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

Автор книги: Kerry Wilkinson

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Текущая страница: 34 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

26

It might have been the wind or the drying dampness stuck to her arms but Jessica felt a chill spiral down her back. She was fixed to the spot, sliding the top part of the phone upwards then downwards and staring into the pile of rubbish. The smell was no longer affecting her, the stinking aroma was nothing compared to the shock she felt at what she was holding. Jessica tried pressing the button to turn it on but then realised there was no back panel and no battery. She used her finger to scratch into the compartment where there should have been a SIM card but it was empty.

She quickly realised her mistake. Her fingerprints would be all over the phone now too. Even if she took it to a superior officer and said she found it in DCI Farraday’s bin, all he would have to do was deny it. If he had used gloves to lift it from the scene there would be only her marks on it and who would believe a mad woman who claimed to have found it rooting through other people’s rubbish?

Jessica had a connection from Farraday to Carrie’s death and John Mills’s stabbing. If the lab results came back the way they all expected them to, the latest attacks would also be linked to the killings of Craig Millar, Benjamin Webb, Desmond Hughes and Lee Morgan. That meant she had an indirect link from the DCI to everything that had happened but she couldn’t believe her own stupidity. She had blown it and was holding evidence she couldn’t use and a theory she would have to keep to herself. The only thing she could console herself with was that her paranoia hadn’t been misplaced. It wasn’t much of a relief though, given she knew she would have to act on her own.

There were still so many things she would have to figure out, not least how Donald McKenna tied into it all, but at least she knew who she was up against.

Jessica pocketed her own phone and Carrie’s, not even being careful to keep the mess that was on her hands from getting on her clothes. She put the lid down on the bin and stepped back towards the hedge line to walk towards the gate. She was almost halfway towards the exit when she froze. A car had turned off the road and its headlights were now shining through the gate. If she had been five yards further ahead, the lamps would have been pointing straight at her.

Jessica quickly walked backwards as she saw a silhouetted figure get out of the car and walk towards the gates. The person stood next to the box that was by the gate, presumably typing in some sort of code as Jessica dashed backwards towards the garage. She didn’t want to be caught by the headlights and moved into the alley that ran alongside the house.

There was a large plastic water butt next to a side door. Jessica was beginning to feel the pain in her ankle from where she had landed after jumping the gate. Each time she pressed down, she felt jolts flaming up through the joint. She could hear the car moving down the driveway and risked a look around the corner of the house but saw straight away she had made another error. The bin had initially been in an alcove next to the garage but she had bumped it so it was now partially blocking the door.

She watched as Farraday stepped out of the driver’s seat and walked towards the object. Jessica knew she should move backwards so there was no danger of being seen but instead felt transfixed. He pulled the bin backwards and Jessica thought he was going to move it back into place but then felt a twinge in her chest as he flipped the lid over and looked inside. She knew straight away there was something wrong. She had just dumped the torn-open bags on top and, instead of the sealed-up rubbish, he would have seen the unfiltered mess. The car lamps were illuminating the scene for her as she saw him reach in but quickly withdraw his hand, not wanting to touch what was inside. He closed the lid but stood next to the container apparently not knowing what to do.

Jessica crept backwards and hunched behind the water butt, grimacing because of the pain in her ankle and waiting to hear the garage door open or the engine rev again. Instead there was just the sound of the wind and the quiet hum of the car idling in neutral. The size of the water container shielded her from view but she felt watched. She didn’t want to risk peering around towards the end of the building. She closed her eyes and held her breath before finally hearing the garage door sliding upwards. She breathed out slowly as the car pulled in and then the door slid shut again. Jessica didn’t know if the man would have to come back out of the garage to go into the house or if there was an internal door. During the party they had all been to, she hadn’t really left the main living-room area.

Apart from the wind, Jessica couldn’t hear anything. She sat and waited, gently rubbing her ankle before eventually stepping back towards the side of the house. She almost expected to see the chief inspector standing beside the garage door as she looked around the corner but there was nothing. Gritting her teeth and ignoring the pain from her leg, Jessica ran as fast as she could to the gate. She could feel her ankle wanting to give way but ignored it, pushing off on her stronger leg and jumping up onto the gate. It had been much easier to get over the first time around but she used her shoulders and upper arms to pull hard on the top of the gate frames and haul herself over, carefully lowering herself down on the other side.

She didn’t look back as she half-ran, half-hobbled over to her car. She immediately realised that if Farraday had ever taken notice of the vehicle she drove, there was a good chance he would have seen it parked on the road as he pulled his own car in. But seeing as he didn’t seem to know anyone’s first name, that was far from a given.

She unlocked the door and slumped into the driver’s seat, finally feeling able to breathe properly. Jessica dug the key out of her pocket and realised for the first time just how dirty her hands and arms were. She turned the key and felt the engine roar to life but didn’t risk putting the headlights on.

Before she pulled away she looked back at the house and saw a lone silhouette standing in an upstairs window illuminated by the light from inside.

It took three people to ask if she was all right the next morning before Jessica finally snapped and launched into a barrage of swear words that would have shown them she definitely wasn’t.

She had showered when she got in the night before but barely slept, with vivid dreams waking her each time she dropped off. By the time she got to the station, it had almost become a game to add up how little sleep she’d had. She even wrote it down on the notepad she kept on her desk. Her head struggled with the maths but the computer’s calculator helped. She didn’t feel the same person as she wrote ‘6/48’ on the pad.

She estimated she’d had six hours of sleep in the last forty-eight – and that was being generous, adding up the ten minutes here and the fifteen minutes there from the night before.

For some reason she worked out how many hours that would equate to over a week, writing ‘21’ on the pad. Then she looked on an Internet site and read you were supposed to get eight hours’ sleep a night. Again using the calculator to do the maths, she wrote ‘56’.

You were supposed to sleep for fifty-six hours a week but she was on for twenty-one, not even a full day. Jessica looked at the numbers and let her eyes drift in and out of focus.

Her mobile phone beeped and stunned her out of the daze. It was another text message from Adam. She had deleted two more the night before but clicked to open the latest one.

‘RU OK? Miss U. Worried. Pls call. Ad. X’

She read the words over three times and then deleted the message.

In the hours since finding Carrie’s phone, Jessica didn’t know if the figure in Farraday’s upstairs window had seen her or not. A couple of times when she had woken up in the night she had reached out onto her nightstand to make sure Carrie’s phone was still there and that she hadn’t dreamed it. When she finally pulled herself out of bed feeling worse than she had when she got into it, she knew she was on her own. Unless DCI Farraday challenged her directly, she would say nothing to him and not risk testing his authority again.

Herself, Reynolds and Cole had their regular briefing with the chief inspector that morning and if he had recognised Jessica the night before, he didn’t say anything. The first set of autopsy results were back but all they showed was that DC Jones had bled to death due to the stab wound in her neck. The weapon was consistent with the knife that had been used to kill the other four victims but the lab team still had a lot to do.

John Mills had stabilised in hospital and his life was no longer under threat but the doctors still had no idea if he would regain consciousness. He too had been stabbed in the neck and once in the chest but nothing major had been hit. Jessica thought about the injustice that he could survive while her friend hadn’t.

After the briefing, she went back to her office and phoned the labs. Jessica asked the receptionist to put her through to the supervisor directly, knowing there would be no risk of having to talk to Adam.

The lab manager explained that it would be a while until any results would be available because there was such a jumble of blood at the scene. As well as that of DC Jones and Mills, the man’s girlfriend had contaminated the scene by touching the bodies before calling the police. There was also diesel on the driveway which had complicated matters and it would take time to separate it all out.

So far, nothing else had been found.

It didn’t really matter to Jessica if the results came back with another link to Donald McKenna, her priority was to try to connect the prisoner to Farraday. Given everything she had found, there had to be something. On the surface she was working with the rest of the team in the same way she should be but, when she had time alone, she was hunting for that link.

The obvious theory was that the DCI was somehow planting blood or hair from the inmate at the scenes although, apart from to cover his own tracks, she had no idea why it was McKenna in particular he was using. She knew from Adam how hard that would be but the chief inspector must have seen enough crime scenes over the years to have a pretty good idea how things should look.

She checked to see if McKenna had committed any offences out of the county that the DCI could have been involved with but there was nothing. Without going to the personnel department, she wouldn’t be able to find out things like the chief inspector’s exact age or place of birth so couldn’t tell for sure if there was anything in the past that connected them. She knew they must be roughly the same age and tried using the Internet to see if it threw up any links but there was nothing.

The thought occurred to her that perhaps the warden, Lee Morgan, had helped get the blood and hair samples for Farraday and maybe he had been killed to stop him revealing anything? There was so little she had to go on though. The prison officer had no criminal record and all she had were his basic details. With her boss’s personnel file beyond her reach and the Internet offering up nothing to pair him with McKenna, she had nowhere to go.

She thought about approaching Superintendent Aylesbury. The two of them had bonded before he had been promoted but it seemed like such a long time ago and he was always keen on using the correct authority structure. Jessica knew she had no evidence anyway. She couldn’t hand over Carrie’s phone and the constable’s personnel file might well have been returned by now. Even if it was still in the DCI’s drawer upstairs it didn’t show anything conclusive. The chief inspector being first at the scene could be easily explained by him being called by the desk sergeant as well. It was all circumstantial and proved nothing.

Jessica sat at her desk and leant back in her chair with her eyes shut allowing the exhaustion to grip her. As she drifted off to sleep, she realised she had absolutely no idea what to do next.

27

Jessica spent the next nine days trying to act normally but her nightlife was catching up with her. Each evening she would drive to the estate Farraday lived on, park two streets away and then sit on a low wall opposite his house simply watching. Sometimes she would do it for half an hour but on one occasion she waited until half past five in the morning then went home, had a shower, got changed and drove to the station.

Jessica had no idea what she was hoping to see but justified the way she was acting by the fact no one had been killed since. She knew the chief inspector hadn’t left his house overnight and, in her mind, that meant she had prevented anyone else being murdered.

Sitting in on the daily briefings made her feel sick. She had to watch Farraday talk each morning and endure the cold way he said the word ‘Jones’. Jessica had hidden the mobile phone she found under her bed but would take it out each morning, sliding the top part up and down over and over.

Her obsession with sleep was consuming her. Each morning she would add to the numbers written on the pad on her desk. Sometimes she felt as if she were deliberately keeping herself awake just to have a little less sleep than the night before.

She felt an arm shaking her gently. ‘Jess?’

Jessica jolted awake and could hear the rat-a-tat-tat noise of the train she was sitting on speeding along its tracks. ‘Are you okay?’ the voice asked.

Jessica shook her head and opened her eyes. The flashes of green outside the window were disorientating as she tried to clear her head.

Rat-a-tat-tat.

‘Yeah, I just dropped off for a moment.’ She blinked a few times and looked across the table to see Rowlands’s concerned face. He had that sideways tilt to his head she so hated. ‘Where are we?’ Jessica asked, pushing herself back into the seat and trying to get comfortable.

‘Not sure. Somewhere Welshy.’ Rowlands was smiling but Jessica could tell it didn’t have the same feeling behind it as it might have done a few weeks ago.

‘How long was I asleep?’

‘Dunno but you’d started dribbling so I thought I’d wake you.’

Jessica reached up to wipe her chin but it was dry.

Her colleague winked at her. ‘Gotcha.’

She forced a smile but there was no sincerity. ‘Have you ever been before?’

‘Aberystwyth? Nope.’

After over a week of tests, Carrie’s body had been released back to her family for the funeral. Jessica was always going to be one of the officers representing the force but Rowlands insisted he wanted to go too. DCI Farraday said he had too much work to do and Jessica knew Cole had a lot on.

‘Did you see this?’ Rowlands said, holding up a newspaper.

Jessica shook her head but reached out to take it. She read through the front page and then turned inside, skimming through the article. ‘Changed their tune, haven’t they?’

‘Not surprising though, is it?’

‘Why did it have to take one of us dying before they finally decided killing people was wrong?’

A few days previously the labs had isolated the various samples taken from Carrie’s body and found a single hair that had a DNA match to Donald McKenna. There was a mixture of excitement and disappointment around the station with people not knowing if it was a good thing. Cole had been consistently talking to the CPS about the possibility of a prosecution but there was no way they felt a jury would convict.

The prisoner’s DNA was directly connected to four killings and one attempted murder and he was the prime suspect in Lee Morgan’s death too but they could do nothing. She and Cole visited the inmate again but hadn’t found out anything more than they had managed before. For the first time since they started working together, Jessica told her boss she wanted him to lead the questioning but the prisoner had nothing new to say.

Her own investigations into Farraday weren’t going anywhere either. She had even tried staying late on a couple of evenings in case the personnel department left their office unlocked but they were more professional than that. She knew she was clutching at straws but couldn’t think of anything better to do.

‘Nice piece about Carrie in the Herald, wasn’t it?’ Jessica added as the train continued to thunder along.

‘Terrific.’

‘Did you tell Garry you liked it?’

Rowlands said nothing, still refusing to acknowledge he knew the journalist. ‘Did you see the bit about Daniel Wilkin?’ he said instead.

Jessica skimmed through the pages until she saw what he was talking about. Everything that had happened in the past few weeks was blending together for Jessica and had been utterly overshadowed by her growing obsession with Farraday. She remembered the e-fit of the student and read the piece. He had pleaded guilty to a charge of manslaughter and been given bail with very strict conditions to reside at his parents’ house with a tagged curfew. From experience, Jessica knew people accused of murder or manslaughter very rarely got bail but Daniel Wilkin really was no threat to anyone.

She looked up to Rowlands. ‘I’m glad they gave him bail.’

‘He’s still going to end up going down.’

Jessica shrugged, knowing the constable was right. She wondered what Arthur and Jackie Graves would consider as justice for their son.

‘Have you heard anything from that stalker guy who confessed?’ Rowlands added.

‘Nothing. He’s tagged on a curfew as part of his bail. I didn’t really get the sense he was dangerous anyway, just weird.’

Jessica didn’t read the rest of the crime coverage in the newspaper but turned to the gossip and celebrity section. Usually these would be the pages she immediately skimmed past but something about the inanity of it all was reassuring. No matter who had died and how much of a mess the world was in, there was always some orange-skinned semi-naked nobody whining to the papers about her boyfriend.

In recent days, a few of the papers had started to carry angles about the mystery over the DNA evidence. Given the number of bodies and the people who knew within the station, there was always likely to be a leak at some stage. Ultimately, the media didn’t know how to report it either. There were a few smaller stories about the bodies being linked to the prison but McKenna wasn’t mentioned by name. Another article said there was confusion over the exact nature of the forensic evidence, which was true but not because they didn’t know what it was telling them, simply because they didn’t know what to do about it.

The train finally pulled into Aberystwyth’s train station and they took a taxi to the church. Jessica and Rowlands entered through enormous thick wooden doors at the front and Jessica felt tiny as she peered to either side and saw huge stained-glass windows stretching high towards the ceiling. The roof towered far above them, the soft organ music being played at the front echoing around.

The venue was old and majestic and reminded Jessica of being young when her school would go to the local church once a week. Back then, she was at an age where Jesus was as mystical a figure as Santa Claus and she firmly believed God had created everything around her in seven days. She enjoyed being in the school choir and singing hymns once a week was one of the things she looked forward to most.

Jessica sat next to Rowlands on the hard wooden bench. She was on the end of a row and stretched her ankle out into the aisle, rotating it gently. She wasn’t sure if she had sprained it jumping down from the gate but had strapped it tightly each morning to try to stop herself limping. If DCI Farraday had seen her shadow leaving his house he would have seen her hobbling and she didn’t want to give him any clues by limping around the station too.

The service was far more positive than Jessica would have expected. One of Carrie’s old friends told a story about how she had gone missing for an afternoon when they were still at school. It wasn’t like her to miss lessons and no one knew where she was. When people had realised she wasn’t at home either, there had been a panic over the missing girl. It turned out she had somehow managed to lock herself in a toilet cubicle and, in an age before mobile phones, hadn’t been able to tell anyone. A caretaker found her in tears as the school was being locked up. As the speaker finished the story, there was a mix of tears and laughs, which Jessica felt summed her friend up perfectly.

The woman’s mother spoke movingly about her daughter and, along with some readings and hymns, the ceremony engrossed Jessica more than anything had managed to in the last week or so. She didn’t even feel tired and had a clearness of thought she’d not felt in a while.

The burial was in the graveyard attached to the church. The casket was closed, which Jessica assumed was because of the work the forensics team had had to do to the body. At the smaller ceremony outside, the vicar said the Joneses were a major part of the local community and that Carrie was being buried next to her grandparents. It was heartbreaking for Jessica to watch the two parents say goodbye to their daughter and, while the mother was holding things together, the father was a mess and couldn’t stop himself breaking down.

There was a wake in the church hall a few hundred yards away and Jessica wasn’t surprised to see Carrie’s father hadn’t made it. As soon as they entered the hall, the dead officer’s mother sought them out.

‘You must be Jessica,’ the woman said before turning to Rowlands. ‘And David, yes?’ Her accent was far stronger than her daughter’s but there was a similarity to Carrie’s voice that stretched beyond just the accent.

Jessica introduced herself and DC Rowlands properly and the woman gave them both a hug. ‘I’m so glad it was you two who came down,’ she said. ‘Carrie would talk about you all the time. It was always hard for her being away from home but I know she valued the pair of you.’

Jessica felt embarrassed that, despite their friendship, she had never asked the obvious question about why Carrie lived so far away from home. She always assumed her friend had moved north to go to university or something similar but it seemed very selfish she had not been interested enough to find out for sure.

‘That’s nice of you to say,’ Jessica said.

‘Are you able to tell me anything about . . . what happened?’

It was the question Jessica was dreading. She stumbled over some vague-sounding, ‘We’re doing all we can’ nonsense, which was exactly the kind of police-speak the general public hated. In truth, she didn’t know what else to say. The only other options were either to give the official line, ‘No, the man we think did it is locked in prison and we don’t have a clue,’ or instead tell her, ‘I think our chief inspector did it but I made a mess of hand ling the evidence and have no idea how to fix things’. Neither of those options would be good enough even at the best of times, let alone now.

The woman looked disappointed but nodded sympathetically. ‘It’s okay, dear, I know you’ll be doing all you can.’

Carrie’s mother gave Jessica her phone number and both detectives left her a card just in case she wanted to call them. After that, they found a quiet corner and had a drink, trying not to catch anyone else’s eye. Jessica felt they had to stay for a while out of respect but she didn’t want to get into any further conversations with people.

‘That was awkward,’ Dave said.

Jessica shrugged at him as if to say, ‘What can you do?’

‘How’s Adam by the way?’ he continued. ‘He seemed like a really nice guy at the quiz. I know we didn’t really get a chance to talk afterwards but I thought he was a right laugh. Hugo was asking after him too.’

‘He’s all right.’

Jessica hadn’t seen Adam since the early hours of the morning after that night and he had stopped contacting her two days ago. She hadn’t replied to any of his texts and ignored the messages he had left at the station for her. She couldn’t explain the way she was acting but put him out of her mind, hating herself and Farraday for making her waste evenings watching a house instead of spending them with someone she liked.

‘The service was nice,’ Dave added.

Jessica nodded, not wanting to make small talk and then thought she heard her phone ringing. Because they had drifted off to a corner they had ended up sitting under a speaker and the music drowned out the ringtone. She took the device out of her pocket and realised she had three missed calls from DI Cole. She moved outside, edging into the car park towards the back of the building.

The air was cool and she shivered with the breeze but pressed the buttons to call him back. He answered straight away. ‘Jessica?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you all afternoon. I forgot about the funeral. How did it go?’

‘It was good. Carrie’s mother asked us to pass on her thanks to everyone.’ Cole sounded distracted, which wasn’t like him. ‘Is everything okay?’ Jessica added.

‘Are you back tonight?’

‘Yes, we’ve got a train in an hour or so.’

‘Good, because you’re not going to believe what they’ve found in Donald McKenna’s cell.’