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

Автор книги: Kerry Wilkinson

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Текущая страница: 33 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

25

Jessica looked across the room at her colleague. ‘You actually saw him in here?’

Reynolds seemed a bit confused but pointed over his shoulder towards their office door. ‘Sort of, he had just come out of the door as I walked into the corridor. I asked him if he had been talking to you in here but he just mumbled something and walked off. I didn’t really catch it but assumed he was looking for you when I saw you weren’t around.’

Jessica tried to calm herself and not show Reynolds there was any obvious problem. She wasn’t ready to share her ideas with anyone else just yet and still feared she was being paranoid. ‘I did tell him I was going to be in my office. Maybe he just knocked something over by accident? It’s fine.’

Reynolds looked at her with his head tilted at the angle she hated as it indicated someone was about to ask if she was all right. Before he could speak, she started walking back towards the door. ‘I’ll check with him now.’

Jessica again didn’t know what to think. Her side of the office was always a mess but she knew where everything was and could tell someone had gone through her things. What could Farraday have been looking for?

She headed for reception and then up the stairs. On the first floor, aside from the chief inspector’s office, there were only storage areas and miscellaneous rooms for officers from other districts who were working with them temporarily. If ever the superintendent was at their station for a day he would be given one of the spare rooms to work from. The floor was a lot quieter than the rest of the station and, apart from the DCI himself, very few people spent much time upstairs.

Farraday’s office had glass that ran all around it and Jessica could see instantly he wasn’t there. She hadn’t even known what she was going to say to him but, given Jason had said he was looking for her, it would at least be a start. She stopped and motioned to turn back towards the stairs but then had a thought. Jessica walked towards the door of the office and pushed the handle down. The office would usually be locked overnight but the grip allowed her to open it. She paused at the door knowing she shouldn’t go in but the theories in the back of her mind urged her forwards.

She didn’t know what she was looking for as she stepped carefully behind his desk. Jessica realised she was on tiptoes even though she had no reason to be creeping; it wasn’t as if someone downstairs would hear her. At first she fingered through some papers on the desk and then looked on top of the filing cabinets behind her. There was nothing of any significance but she turned back to the desk and tried the drawers.

The top one was full of pens, rubber bands and paper clips, and she closed it quietly before opening the middle one. There were a few documents inside and Jessica looked through their contents. They related to a separate case that was being worked on but there was nothing untoward in him having them.

Finally, she pulled out the bottom drawer. There was an A4 writing pad on top with two more files underneath. She thumbed through the first one, which had some financial figures relating to their budget, and then picked up the final cardboard wallet at the bottom of the drawer. She opened the front cover and blinked furiously at the top sheet of paper.

It was Detective Constable Carrie Jones’s personnel file.

Jessica found it hard to believe what she was holding. She skimmed through the contents and could see all of her friend’s personal details. Her full name, date of birth, place of birth, current address and contact numbers were on the top sheet. There were details relating to her parents and education plus underneath were the test results from when she had joined the force. The sheets that had been filled in when she was interviewed were included and so were the results of her physical exams. There was a hard copy of her Criminal Records Bureau check, showing she didn’t even have a driving conviction.

She didn’t read the contents word for word but everything you could have wanted to know about the constable was present.

Jessica’s heart was racing as she returned the contents of the drawer and walked out of the office, closing the door behind her. The personnel department were based on the floor below and, while everyone’s records were also stored digitally on the computer system, there were hard copies too. All of the information was supposed to be private and Jessica had no idea how the DCI would have managed to take the file, let alone why he would do so.

Having the file could well be a disciplinary offence but Jessica knew she had to tread carefully. Perhaps he had taken the file after the killing because he was looking for a lead himself? Without talking to Cole or her it would be an odd thing to do but it was possible.

Jessica quickly made her way down the stairs and went to see if Cole had arrived. Despite what she had just seen, she was desperate to act as normal as possible. The whole team would be waiting for the morning briefing and, suspicions or not, she and Cole were going to have to meet with the DCI at some point to get all the details together.

As she was walking towards the offices, Rowlands was coming towards her. ‘There you are. Reynolds said you had gone to look for the DCI.’ Jessica didn’t want to say anything so simply looked at him, asking him with her eyes what he wanted. He took the hint and continued talking. ‘I’ve spoken to one of the officers at the scene and they say there are still Scene of Crime officers at Carrie’s house.’

‘Did they find her phone?’

‘The guy said they’d found her footprints leading towards Mills’s house so they know she walked across her neighbour’s garden to get there. According to the person he spoke to they didn’t find a phone.’

‘What about the taxi?’

‘It took a few calls but I found the company that operate from the rank by the pub. They checked the records and found the journey from last night. They checked with the driver but he says there was nothing left in the back of his cab. It was his last journey of the night too so it’s not as if anyone else could have picked it up.’

Jessica took her phone out of her jacket pocket and pressed a few buttons. ‘May as well try it,’ she said. The number she called didn’t even connect, instead going straight to voicemail. Jessica felt sick as she heard the cheery Welsh voice at the other end.

‘Hey, it’s Carrie. I’m busy or something, leave a message.’

Jessica hung up, trying to keep her composure. ‘It’s off.’

Half an hour later, Jessica was sitting back in Farraday’s office. She nervously looked at the desk she had searched through not too long ago but, if she had left anything out of place, it hadn’t been mentioned. Cole was sitting next to her as Reynolds stood. The chief inspector was drumming his fingers.

‘Before we start, I was given some news this morning to pass on to you, Daniel. Graham Hancock has been bailed. You know he pleaded not guilty to wasting our time and had been kept in but some soft-arse magistrates let him out on appeal this morning. Christ knows when he’ll be on trial but until then that sicko’s free to walk around.’

With everything that had happened during the morning, Jessica had forgotten about the man who had confessed. She didn’t feel in danger from him but the idea he could be back on the streets was certainly not what she expected. He had initially been remanded but, because he could only get six months in jail as a maximum punishment, the magistrates had decided he should be let out.

DCI Farraday looked at her but she couldn’t read his face. There might have been concern but it could just be annoyance. ‘Are you going to be okay with that?’ he asked.

‘Yes, Sir. It’s fine.’

He looked back towards the centre of the room, trying to talk to the three of them at once, without singling any of them out. ‘We’re all senior detectives here and it’s us who have to set the example today. Jones was a colleague to us all and I know you must be feeling angry but we have a job to do.’

Jessica knew he was right but hearing her friend called ‘Jones’ sounded cold.

‘Do I think this is linked to the other deaths? I don’t know. We need to start by finding out if this is somehow connected to them and, of course, McKenna. That’s going to take time through the labs but, in the meantime, let’s start with Mills. Someone needs to go back to talk to the girlfriend and someone else needs to get digging. Talk to the other neighbours too. We know what his record is like but let’s really nail him.’

‘What about Carrie?’ Jessica asked, deliberately using her first name.

The DCI turned around to focus solely on her, his eyes narrowing. ‘We all want to push on and find out what happened but we’re going to have to wait for the results.’

‘Do you know her phone is missing?’ Jessica’s question brought an abrupt silence and she could feel the three men looking at her. ‘I checked the records,’ she continued. ‘It wasn’t found at the scene, it’s not on the body and she didn’t lose it in the taxi on the way home.’

Cole and Reynolds turned back to Farraday, who was staring at Jessica. ‘Assuming it wasn’t accidentally left off the Scene of Crime team’s list, she probably dropped it, or it’s in her house. I don’t see why this matters,’ he said.

Jessica met his eyes. ‘I think we should talk to the superintendent about asking the phone company to release her call and text records. Maybe the fact it’s missing is important.’

Farraday hadn’t stopped staring at her, his eyes thin and fixed. ‘I’ve seen that list too, Daniel and, given the fact her purse wasn’t taken, I think we can rule out theft as a motive. Her phone isn’t a priority and there are too many legal hoops to jump through to get those records released that will take people away from focusing on the real work.’

‘If it takes time, surely that’s why we should start the process now?’

The chief inspector stopped tapping his fingers on the desk and the room was silent. ‘Are you questioning my judgement?’

Jessica was prevented from saying something instinctive as Cole cut in. ‘I think we’ve all had a long night and are feeling a little emotional.’

She said nothing but refused to look away from her boss, daring him to take his eyes away first and wanting him to feel uncomfortable and know she was on to him.

Cole spoke again, trying to defuse the tension. ‘What are we going to do about the media?’

It was a question that couldn’t be ignored and Farraday finally stopped eyeing Jessica and turned to the inspector. ‘The press office have started putting together a statement. At the moment we’re going to avoid linking it to the previous cases until the lab results come back. If they put two and two together, there’s not much we can do. The office have said that if anyone wants to make a personal tribute or something similar to Jones, then they are compiling a few before putting out a separate statement later.’

He asked if anyone else had any questions but the three detectives stayed silent and the DCI sent them on their way, saying the four of them would give a briefing to the rest of the team in fifteen minutes. On their way down the stairs, Cole said something about staying calm but Jessica wasn’t listening. She walked straight out of the station, getting into her car, and calling Garry Ashford.

The journalist answered immediately.

Jessica knew she could have given a statement to the press office that would have been distributed with everyone else’s but she wanted to talk to someone she trusted. Garry had already heard about the killing and she told him she couldn’t pass on too many specifics about the crime scene. The truth was she didn’t trust herself to keep her suspicions about Farraday private. Instead she spoke about how highly she thought of the dead constable. She didn’t really know what she was trying to achieve. In one way it was a slight rebellion against the chief inspector by bypassing the press office but it also felt good to talk about Carrie’s best qualities. After speaking for ten minutes, she knew she had to be back at the main meeting and told Garry he could call her later if he wanted to.

The team briefing went well. The chief inspector formally told the officers what had happened the night before and said that, for now, they weren’t officially linking it to the other deaths at least until the lab results came back. DI Cole let everyone know where they were up to with the investigation, which wasn’t far, and handed out the jobs for the day.

Regardless of how she was feeling, Jessica knew Farraday had been right about them setting an example and when it was her turn to talk, she took a deep breath and spoke as calmly as she could manage.

‘I know a lot of you are angry and upset and want to get out there and find who did this but we have to work as the trained professionals we are. We need to be calm and level-headed and not make mistakes. If you’ve been given a job to do, you need to be able to do it to the best of your abilities.’

She paused for a moment to stop her voice from cracking. ‘There’s no shame in being upset and none of us have a problem if any of you need to speak to the counselling staff. But we need to be able to work on this like any other case and, instead of being consumed by our anger, we must use it to drive us and get things done. We all lost a friend this morning – now let’s show everyone what a fantastic team of people Carrie had around her.’

There was complete silence in the room as she finished talking. She felt a lump in her own throat and could see that a few of the officers in front of her seemingly had something in their eyes that needed wiping away.

Farraday dismissed everyone and Jessica returned to her office with Reynolds. With the door shut behind them, he opened his arms and hugged her tight. At first, she didn’t know whether to reciprocate but, despite them being two officers on duty, the moment felt right. After letting her go, he said he had been moved by the way she had talked to the room. It was nice of him to say but didn’t help with Jessica’s own feelings of anger. She had told the rest of the officers they could speak to the counselling staff if they wanted but knew she needed to above anyone. They were just a phone call away but she couldn’t bring herself to dial the number.

Jessica felt in a daze for the rest of the day. She’d had no time to grieve and hardly any sleep but spent the entire time working hard. In the back of her mind was Farraday. She knew it was paranoia but just because she recognised it, that didn’t necessarily mean it was misplaced.

The afternoon had been spent talking to Carrie’s other neighbours. They all said roughly the same thing; she was a joy to live next to and John Mills was a nightmare. None of them had heard anything the previous night.

After finishing taking the statements, Jessica went back to the station to type them up herself. It wasn’t the kind of work she was expected to do but she felt she had to keep going. The rest of the day crew had already gone home by the time she had finished, with some of the night officers openly asking if she wanted them to help her out so she could go. In the end, to get some peace, she closed the door to her office and turned the lights out, with only the glow of the computer monitor stopping the room from being completely dark.

She looked through all the information that had come in that day then re-read everything they already had on file from the previous deaths. Although the killings weren’t being officially linked yet, she knew they were, even if the lab results weren’t expected for at least another twenty-four hours. She wanted to see something in their records that would either confirm her suspicions about the chief inspector or make her realise she was overreacting.

There was nothing.

Adam had texted her a few times during the day but she had deleted the messages without even reading them. She felt selfish but it was almost if she wanted to punish herself for not preventing what had happened the night before.

As Jessica sat staring at the computer screen, her thoughts drifted to cartoons from her youth for no apparent reason. She considered how simplistic it seemed when Bugs Bunny had a small devil on one shoulder whispering bad thoughts in one ear as a little angel sat on the other telling him the opposite. It sounded stupid but she could almost feel them there behind her, the devil telling her the chief inspector was the one and that she should shout it from the rooftops, the angel reminding her she was just struggling to deal with her friend’s death and seeing demons where there were none.

Jessica walked out to her car and got in, looking at the clock on the dashboard. She realised she had slept for barely four hours in the last day and a half. It felt as if someone else was driving as she pulled onto the road to travel home. Her feet and hands were moving over the pedals, gear stick and steering wheel but Jessica made no real conscious thought to control what she was doing.

Her mind snapped back as a car behind her beeped as she waited at a green traffic light. She wasn’t sure if she had fallen asleep for a few moments or simply if she hadn’t noticed the colour. She tried to pull forwards but the car lurched over the stop line and stalled. The car behind beeped again, swerving around her and speeding through a light which was now definitely red. Jessica started the engine again and felt that little devil in her ear, whispering mischievous ideas. The next time the light went green, she pulled away quickly and did a U-turn at the junction going back the way she had come.

She wasn’t going home.

Jessica couldn’t remember the exact directions but knew roughly which area she was going to. She found the estate fairly easily but drove through the maze of roads for fifteen minutes looking for the exact one she wanted. Eventually she parked on the side of the road and turned her headlights off. She had no plan or no real idea what she was going to do but in the darkness she sat and watched DCI Farraday’s house.

She had known the rough location because of the party he had thrown when he had first started the job. It was in a fairly affluent area and she knew her car would stand out. Jessica made sure she was stopped between street lights in the shadows and stared at the house. There was a light on downstairs but the rest of the property sat in darkness. Around the house was a mixture of fences and hedges around six feet high or so with an automated gate at the end of the driveway. It was the type where you pressed a button and waited to be buzzed through.

Jessica was thinking as clearly as she had done the whole day. She stepped out of the car and walked quietly up to the gate, making sure to avoid the glow of the street lights. She looked for a security camera but couldn’t see one. She first tried opening the gate but it wouldn’t budge, so instead she pushed it roughly to see if it was fixed sturdily enough in place to let her climb. It felt as if the bolts fixed into the ground were solid so she squinted into the distance towards the house to see if there were any obvious motion lights that would come on. She couldn’t see anything and, after looking both ways to check for approaching cars, Jessica quickly jumped up onto the middle bar of the gate and then flipped herself over the top.

She landed a little awkwardly on her ankle on the other side but gritted her teeth and refused to cry out. She followed the line of the hedge towards the house, stepping carefully in an effort to leave no footprints.

Jessica reached the garage attached to the house. The front door was only a few yards in front of her and a small alley on her right presumably led towards the back of the house.

She jumped as the downstairs light went out and held her breath, ready to duck into the alley if any of the doors opened. She wondered if it had gone out because someone had seen her but she started to breathe again as a light upstairs went on, figuring it was just the occupant going to bed. She gently rattled the garage door to see if it would open but it was locked from the inside.

Jessica realised she had no idea what she was doing. She had acted on impulse but ended up doing exactly what she had told the officers not to do at the briefing; she had let her anger cloud her judgement. She crept backwards but her heel clipped something hard, making it rattle noisily. Jessica quickly ducked, pressing herself towards the hedge. The sound might have seemed louder to her but she again held her breath, waiting for what seemed like an age. She could feel the wind starting to whip around the garden but nobody came.

When she was sure no one was going to discover her, Jessica looked to see what she had bumped into and noticed a black wheelie bin. Her head was telling her to turn and run, to get into her car and drive home to get some sleep but her eyes felt fixed on the plastic container that came up to her chest. She stepped towards it, flipping over the lid. A smell of rotting rubbish hit her but she looked inside anyway. She used the light of her phone’s screen to see in the dark but on top was an apple core and two banana skins, plus some sloppy leftover food.

Jessica knew it was time to go and could feel a voice in her head practically screaming at her but, without thinking, she was suddenly digging through the bin. It stank and she didn’t want to think about the slime she could feel on her hands but she pulled out small carrier bags full of rubbish, digging her nails in to rip them open and then dumping the contents back into the container as she fingered through whatever was in them.

She took out a supermarket carrier bag, which had been tied at the top, ripping the sides open. Some sort of liquid oozed down her arm as she dropped it back into the bin but, as she did so, something heavier fell out. She used her phone to light up the area and reached in to see what had dropped. In among a small pile of old filtered coffee and drained tea bags, Jessica used her thumb and forefinger to pull out a small plastic object. It was sticky and clearly damaged but Jessica had no doubt what it was and who it belonged to.

It was Carrie’s mobile phone.