one place we’re most likely to find evidence of that is in her home.’
Thirty-Nine
An area of cul-de-sacs and uniform semi-detached homes with plots of lawn to the front, Ravensthorpe had been built on the site of the old RAF Westwood base ahead of the new townships being developed in the late seventies. Abbi Turner lived in a shared ownership house. A representative from the housing association landlords met them at the property. Bliss had been perfectly willing to take the front door off its hinges as instructed, but a well-placed phone call from Chandler had secured entry for them.
The first thing Bliss noticed was how clean the place was. It smelled fresh, too. It was one of the main differences he’d noticed between the escort type sex workers, whose livelihoods relied on their abstinence from both drugs and an excess of alcohol, and those who worked the streets or knocking shops and snorted or injected their way through life. In the homes of the latter, you needed to double-glove and were glad of a mask. These girls with the classier gigs worked hard at staying clean in every way.
He preferred to search specific areas in tandem with his partner, so the pair got to work upstairs. Of the two main rooms, Abbi appeared to use one to sleep in and the other as a walk-in dressing room and wardrobe. Before touching anything or carrying out his search, Bliss first stood on the threshold to Abbi’s bedroom. Something clicked into place that ought to have occurred to him before. He turned to look at his partner, annoyed with himself for having wasted time.
‘Pen, give Bish a bell, would you? Tell him we need a couple of CSIs out here and a bagging team. If this bloke Abbi was partial to ever came here, his hair, prints and DNA could be all over the place. We’ll continue our search, after which they can follow up forensically.’
While Chandler made the call, Bliss worried about the slip. First he’d forgotten about searching the property, and then he’d failed to extend that action to the crime scene investigators. Both lapses were perhaps understandable given the rapidly changing circumstances, and he’d recovered from them. But they caused a twinge of anxiety in his chest, all the same.
The examination of the upstairs area proved fruitless. It told them Abbi Turner was a young woman with taste and more than a little sophistication. Her chest of drawers and bedside cabinets contained paraphernalia connected with her work, along with erotic lingerie. Bliss pulled the drawers out of their runners and flipped them over; people often taped items on the underside in an effort to conceal them. He discovered nothing.
If her dressing table was anything to go by, Abbi liked makeup, perfume and jewellery. Much of the latter was of the costume variety, but in a box mercifully free from a spinning ballerina or the tinkling sound that usually accompanied one, he also noted a few relatively expensive items. She preferred white gold, silver or platinum to yellow gold, and in a Tiffany box he found a simple bangle. To Bliss’s untrained eye, it looked like the real deal.
Beneath the bed they found only a thin layer of dust; behind the chest of drawers, more of the same. Simple and elegant, the furnishings suggested a young woman whose income matched her taste and keen eye. Bliss found himself becoming impressed with Abbi, which prompted a fresh squirt of adrenaline. The natural urge was to search quickly, but much could be missed if you gave in to that inclination.
The spare room holding the majority of the girl’s clothes gave up no obvious clues. Bliss was no Vogue reader, but he had always been able to spot quality. Amongst her daily wear items and the more formal and suggestive clothing, he identified simple knee-length skirts and blouses made from good fabrics. Each piece told him a little more about her.
‘Nice clobber,’ he said to Chandler. ‘I bet she wears it well, too. The right hairstyle and scent to match any occasion.’
His partner agreed. ‘If these aren’t knock-offs, our Abbi is not only a girl of refined tastes – she has the bank account to match.’
‘Where are we on her phones?’
‘Last I heard, data was starting to come through. Plenty of messages stacking up in her voicemail, but no outgoing texts or calls since last Wednesday.’
Bliss had one final look around the room. ‘This place was her escape,’ he said. ‘When she was here, she was just a woman who enjoyed fine things and could
