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

Автор книги: Kerry Wilkinson

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Текущая страница: 54 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

‘I’m fine, thanks.’

‘Do you like all my pictures of Lewis?’ Vicky pointed at a particular one above Jessica’s head. ‘In that one there he was in the school play. He was fourteen but they wouldn’t give him the lead role. He was the best one there though – no one could have denied that.’

‘Did you know much about his friends, Mrs Barnes?’

The woman took a gulp from her tea then answered. ‘Oh yes, he played a bit of rugby and so on. I used to let him have his friends stay over. I know I probably shouldn’t tell you this but I’d get them some beer or something on a Friday night. You know what lads are like, don’t you?’

‘Would you remember the names though? For instance did you know Jacob Chrisp and Edward Marks?’

The woman pursed her lips. ‘I wasn’t always sure about the rugby boys. Faces I’m fine with, it’s the names that don’t come so easily.’

‘You didn’t remember Matthew Cooper the other day,’ Jessica reminded her.

Vicky shrugged defensively. ‘If he knew Lewis, it must have been a friend of a friend-type thing.’

Jessica took the holiday photo out of an envelope she had been carrying around and walked over to the woman. She pointed at the two young men she didn’t know. ‘Do you know who these people are?’

The woman looked hard at the photo. ‘I know the faces, erm . . .’ She looked up to the ceiling as if it were written up there. ‘One of them’s “Steven” but I don’t know the last name. The other one is somebody Newcombe. They called him “Newey”. I’d know the first name if you said it.’

Jessica gave the woman time to think things over but Vicky couldn’t remember anything else. They made small talk and Jessica listened to another rant about January before she thanked the woman for her help, adding that if she remembered any of the names fully, she could call at any time. Vicky wanted to know the significance of the photo but Jessica didn’t reveal too much. She asked Lewis’s mother if she could look for any further photos taken around that time of her son with his friends and then said her goodbyes.

After finding the link from Matthew to the other three victims and having at least partial names for the other two, Jessica was going to drive back to the station, log the information on the system and then go home and drink an entire bottle of wine herself. It wasn’t something she did too regularly but there were now only a few hours until her birthday and she was hoping no one had remembered.

27

It wasn’t often the post turned up before Jessica had to leave for work but, as if Royal Mail somehow knew, a birthday card was waiting in the hallway of her communal block of flats as she was on her way out. She only needed to read the handwriting on the envelope to know it was from her mother. A few years ago, the postman responsible for the round where Jessica lived had been arrested for stealing from the mail. Over ten thousand undelivered items were found in his garage. Somehow, despite that and another year where there was a strike on, Jessica’s mother always managed to get a card to her on time.

Jessica had spent her nineteenth birthday in Thailand with Caroline. The two had gone travelling for the best part of a year after finishing college but, even then, the receptionist at the hostel where they were staying had hand-delivered her a card from her mum. She thought Caroline must have been involved somehow, at least in divulging where they were staying, but her friend denied everything.

Before she pulled her car away, Jessica opened the envelope and read the contents of the card. It both moved her and made her laugh at the same time.

‘A third of a century. We’re so proud of you. X.’

And then came her mother’s signature followed by the sign-off:

‘PS: Our phone number hasn’t changed. Use it!’

Jessica knew she wasn’t great at staying in contact with her parents but it wasn’t the easiest thing to do. Her dad always wanted to talk about her job but often it was the last thing she wanted to discuss. Her mum would want to know about boyfriends or Caroline or other things that hadn’t been going too well. She had never really told them that she and Caroline had been out of touch for a long while and had only just begun to be good friends again. After things turned out the way they had with Randall, Caroline had gone to stay with Jessica’s parents for a short while. They frequently said they saw her as their own, given Caroline’s parents had both died.

Jessica’s mother and father were both coming down for the wedding and apparently looking forward to it. She didn’t want to be asked the obvious questions about when it would be her turn to walk down the aisle. That was bad enough but if either of them started talking about grandchildren, it really would wind her up.

As she arrived at the station, no one said anything to indicate they knew it was her birthday, which suited Jessica just fine. She had already emailed Cole a few details about the two people in the holiday photo who were so far unidentified. The chief inspector gave her a couple of officers to help find out who they were. Someone was visiting the parents of Jacob Chrisp to see if there were any other photos from the same time and to ask if they knew who the other people in the picture were. A different officer had gone to see Matthew Cooper’s brother for the same reason.

While that was going on, Jessica was working from the station to find out what could be discovered using the names ‘Newcombe’ and ‘Steven’. It was obviously a common first name but they knew roughly what ages the two unidentified men should be, which gave them a start. On the college-leavers’ list there was no one with the last name, while the Stevens had all been ruled out, regardless of how they spelled their first names. That meant that, as with Matthew Cooper, they had to look further afield into people who lived in roughly the same area as the other victims, while trying to track down the types of clubs and societies the men might have been in.

It was enormously complicated as they didn’t know where to start because the chance of people being friends of friends meant the net had to spread so wide. That left them compiling a list of everyone with the names ‘Newcombe’ or ‘Steven’ and then working backwards to connect them to any of the victims. Or, as Rowlands so eloquently described it, ‘Trying to find out who’s taken a piss in the ocean’.

Jessica didn’t leave the station for the entire day but news filtered through that the officers who had gone to see the Chrisp and Cooper families had come back with nothing. Jessica had a long list of people who weren’t in the photo but nothing concrete to say who was. It was a long frustrating day all around, especially with the air-conditioning still not working. Things were so bad the staff had even stopped complaining about it. People were bringing their own desk fans from home to use, although the temperature had at least dipped a little outside in the past day.

Not a single person asked about her birthday which to Jessica was far more suspicious than people hinting at the subject. She’d had her suspicions but the reason eventually became clear as Rowlands tried to start a casual conversation with her towards the end of the day. ‘Do you fancy the pub after work?’

‘Are you being serious?’

‘What do you mean?’

Jessica raised her eyebrows. ‘So it’s just us two off to the pub, out of the blue, which is something we’ve not done in months?’

‘It’s been a busy few weeks; I figured we could go for a pint and a catch-up. Maybe bring Iz along too?’

‘A catch-up? We see each other every day.’

‘You know what I mean,’ Dave said.

‘Yeah, unfortunately I think I do. Right, well, if you do want to do this whole thing then yeah, whatever, pub after work.’ Rowlands did his best to look as if he didn’t know what Jessica was alluding to but she could see straight through him. ‘If you ever get arrested for anything, Dave, make sure you say nothing because the second you start talking you’ll give yourself away,’ she added.

Her fears were confirmed as Dave and Izzy casually walked her to the station’s local, each pretending they were simply after a quiet drink. A smaller team had been left to work on the leads they had and, while Jessica would have preferred to stay herself, she went with her friends. She couldn’t even pretend to be surprised as she walked into the pub to find a select group of her colleagues, Caroline and a few other people she knew waiting for her.

There was a token cheer of ‘surprise’ but a general acceptance she would have been one of the worst detectives going if she hadn’t figured out what the two constables had planned.

Jessica had never been keen on being the centre of attention, much preferring to sit in the corner and make sarcastic comments, but she thanked everyone and then cheered up even more when the landlord said her drinks were free for the night. She walked around the pub a couple of times, making small talk with the people that had come to say hello and then, almost inevitably, ended up in a booth towards the back with Caroline, Dave and Izzy.

‘So which one of you organised this then?’ she asked.

‘You can thank Dave,’ Izzy said. ‘Although I did tell him there was no way he’d keep it a secret.’

Jessica turned to Rowlands. ‘I’ll give you one thing; you can definitely organise a piss-up in a brewery. If you can sort out a shag in a brothel, you’ll be up for promotion.’

The constable smiled. ‘You really don’t do gratitude, do you?’

Jessica put on a sarcastic voice. ‘Thank you very much for reminding everyone I’m getting old.’

‘No problem.’

Although it was early evening, Caroline said she’d left work an hour prematurely. She was certainly dressed up for the occasion, wearing a short purple dress the type of which wasn’t seen very regularly in a police pub like the one they were in. The older male officers had certainly noticed but her friend seemed oblivious. She told Jessica that Dave had invited her. They had met on a couple of occasions in the past, although not as embarrassing as this one, and he’d kept her phone number just in case something like this came up. Jessica suspected he had taken her number just in case the woman became single at any point but didn’t want to point it out.

‘So, presents,’ Caroline said, sounding excited. She pulled a large glossy paper bag out from under her seat. Jessica tried to look cool but, even though public parties weren’t her thing, presents always went down well and she struggled to hide at least a degree of excitement. There were three items in the bag. She unwrapped the first to find a cook book that boasted it could teach simple culinary methods anyone could use. ‘I thought it was about time you learned some basics,’ Caroline said. ‘It’s got all sorts in there just to get you going.’

Jessica had been thinking the same thing for years but had never had the inclination. She wasn’t convinced the book would give her that but smiled and thanked her friend nonetheless. She also poked a smirking Rowlands in the leg.

The second gift was some vouchers for a department store in the city but Jessica really felt touched by the final one. It was a framed picture of her and Caroline from the week before they left to tour south-east Asia. They were both teenagers and it was a photo Jessica recognised and remembered being taken but hadn’t seen in years. They were cheesily grinning at the camera, wearing each other’s clothes. Jessica smiled and gave her friend a small hug. ‘This is really nice, thanks.’

Rowlands picked the picture up from the table. ‘Christ, you look young here.’

‘It was taken before I had to endure the stress of working with you every day.’

The constable ignored her. ‘Girls get such boring presents. Us lads get computer games, toy cars, robots and all sorts of cool stuff. You get bloody pictures and all kinds of shite.’

Jessica put on a serious face. ‘It’s called growing up, Dave. Most people stop wasting their life with games, comics and robots when they hit their teens. If you’re still doing that by the time you get to thirty, it might be time to get a proper hobby.’

‘All right, all right, enough of this “turning thirty” talk. You know how to kick a man when he’s down, don’t you?’ Dave protested.

‘Actually, there’s no better time to kick a man than when he’s down. I pride myself on being good at it.’

Izzy stepped in to change the subject. ‘So, when’s the wedding then?’ she asked Caroline.

‘Just a few weeks now.’

‘Are you excited?’

‘Yeah, can’t wait.’

‘It’s my wedding anniversary in a few weeks. It only seems like yesterday in some ways.’

‘Have you got kids?’ Caroline asked.

Jessica winced, realising her friend had asked exactly the thing she shouldn’t. Caroline realised it too because of the look on Izzy’s face. ‘Sorry . . . I didn’t mean . . .’

‘No, it’s fine. I haven’t got any children, no.’ The constable stayed calm but the atmosphere was edgy and it was clear it was a touchy subject.

‘Who are you taking then?’ Dave asked Jessica, obviously trying to lighten the mood.

‘What, to the wedding?’

‘Yes, who are you taking?’ Caroline added. ‘We’ve left a place for them at the table but haven’t got a name to go on the plan yet.’

Jessica shuffled nervously. ‘Just someone. It’s all sorted, don’t worry about it.’

‘A secret boyfriend?’

‘No, just a friend.’

‘A friend who’s a boy?’ Caroline pushed.

‘Sod off, just a friend. Don’t worry about it.’

‘Is it someone from the station?’ Izzy asked.

‘Can we change the subject?’

The other three people looked towards each other and almost collectively made an ‘oooh’ sound. ‘Right, what’s the plan for later?’ Jessica said, still trying to change the subject. ‘Are we staying here or what?’

‘It’s up to you,’ Izzy replied. ‘It’s your birthday.’

‘Right, well, considering I’m on free drinks all night, I vote stay here, then pizza on the way home.’

Dave laughed quietly. ‘You’re not going to invite us all round and cook fried eggs now you’ve got your new book?’

‘If you fancy a pot noodle, you’re welcome. Well, you’re not but these two are.’

‘I don’t really do pizzas,’ Izzy said. ‘I’m more of a kebab kind of girl.’

Jessica pulled a face. ‘I used to be like that but the problem is the morning after. With a pizza you can have the leftovers for breakfast. With a kebab, it looks as if someone’s hurled it up.’

The other three people around the table were united in their reply. ‘Eew.’

‘Are you telling me I’m wrong?’

Izzy answered. ‘No, but there are some things you don’t have to say out loud.’ Jessica laughed and had to admit that was true. The constable grinned herself. ‘If we’d organised this properly we could have gone around town doing the birthday scam.’

‘The what?’ Jessica asked.

‘Way back before I was an officer, me and my friends used to do it when we were teenagers. We’d go to one of the restaurants in town and someone would drop the hint it was someone else’s birthday. All the servers would come over and clap and sing this stupid song but you’d get a free cake out of it. Then we’d move on to the next place and do the same thing. There were about five places in town who had that policy so every few weeks we’d be out claiming it was someone’s birthday.’

‘I’m not convinced we’d get away with that any longer given our oath to uphold the law,’ Jessica said.

‘Maybe not but you’d get free cake.’

Despite her reservations about any sort of acknowledgement of her birthday, Jessica ended up having a good time. She liked that the two constables kept her grounded.

Jessica found herself getting tipsier as the evening went on. She didn’t know if the free wine was courtesy of the landlord himself or because her colleagues had put money behind the bar. By the time she’d got close to finishing her sixth glass of wine, along with the various shots that had been placed in front of her, Jessica knew she was beginning to slur her words. She had always found it ironic how much she and other officers drank, considering most of the crime they investigated, especially officers in uniform, ultimately came down to alcohol. She had always been a good drinker and was more inclined to laugh the night away than get herself in trouble. If anything, Jessica had always thought she was far more likely to say something stupid when she was sober as opposed to after she’d had a bit to drink. Despite that, she decided she had finished drinking for the night, especially as she would have to be back at work the next day.

There were a few mini protests from the constables as Jessica said she wanted to go but Caroline didn’t look too bothered as she had gone quiet and seemed to be fighting to stay awake.

Jessica caught a taxi from the nearby rank but it was only after she arrived home, via a pizza shop, that she noticed she had missed calls. Her head felt fuzzy but the takeaway took the edge off ever so slightly. Jessica pressed the buttons on the phone to listen to her voicemail but it took a few attempts to get it to do what she wanted.

She listened through the message once but Jessica’s brain wasn’t thinking clearly enough to take it all in. It was only on the third listen that she finally realised why she had been called so late. The team working at the station had identified both of the remaining people in the photograph – and one of them was already dead.

28

Jessica felt a little silly as she finally got her head around the message. Firstly, she had somehow managed to miss three separate phone calls from the station. It would have only been one or two people working their way through the list of names who had found the breakthrough and the person wouldn’t have been calling because they expected her to go back, simply because they wanted to update her. If Jessica had noticed her phone going off in the pub, even with what she had drunk, she would at least have been only around the corner from the station.

Back at home, there was no realistic way she could get herself back to Longsight and, given how drunk she was feeling, it wasn’t as if she could do much good anyway. Jessica thought about calling Cole to see if he knew any more but had enough self-awareness through her drunken haze to know she should probably leave it for the rest of the night.

She lay on her bed still wearing the clothes she’d had on all day and, as she watched the ceiling spin, Jessica thought the pizza wasn’t the best of ideas after all. She wanted to think about the two people that had now apparently been identified but it wasn’t long before her mind gave up and she drifted off to sleep.

After the amount she had drunk, Jessica would have expected to sleep through to the moment the alarm on her phone went off the next morning but surprised herself by instead being awake over an hour before she had to be and feeling just about as alert as she could be, given the circumstances.

Apart from an aching bladder, Jessica felt ready for the day. She listened to her voicemail one more time. The officer who had left the message sounded nervous but excited, a nuance which Jessica had definitely not noticed the night before. They said they knew the final two people were called ‘Steven Povey’ and ‘Barry Newcombe’ but that Barry was already dead.

From just that, it was difficult to know exactly what was meant. Had the man already died or had he recently been killed in a way that related to the case? None of the other victims they’d found hands from were confirmed as deceased so something certainly sounded different. Jessica checked the times of the calls she had missed. They were all at a point where she would have been sitting in the booth in the pub and it was only then she realised she had somehow muted the device. It wasn’t the first time she had managed to do something similar but it was the only time she had missed something important through doing so. Her one crumb of comfort was that, given the time the calls had come in, she wouldn’t have been able to do much anyway.

Jessica again thought about calling Cole but, because it was early, didn’t want to disturb him while he might be with his family. Instead she caught the bus to the station, having left her car there the night before. She read her emails and, from what she could tell, the officer responsible for the breakthrough had simply been a little lucky in that they had stumbled across the right combination of names. After they had found the correct ‘Newcombe’, that had led them to work out who the other person was. It was always likely to be a matter of time before somebody found the right people but Jessica would still make sure the person responsible got the credit they deserved.

It only took a few moments for Jessica to realise the message she had been left the night before was slightly misleading. Barry Newcombe was dead but, if it was down to foul play, then the person involved had been very clever. He had been involved in a head-on collision in a car eight years previously in which he, his girlfriend in the passenger seat and the driver of the other car had all been killed. The reports showed Barry had been almost three times over the drink-drive limit and, given the car’s positioning on the road, the only suspicions of anything being untoward related to the man’s own decision to drink and drive.

If he had somehow survived the smash, he would have almost certainly been charged with causing death by dangerous driving and the witness reports were pretty damning. He had apparently been drinking at a party with some of his friends and had not even pretended to hide the fact he was going to drive home. A few of his mates said they had tried to stop him but none had called the police. Quite why his girlfriend had joined him nobody really knew but the poor guy he had crashed into left behind a wife and four children.

It wasn’t the first story of its type Jessica had read but it was one of the worst. A whole family had been destroyed because of the selfishness of one person.

She found it hard to concentrate on the other name that had been left for her, Steven Povey, but realised he was now the one person in the holiday photograph that was still unharmed. He was the youngest of the six men pictured at twenty-nine, which meant he would have only just turned eighteen at the time they figured the photo was taken. Barry Newcombe was the eldest and would have been twenty. The other four men would have been either nineteen or just about to have their birthdays.

Jessica had already checked with a few well-known travel operators but none of them had records going back eleven years. That meant Steven Povey was her one final link to finding out what the reason could possibly be for what was happening. Although it wasn’t quite eight in the morning, Jessica couldn’t be bothered to wait and phoned the number the officer had left for him. The man had moved out of the city a few years before and now lived in a village further north in Lancashire. He reluctantly agreed to meet Jessica later that day. Initially he wanted to put her off but she insisted it was urgent and that it had to be as soon as possible. Jessica didn’t tell Steven about the holiday photograph or talk about possible links to the other men at first but stressed it was important she was able to speak to him.

Jessica waited for Cole to arrive and told him where things were up to before going to grab either Dave or Izzy to take with her. Both constables were looking a little the worse for wear after the night before – but had clearly caught up on the news about the final two faces from the photo. Izzy looked marginally less hung-over, so Jessica left Rowlands to dig up any other information about the car crash which had killed Barry Newcombe, while the two women went to meet Steven Povey.

Jessica was a fierce defender of her car whenever colleagues wanted to give her stick about its age and the volume of the exhaust but she never trusted it to get her much further than from her flat to the station. She certainly didn’t want to risk it on the motorway and so asked Izzy if she fancied driving. The other woman’s vehicle was only a couple of years old and was definitely a lot less likely to break down. As it was, Jessica needn’t have worried, not that it gave her any comfort. There had been a major accident north of the city on the M60 ring road. A tanker carrying diesel had spilled across the carriageway and not only were large parts of the throughway closed, but traffic was backing up into the city centre.

What should have been a simple forty-five-minute journey up the motorway turned into a two-and-a-half-hour inquest into everything that was wrong with the country, the police force, their colleagues and, eventually, life in general as they sat in largely stationary traffic. After they finally got onto the M61 to take them north, the pair had pretty much come to the conclusion they were the only two sane people left on the planet.

After they left the motorway, it had taken a lot longer than Jessica would have thought to get to their destination. On the online map she’d looked at, it wasn’t a long distance to Steven Povey’s house but the single-track lanes with high-banked overhanging hedges took a while to negotiate because there wasn’t always room for two cars to pass each other and Izzy frequently had to pull over.

As they drove into the village, the scene almost seemed to spring into colour. A large bank of flowers that spelled out the name of the place welcomed them, with baskets of plants hanging from seemingly every house. The properties were all detached, with large driveways and patches of grass around them.

A sign proudly told visitors the village had won a ‘Britain In Bloom’ award for eight years running, another informing them the village’s summer fete would be taking place on the following Saturday.

It was the kind of location Jessica figured people from overseas pictured when they thought of Britain because of the television shows that had been sold abroad through the years. If it wasn’t for the smattering of satellite dishes and brand-new cars, it could almost have been as if they had travelled back in time forty or fifty years.

Although it was just a few centimetres on the map, the whole area felt a world away from the city. Ultimately Jessica knew people were prone to the same mistakes and cruelties regardless of where they lived. She wasn’t sure whether she preferred the honesty you might expect from residents on a rough estate or the apparent tranquillity you would probably get in a village like the one they were in.

There was only one main road through the village but, without a satellite navigation device, neither of them were entirely sure which of the side roads the house they were looking for was on. Izzy pulled over next to where a man was sitting having a lunchtime pint on his own outside a pub. Although she had lived in the north-west of England her entire life, Jessica found his accent hard to decipher but, between the two of them, they eventually worked out where they should be going.

Back in Manchester, a lot of the buildings were a mismatch of styles as diverse estates had been put up at different times, while other properties had been renovated or built by various people working independently of each other. All of the houses in the village seemed to have been either built at the same time or at least created with an eye on the tone of the rest of the area.

Steven Povey’s house was no different and looked strikingly similar to the rest of the surrounding properties. There was a low stone wall at the front, edging onto the side road he lived on. There were tidy neatly trimmed grass areas on either side of a concrete path leading to the man’s front door. The house itself was made of grey stone with an old-fashioned authentic-looking wooden edge to the windows and door frames. The door was painted bright red, perfectly matching the shade of the rest of the trims. On the front was a heavy black metal knocker, which Jessica used. A man soon answered. He had black hair swept away from his face with a small amount of equally dark designer stubble. He was wearing a T-shirt, three-quarter-length trousers and a pair of brown sandals.

He looked nervous as they introduced themselves and he invited them in, confirming he was Steven Povey. He asked if they wanted to sit outside and led them through to his back garden. There was a black metal table already set up, with four matching chairs around it. The grass was as tidily cut as it was at the front and went back a lot further than Jessica might have guessed from looking at the front of the house.

Steven was still edgy as he sat opposite them. Aside from confirming his identity, no one had given him the full details of why they wanted to speak to him, except for the fact it related to something from the past. He was clearly trying to force a smile as he looked from Izzy to Jessica. ‘How can I help you?’

Jessica took out the photograph of the six men on holiday from an envelope. It was a copy of the original she’d taken from the Markses’ house. She had spent the last few days almost memorising the features of the unidentified duo in the photo and it had been clear to her straight away that the man in front of her was one of the two. She pointed to the image. ‘Can we confirm this is you, Mr Povey?’

He picked the photo up, staring at it. Jessica carefully watched his reaction and there was an obvious flicker of recognition. ‘It was taken a long time ago but it is me.’

‘Do you know the other five men with you?’

‘I suppose . . . but it’s been years since I last saw any of them. I lived next door to Barry and he knew one of the other lads.’ Steven pointed to Lewis Barnes. ‘This guy is Lewis, I went around his house a few times but I only remember that because his mum was a bit weird. I can’t really remember the names of the others. They were only sort of my friends.’

‘Where was it taken?’

‘Faliraki, I think. It was the first time I’d gone abroad without my parents.’

‘Can you remember who took the photo?’ The man shook his head, so Jessica rephrased the question. ‘What I’m asking is if there were six or seven of you who went away? Was it one of your friends behind the camera or a stranger?’