Dead Simple

you.’
    ‘Anyone like a coffee?’ Grace asked. ‘Water? Coke?’
    ‘You buying?’ Branson said.
    ‘No, the ratepayers of Sussex are buying this time. They want us working at midnight, they can buy us coffee. This one’s going on expenses.’
    ‘I’ll have a Diet Coke,’ Branson said. ‘Actually, no, change that. Make it a full-strength Coke; I need the sugar hit.’
    ‘I’d love a coffee,’ Emma-Jane said.
    Grace walked out, along the empty corridor to the rest area with its kitchenette and vending machines. Fumbling in his pocket he pulled out some change, bought a double espresso for himself, a cappuccino for Emma-Jane and a Coke for Branson, then carried them back to the Incident Room on a plastic tray.
    As he walked in, the young detective constable was pointing at something on her computer screen, and Branson, leaning over her shoulder, seemed engrossed. Without turning his head, he said, ‘Roy, come and take a look at this!’
    Emma-Jane turned to Grace. ‘You asked me to check up on Ashley Harper’s background—’
    ‘Uh huh. What have you found?’
    Almost swelling with pride she said, ‘Actually, quite a lot.’
    ‘Tell me.’
    She flipped a couple of pages on a notepad covered in her neat handwriting, checking her notes as she spoke. ‘The information you gave me was that Ashley Harper was born in England, and her parents were killed in a car crash in Scotland when she was three; that she was subsequently brought up by foster parents, in London first, then they moved to Australia. When she was sixteen she went to Canada and stayed with her uncle and aunt – and that her aunt died recently. Her uncle’s name was Bradley Cunningham – I don’t have her aunt’s first name.’
    Still reading from her pad she went on: ‘Ashley Harper returned to England – to her roots – about nine months ago. You said that previously she had worked in real estate in Toronto, Canada and that her employers were a subsidiary of the Bay group.’ Then she looked up to Grace and Branson as if for confirmation.
    Grace replied. ‘Yes, that’s right.’
    ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Earlier today I spoke to the head of Human Resources for the Bay group in Toronto – as you may know they are one of the largest department store chains in Canada. They do not have a real estate subsidiary, nor have they ever had an Ashley Harper work for them. I did some further checking and found there are no real estate firms anywhere in Canada with the name “The Bay” in them.’
    ‘Interesting,’ Branson said, flipping the ring-pull of his Coke. There was a sharp hiss.
    ‘It gets even more interesting,’ she said. ‘There is no Bradley Cunningham listed in any phone directory for Toronto, nor for anywhere else in the whole of Ontario. I haven’t had time to check out the rest of Canada yet. But…’ she paused to sip some chocolate-covered froth off the top of her cappuccino, ‘I have a journalist friend on the Glasgow Herald in Scotland. She’s checked back in the archives of all the principal Scottish papers. If a three-year-old girl was orphaned in a car crash, it would have made the news, right?’
    ‘Usually,’ Grace said.
    ‘Ashley claims to be twenty-eight. I’ve had her go back twenty-five years, and then five years either side of that. The name Harper has not come up.’
    ‘She could have taken the name of her foster parents,’ Branson said.
    ‘She could,’ agreed Emma-Jane Boutwood. ‘But what I’m about to show you reduces that possibility.’
    Grace looked admiringly at the young DC. She seemed to be growing in confidence in front of his eyes. She was exactly the kind of new blood the police force so badly needed. Smart, hard-working youngsters with determination.
    ‘I had the name Ashley Harper run through the Holmes network, as you requested,’ she said, addressing Grace.
    Holmes-2 was the second phase in a computerized database of crimes, linking all police forces throughout the UK and Interpol and, more recently, other police networks overseas.
    ‘Nothing showed up under the name Ashley Harper,’ she said. ‘But this is where it gets interesting. Taking the initials “AH”, and linking them to a broad category heading of “property”, Holmes came up with the following. Eighteen months ago a young lady called Abigail Harrington married a wealthy property developer in Lymm, Cheshire, called Richard Wonnash. He was big into free-fall parachuting. Three months after their wedding,