Текст книги "Jessica Daniel: Think of the Children / Playing with Fire / Thicker Than Water"

Автор книги: Kerry Wilkinson

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Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 56 страниц)

Jessica pressed against the glass and stared up at the clear sky. The moon was a bright white and she could see the blinking red lights of a plane passing overhead.

‘What if he was out here when we knocked?’ Rowlands added. ‘He might have heard us and then shoved it in there to hide it and run off.’

Jessica wasn’t convinced but a thought skipped through her mind. ‘There is a shed at the other end.’ She pointed towards the shadowed corner. The constable stepped forward but Jessica held a hand across him. ‘Be careful, we’re not supposed to be here. Don’t leave any footprints.’

Together they navigated their way across the uneven flags, carefully stepping on the parts of the lawn with the most grass when they had to. Jessica knew they wouldn’t have a good reason for trampling on his property if Anthony was in his shed. If he wasn’t, she didn’t want to run the risk of having problems with evidence later.

With something like the petrol can, she couldn’t simply phone into the station and say what they had picked up because they had discovered it while trespassing. If that ever found its way into a defence lawyer’s argument, the evidence could be ruled as inadmissible. That didn’t mean there weren’t ways and means of working around the law. Jessica had already mentally rehearsed the conversation she would have with Cole later that evening. It would go along the lines of, ‘Our only suspect went missing at the exact time the fire was being set, let’s ask a magistrate if we can have a warrant.’ It was easy to make it sound like two and two were five if really necessary. Once that warrant was granted, Jessica would either be with the team that arrived at the house, or she would have a quiet word with whoever was leading the raid, just to say that there might be something of interest under the window at the back. If they could handily forget that the side gate was unlocked, then all the better.

It was the kind of thing that happened frequently although no one ever talked about it. When they knew about a certain person who was dealing drugs, they might have no evidence but ‘intelligence’ would emerge of people coming and going at inopportune hours, or ‘neighbours’ would provide anonymous statements. By the time they’d raided the place and found the evidence as they knew they would, no one cared whether the tip was genuine.

Lost in her thoughts, Jessica almost fell into the constable as he tripped on a raised paving slab and rocked backwards to steady himself. She stumbled and stretched out as he half-turned and reached out to grab her. He caught her just in time to stop her falling but Jessica winced as he touched the shoulder Ryan had barged into.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, come on, let’s get on with it.’

Jessica stepped past her colleague and hopped from one paved area to the next until she was in front of the shed. She hadn’t been able to see it from a distance but the wood was stained a greeny-brown and large parts of it were damp and rotten, even though it hadn’t rained for a few days. The door appeared as flimsy as the rest of the structure but a large metal padlock was attached. Jessica rattled the door gently but couldn’t pull it forward enough to make a crack she could see through.

‘Shall we go?’ Rowlands whispered. ‘He’s obviously not here if it’s padlocked from the outside.’

‘Light your phone up and hold it here for me,’ Jessica said, crouching next to the lock.

The constable did as he was told as Jessica reached into an inside pocket of her jacket and took out a wide hair clasp. ‘What are you doing?’ Rowlands asked but she ignored him.

The padlock was connected to a metal bracket and, using the clip at the back of her clasp, Jessica scraped the paint out of the grooves of a screw holding the joint in place. After clearing all three screws, she pushed the clasp into the grooves sideways then slowly began to turn it. As she twisted, Jessica thought the clasp would give way first but she gradually managed to loosen the screw before, finally, it dropped into her hand.

‘That was pretty good,’ Rowlands said.

‘Just hold the light still,’ Jessica replied grumpily as his hands shook. She started on the second screw, using both hands.

‘If this was a movie, you would have just picked the lock,’ the constable whispered.

‘If this was a movie, I’d have a chest three times bigger than I actually do and you’d be much better looking. Now hold still.’

Steadily Jessica eased the second and third screws out from the bracket before pocketing them. Although the padlock was still connected, the door’s hinge was only screwed to the frame of the shed, so Jessica could pull it open. It squeaked loudly, so she wrenched it as quickly as she could and then propped a stone in front of it.

Jessica entered the shed, holding her phone out in front of her for light. She didn’t know what she expected but the interior was about as shed-like as she could have imagined. A lawnmower was in the corner although, from the state of the back garden, it didn’t look as if it had been used in a while. A wooden shelf ran along the left-hand wall, stacked with jam jars, paint brushes and all kinds of tools, with potted plants lining the wall opposite.

‘This is like my dad’s shed,’ Rowlands said unhelpfully.

‘Thanks for that. I just spent five minutes tearing my fingers to pieces trying to get in here.’

‘Can you see anything?’

‘Junk.’ Jessica turned to leave but Rowlands was blocking her way. ‘Come on, move,’ she said agitatedly.

Dave stepped backwards, grabbing her arm. ‘Jess . . .’

Jessica turned to see where he was pointing his phone. Her eyes struggled to adjust to the light but, as she squinted, she could see an upturned bucket caked in soil. At first she didn’t know what he was highlighting but then she noticed it: sitting next to the bucket was a can of spray paint with a yellow cap.

10

Jessica had reached the main road on her commute the following morning when her phone started ringing. She pressed the button on her car’s dashboard to answer. Rowlands’s voice sounded but he didn’t even say ‘hello’ before getting to the point.

‘Have you seen the paper?’

‘Which paper?’

‘The Herald. They’ve got the fire on the front page.’

‘Who wrote it?’

‘Some Sebastian bloke.’

Jessica edged into traffic that wasn’t moving and put her handbrake on. ‘What does it say about Martin and Anthony?’

Dave mumbled to himself, as if reading quickly. ‘It says it happened at Martin Chadwick’s house and that he was recently released from prison. It mentions the Alfie Thompson case . . . I think that’s it. They’ve got a photo of the house so someone must have been there after we left.’

‘No Anthony or Ryan?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well that’s one thing.’

‘There’s something else.’ Rowlands sounded ominous.

‘What?’ Jessica edged off the brake, crawling forward four car lengths before stopping again.

‘It’s got the girl’s suicide in. The one you were asking Ryan about. It’s only small but that’s on the front page next to the main story.’

Because she had seen Sebastian at the scene, Jessica knew that story would be going in but was worried about the journalist finding the link she knew existed between the two cases – Ryan.

‘Does it mention any names?’ Jessica asked.

‘No, not even the girl’s.’

‘Well, that’s two things.’ There was a pause but Jessica could sense Rowlands had more to say. ‘Are you on a late today?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, I’m not in until this afternoon. Do you know what’s going on this morning? I’d rather be with you.’

Jessica didn’t want to admit it to him but she would rather Dave was with her too. With Izzy’s maternity leave and the fact no one else had been hired to cover her, a detective constable was being asked to come in from a different district for a few hours at the end of the day to tidy up any of the late bits and pieces. It helped to clear the paperwork but hadn’t gone down well among staff.

‘I spoke to Jack last night,’ Jessica said, waving a car into her lane with an exaggerated movement of her arm to let the other driver know she was doing them a massive favour. ‘Someone was going to watch Anthony’s house overnight while he sorted out a warrant to search the property. They might have already gone in. I told him they might want to pay attention to under the back window and in the shed.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He pretended he hadn’t heard.’

‘Ha! What about Anthony? Have we got a warrant to pick him up?’

‘I don’t know. Jack said they had put him on the watch lists and were going to send uniform around to knock on doors. He reckoned they’d call me overnight if he turned up but I haven’t heard anything so I assume he’s still missing. We still don’t have anything concrete to connect him to the fire other than the fact he’s not at his house. I suspect the DCI’s played a bit of smoke and mirrors if he’s sorted the search warrant but we probably didn’t have enough for the arrest one.’

Jessica heard Rowlands yawn loudly. ‘Were you up late last night?’ she asked. ‘What were you doing?’

Dave yawned again straight away but Jessica could hear him trying to talk through it. ‘Nothing. I got in late and couldn’t sleep.’

‘Aye aye, so you’ll have deleted the Internet history this morning before Chloe saw it?’

Rowlands’s alleged web-surfing habits, which Jessica had invented to get a laugh out of Izzy a few months previously, were a frequent cause for her amusement.

Jessica laughed as the man protested. ‘Hey, I was phoning you to be nice and give you a heads-up.’

‘Yeah all right, your secret’s safe with me. I’ll see you later.’

Jessica hung up, realising she had travelled barely a quarter of a mile during the entire conversation.

Despite arriving late because of the traffic, Jessica reached the station in time for the morning briefing in Cole’s office along with Reynolds and Detective Sergeant Louise Cornish. The DCI said the investigating fire officer had found traces of petrol or diesel which he thought had been used to start the blaze at Martin Chadwick’s house. Meanwhile, they had searched Anthony Thompson’s empty home earlier that morning and, as Jessica knew full well, had discovered an empty petrol can and almost-empty tin of yellow aerosol paint.

Jessica thought about the fifteen minutes it had taken her to twist the screws back into the shed the previous evening and wondered whether the tactical entry team had simply smashed the door in with a battering ram. Cole didn’t mention her ‘tip’ to the rest of the room – but he did glance her way as he brought it up, letting her know that he knew what she had done.

As she suspected, Anthony was still missing and, with little else to go on, they were doing what they could to look for him without making it official. The items recovered from his house would be sent off for testing to see if they could be linked to the crime scene but it was unlikely. The wall where the yellow graffiti had been sprayed was badly fire-damaged, with the petrol can circumstantial at best.

As for finding Anthony, by discreetly working with the rest of Greater Manchester Police, they could coordinate things such as pulling over suspicious cars, door-to-door checks around the area he lived in, and visits to places he was known to frequent. What they didn’t want to do was tip off the wider media that he could be involved with the fire. For one, they didn’t know that he was but, worse than that, they didn’t want to risk the negative attention it would bring to them all if there was an innocent explanation for his disappearance. Jessica thought of what Sebastian’s gleeful face might look like if that happened.

The only other piece of news the DCI had was a steer from the coroner that Sienna’s death would likely be ruled as suicide but that he wasn’t yet discarding the chance of an inquest because there were still a few test results to come back. It was what they had suspected but Jessica still had a nagging thought in her mind about the presence of Ryan in both cases.

With the search for Anthony being kept quiet and Sienna’s death not yet ruled upon, Jessica and Reynolds were assigned to visit the college that Sienna had attended. Even if the coroner did eventually decide on suicide, it would do no harm for them to find out as much background as they could to what had happened.

Jessica first called the college to check the details they would need. The Manchester College largely served sixteen– to nineteen-year-old school-leavers and they had half-a-dozen campuses dotted around the city. Sienna had been studying health and beauty at the Openshaw site which, Jessica noted from the website, was the closest to where Ryan lived. As the receptionist passed on the information, Jessica asked authoritatively which course Ryan was involved with. Although she wasn’t entitled to that information, she knew that, if you used any of the words ‘officer’, ‘detective’ or ‘sergeant’ and asked with enough confidence, most staff would happily tell you what you wanted to know, thinking they were obliged to do so.

Ryan was studying masonry and brickwork on the same campus but the key piece of information Jessica discovered was that both he and Sienna shared the same form tutor. It had been a while since she had been in education but the receptionist told her that every student – regardless of course – was assigned to a set adult who would monitor their attendance. They were required to sign a register each day and attend bi-monthly meetings with the tutor to talk about their overall progress. Jessica noted the teacher’s name – Aidan Barlow – and asked the receptionist if they could organise a time to speak to him that day. Jessica figured he would be one of the few adults to actually see Sienna and Ryan interacting.

Much of the local traffic had cleared by the time Reynolds drove them to the college but Jessica’s frustration at the hours she seemed to have spent in a car that day didn’t abate as they endured fifteen minutes searching for a parking spot at the campus. Her suggestion to ‘just run him over’ as a gormless-looking student wandered in front of them was ignored, as was her idea to ‘just block him in’ when they drove past the head teacher’s marked space for the third time.

By the time they had reached the reception area, only to find a queue of people, Jessica was ready to snap. After another ten minutes of listening to the group of girls in front blathering on about which type of hair extensions they should get, Reynolds had resorted to resting a reassuring hand on Jessica’s shoulder. The pain had largely subsided from the previous evening but she could still feel a twinge as her supervisor gave her a wide-eyed ‘be calm’ look.

Jessica did lots of things well. Calm was not one of them.

Despite her annoyance, she had to admit the receptionist was helpful when they reached the front. She phoned for a support staff member, who led both officers out of reception across the car park they had spent so long navigating. Although the signs proudly displayed the area as a ‘campus’, Jessica wasn’t sure the large two-storey grey building that stretched for a hundred metres or more could really be classed as anything other than a giant warehouse with windows.

The member of staff swiped them through a set of double doors and led them up a flight of stairs that opened onto a cream-coloured corridor that looked identical to the one below it.

Eventually, they reached a door with Aidan Barlow’s name printed on it and, after knocking and being called in, Jessica and Reynolds were offered seats in his office.

Aidan greeted them with a handshake and a smile, although Jessica struggled to identify his accent. At first she thought it was Irish but she also wondered if there was a hint of Scottish. The man was somewhere in his mid-thirties with a mop of straggly brown hair. He was wearing a jumper over a shirt, with thick-rimmed glasses which perfectly suited his face. In terms of looks, he wasn’t as striking as Sebastian but there was definitely something about the man which Jessica felt drawn to.

She did figure that part of the appeal could be the state of his office. While his desk was placed in the centre facing the door, piles of papers and files littered the edges of the room. Some were in boxes, with others piled on top of each other. It reminded Jessica of her own ‘filing system’.

‘How can I help you?’ Aidan asked when they were all seated and the two officers had turned down the offer of tea.

Given the way Reynolds had tried to calm her in reception, Jessica didn’t know if he would want to take the lead. Usually there was something unspoken between them – between her and pretty much anyone at the station in fact – that she would ask the questions. Even Cole gave way to her, although she had never asked him why. As the inspector stayed quiet, Jessica took the cue.

‘Obviously you know what occurred with Sienna Todd a few days ago,’ Jessica said. ‘We wanted to talk to you as her form tutor about anything that might have led up to it.’

Aidan nodded gently, ready to help. ‘I heard it was suicide?’

‘We’re not completely sure yet.’

‘Have you spoken to her friends? I’m not sure how much use I can be.’

‘That’s our next stop,’ Jessica assured him. ‘Any background you can give us would be great. Is it right Sienna had been in your form since September?’

Aidan pushed out his bottom lip, nodding. ‘Yes, just this year.’

‘What did you make of her?’

‘Sienna? I’m not sure. She had one of those names that’s a bit different, so you remember them. She seemed to be very friendly with everyone. Her course progress was good according to her marks. Generally she was here on time. She seemed very normal.’

Jessica asked for any particular friends that Aidan knew she hung around with but he didn’t offer any names other than what they had from the earlier inquiries.

‘What about boyfriends?’ Jessica asked.

Aidan gave a knowing smile but quickly suppressed it. ‘I’m not sure about a boyfriend,’ he said. ‘She was certainly very friendly with a few of the male students but I’m not sure I knew enough about her to answer that. You would have to speak to her friends.’

From what Andrew had told Jessica about Sienna’s abortion, Ryan’s claims, and now her form tutor’s insinuations, a rather disturbing picture of the young woman’s relationships was emerging. Jessica knew Sienna’s friends might be her best bet for finding the truth although, from her own experience of adolescence, she wasn’t convinced she would get the answers she needed.

‘What are her friends like? Are they in your form?’ she persisted.

Aidan scratched his chin and nodded. ‘A couple of them. I’m not sure if it’s the fairest term to use but she was in a sort of clique with four or five others. I believe they were on the same course. Every time I saw them around campus, they were together.’

The man didn’t know all of the names but two of them were the girls who had already been spoken to.

‘Did she ever come to you with any problems?’ Reynolds asked.

The man shook his head. ‘Why would she?’

‘Because you’re her tutor,’ the inspector observed. ‘Perhaps she mentioned to you problems at home, or issues with her work or something like that?’

Aidan continued to shake his head. ‘We didn’t have that kind of relationship, I’m afraid.’

Jessica tried to word the question in a slightly different way. ‘Did you ever see her upset or depressed?’

The man continued to look blankly back at them. ‘Sorry.’

Jessica could feel Reynolds trying to catch her eye, as if to say he didn’t think they could get any more from the man, but she still had something else to say. Jessica asked the question already knowing the answer. ‘Is Ryan Chadwick in your form?’

‘Ryan? Er, yes . . .’ The query had clearly taken Aidan by surprise. Jessica felt Reynolds tense slightly next to her but he didn’t say anything.

‘What’s he like?’

‘Um, I’m not sure what that has . . . ?’ From sitting coolly in his seat while discussing Sienna, the man began to fidget and he looked nervously towards the wall.

‘No reason,’ Jessica said. ‘We just know he was friends with Sienna.’

Aidan steadied himself as if his moment of nervousness had never happened. He gazed at Jessica again. ‘Oh right. Um, Ryan’s a . . . complicated character.’

She could not have thought of a better word herself but wanted specifics. ‘How do you mean?’

‘He’s not the easiest person to communicate with. Sometimes he seems happy, other times not. Sometimes he’ll join in with the group but then he can be a loner too. He’s the type of person where you’re never quite sure where you stand with him.’

Everything Aidan was saying backed up Jessica’s own impressions of Ryan. ‘I’ve heard he’s perhaps a little more than just friends with Sienna,’ Jessica added, trying to make it sound as if she knew more than she did and fishing for information.

Aidan seemed a little surprised at Jessica’s question, his eyebrows deepening before he shrugged slightly. ‘I guess. I’ve seen them talking in registration but I don’t know much more than that. They’re all at a bit of an awkward age in regards to opening up. Some of them are all right with you but others are still stuck in the moody teenager phase.’

Jessica glanced at Reynolds, letting him know she was finished. Aidan must have noticed the gesture because he continued to speak. ‘I . . . um . . . it’s a bit awkward . . .’

Jessica looked back to the tutor, eyebrows raised expectantly. Aidan seemed to be struggling with something. He was sucking nervously on his top lip. ‘I might have something for you regarding Ryan but . . . there are confidentiality rules and I . . .’ He tailed off without finishing the sentence.

Reynolds tensed further in the seat next to her. Listening to whatever Aidan might have would be a legal grey area at best, perhaps even an outright breach of various protection laws – if not on their part then certainly on his.

Jessica sensed it could be important but didn’t have time to reply before the tutor spoke again. ‘If you’re off to talk to other people, can you give me maybe an hour? I have to check a few things out.’

Jessica didn’t bother to wait for her supervisor’s approval. ‘We’ll see you in an hour.’