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

Автор книги: Kerry Wilkinson

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Текущая страница: 37 (всего у книги 56 страниц)

‘A couple more,’ she said.

‘I went to see Aidan today. I told him that I knew about him and Si. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so scared. He asked me what I was going to do. I said I wanted him to tell the headteacher and if he didn’t, then I would. He asked if I could leave him over the weekend because he’d have to tell his wife. I thought it sounded fair enough.’

Jessica shuffled onto the final page. She flipped it around to show both men. ‘I could read this out for the tape but I won’t. As you can both see, the “c” word has been written over and over in capital letters. I’ll continue from the next page.

‘I went to see Aidan again today. He lied about talking to his wife. He said that I had no proof and that, if I thought about going to the head or the police or anyone else then he would “fucking do me”. He said that he would make sure no university would take me and that he would spread rumours through the school. At first I thought he wasn’t serious and tried to say I’d tell the police anyway but he grabbed my arm and spat in my face. He told me not to mess with him and kept going on about how I have no proof. The thing is that he’s right. All I’ve got is Si’s word and she’s not here. I miss her so much. I started writing a poem about her last night but couldn’t finish. Mum and Dad have invited me out with them for lunch tomorrow but I can’t stand it. It’s not them, I just don’t know what to do. I wish there was someone I could talk to.’

Jessica put the pages down and looked up, waiting until Aidan caught her eye. ‘Molly North killed herself the next day,’ she said quietly. A fury was raging inside of her but she kept her tone calm. ‘Are you proud of yourself?’

Before Aidan could speak, his solicitor cut in. ‘This is ridiculous. How are you ever going to convince a court those words you’ve just been reading aren’t something you’ve made up? What are you even going to charge him with? As far as I can tell, from everything you’ve described, no criminal offence has taken place.’

Jessica didn’t want to speak, partly because her throat was hurting but also because she didn’t know if she could stop herself from saying something she would regret. Taking the hint, Reynolds cut in and spoke to say he was ending the interview. Aidan and his solicitor looked on, each as confused as the other.

Both officers stood up. ‘You can leave,’ Reynolds said, nodding towards the door.

Aidan slowly got to his feet, his solicitor packing the pad he had been writing on into his briefcase. ‘Did you really just bring us here to read all of that?’

Jessica watched Reynolds stare at Aidan. Because of the way he usually acted like a mixture of her father and older brother, she had forgotten how fearsome he could be.

‘No, we brought you in here to let you know that we know what you did,’ Jessica said. ‘Whether we can prove it – and whether it’s technically a criminal offence – is another matter.’

The solicitor took his client by the wrist and led him out of the room. Jessica started to speak but Reynolds barely let her get a word out. ‘Not here.’ In silence, he led her along the corridors until they were in his office.

‘What do you think he’s going to do?’ Jessica asked.

‘I couldn’t care less. We could go into abuse of trust or something like that but Sienna was over eighteen and the only proof we have of anything is the diary of a dead girl. We already knew that. Neither of us really thought he’d confess, not with a solicitor there.’

‘It was worth a try though. He’ll be looking over his shoulder every time he sees a blue flashing light now.’

‘Oh, he’ll be doing more than that.’

Reynolds had spoken with a fearsome tone in his voice and Jessica felt intimidated by such a change in the man she thought she knew.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

‘I’m going to send photocopies of this diary to every newspaper and TV channel in a ten-mile radius. I don’t even care if it comes back to me – there’s no way he’s getting away with this.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Jessica said.

‘No you won’t. If I end up getting it in the neck for this, I want you to get my job.’

‘Why would you do that?’

The inspector put an arm around Jessica. ‘Because you’ve already done enough.’

32

Jessica relaxed into the large reclining chair and put her feet up on the desk. ‘About time you got a new one,’ she said approvingly.

She watched Andrew relax into his own matching chair. ‘I didn’t think I could put up with you moaning about it any longer.’

‘How did Harley take the news about his daughter and her teacher?’ Jessica asked.

‘I don’t know. I called him the night before you told me it was going to drop in the papers. I thought he’d be angry, which he sort of was, but I think he’s been through too much to really take it all in. He said he’d pay me. I kept telling him it was nothing to do with me but he wouldn’t listen.’

‘What are you going to do with the cash?’

‘I don’t know. Give it to charity probably. He still doesn’t know what happened with the fire and, even though I’m sure he’ll have the insurance, it doesn’t feel right taking the bloke’s money.’ Andrew caught Jessica’s eye. ‘Sorry about mentioning the, er, fire.’

‘It’s fine.’

‘Do you know anything yet?’

‘No, we’re looking into things.’

Andrew stood and walked to the window. ‘You should quit and do this.’

Jessica spun around in her chair and snorted. ‘What, follow people around for a living? I’m all right.’

‘The money’s better and I’d bet it’s far less hassle.’

‘It’s not about the money.’

‘What’s it about? Putting yourself in danger?’

Jessica realised Andrew was being serious. She thought of the people she had come across over the years and the number of times she had been in trouble. ‘It’s about mates,’ she said. ‘I get to go to work with my friends every day and, even when they’re being dicks, they’re still my mates.’

‘You could come to work with me? I’ll pay you well. We’ll set up our own joint agency.’

Jessica grinned at him. ‘It’s a really nice offer but I’m all right, thanks.’

‘You’ve got my number if you change your mind.’

‘I won’t.’

Andrew went back to his desk and hunted through the top drawer, before picking out a newspaper and placing it on the table between them. ‘What do you think is going to happen?’

Jessica picked it up and scanned the front page before turning to the inside and laying it flat. ‘I have no idea but I did hear that Aidan Barlow resigned last night.’

‘Do you think he’ll sue?’

Jessica shrugged. ‘Who cares? I spoke to the guy I know at the paper. He says that if the guy does try legal action, they would be able to produce all the diaries in court. Because it’s a civil case, it’s on the balance of probabilities, not beyond reasonable doubt. He might still win but more and more details would be revealed each day. The papers only printed that he had an affair with a student who later killed herself. If it got to court, everything else would be released about his threats to the second student.’

‘Sneaky.’

‘Yeah, it wasn’t entirely my idea. I would have leaked the whole lot.’

‘Are they going to know the information came from your station?’

Jessica shrugged again. ‘Probably. But again, if they complain, they risk the rest of the information coming out. I reckon Aidan will keep his head down and hope his wife forgives him. He’s got off lightly.’

‘He’ll have to watch out for Harley too.’ Jessica didn’t want to comment, thinking that Aidan deserved everything he got but not wanting to condone anything else that might happen. ‘I bet sales of the Herald are up today,’ Andrew said, flipping over to the next page of the paper. ‘They got five pages out of it and it’s been on the news all morning.’

‘Yeah, my mate Garry will be happy.’

‘I didn’t think you were supposed to be friends with journalists?’

‘We’re not really but they can be helpful sometimes. I said I’d take him out for a beer but he’ll be buying after this.’

Andrew laughed but stopped himself when he realised Jessica wasn’t joining in. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

Jessica jumped up from the chair and took her phone out of her pocket. ‘Sorry, I’ve got to make a call. Are you going to be free later?’

‘I guess.’

‘Good, because I might have one final job for you.’

Jessica sat staring across the rippling water. The gentle waves were illuminated by rows of lamps along the water’s edge, the bright white moon reflecting from the surface. The evening was cool but Jessica left the flat’s balcony door open, her feet resting on the handrail.

She knew something had changed. She didn’t know if it was down to her, perhaps a natural progression as she got older, or if her relationship with Adam had matured her. She wanted to feel angry but instead she felt calm. The fact that she recognised her attitude had altered made her all the more certain that things weren’t quite right.

It didn’t matter how much she thought about the fires – and the fact someone had tried to kill her and Adam; she couldn’t raise the fury in her that she knew would have come so easily barely months before.

Instead, she couldn’t forget Rowlands’s words. ‘Why is it always you?’ Over the course of her conversation with Ryan and the way she had uncomfortably begun to realise that they were very similar people, she thought she had stumbled across the answer. It was always her because she couldn’t stop herself. Everything about her personality was act first and think later. If she had thought first, she wouldn’t have lost Adam originally. If she had thought first, she would never have ended up alone in her flat with a mass murderer. If she had listened to Izzy, her flat would never have burned down.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Caroline’s doorbell. Adam had been saying that perhaps they could think about buying the flat – but Jessica knew she could never stay there long-term. The house they had been living in felt like Adam’s and this place felt like Caroline’s. She wanted somewhere of her own to call home.

Jessica closed the balcony door just as her phone begun to ring. She checked the caller and smiled, walking to the front door. The man standing there was cradling his phone to his ear with his shoulder, holding onto a stack of newspapers under each arm.

‘You’re late,’ Jessica said.

He tried to enter but bounced off the doorframe, spilling one of the piles onto the floor. As he wobbled and tried to stop the first few falling, he accidentally released everything from under his other arm, leaving a mound of papers covering the area in between the hallway and the flat. He crouched down, swearing under his breath and trying to pick everything up.

Although he had come to see her for a serious reason, Jessica couldn’t stop herself from laughing. ‘I thought the sign downstairs said no free papers?’

Garry Ashford looked up from the floor as he tried to re-stack what he’d dropped. ‘Ha ha, you’re very funny. Are you going to help?’

‘If by “help”, you mean take pictures and laugh, then yeah.’ Jessica stooped and began to pick up some of the papers herself before they eventually moved everything onto the floor inside the flat.

‘Nice place,’ Garry said, wandering to the window and peering over the water.

‘It’s nicer when the sun’s out.’

‘How’s Adam? I heard he was out of hospital.’

‘He’s all right. I asked him to go out for the evening so we could work.’

Jessica sat on the floor next to the stacked papers and opened the lid of the laptop she had borrowed from Andrew.

Garry sat on the sofa. ‘Do you know what I had to go through to get those out of the office?’

‘I dunno. You left with them under your arm and managed not to drop them? How hard can it be?’

‘I had to sign them out because they’re part of our archive. It was only because I said I was working on a story that they let them go.’

Jessica shunted the laptop to one side and picked up the first paper. ‘Do you remember the last time we did this in my old flat?’

Garry clearly did. It had taken the combination of the two of them both to figure out who had been killing seemingly unconnected people in their own locked homes.

‘Is that why I’m here this time?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know who started those fires?’

‘Probably.’

‘Then why aren’t you out . . . I don’t know . . . getting them?’

Jessica shrugged and looked away, unable to admit that it was because she wasn’t sure if she trusted her own judgement any longer. ‘I want to know what you think first.’

‘Why me?’

Jessica beckoned the journalist over, so he was sitting next to her on the floor. She put the paper down and pointed to the page she had loaded from the Herald’s website. ‘What do you think?’

Garry leant forward and squinted at the screen, reading the headline and first few lines. ‘What am I looking at?’

Jessica flicked onto a second page and let him read again, then onto half-a-dozen more. Garry turned to her, obviously confused. ‘Stories about the fires, your fire, Martin Chadwick being released . . . I don’t get it.’

‘How far back do these papers go?’ Jessica asked, pointing at the pile.

‘It’s what you asked for – about seven months or so. I’ve not got them all because there would have been way too many.’

‘Do all the stories you print go on the Internet?’

‘No, not the smaller ones.’

‘Okay, let’s start at the beginning.’ Jessica reached across Garry and started sorting through the papers.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Looking for the earliest one.’

Garry half-heartedly picked up the papers closest to him and began sorting them. ‘Are you going to tell me why?’

‘I want you to see it.’

Jessica needed Garry to work things out. If he could, it would offer some sort of justification for her actions and thought process. She flipped over the pile of papers and took the one from the bottom, checking the date, and then skimming through the first two dozen pages. ‘Not this one,’ she said.

‘What am I looking for?’

‘Just wait.’

Jessica flicked through eight more newspapers before finally handing one to the journalist. ‘That one.’

She waited as Garry looked through the same sections. He looked up at her curiously. ‘Jess, I . . .’

Jessica continued working her way through the first pile, picking out three more and passing them to Garry and then choosing another five from the second. When she was finished, she tidily stacked the ones she had used in date order and sat on the sofa, looking to where the journalist was going through the items she had given him.

After the final one, he stared up at her, holding his palms upwards. ‘I don’t get it.’

Jessica closed her eyes and leant back in the seat. ‘Just look. Read what I’ve given you and read what’s on the Internet.’

As Garry looked back at the stack of papers, she could tell he was thinking that everything had got to her. She could almost hear his mind working, wanting to ask her if she was all right.

‘Just read,’ she whispered quietly.

33

The man reached into his jacket pocket and fingered the ignition of the lighter. He felt a thrill of excitement surge through his chest as he rubbed the grooves of the circular part with his thumb, gently rotating it slowly enough so that it didn’t produce a flame. He kept one hand on the object, holding his phone with his other as he walked briskly through the maze of alleyways he had so carefully remembered.

He felt proud of the way he had evolved. In the early days, there had been no planning at all. He would drive to the site, do what he had to do and then get in his car and head home. It hadn’t taken him long to figure out that he would find it hard to explain things if any witnesses reported his number plate close to more than one of his targets.

What he also started doing was buying fuel at a different petrol station each time, allowing him to refill his petrol can without arousing suspicion.

Not using his car at the scene solved one problem, but it left him with the issue of how to get the canister to the target without being seen. Public transport was obviously out and walking was not only impractical because of the distances but also due to how heavy the petrol was. He had thought about using something else to get the fires started but he hadn’t come across anything that was so quick to burn while, at the same time, being so easily available.

There was something about the smell too.

The aroma was perhaps the best part: the thick scent of power hanging in the air before he used the lighter. It offered more satisfaction than a match. The enjoyment as he quickly scuffed his finger along the round ignition was so much more thrilling than simply flicking a match along the side of a box.

Hiding the can close to the victim’s house had come to him in a moment as close to genius as he thought he had ever managed. He would find a nearby spot during daylight and then return to hide the can not long after it went dark. He would leave it under a hedge or somewhere similar that the public paid no attention to. With that done, he would park around a mile away in the early hours, hurry through the collection of side streets and back alleys he had memorised, and then retrieve his prize. After lighting the flames he would race back the way he had come and be in his vehicle before someone had even called 999.

At that time of the morning, it was almost always clear and by the time anyone arrived to start investigating what had happened, he was well on his way home.

Well, that was how it worked now.

Martin Chadwick’s house had almost been a big mistake. The early evening timing had been utterly naive, but at least it had guaranteed the target was in – and allowed lessons to be learned.

The man was glad it was spring, the early morning temperatures were relatively comfortable and the ground wasn’t frosty and slippery. He also didn’t have to wear a thick coat, making it harder to run.

He crossed a road, ducking under an overhanging branch before hurrying through a ginnel and emerging onto the cul-de-sac he had chosen. The hiding place for the fuel had been pretty easy this time around. Purely by accident when he had been driving to check the location earlier, he saw that it was bin day. Residents had already started to leave their large grey wheelie bins at the end of their driveways ready for collection the following morning. The man had left his can in the one belonging to the house opposite and then driven off.

He put his phone into his jacket pocket and raised the bin lid, reaching inside and lifting the petrol container out. He had deliberately not filled it all the way, knowing how heavy it would be otherwise. Making his way across the road, he could feel his hands trembling with anticipation.

At the end of the target’s drive, he stopped and placed the can on the floor, unscrewing the lid and inhaling just enough to enjoy the sensation without clouding his senses. His heart was pounding as he walked towards the front of the property and began dribbling the liquid in a thin trail towards the main door.

The faint glow of the nearby street lights glistened from the liquid as he watched it seep into the ruts of the paved drive before he reached the front of the house. He continued to trickle it gently as he never felt comfortable glugging the liquid over doors and window frames. The noise sounded wasteful, as if the fuel were simply being hurled away, rather than being used for a legitimate purpose.

He was lost in his thoughts, the smell gradually reaching the point of empowerment when he heard the front door open. The man was so surprised that as he spun around the can slipped in his hand and noisily clattered to the ground. He glanced up to see Detective Sergeant Jessica Daniel standing in the doorway. The liquid gushed out of the container over his shoes. He could feel a squelching sensation as he took an involuntary step backwards.

Jessica hadn’t left the doorstep but the man could hear movement behind him. He turned to see someone he didn’t know standing at the edge of the driveway. Looking from one person to the other, he heard Jessica saying his name, telling him not to be stupid. Desperately, he tried to think of an innocent explanation for why he happened to be there but there was clearly none.

He knew it was game over.

His hand shot into his pocket and pulled out the lighter in an attempt to keep the man from advancing down the driveway towards him. He held it in the air in a silent threat, trying to think what to do next. He wondered how they knew. Was it Jessica or was it the man he didn’t know who had figured it out? He thought he had been careful enough but there must have been something he had overlooked.

He turned to see the stranger advancing one step at a time. He shouted ‘Stay back’, and held the lighter higher, his thumb resting on the trigger. Jessica still hadn’t moved but she was saying his name again, telling him to think about what he was doing.

He could feel the fumes drifting into his nostrils. As the stranger took two steps closer, he flicked the switch, feeling the heat of the flame close to his thumb. ‘Stay back,’ he shouted again, looking from side to side and wondering if there was somewhere he could run. He eyed the hedge that bordered the adjoining property. He might have been able to jump it but where could he go then? If he somehow escaped, he wouldn’t know where to hide long-term. Even so, it was surely a better idea than simply standing still?

His feet squelched again, this time uncomfortably, as he edged away from the two people towards the hedge. Jessica called his name again, seemingly sensing what he was thinking, but the stranger was now moving quickly towards him. He stepped backwards without looking and clipped his heel on an uneven part of the driveway.

Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. The man felt himself tumbling while instinctively putting his hands down to stop himself. The stranger leapt sideways. The man turned just in time to see Jessica dashing into the house. As the lighter slipped from his grasp, he thought the flame was out. He stretched forward to catch it but couldn’t control his falling body as he landed on his backside, the lighter dropping onto his foot.

For a moment he thought nothing was going to happen but then he felt the heat. Somehow the flame had ignited and, as he felt pain surge through his body, he stared down in disbelief at the fire that had engulfed his feet.

In the weeks that had gone by, the power of the flames had entranced him in their initial moments before he had to run off. He could barely comprehend the sight of the blaze that was covering his lower half. He couldn’t even scream as the heat and the pain overwhelmed him.

He tried to roll before he heard a woman’s voice shouting and then something hammered into his legs. He heard the liquid hitting him before he felt it but, as he scrambled onto his back and stared down, he saw Jessica holding a fire extinguisher and spraying white foam over his lower half. He couldn’t feel anything except for an intense pain and didn’t even know if he was screaming.

The man breathed in, desperate for clean air, but all he felt was a gagging sensation in his throat as the stench of his own burned flesh tore through him.