Page 98 of Making a Killing

He shakes his head. ‘Just that it was for some TV production company or other. She’d done some odds and sods for them before but apparently this could have turned into something bigger. Though you know what that industry’s like – most of it is bullshit that comes to nothing.’

‘Do you know the name of the company?’ asks Bradley.

‘Sorry, you’d have to ask Mack.’

‘Did she hire a car while she was here, do you know?’

‘We told her she could use Mack’s.’

‘The SUV out the front?’

‘No, Mack has a Nissan Figaro.’

‘Do you know if she definitely used it?’

Stirling gives him a sardonic look. ‘Well, funnily enough, I didn’t think to check the mileage.’

Asante gets up and hands him a piece of paper. ‘Could you give us the registration?’

Stirling frowns slightly, but writes it down and passes the paper back.

‘And you continued to get messages from her after she went back to the States?’

‘Yup. Right up until about a week ago. Though according to you, she’d been dead for over a month.’ He sits forward. ‘You think someone stole her identity, is that it?’

Asante spreads his hands. ‘It certainly looks like someone was trying to make her family think she was still alive. Though as to who that might have been, we have no idea. Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm her?’

Stirling flops back in the chair. ‘Of course I bloody don’t –’

Bradley now. ‘Were there any signs of a break-in when you got back?’

He frowns. ‘No. It was all exactly like it was when we left.’

‘Robin didn’t leave anything behind – clothes, a laptop –?’

‘No.’

‘And you didn’t have anyone looking after the property while you were away? A cleaner, maybe?’

‘No, we didn’t bother, given Rob was going to be here.’

‘I noticed you have security cameras on the house, are they operational?’

Stirling shrugs. ‘The back one is, the front one’s been playing up. The alarm kept going off at random the week before we left and it was driving us insane so we disabled it. The bloody thing sounds like Armageddon.’

So that won’t be any use.

Bradley again. ‘Does the name Sabrina Madigan mean anything to you, by any chance?’

He stares at her. ‘No, should it?’

‘Or Daisy Mason?’

‘No. Unless they’re friends of Rob’s I don’t know about.’ He looks from Bradley to Asante and back again. ‘Look, what is this? Are me and Mack supposed to know these women?’

The officers exchange a glance.

‘This isn’t something we’ve released to the press,’ says Asante eventually, ‘but there was a hair found on Robin’s body. It belonged to someone else – a young woman called Daisy Mason. We have no idea how it got there or what connection they may have had to one another.’

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