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

Автор книги: Kerry Wilkinson

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Текущая страница: 43 (всего у книги 56 страниц)

9

Although Adam had been keen to act as if nothing was wrong, Jessica had made it clear she wasn’t happy. She was still in a mood the next morning as she made her way into DCI Cole’s glass-walled office for a senior briefing before the chief inspector talked to the rest of the team.

Cole was sitting behind his desk, with Jessica, DS Cornish and DC Diamond in a semicircle around him. Jessica had never known Izzy sit in on a senior team briefing in the past, so she knew her friend must have something important to share.

When she first started attending briefings, Jessica had felt herself itching to get away. She couldn’t see the point in sitting around talking when you could be out doing something instead. Recently, she had begun to realise it was more of a way to offer ideas and share opinions.

‘I do have something for you,’ Cole began, picking up a printout from his desk. ‘As we thought, Oliver Gordon was killed by asphyxiation. As far as we can tell, there was no strangulation – his neck wasn’t bruised and his hyoid bone is also intact.’

Jessica was waiting to hear whatever the news was about the casino Kayleigh and Eleanor had worked in but knew the chief inspector would get to it when he was ready. Although she didn’t have any great depth of knowledge of anatomy, she had only been in uniform for a few months when she found out the hyoid bone was at the top of the neck, almost directly under the chin. She had been working late shifts and been told to attend a 999 call at a local petrol station. A worker had been robbed but his attacker had also beaten him around the chest and body with an axe handle. The man could barely breathe but had somehow managed to call the police. When Jessica arrived, she could see the dark purple marks on his neck and the man croakily said at least two of the blows had caught him under the chin. When they were alone, the more experienced officer she had attended the scene with said he thought the man had broken his hyoid bone, adding that Jessica would recognise it herself if she ever had a case that involved strangulation.

‘Were there any major chest injuries?’ Jessica asked now.

The chief inspector shook his head. ‘He was likely killed by a plastic bag or something similar wrapped tightly around his face. He took at least one hard blow to the face, probably a punch, which may even have knocked him out before the bag was wrapped around him. There are a few minor marks on his back, which could have come from someone digging an elbow in, or pushing a knee into him if they were on the ground.’

‘Was there anything else at the scene?’

Jessica had not seen much when she’d been at the house but other members of the force would have been examining the Sextons’ property as well.

Cole shook his head again. ‘The homeowner found Oliver’s phone but we’ve not come up with anything untoward in the records. The hallway had various household things already in it – coats, shoes and the like – but they were apparently untouched.’

Cornish had been taking notes but stopped to interrupt. ‘Do we have any idea what happened then?’

Jessica had been wondering the same thing since first attending the scene. Cole took a large breath, shaking his head. ‘We still don’t know if Oliver was killed at the Sextons’ house or if he was taken off-site. It might have been that there was a knock on the door and he opened it, only to be punched in the face and then suffocated. We haven’t found anything in the house and can’t find anything that says he was in contact with anyone else, or that he left the property either voluntarily or not. His computer is clean too and none of the neighbours saw anything. Checking the traffic cameras nearby is needle in a haystack stuff so we just don’t know.’

Jessica knew DS Cornish had definitely gone for the inspector role and, assuming they hired internally, Jessica thought her office mate would get the job. She certainly had the drive and efficiency to do it, although Jessica didn’t know how she felt about the prospect of Louise potentially outranking her. Although they got on, they had little in common and rarely talked about anything other than work.

The sergeant said nothing but started writing.

‘I didn’t get anything from his parents or friends either,’ Jessica said. ‘We can maybe leave it a few days, then try talking to them again, but everything pretty much adds up to the fact that Oliver was a relatively normal kid.’

‘Normal’ was a word most members of CID hated. What they didn’t want was the situation they had – where no one had a bad word to say about the victim. ‘Yeah, sure, I saw him taking part in that drug-fuelled Wizard of Oz-themed orgy’ they could cope with. ‘All he did was sit in his bedroom watching movies’ was a struggle.

‘How are we going with the newspaper obit?’ Jessica asked. She had been slightly out of the loop since bringing back the details and handing them over.

‘Isobel,’ the DCI said.

Izzy glanced at her notes, then looked back up and spoke confidently. ‘We’ve been in contact with the phone company to try to trace whoever made the call to place the notice. Considering we had the paper’s full cooperation, we thought it would be easy, but it’s taken them this long to come back to us with a payphone in the city centre. It’s only a few hundred yards away from the newspaper office.’

‘Do people only use payphones to make nuisance calls?’ Jessica asked, only half in jest.

Izzy continued: ‘Because of the length of time this has all taken, any CCTV we may have had of the area is gone. All we have to work with is the description of the caller.’ She looked towards Jessica and this time she smiled. ‘I think it’s fair to say that’s left us with quite a wide scope.’

‘A man who is eighteen to bloody fifty,’ Jessica exclaimed in disgust. ‘How many teenagers do you know that sound like a fifty-year-old? Or vice versa?’

‘What are we going to do about this?’ Cornish asked.

Cole caught Jessica’s eye and she guessed the answer before he spoke. It was the only thing they could realistically do. ‘For now, we’re going to put it to one side. Apart from the staff at the paper, no one else knows. If any readers saw the notice on the day, then they didn’t clock it and no one else has come forward to point it out.’

‘It can only have been done for attention,’ Jessica said, picking up the point. ‘Assuming it was our killer, they wanted us or whoever to see it. Obviously we have but there’s not much benefit at the moment to sharing it with the public. If the killer wants us to notice them, we’re better off keeping it quiet and hoping they try to get our attention again – hopefully without murdering anyone.’

Cole nodded a short acknowledgement. Jessica knew the danger was that whoever was responsible could try to get their attention by killing someone else – but that was a risk anyway. The body had been left for them to find, the newspaper notice deliberately placed. If the perpetrator was trying to show off by pre-announcing their crimes, it could likely happen again. If the team could spot it in time, they might be able to do something about it.

‘We’ve been in dialogue with the paper,’ Cole added. ‘They’ve agreed to keep everything quiet for now, although we may end up having to give them something at the end of all this. They’re now taking more details of callers and people who email in for any obituary notices but that doesn’t mean the same thing will happen again.’

‘How are we doing with Kayleigh?’ Jessica asked, trying to hide her impatience.

The chief inspector nodded towards Izzy, who answered. ‘Kayleigh’s been in the house for five years and there were only two other sets of owners in the previous twenty-five years. The ones from furthest back have both died while we can’t find any connection from the most recent ones to Oliver or his family, or to Cameron and Eleanor. I managed to speak to them last night but they have moved out of the area and don’t appear to have any link to anything.’

‘So was whoever left the body targeting Kayleigh, or was it random?’ DS Cornish asked.

Cole was scratching nervously at his head. His hair had been receding rapidly over the past year or so and Jessica wondered if he realised how much the job was ageing him. ‘It’s hard to know,’ he said, nodding to Jessica, who took up the conversation.

‘It could be random but it would be very random. Firstly, they could have left the body anywhere. Secondly, there must have been easier houses to get into if that’s what they wanted: places with windows left open and so on. It was only a single pane of glass to break at the back of Kayleigh’s house but the guys reckon it was smashed with one brute-force strike. They’d have had to protect their hand but it could even be something like a punch.’

‘How would they have known about the key being left in the back door?’ Izzy asked.

Jessica shrugged. ‘It could be someone Kayleigh knows, or that could have just been good or bad luck depending on which way you’re looking at it. If they went equipped to break in, they would have probably found a way in any case.’

The constable nodded in agreement. ‘We spoke to Eleanor Sexton yesterday. She was a bit surprised to hear Kayleigh’s name but pretty much confirmed everything we had already been told – they worked together at a casino in the city but left around twenty years ago. They stayed in intermittent contact but nothing in the past decade or so. Neither of them seem to have been in any sort of trouble in the past and we can’t see anything else that would connect them. If Kayleigh hadn’t told us she knew Eleanor, we wouldn’t have known.’

The constable glanced up at Jessica as if to say the information she had been waiting for was finally on its way. She then turned to the chief inspector, who picked up a grey file from his desk and opened the cardboard cover.

He looked at Jessica specifically as he spoke. ‘Have you heard of Nicholas Long?’

Some local criminals were notorious, their faces and names known to pretty much everyone in uniform, but this wasn’t a name that instantly rang any bells for Jessica. ‘He sounds familiar,’ she replied, not knowing if it was because he was some sort of crook she should recognise, or if he was someone else semi-famous.

Cole held up an enlarged photograph for them to see. It showed a man somewhere in his early fifties smoking a cigar, grinning broadly. His skin was rubbery, his cheeks red and sagging, and his forehead covered in wrinkles, with strands of hair combed across his scalp in a way that fooled nobody.

Jessica shook her head slowly. ‘I’ve definitely seen him before . . .’

‘He’s a little before your time,’ Cole said. ‘Nicholas Long is a businessman in the strictest sense of the word. He currently runs a club in the city centre but that’s a vast scaling back of his operations. Twenty years ago, he ran the casino that both Kayleigh Pritchard and Eleanor James, now Eleanor Sexton, worked at. In between times he has run various businesses, including employment agencies, pubs, and a snooker club.’

‘What type of club does he run now?’ Cornish asked.

‘It’s a gentlemen’s establishment,’ the chief inspector said, raising his eyebrows towards Jessica, who didn’t know why he simply didn’t call it a ‘strip club’.

Jessica was beginning to fill in the gaps but didn’t interrupt as Cole spelled it out. ‘Throughout all of this time, he’s been suspected of various criminal offences, drugs being the main one, but prostitution and people-trafficking as well. They’ve been trying to pin illegal weapon possession on him for some time but have never been able to find anything. Apart from GBH charges when he was a teenager, he’s somehow managed to keep a clean record. To all intents and purposes, he is a legitimate above-board businessman.’

He paused as if waiting for the question that didn’t come, then flicked through the file and took out another sheaf of papers. ‘What he may not know, although I suspect he does, is that the Serious Crime Division have been looking into him for the past two years. They’ve been checking his books and employment records.’ He fixed Jessica with a stare. ‘This means that we have to tread very carefully indeed.’

Jessica broke the gaze and looked towards Izzy. ‘Have we got anything else on him?’

The constable glanced sideways at their supervisor for assurance before referring to her own notes. ‘Nicholas Long is fifty-five years old and is married to Tia Long.’ She held up a photo of a young woman with tanned perfect skin and flowing dark hair. She couldn’t have been any older than thirty at the most.

‘I wonder what attracted her,’ Jessica said.

‘He has a teenage son, also called Nicholas, with a former wife called Ruby. He comes from Moss Side where our records are a little sketchy. What is clear is that he does still have some sort of high respect in the area.’

She passed across a photocopy of a newspaper article from a few years ago with Nicholas Long standing outside a building grinning at the camera. Jessica skimmed the first few paragraphs before handing the page to DS Cornish.

‘As well as the boxing club he paid for mentioned in that article,’ Izzy added, ‘he also owns one of the main pubs in the area plus paid for recent renovations to a community centre on the estate.’

‘He can’t live there, though?’ Jessica queried, knowing that a man who had that kind of wealth would probably not choose to reside in one of the most deprived areas of the city – even if he was seemingly happy to spend money there.

Izzy shook her head. ‘He’s got a few properties but the main one seems to be a bit further south, close to the golf course in Didsbury.’

‘Nice area,’ Jessica said.

‘Clearly things are very sensitive,’ Cole said. ‘I spoke to the superintendent and the SCD yesterday and everyone is keen for us not to do anything that may interfere with their investigation. They are looking into things like the boxing club as they figure it was a way to siphon away illegitimate money he may have made and then create something that makes that cash harder to find – and makes him a sort of hero at the same time. This guy is not stupid.’

Jessica knew he was talking directly to her, even though he had been subtle enough to look at all three of them while speaking.

‘What would you like me to do?’ Jessica asked, refusing to take the bait.

The chief inspector picked up his pen and started drumming it on the table. She could tell he wished DI Reynolds was around. ‘You can go speak to him to find out if he knows either of the two women who used to work for him, just . . . be careful with it.’

Jessica nodded as her supervisor gave them a brief rundown of what else would be going on, then sent them on their way. He and DS Cornish would lead the main briefing downstairs, leaving Jessica clear.

Izzy and Jessica descended the stairs together. ‘Are you going to go on your own?’ the constable asked.

‘I’m going to grab Dave and force the moody git to smile at least once.’

‘I’ll call you if I find out anything but our records are awful when we start going back that far.’

As they reached the bottom they paused before heading off in different directions.

‘What are you going to do?’ Izzy added, quietly enough so that only Jessica could hear.

Jessica didn’t hesitate in her reply. ‘What I always do – go piss someone off.’

10

Despite being told by her boss to take a week off, Kayleigh desperately wanted to go back to work. The back door had been fixed and the police officers had finished whatever they were doing, generally getting in the way. Although she had never minded living alone, now she felt trapped in a house that no longer seemed like hers.

Kayleigh lay in bed staring at the flaking paint on the ceiling, wondering if whoever had dumped the body in her bath had entered her bedroom. Had they looked themselves up and down in her full-length mirror? Had they gone through her things? Was it someone she knew? She closed her eyes tightly and focused on her breathing, remembering the yoga classes she had gone to and wanting to believe that it would help calm her enough to make everything go away. Of course it wouldn’t: you spent so much time thinking that you weren’t breathing correctly that focusing on anything other than your breathing was impossible.

In the days since her find, Kayleigh’s friends had offered her rooms to stay in but, although she had been tempted, it also felt like to accept would have been giving in. That didn’t make her feel any more comfortable in the house, however. It was easy to show bravado on the phone, not quite so simple in an empty home when everything was dark and quiet outside. Kayleigh hadn’t been scared of the dark since she was a child, when she would jump at the pipes clanging around her parents’ old house, or worry about what might be in her wardrobe. Since finding Oliver’s body, she had slept with the light on every night, struggling to drift off and instead dozing in twenty-minute bursts which made her feel more tired than if she had simply stayed awake.

The outside sounds didn’t help either. In an area where people worked shifts and others arrived home in the early hours from the pub, there was frequently some sort of noise in the vicinity. Kayleigh would strain her ears, trying to hear if anyone sounded close to her front door.

Feeling more tired than she had when she went to bed, Kayleigh rubbed her stinging eyes. One part of her wanted to spend the day trying to sleep but the other was urging her to get out and do something.

Forcing herself to clamber out of bed, she ran a hand through her greasy and lifeless hair. She stepped close to the mirror, staring into her eyes, before examining the skin on her face which looked pale and puffy. With a sigh, she took off her nightie and picked up yesterday’s clothes from the floor. The effort of hunting through her wardrobe, where the intruder might have touched the contents, felt like too much to deal with. Shivering slightly as she finished dressing, Kayleigh turned and left the room without a final look in the mirror.

Despite the window having been fixed, Kayleigh’s kitchen still seemed cold, even when she kept the central heating on. She stifled another shiver while opening the fridge, the bright white light hurting her eyes. Although she didn’t feel hungry, Kayleigh had been forcing herself to eat in the mornings in an effort to try to keep some sort of routine going. As she hadn’t left the house in days, the fridge was looking decidedly empty, with only a dribble at the bottom of the milk bottle and a few salad items that could barely make a snack between them, let alone a proper breakfast. Who wanted green stuff at a time like this anyway? If ever there was a time where you could feel justified in polishing off a packet of muffins, this was surely it.

Because she worked in a supermarket, Kayleigh was used to picking up whatever she needed at the end of her shift, and so actually going food shopping was something she had only done once or twice in the past year.

Kayleigh first checked the back door was locked, even though she had done it the night before, and then walked around the ground floor, ensuring each of the windows was also secure. Twist one way, then the other. Rattle, rattle. Tug it, push it. Definitely closed.

After going back upstairs to take her house keys out of the bedside cabinet, she re-checked each possible point of entry a second time, before hunting through the cupboard under the stairs to find her warmest coat.

As she left the house, Kayleigh locked the door, lifting the handle half-a-dozen times before finally admitting to herself that it was secure. She knew she was becoming obsessed but that didn’t mean she could stop herself. If she had been that conscientious before, the events of the past week might never have happened.

Kayleigh turned, surveying the street in front of her. Although she had lived there for a few years, it now seemed alien. A woman pushed a buggy along the pavement at the end of her pathway, which somehow made her want to go back into the house. Her enthusiasm to get back to work feeling misplaced, she wondered if the person with the buggy might be connected to whatever had gone on. Perhaps they used the buggy to keep stolen goods in and now they were coming back to re-examine the scene? It was the perfect cover.

Taking deep breaths to calm down, Kayleigh slowly assured herself it was simply someone on their way home from dropping their children off at school.

She breathed in through her nose, focusing on letting the air out through her mouth. Maybe those yoga classes weren’t so bad after all? When that seemed to work, Kayleigh walked to the end of her drive before setting off towards the local shop. Each time anyone passed her on the pavement, she felt edgy and kept her hands firmly in the pockets of her coat. It only took her five minutes to make the journey to the main road, where there was an express version of a supermarket. She bought bread, milk and some fruit, ignoring the worker’s small talk, avoiding the allure of the cakes, biscuits and chocolate, and quickly exiting. As someone who worked in a similar environment, Kayleigh felt guilty about snubbing the checkout girl as she always hated it when customers refused to talk to her. Some of them wouldn’t even look at her, presumably thinking they were too good to be interacting with someone who worked in a supermarket.

As she walked through the sliding doors at the front of the shop, she jumped as a man reached out and touched her on the arm.

If she hadn’t been so shocked, she would have yelped but he spoke before she could say anything. ‘Do you know the time?’

Kayleigh stumbled over a reply but he continued. ‘My phone’s out of battery and there are no clocks anywhere. I’m supposed to be going for an interview but I don’t know where it is. My bus was late and now I think I’m late.’

Kayleigh noticed the shoulders on the man’s suit were far too big for him and he was nervously glancing from side to side. He was at least six inches taller than her and smelled of cheap aftershave, like one of her ex-boyfriends. The one who ‘stayed late’ at work a lot. Kayleigh struggled to speak and he offered a ‘sorry’ before entering the shop. She didn’t know if it was her expression or his haste which had made him walk away.

Realising she could feel her heart beating hard, Kayleigh turned and walked back the way she had come, keeping her head down and moving as quickly as she could without breaking into a run. As she reached her front door, she half expected it to be open and tried the handle before digging into her pocket to take out the key. She almost fell inside, shoving the door with a bang behind her, and leaning against the inside of the frame trying to catch her breath.

Kayleigh scanned the hallway, looking to see if everything was as it had been when she had left. It took a while but after convincing herself no one had been in the house during her absence, she crept through to the kitchen and put the shopping bag on the floor before peering through the window to see if anything in the back garden was out of place. She hated the feelings of unease but could not stop herself and wondered how long it would be before she could leave the house without double-checking every door and window. Or how long it would be before she could see a stranger without thinking they might be out to harm her.

As someone who had previously been confident and relatively outgoing, Kayleigh hated the person she knew she was becoming, detesting even more the person who had put her in this position by breaking into her house.

Resolving that the best way to start pulling herself together was to clean herself up a bit, Kayleigh put the shopping away and made her way upstairs to the bedroom where she picked up a fresh towel. She knew the reason she hadn’t been keeping on top of things was because she dreaded going into the bathroom. The police team had spent days testing everything and taking samples but she couldn’t see past finding Oliver’s distorted body.

After undressing, Kayleigh wrapped the towel around herself and carefully entered the bathroom. One of the police team had ended up cleaning things for her and, in that sense, the room looked and smelled better than it had in years. That didn’t stop her remembering the odour from before.

She turned on the warm water before realising that she no longer had a shower curtain. It had been taken for evidence but she had somehow switched off from the fact that it would need to be replaced. Kayleigh couldn’t stop picturing Oliver in the bath, even as she stood under the cascading water that half-sloshed onto the floor, trying to wash everything away.

After finishing, she stood and looked at her face in the bathroom mirror. Somehow the water had washed away some trace of the bags under her eyes, but her skin was still a sallow white. Her hair at least felt a little more normal, and she reached onto the nearby shelf to pick up her hairbrush. Realising it wasn’t in the spot where it usually was, she checked the shelf above, then the bathroom cabinet. She couldn’t think of a reason why anyone from the police team would have taken it – and hadn’t seen the brush on the list of things they had taken. She had another in the drawer next to the mirror downstairs but didn’t fancy going all that way.

Kayleigh re-wrapped the towel around herself and walked through to the bedroom where she checked her bedside table, even though she never left her brush anywhere but the bathroom.

She sat on the bed, gently towelling her hair dry and wondering where she could have possibly put it.