Locked In Read Free Page B

ignored them, nudging past and pushing on towards the door at the back of the hall that led towards the rest of the house.
    DI Cole came out of the kitchen just as she reached the already-open hallway door. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked but she didn’t react.
    She looked at the wall to the right of the doorway, wanting to make sure she had been right about what she thought she had seen when she was going up the stairs earlier. At the time, it hadn’t registered fully but she could now see what was in front of her; a row of hooks with keys hanging from them. On the right one was a set of car keys attached to a fob but it was what was hanging next to it she was interested in.
    DI Cole looked at her bemused as Jessica went to the paper-suited person still by the doorway and asked for a rubber glove. She returned to the rack and carefully took the key ring hanging on the left hook. It had two keys on it. ‘What are you…?’ DI Cole started to say before tailing off.
    Jessica took the key to the front door, still just about hanging on to the frame after being smashed through by the police. It was a big, heavy double-glazed door, the type that needed the handle pulling up so it would lock. She crouched down and wiggled the key into the lock, turning it just to make sure it was the right one.
    She then quickly hopped up, striding back past the paper-suited officer and DI Cole into the kitchen. She walked purposefully past the immaculately clean stove and worktops to the back door before trying the handle. It was locked but the second key on the key ring fitted and turned. DI Cole was now behind her next to the door and spoke more forcefully this time. ‘What are you doing?’
    Jessica paused for a moment before replying. ‘Well, Sir, if the front door had to be broken down because it was locked but the key was hanging in the hallway the whole time, then how did the killer get in – or back out?’

THREE
    It hadn’t taken long to establish that every window in the house was also secured from the inside. There was no sign of forced entry, none of the locks had been damaged, nothing was broken and no obvious items had been stolen. There was still a flatscreen television on the wall and a laptop computer on a desk in the living room. Jessica knew that didn’t mean other things hadn’t been taken but, with a standard burglary, something like a laptop – light, mobile and worth a few quid – would have been one of the first things out the door. Yvonne Christensen’s mobile phone, which had been heard ringing, was on the nightstand next to the bed as well. It wasn’t a top-of-the-range model but she knew some scroat somewhere would have paid a tenner for it.
    Jessica left DI Cole, who said he was going to have to phone his wife, and walked back to the Wilsons’ house, asking DC Rowlands to come outside. ‘Why did you dash off like that?’ he asked.
    ‘It was when Mrs Wilson said she couldn’t let herself in to the victim’s house. When we were over there I remembered some keys hanging in the hallway but the front door was locked because we had to smash it down. I figured that, if her best friend didn’t have a key, then how did whoever killed her get in? The back door and windows are all locked too.’
    ‘So you reckon it was the husband then?’
    Jessica let out a long “hmmm” noise. ‘Maybe but that doesn’t make much sense either. Firstly, we don’t know if he has a key any longer but, even if he does, if you were going to kill your partner, you wouldn’t make it obvious would you? If you knew you were one of a few people with a way in, you’d hide the fact that was how you’d done it. You could fake a burglary or something like that but it’s all so clean in there. It’s not like it’s one of those old-fashioned doors that just lock when you pull them shut, you actually have to try to secure it.’
    ‘Could she have let someone in?’
    ‘Possibly but how did they lock it when they were back out again