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Chapters (70)
  1. Cover
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  3. Map of Rutland
  4. Map of Oakham
  5. 1
  6. 2
  7. 3
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  65. 61
  66. 62
  67. 63
  68. On Borrowed Time
  69. Acknowledgments
  70. Adam Croft

Walsh sighed. ‘Look, if you think something happened that I’ve forgotten about, I’d appreciate it if you could let me know the details and see if it jogs my memory. To be honest, I don’t like the way you’re behaving. This was meant to be an informal chat, something to help you guys out and find out who killed Roger. But instead you’ve subjected me to some sort of Stasi interrogation. If you want to arrest me, arrest me. I’ll call my lawyer and we’ll go down that road. Otherwise, if it’s quite alright with you, I’m going home.’

Caroline and Dexter left the interview room feeling they’d got no further in the investigation. If anything, it felt as though they’d gone backwards. They made their way back to the incident room and Caroline sat down at her desk before Sara Henshaw came bounding up with far more enthusiasm than Caroline felt.

‘Good news, boss,’ Sara said. ‘We’ve been analysing Roger Clifton’s laptop. I think we might have a pretty strong lead.’

‘Go on,’ Caroline said, her interest piqued.

‘It’s all pretty normal and above board, except for one thing. Someone sent Roger a threatening email almost exactly a week before he died.’

‘What kind of threatening email?’

‘I’ll read it to you. “How do you sleep at night? You’ll pay for your family’s actions one way or another. Scum like you deserve to rot in hell.”’

‘Is that it?’

‘Yep.’

Caroline exhaled. The religious connotations of “rot in hell” were too many for her to ignore, but now wasn’t the time to push that particular angle again. ‘Are we able to trace it?’

‘Not me personally, but yes. The originating IP address was Oakham Library.’

‘Wow. Okay. And we have the date and time it was sent, yes?’

‘Yep.’

‘Then we need to request CCTV footage from the library. At the very least, we’ll be able to narrow it down to people we know were inside the library at the time.’

‘Already done. They’re going to pull the footage and get back to us.’

‘Who are? The council?’ Caroline asked. Sara nodded in return, and Caroline filed this away in her mind. Roger’s links to the council were worth remembering.

‘There’s a slim chance they could narrow it down to the specific machine at their end, but they didn’t make any promises. The computers aren’t particularly top of the range, and anyone with a bit of knowhow could mask things fairly easily. But if they had that much knowhow they’d have used a VPN and not risked getting caught on CCTV.’

‘Sorry. Acronym overload, Sara.’