Текст книги "Jessica Daniel: Locked In / Vigilante / The Woman in Black"

Автор книги: Kerry Wilkinson

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

5

Considering she had been woken up early and had a strong suspicion the biggest case of her career was hurtling towards a dead end, Jessica knew she was in a mood her flatmate Caroline would describe as ‘particularly sweary’.

The phone call wasn’t helping. ‘I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?’ she asked the man on the other end of the line, who was definitely going on her shit-list when she hung up. It was a fairly short list, consisting of the DCI, one of her ex-boyfriends and the pervy bloke who ran the chip shop at the bottom of her road.

‘My name is Garry Ashford,’ came the reply. ‘I work for the Manchester Morning Herald. I wanted to ask you about the body you found this morning.’

Jessica knew the media hadn’t been given any information yet. Later on, they would be told a standard line about a body being found and tests being done. If the son had been informed, they might even be given the name of the victim. Next week would be when the media were brought in and asked to cooperate. They would get the details of the victim and asked to give out a phone number for members of the public to call if they thought they had information.

Manning that line was definitely the worst job when you were a constable. Trying to pull out anything remotely useful from the mass of nonsense calls you had to wade through was a nightmare. Everything had to be followed up just in case that one piece of information you had deemed useless actually ended up being something vital. Someone would have to oversee the operation and Jessica thought it was a job that had Rowlands’s name all over it.

‘Which body are you talking about?’ Jessica asked, wondering if straight-batting the caller would work.

‘Hang on, let me check. Er, somebody Christ or something . . . sorry, I can’t read my own writing. Er, Yvonne, Yvonne Christensen.’

Those words meant there would be two names finding their way onto Jessica’s shit-list. First, this journalist, second, whoever leaked him the name. Everything released to the media by the police had to go through the press office. They got decidedly annoyed if something they hadn’t approved ended up in the papers or on television. Working with the media was even part of the training nowadays and, worse than that, the DCI would be annoyed if he didn’t get his chance to go on television and make an appeal.

‘How did you get that name?’ Jessica asked.

‘You know I can’t tell you that. I’ve got to protect my sources and all that.’

So he wasn’t just a know-it-all, he was a cocky sod too, thought Jessica. ‘Look, I’m going to have to refer you to the press office. There’s no one in at the moment but I know there will be a statement going out later. If you phone their main number, somebody will come back to you in a bit.’

Jessica thought she was keeping her temper pretty well in check. The press-office speech was something she had given to people in the past, usually when she was far more junior and didn’t know any information even if she wanted to give it out.

‘I figured that,’ Garry replied. ‘But I thought they would probably only be giving out basic information later and thought I’d ask someone who might actually know something.’

‘Right . . . how did you get my number?’

Garry lowered his voice. ‘I know a guy at the phone company who can get numbers for me.’

He was really getting on her nerves now.

‘I wonder if you could pass him on a message for me. Have you still got you pen handy?’ Jessica didn’t wait for the caller to answer before continuing. ‘Tell whoever got you that number that they will be fired and possibly prosecuted. Can you spell “prosecuted” or does it have too many letters for you?’

Even if he was telling the truth, Jessica was fully aware she had no way of knowing who this journalist’s ‘guy’ was – let alone a way of getting him fired – but she might as well try to get someone sweating a bit.

‘Okay,’ Garry said dismissively. ‘I’ll tell them that . . . so do you want to make a comment then?’

‘No.’

The cheeky swine had gone right to the top of her list with that flippant remark.

Jessica hung up abruptly after considering sending the journalist packing with a two-word goodbye. She wondered if she should tip off Cole but thought that the journalist would have already gone over her if he was going to. Besides he was probably just full of it. One of those Scene of Crime people, or someone in uniform, had just blabbed and he was trying it on, seeing if she let anything slip. She would wait for the Sunday paper and then decide if she was going to hunt him down and make his life difficult.

As much as Jessica wanted to get on with the case, CID struggled with weekends simply because of everyone else’s working patterns. Courts, coroners, solicitors’ offices, forensics, their own press office and all kinds of other departments were either closed or trying to run with a cut-down weekend workforce. While uniformed officers had many more call-outs and lots more work to do across Friday nights, Saturdays and Sundays, plain-clothes officers were often left catching up with paperwork.

She had been planning on going home and possibly getting something to eat with Caroline but knew she wouldn’t be the best company given her mood. After her talk with the journalist, Jessica went back into the station to catch up on some paperwork, figuring it would be one less thing to do the following week. The desk sergeant was clearly confused, seeing as Saturdays were usually the day when plain-clothes officers were battling to get out of the door, rather than back in it.

She had her own office but wanted a bit of company. Rowlands was on the main floor doing some paperwork of his own so she went and sat opposite him. ‘Wotcha,’ she said.

‘You’re way too old to be talking like that.’

‘Oi. How are you doing anyway? Did Eric Christensen get home okay?’

‘I assume so. Someone took him in a car to identify the body then they were going to drop him back.’ Rowlands paused for a moment, looking up at her across the table.

‘How are you? Isn’t it this week that . . . ?’ He tailed off.

As much as they bickered and joked with each other, there really was affection under the surface, albeit strictly platonic. ‘Yeah, Monday.’

‘How long has it been?’

‘Eight months.’

‘Do you still miss him?’

‘Of course.’

Everyone who first joined CID started as a detective constable after spending around two years in training and a period before that in uniform. Generally, being a new DC meant you were the first point of call when the teas needed to be made or you could possibly be sent on a biscuit run on a quiet day. Woe betide a freshly recruited constable who brought back a packet of custard creams from a mid-morning dash to the local supermarket. Even hardened criminals didn’t get as much abuse as some unfortunate new recruit returning with something that didn’t have chocolate on it.

You learned pretty quickly.

On top of that really important work, you also got all the jobs no one else wanted. You would get the vast array of forms to fill in and handle the rest of the paperwork to file, sending it off to wherever it was needed. You would have to hunt through the mountains of papers or computer files to fulfil the freedom-of-information requests. You might have to work with the press office if you really annoyed someone, or perhaps liaise with other police forces around the country and make the endless hours of phone calls to rule people out from inquiries. If you were really unlucky, you could even get the task of hunting through hours of CCTV, phone logs or anything else in an attempt to find a breakthrough.

Every now and then you were actually responsible for a decent lead, something that might get an expression that wasn’t just a scowl from an inspector or chief inspector if you were really lucky. If you got a ‘well done’ or someone bought you a pint, you knew you’d had a really good day.

Those months were the initiation ritual where you found out whether you actually wanted the job, or whether you were up to it. Not everyone was.

After her introduction to the department, Jessica had been assigned to help out Detective Inspector Harry Thomas around two years ago. Despite his position, he was still eager to get out into the thick of the action. Desks weren’t for him and neither was the brown-nosing, which was why he hadn’t even tried for anything like a promotion. At first it was just a shadowing exercise set up by bosses looking to tick boxes and perhaps have a laugh among themselves. She was in her late twenties, emerging from five years of working in uniform and taking exams to qualify.

Harry was two ranks above her and twenty years older. He was an old-fashioned detective with not much hair, a paunch belly and a north-east accent – even though he hadn’t lived north of Manchester since he was a child. He also had a supposed attitude problem, certainly when it came to anyone in authority above him.

It had most likely been their DCI’s little joke at first – pair the new girl with the grumpy old guy who has sat at the same desk for a decade and see how much she wanted to be a detective then.

In fact, their partnership turned into a firm friendship and mutual respect. She liked how he got results and was completely committed to getting bad guys off the streets. He liked . . . well, she wasn’t sure. It wasn’t the type of conversation they would ever have had – feelings and all that. It would have been like confiding in your dad. Either way, he had put up with her for long enough and, for Harry, that was as close as it ever got to giving someone his approval.

‘I know you and Harry were close but I didn’t really know the guy,’ Rowlands said. ‘He always seemed a bit grumpy and people went on about leaving him be. I don’t think they really knew what to make of it when he took you under his wing.’

Jessica nodded. ‘He was certainly grouchy but I think it was just his way. When you got past that he had a really dry sense of humour.’

‘Is that where you got all your dirty jokes from?’

‘Only the good ones,’ Jessica grinned. ‘The thing was he had contacts everywhere. This killing this morning, if I’m honest with you, Dave, I don’t really know where to start. I’m just sitting here hoping forensics strike lucky. Harry would have been out there talking to people he knew. I’d ask him how he had those contacts and he’d just shrug and say he had a pint with them fifteen years ago.’

‘Blimey, I was still at school then.’

‘Exactly. This one time I was out with him and there was a homeless bloke he bought cans of lager for. He’d just put them down next to him and give the guy a wink. I didn’t know why he’d done it but he just said, “You’ll see.” Then, two weeks later we went back to the same guy. He was in the same window wearing the same clothes and Harry went and sat next to him on the ground.’

‘What, in his suit?’

‘Yeah, it was mad. I just kind of hung around on the other side of the path not knowing where to look. He gave the guy this brown envelope or something, had a quick word and then walked off again. I asked him what was going on and it turned out this homeless guy had witnessed some incident a few nights previous. People don’t notice him because they think he’s asleep or passed out or whatever. Later on, Harry goes and arrests some other bloke and the case we’re working on is all sorted.’

‘That’s quality.’

‘I know. Things like that happened all the time but most people didn’t get to see him work.’

‘Has he told you what actually happened with . . . y’know?’

‘I’ve not spoken to him in five months. He doesn’t answer his phone and, assuming he hasn’t moved, he doesn’t open his front door either.’

‘People have been saying he didn’t cooperate with the investigation.’

‘Who knows? I think he just feels embarrassed by it all.’

‘Surely it wasn’t his fault he got stabbed?’

Jessica sighed. ‘The thing is, Dave, I just don’t know.’

Eight months ago, Harry had gone to the pub after shift for a late drink. She didn’t know for certain but Jessica assumed it was something he did most nights. In general Harry wouldn’t go near the police pubs; he preferred the ones far more dimly lit where the landlord was happy to let his clientele hang around after closing for a cheeky final drink. Or five.

The drinking never seemed to affect Harry’s work and, other than the job, there wasn’t much they had in common but Jessica had seen him mellow somewhat. After they had been working together for six months, she had even persuaded him to go to the same pub the rest of the crew went to. He had let her buy him a drink: ‘Not that Scotch shite, a proper drink, bourbon,’ is what he had told her to order.

That is exactly what he had been drinking when some boozed-up thug knifed him in a dingy pub at the end of a bright September day. He survived but spent weeks in hospital and never returned to the force. Jessica had visited him but he wasn’t the same person.

Faced with the mandatory counselling sessions before being allowed to return fully, he took early retirement. He didn’t even seem that interested in helping the police’s own investigation. Whether it was the shame of drinking himself into a vulnerable position or simply not being able to defend himself, she didn’t know.

‘From what the papers said, it sounded pretty clear cut,’ Rowlands said. ‘We got the guy’s fingerprints and the knife and everything.’

‘The prosecution are using me as a character witness at some point. I know people were saying Harry hadn’t cooperated properly with them but they didn’t tell me any of that when we met up last week.’

‘But if they’ve got the knife and everything, what else do they need?’

Jessica shrugged. ‘From what the lawyer said, the problem is the CCTV from the pub is more or less unusable. There were plenty of people in there at the time but mysteriously they all seemed to be in the toilets at the same time.’

‘Oh right, like that then.’

‘Exactly, no one wants to say anything.’

Tom Carpenter was someone who couldn’t handle his drink and happened to carry a knife in his back pocket. Regardless of the witness problems, his fingerprints had been all over the knife left sticking out of Harry’s guts. A string of low-level thefts meant they’d had no problems identifying who he was.

At the time Carpenter might not have realised he had stabbed a police officer but, when the papers and news programmes got hold of the story and started flashing his photo around, there weren’t too many places to hide and he handed himself in.

Jessica hadn’t known how to take the news when she found out. She had certainly done plenty of hard graft working with Harry but he had always been fair with her. The years of exams you had to take before getting onto CID could teach you the things you might need to be a detective but Harry had helped her become one. He had introduced her to his sources and shown her how to find her own. He told her which journalists you could trust and which ones you should nip to the public lavatories to avoid, even if they were on fire. It was almost as if he opened her eyes to the city itself.

Cole had been promoted when it was clear Harry wasn’t coming back and it was a sad fact she had almost certainly been promoted to detective sergeant to fill a gap left by him walking away. It had seemed like a quick promotion but a lack of recruitment in the local area meant sergeants were getting younger all the time. In theory it meant she got to supervise the detective constables but in practice, she still took orders and was given only slightly better jobs to do.

Jessica didn’t want to talk about things any longer. ‘You may as well get off, Dave. I’ve got a few things to sort out then I’ll be following you.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah, just sort that bloody hair out when you get home. You look ridiculous.’

Rowlands laughed. ‘You’re one to talk. It still looks as if you only got out of bed twenty minutes ago.’

‘Whatever, see you Monday.’

After the constable had left, Jessica tried phoning Harry to see how he was feeling ahead of the court case. As expected, he didn’t pick up. She had been around to his flat twice in those months too but there had been no answer. Whether he was in or not, she didn’t know. Seemingly he wasn’t in any kind of contact with anyone from the station. She sent him a text message just in case.

With little else to go on, she thought contacting a locksmith would be a good idea, just to ask how easy it could be to break through a double-glazed door or window without a key. She picked a name from the Yellow Pages classifieds and called. His advert claimed he worked ‘24/7’ – but he said he would only be available to talk to her if she had an actual job that needed doing.

In other words, he wanted a few quid.

He did reluctantly agree that he could spare her ‘a few minutes’ on his lunch break on Monday so she arranged to meet him at his house, which was a short drive from the station. Jessica could have kept ploughing through the phone book to find someone who would speak to her today but she just wasn’t in the mood any longer.

6

The next morning Jessica was sitting in her flat’s kitchen eating some toast and reading the Sunday edition of the Herald. She didn’t usually buy a newspaper but, given the phone call from the reporter the previous day, she had been out to the local shop to pick one up.

There was a small article under the main story on the front page that basically rehashed the media release she’d helped the press officer write the evening before. The officer had been ‘working from home’ so it had been a short conversation but at least the paper had played ball. Garry Ashford’s name was nowhere to be seen either and Jessica concluded he was clearly all talk. Some of the national papers had a paragraph or two on their websites but there was no way she was going to buy all the papers just to check what had gone in.

She used her phone to search the Internet for the victim’s name but it hadn’t turned up any news stories of note, certainly nothing that related to the case. At least that meant the department were still on top of things and she wasn’t going to have to explain to the DCI why his television appearance would be upstaged.

As she was reading, her flatmate Caroline came into the kitchen wearing a white dressing gown and fluffy pink slippers that looked like piglets.

‘Morning,’ Jessica said. ‘I didn’t think you’d be up this early. I tried to be quiet, not that it would make much difference.’

Jessica was always amazed by her friend’s ability to sleep through anything. If there was an overnight alien invasion, she thought Caroline would just wake up after eight hours of uninterrupted slumber and wonder who the grey-headed extra-terrestrial with the probe was.

Caroline laughed. ‘If I had the choice of my superpower of being able to sleep through anything, or yours of being able to eat any old shite and not get fat, I’d rather have yours.’

Jessica knew her friend had a point. Saturday fry-ups and regular curries were just the start; she had never really put on weight, even as a child. Now approaching her dreaded thirty-somethings, she had been telling herself she had to start eating properly but hadn’t got around to it.

‘Anyway,’ Caroline added. ‘I don’t know why I’m up. I guess I just fancied doing something.’

‘You’re not turning into a morning person, are you?’

‘I hope not. I hate those people.’

Caroline Morrison was Jessica’s oldest and best friend. She was slim with naturally slightly olive skin plus long brown hair and wide brown eyes to match. If she was honest, Jessica had always been a tad jealous of her friend’s looks and especially those eyes. Caroline really was pretty whether she put any effort into her appearance or not. A few years ago, when they used to go out a lot more often than they ever managed now, Jessica always felt the need to wear more make-up and spend longer on her own hair in order to not be the ‘ugly friend’. She didn’t feel unattractive but, compared to Caroline, she was always likely to be second choice.

At that time Jessica was frustrated her skin was frequently pale, her hair wasn’t completely blonde, while her hazel eyes weren’t quite any colour. Some days they seemed green, others brown or grey. She wasn’t bothered by anything like that now; Harry’s stabbing and subsequent downward spiral had matured her in a way she couldn’t have expected.

Caroline nodded towards the toast in Jessica’s hand. ‘Any bread left?’

‘Yeah, you might have to cut the mouldy bits off though.’

‘Eew . . . oh is that . . . ?’

Caroline had noticed the main picture on the paper’s front page above the murder story. Jessica closed the pages and scowled at the photo. ‘Yes. Peter Hunt.’

‘Is that because the court case starts tomorrow?’

‘I tried not to read it but probably.’

When Tom Carpenter, the man who stabbed Harry, handed himself in, it wasn’t the police he had come to, instead it was someone altogether more sinister – Hunt. Lawyers weren’t that popular with police officers in any case but Hunt was truly the scourge of the Greater Manchester Police force.

He was a lawyer who delighted in taking on cases to defend anyone with a high-enough profile to get his photo into the papers and on the news bulletins. There may have been rifts between colleagues in her department but the one thing everyone Jessica worked with was united on was that Hunt was as low, if not lower, than the people he represented.

It didn’t help that he was from the south. Being a lawyer was Hunt’s first crime, while having coiffured blond bouffant hair was another. But being born in Cambridge and speaking with a southern accent was an altogether bigger one. The fact he represented all manner of hooligans and law-breakers was the final straw.

Public Enemy Number One for the force wasn’t anyone among the array of drug dealers, gang members and other ne’er-do-wells that blighted their life, it was Hunt. Even the DCI, disliked by most of the officers under his care because of his pomposity and adhesion to strict form-filling, had it in for the lawyer. It was rumoured he himself regularly checked the status of Hunt’s tax disc just in case he’d forgotten to renew it on the £250,000 Bentley he drove around in.

‘I saw him on TV last week,’ Caroline said. ‘He was on one of the news channels talking about some book he’s got out.’

‘He’s always somewhere giving his version of the truth. He was in the paper last week because he was launching some campaign with one of the local MPs. One of the younger lads set up a dartboard with the picture on. It was very popular.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought you had a good enough aim to get him in the face?’

‘Who said I was aiming for his head? It was a full-length photo.’

Caroline smiled. ‘You really don’t like him do you?’

‘He’s an arse.’ Jessica didn’t like bringing work home but had ranted to Caroline about Hunt a few times in the past.

When she and Harry had first met, he had been working on a case against Frank Worrall, a well-known local crook. Money-laundering is what they had tried to get him on but people-trafficking, prostitution, loan-sharking or the odd beating could have been options too. Worrall was involved in many things that caused misery for others but proving it was never going to be easy. As well as the year of on-off work Harry had already put into it, Jessica had helped with some of the final bits and pieces before the Crown Prosecution Service had been called in.

Worrall was no fool and had an army of people working under him. The dealers on the street were easy to pick up but they were always careful not to be caught with any significant amount of drugs on them. They were always out of court quickly, never turned anybody else in and, even if they had wanted to, they wouldn’t have known it was Worrall at the top of the tree. Eventually CID, along with the over-arching Serious Crime Division, had brought Worrall in and been given that go-ahead to charge by the CPS, who must have thought there was a case.

But they hadn’t counted on Peter Hunt.

A year ago in court, Hunt had painted Harry and the rest of the force as bitter, target-driven incompetents with a vendetta. Worrall’s wife had cried in the witness stand and told the jury what a good man her husband was. She sobbed as she spoke of him grafting every day to provide for her and their children, while Hunt had even handed her a box of tissues to emphasise the point. The kids were also present at the back with the grandparents towards the trial’s conclusion to ramp up the pressure and Worrall himself spoke about inheriting his father’s building business and how he had just wanted to do his dad proud. He insisted the police had it all wrong and he didn’t understand why they had it in for him.

Even Jessica had to admit it was a masterful performance.

Against the emotion of those performances, the paper trail the police had put together was always going to be a hard sell. The jury had the choice of either the crying wife and scared-looking children at the back – or a complicated series of circumstantial transactions that could be implicating. When it came down to picking between the sharp-speaking, good-looking lawyer or tired officers reading from a notebook, there had barely been a contest.

The eight men and four women acquitted Worrall on all counts with Hunt leading the now free man out onto the steps of the court house with their arms aloft. He told the live news broadcasts that proving Worrall’s innocence was the highlight of his career and that the police would have to rethink the way they ran investigations.

If that wasn’t enough to fully put himself in the force’s sights, when he had taken the Carpenter case, he had not only managed to get the man bail but had negotiated the CPS down from an attempted murder charge to one of wounding with intent – or section eighteen grievous bodily harm in legal terms.

Harry’s lack of cooperation hadn’t helped but Hunt had stood up in pre-trial court and vouched for the accused, saying he would be personally responsible for him between that date and the main trial. Carpenter had been free to walk the streets on bail for the past eight months.

Jessica wasn’t bothered by Hunt’s hair, his birthplace or his occupation but, even for him, trying to get this guy off was low.

She folded the paper over and put it down on the table. Given the anger she felt at the giant photo of Hunt, she decided there was only one thing for it that evening. Harry had given her many pieces of advice but one of the things she pledged to remember was about keeping a normal life away from the job.

‘Do you fancy going out later?’ Jessica asked.

‘It’s a Sunday. Aren’t you at work tomorrow?’

‘Yes but we don’t have to go crazy, do we?’

‘All right but not that pub at the end of the road.’

Jessica nodded. ‘Okay, fine. We should probably clean this place up a bit before we go out.’

‘Is that your way of asking me to do it?’

‘Maybe . . . I’ll clean my room though.’

Caroline laughed. ‘You sound as if you’re eight years old.’

When the two of them had first moved in, Caroline had gone for the bedroom with the more girly colours while Jessica was happy with the one that had a light blue tone to it. Caroline’s had lilac walls and she had bought herself a matching duvet cover, while Jessica was using the same bedding she’d had for as long as she could remember. The walls may have been a pale blue but her sheets were dark brown. Her room was consistently the messier of the two as well, with most of her clothes left on the floor.

‘So we’re agreed,’ Jessica said. ‘You tidy the hallway, kitchen and living room and I’ll pick up the clothes from my floor.’

‘Whatever – as long as you buy the wine later.’

‘I did say I didn’t want to come here . . .’

Jessica knew her friend didn’t really like the pub closest to their flat but she didn’t fancy going into the city centre; there would be too much temptation to turn a relaxing night into something not really appropriate considering how much she would have to deal with the next day. This way she could sneak in something from one of the takeaways on the way home too, although she hadn’t mentioned that part when she and Caroline had made plans to go out.

‘I know but it’s close and it’s not that bad,’ Jessica replied.

‘Maybe not that bad for someone as cheap as you,’ Caroline said with a huge grin.

‘Right and whose top are you wearing?’

‘I wouldn’t dare wear something of mine in a place like this.’

The two women giggled to each other as the bottle-and-a-half of cheap wine they had gone through was beginning to take its toll.

‘I think you should give me the top anyway,’ Caroline continued.

‘Why would I do that?’

‘I distinctly remember lending you fifteen quid for a taxi a few years ago when you were going out with that Graham fella and I’m pretty sure I never got it back.’

That was possibly true, although money had never been an issue between them. Jessica hadn’t had much of a pay increase until very recently. Meanwhile, Caroline was enjoying a successful advertising career with one of the local agencies. She had been earning good money for a few years, certainly enough to move out of their flat if she so chose.

They laughed again. ‘Eew, Graham.’

Caroline and Jessica came from roughly the same place not far from Carlisle, a hundred miles or so to the north of Manchester. They hadn’t really had any contact with each other until they started sixth-form college when they were both sixteen. On the very first day, they had ended up sitting together in a history class.

Jessica often thought it was funny how one small, seemingly inconsequential, decision could have such a bearing on the rest of your life.

They were both only children and, since bonding through that, they had been more or less inseparable. They had spent a year travelling through parts of south-east Asia when they turned eighteen. Caroline had applied to go to university in Manchester and, although Jessica wasn’t interested in further education, the pair had both moved to the city upon their return. They didn’t live together at first. Caroline stayed in university accommodation for her first year, while Jessica found a flat close to where they currently lived. By the time Caroline had finished the first year of her course, the two of them moved into the same flat they still lived in.