The Piggy Farmer (The Barrington Patch Book 3), Emmy Ellis [electric book reader txt] 📗

money to him, and he sent them indecent images. That had to be it, didn’t it?

Another photograph of a child, a brown-haired boy, was pinned next to Jess with a small circular magnet—pink. The final insult, Gorley choosing her daughter’s favourite colour. She studied the image. Wasn’t that the lad who’d gone missing, Lee Scrubs, an almost-teenager who’d told his friends he was going to run away because his dad was a bully? Lee had turned up dead in a ditch on the land the New Barrington now stood on, years before Jess had died, and the whole town had been horrified.

She ignored the red arrows and writing.

“You dirty ponce.” She wanted to attack Gorley with her bare hands like she had with Vance Johnson but held back. “Francis, stand by that window so old nosy bollocks out there doesn’t see.”

“He won’t say owt even if does, he’s on the payroll as ears, but maybe we’ll save him the shock.” Francis blocked the view, and the shed darkened. “We don’t need another body on our hands, death by a sodding heart attack.”

Gorley whimpered and fumbled with the lamp, no denial about being a kiddie pervert coming out of him—he can’t even give me that—and the time he was taking to find the switch was doing Lou’s head in, stretching her nerves then shrinking them so the shrivel gave her goosebumps. She clenched her fists and her teeth, counting to three, telling herself if she got to five, Gorley would know about it.

At last, the shed lit up, Jess and Lee drowned in light, their innocent, stuck-in-time faces gazing on. Gorley stared at Lou as if about to shit himself. His silly grey fringe, usually held back with Brylcreem, flopped forward to cover one eye.

Good. She wanted him to experience fear like Jess had.

Like herself and Joe had.

He pushed his hair back. “Please, I don’t know what you think I’ve done…”

Was he the man in the back of the van? Is that why he was never found?

My God, he’s been walking amongst us all this time, the absolute wanker.

Her mind accepted that as a complete fact—it was the only reasonable explanation in her eyes, akin to her pretending Jess was in Cornwall—she’s still down there on the beach with her bucket and spade—a story she made up to cope.

It cemented itself in her mind. Yes, Robin had clutched Jess to him, his dirty pig hand over her mouth to stop her screaming. Robin was the one they were after. No matter that Jess had wandered from The Mechanic’s house to Sculptor’s Field, Vance intercepting, as Cassie had explained. Robin had let her out of that home office, he’d encouraged her to her death.

Yes, that was how it had happened.

“You let my daughter down.” She unzipped her bag and eased her hand inside, careful not to jab herself on the weapon—she didn’t need any of her blood left here. Forensics were so good these days, who knew if it’d still be found in the ashes? “Twenty-three years I’ve thought about this day, told myself I’d come and see you, get things off my chest, and here I am. I can’t hold it in any longer. I need justice.”

Gorley’s mouth flapped. Any more of that, and his creamy dentures would pop out. “I’m sorry, but there were circumstances—”

“Yes, we know about the bribe,” Cassie said on a sigh, reversing and planting her back to the door.

Cassie hadn’t gone to bed. Instead, she’d read the RESIDENTS ledger, then looked the coppers’ names up in the others to see what Lenny had written about them. This bastard here, he’d suppressed the case—on Lenny’s orders—so no wonder the person in the back of the van had never been found (but it’s Robin, that’s why). Lenny hadn’t found him either; maybe he’d known the DCI was the accomplice after all—and if he wasn’t, what the hell was he thinking, getting the case shut down? If Lenny were alive today, she’d use her weapon on him, no matter that they’d been good friends. He’d had no right to interfere, to cover for a bent copper, a paedo. When Cassie had told her about the information found in the ledgers, all Lou’s suspicions had been confirmed. How come Cassie and Francis hadn’t remembered this before now? They’d both read all the ledgers.

Maybe there was so much data it had slipped their minds.

Thinking of Gorley’s wicked part in this brought on a surge of anger, topping up the rage that was already present, boiling it so her face flushed with heat, prickled with sweat. “You told your superintendent the case was going nowhere. How the hell have you lived with yourself?”

Gorley rubbed his wrinkled forehead, his liver-spotted hand jolting from the shakes. “Sleepless nights, guilt, you name it, I’ve been through it. Lenny was a nasty piece of work. He threatened my wife, my kids. What would you do in that situation?”

“What was right.” Although she would have done everything to protect Jess and Joe, she wasn’t about to say so. In his position, yes, she’d have gone down the same path as him, but that wasn’t the issue here. “Someone’s still walking around out there, a man or woman who held my child in the back of a van, maybe too tightly because she wiggled, screamed for her mammy and daddy. It was you, wasn’t it.”

Gorley winced, leaning on the bench. “I can’t apologise enough for— Oh, my chest…”

So he was admitting it then. He hadn’t denied being in that van. “No, you can’t say sorry enough.”

She felt about in her bag, slipping her hand inside the brown leather loop she’d created on the back of a five-by-three-inch piece of wood—the brown to match the gloves of the accomplice—Robin’s gloves—a reminder to her of what this was all about. She’d cut one of