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

Автор книги: Kerry Wilkinson

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Текущая страница: 47 (всего у книги 56 страниц)

‘And you were all women?’

Eleanor nodded. ‘Exactly. All young, all thin: either blonde or black hair because Nicholas didn’t go for brunettes. He never hired black or Asian girls either because he had his types.’

‘And you simply had to walk around looking good to keep the customers happy?’

‘Pretty much, it wasn’t hard.’

‘So what happened?’

Eleanor again went silent and Jessica watched the woman staring at the clock. Eventually she took a deep breath. ‘One of the reasons I don’t like being called “Ellie” now is because that’s what I was then. It’s like two different people – Eleanor the adult, Ellie the child.’

‘I’ve heard your husband calling you Ellie.’

‘He knows I don’t like it. I don’t know how to describe it – he says it differently.’ Jessica knew exactly what she meant – Adam said ‘Jess’ in the way no one else could. She bit her bottom lip, trying not to think of him.

‘What happened to “Ellie”?’

Jessica’s use of the name made the woman look away from the clock towards her. ‘Nothing particularly, it was just different. Back then, Nicholas had this big rivalry going with this other guy, Leviticus. They each ran various pubs and clubs and things like that – and they hated each other. There were always rumours swirling around the staff that one was going to kill the other and they were basically at war. This one night, we closed early and everyone got kicked out at the same time. We didn’t know what was happening, but then it turned out there had been a firebomb attack on one of Leviticus’s pubs just out of the centre. I don’t know if it was anything to do with Nicholas and there never seemed to be any retribution at our end. We all went back to work the next day.’

Jessica must have appeared confused because Eleanor clarified the point. ‘I’m not saying that was anything to do with what’s happened now, I’m just telling you what it was like. We were always scared, especially us women. As well as all of that, Nicholas would shout and swear. He’d throw things and call you names – it wasn’t a good place to be.’

‘Is that why you left?’

Eleanor gulped and Jessica knew it wasn’t. ‘On the side, he used to lend money to people. It all used to tie in together; someone would lose a lot of money at one of the tables and they would be invited into one of the rooms at the back where Nicholas or someone else would offer them terms on a loan. We all knew it went on but it was one of those things you never talked about. Of course, it was never that straightforward, there would be some sort of small print the person had missed – or no contract at all – and the interest rates would go up so people ended up paying ten times what they owed.’

Jessica was unable to stop herself interrupting. ‘Once he had you, he had you.’

Eleanor nodded. ‘Exactly. You used to dread walking past the room. Once I was getting changed after shift and heard this crack, we all did, then it was just some guy screaming. If you couldn’t pay, then someone would hurt you – but then you could never pay anyway because the minute you did, there would be some other penalty clause or something you had missed.’

The woman was clearly becoming distressed telling the story. She was fidgeting in the chair, putting her feet on the floor and then curling them underneath her, twiddling a strand of her hair around her finger, then letting it fall, before starting again. Jessica knew she was getting somewhere. She had waited to visit Eleanor precisely because she needed to figure out Nicholas first.

‘Did you ever tell anyone?’

‘None of us did, it was just one of those things. If he was doing that to grown men, imagine what he would do to women like us.’

‘What made you and Kayleigh get out?’

‘With Nicholas it was all about control; he liked owning things, whether it was buildings, businesses or people. I’m not sure he ever distinguished one thing from the other. He never liked staff leaving and so he started the same with us. He would buy you something you thought was a gift and then, a few weeks later, your wages would be next to nothing. When you asked what was going on, he’d say that you owed him money for the jewellery, or the designer clothes. Of course, because you had no money to pay your rent, he’d force you to take out a loan . . .’

‘. . . And then he had you.’ Jessica felt a chill go down her back. She had seen Nicholas close up and the way he talked about women. Her behaviour the previous day seemed even more reckless.

Eleanor gulped, nodding in agreement. ‘Right. You couldn’t leave the job because you had the loan to pay back, so he had you in two ways. You would be tied to him through owing him money, then tied to him through the job too.’

‘. . . My women . . .’

‘How did you get away?’ Jessica asked.

Eleanor started to scratch around her eyes, although Jessica could not see tears. ‘I think even back then I knew what was going on. While the other girls took their jewellery, I always said no. Somehow I knew it was going to end the way it did.’

‘So you didn’t owe him anything?’

‘No.’

‘What about Kayleigh?’

Eleanor sighed deeply, taking a tissue from the table and blowing her nose before replying. ‘She was more trusting.’

Jessica let the woman compose herself, allowing the silence to boom uncomfortably through the room.

‘It wasn’t just that,’ Eleanor added. ‘With the customers and men, he’d break your bones – or get one of his men to. He’d hurt you, or threaten to hurt you to make you pay. With us women . . .’

Jessica swore under her breath.

‘Kayleigh owed him for a few things. The only reason any of us started working there was because it was easy and the money wasn’t too bad. All you had to do was turn up for work looking half-decent and you were done. That’s where the problem came – girls would keep their money and then leave after a while. Kayleigh had saved pretty well but that all ended up going back to Nicholas because of the loan.’

‘But you helped her?’

Eleanor nodded. ‘We were mates. You know what it’s like when you’re young and you look out for each other. You get more cynical as you get older. I’d kept my money too and, because I didn’t owe him anything, I gave Kayleigh my savings. Between us, we bought him off and there was no way he could come back with charges, fines, or whatever.’

‘Had he . . . touched . . . her before that?’

Eleanor shrugged, not elaborating on Jessica’s choice of word. ‘Probably.’

‘What about you?’

‘I would have fucking killed him if he’d touched me.’

The swear word came from nowhere. Previously Eleanor had been speaking quickly but clearly and eloquently. Although she had something of a local twang, it wasn’t overbearing but, as she cursed, she looked directly at Jessica, her eyes making it clear she meant it, her accent strengthening.

‘So you gave the job up together?’

‘It was never one of those “hand your notice in” things, we just never went back. We moved to a different flat as well. If he had wanted to find us, he would have done – but neither of us owed him money and we hadn’t done anything other than not go to work. Although he had all the loan stuff going on, he was still a proper businessman on the surface. Neither of us thought he’d come after us and he didn’t.’

‘Did you ever hear from him at all?’

‘Not once. I saw his name every now and then in the paper or on the news but it was never for what you wanted.’

‘Who’s the Leviticus guy you talked about?’

Eleanor shook her head, shrugging, and it was clear she had said all she had to. The name was distinctive enough to track him down anyway.

Jessica asked if she wanted to add anything else, then made sure the woman was all right.

‘Cameron doesn’t know,’ Eleanor whispered.

Nodding a silent guarantee, Jessica left her contact details, closing the front door gently and thundering down the steps onto the pavement. She walked so quickly that she was practically running, fury raging through her that she couldn’t remember experiencing before. She had managed to contain herself in front of Eleanor but the story of the way Nicholas treated other people, women in particular, was almost too much to take. He’d had things his own way for his entire life, bullying and blackmailing people to do what he wanted them to. She didn’t want to think about the things Kayleigh might have gone through all those years ago and it was no surprise the two women had been too scared previously to tell the police about the monster from their past. Now Kayleigh was dead and even though there was nothing to link Nicholas to the killing itself, he was still the person who connected the two women.

It wasn’t until Jessica reached an area with no street lights that she realised she had been heading in the wrong direction away from her bus stop.

Her hands were aching and she looked at them in the light of the moon to see thin lines of blood across her palm from where she had balled her fists tightly, digging her nails in, so angry that she hadn’t noticed. As she turned to go back in the correct direction, Jessica resolved that one way or the other, she was going to take Nicholas Long down once and for all.

17

Jessica was finding the weight of her silent promise to Eleanor hard to live with. Already her sleeping patterns were a mess, thanks to a mixture of mistrust towards the man next to her and a legacy that stretched back a lot further than when she had woken up in a house that was on fire. She could barely bring herself to think of what might have happened to Kayleigh and the other women who owed Nicholas Long money but that only made it harder to push out of her mind. She thought of the man’s alcohol breath and his temper, plus the way she had put herself in harm’s way.

Again.

After another mainly sleepless night, Jessica spent large parts of the following morning scowling at colleagues to dissuade them from asking if she was all right.

Typically, it was Izzy who saw through the act first as Jessica picked at a sausage sandwich in the canteen.

The constable slid in across the table from Jessica and stole one of the sausages off the plate. ‘You look like you should be in bed.’

‘I was eating that.’

‘No you weren’t.’

Jessica looked up at her friend, her eyes widening in surprise. ‘What on earth is that?’

Izzy laughed. ‘What does it look like?’

‘It looks like your hair is now purple.’

‘Yep.’

‘Actual purple.’

‘That type of observation is why you should be up for Jason’s old job.’ The constable was grinning while she ate the remainder of the sausage.

‘When did you have that done?’

‘Well, you saw me two days ago . . .’

Jessica couldn’t stop herself from yawning. ‘Sorry, I’m not quite with it.’

‘Dave says you’ve been locked in your office all morning.’

Jessica put down her fork and picked up a sausage with her finger. ‘I wasn’t locked in there.’

‘Do you need a hand?’

Jessica shook her head, not wanting to say that she had spent the morning looking into Leviticus Bryan. Because she did not want to take Eleanor’s secret to anyone else unless she had to, she was determined to find something, or someone, who would give her another angle on Nicholas.

‘I’m fine,’ Jessica said, a little too sharply.

‘Did you read the autopsy report on Kayleigh?’

Although Jessica wasn’t particularly hungry, she was eating for the sake of it and finished chewing before replying. ‘Exactly what we thought – killer taller than the victim, possible knee mark in her back, pretty much identical circumstance to Oliver.’

‘No sexual assault.’

Jessica nodded. ‘Can you cover for me this afternoon if Jack or anyone else asks where I am? I don’t think he’d mind anyway but I don’t want to go through him.’

‘You’re not going back to . . .’

‘No.’

‘Promise?’

Jessica looked up to catch Izzy’s eye and laughed. ‘How old are we?’

Izzy smiled too but her eyes didn’t. ‘He’s dangerous.’

‘I know.’

‘Some things we should leave to Serious Crime . . .’

‘I know!’ Jessica spoke far more loudly than she intended, instantly silencing her friend. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that,’ she added.

‘I don’t want you doing anything stupid.’

‘That’s what I specialise in.’ Jessica meant it as a joke but Izzy didn’t laugh. ‘Anyway, it’s a bit rich to be told off about doing silly things by the woman with long purple hair.’

The constable did at least smile second time around. ‘I fancied a change.’

‘Then why not have your nails done, or go away for a weekend? There’s change and there’s change.’

‘Do you like it, though?’

Jessica smiled. ‘I wish I had either the time, patience or guts to do something like it myself. What did Jack say?’

‘Not much, if it was going to be an issue then it would have been when I had bright red hair.’

‘True. What about Mal?’

The constable’s face lit up as she grinned widely. ‘Oh, he really likes it . . .’

Jessica rolled her eyes. ‘All right, let’s leave it there.’

Izzy smirked. ‘How’s married life?’

Jessica picked up the final sausage and bit the top off, chewing slowly and deliberately.

‘You didn’t do it, did you?’ Izzy added.

Jessica held up her ring finger, waggling it to show her wedding band before taking another bite as the constable squinted at her, trying to work out what was going on. ‘You can tell me.’

Jessica took a moment to swallow her food before replying. ‘Tell me what’s going on with Dave and I’ll tell you what’s going on with me.’

Izzy met Jessica’s gaze but didn’t waver. ‘So how’s Adam?’

‘He’s being a man.’

Izzy nodded knowingly. ‘That’s the problem with blokes, they’re all so . . . male.’

Jessica put the rest of the sausage in her mouth and wiped her fingers on a napkin, before dropping it on the plate. The constable reached forwards and touched her hand. ‘Seriously, you’re not off to do something stupid, are you?’

‘No.’

‘Promise?’

‘On Adam’s life.’

Sat nav or no sat nav, Jessica didn’t have a clue where she was. After she’d been directed into a cul de sac and then instructed to take a right turn into a field, Jessica told it exactly what she thought of it, before turning it off. Its final words had been ‘after three hundred yards, take the second exit’, even though she was facing a wide metal gate with half-a-dozen cows on the other side.

She decided to do things the old-fashioned way and reached into the pocket behind her seat, pulling out a map and opening it on the passenger’s seat, trying to figure out where she needed to go.

Leviticus Bryan lived just outside Southport, north of Liverpool on the coast where there was all the drizzle and grey of Manchester, along with the added bonus of a bitter sea breeze. Getting to the approximate area had been easy enough but that was when the navigation device decided it fancied a day out at the seaside and stopped cooperating.

It took Jessica another half an hour to eventually find the right house. Each property was set back from the road with large, winding driveways. Most had large, imposing walls or hedges along the front, with huge gates to put off any potential trespassers. Or coppers.

Despite numbers being hard to spot, Jessica saw Leviticus’s straight away because of the large ‘LB’ letters which were part of the metalwork of the gate. His property was perhaps the most imposing on the street. Although each had a large plot of land, his seemed to be wider than anyone’s and the thick brick walls were certainly taller.

Jessica parked on the road and got out, staring up at the height of the wall, thinking that even if someone gave her a piggyback she would struggle to reach the top. Security lights were placed intermittently along it and it was clear you would have to really want to get in if you were going to go over the wall.

As she peered through the gate, Jessica could barely see the house itself. The driveway arched up, then looped around to the right out of sight. The metal of the gate was painted black, with nothing to place your feet on horizontally if you were to attempt climbing it. There was a wide lush green lawn on either side of the drive and a red car was just about visible far off towards the house.

Jessica walked to the speaker box to the side of the gates and pressed the buzzer, shuddering as the sound instantly made her flash back to standing outside Nicholas’s club trying to get in. After a few further attempts with no one answering, she returned to her car, reversing until she was parked directly in front of the gates before turning the engine off.

She had spent the morning reading up on Leviticus and knew a ridiculous amount about him. On paper, it seemed as if the man she was waiting for had an awful lot in common with Nicholas. They had both been brought up in poverty and then made something of themselves through less than legitimate methods. While Nicholas had gone out of his way to offer a genuine front for his enterprise, Leviticus had been less careful. He had a conviction for possession of a dangerous weapon and another for grievous bodily harm. He’d spent time in prison for both offences but had apparently been out of trouble since being released four years ago.

Whether that meant he was crime-free was a completely different matter.

Nicholas’s business had been exclusively based around the Manchester area, while Leviticus operated out of Liverpool. If the two setups running out of roughly the same area hadn’t caused enough tension between the two powerful, wealthy and egotistical men, Leviticus then took things one step further by starting to open places in Manchester as well. On the surface, the launching of a rival pub wouldn’t necessarily cause such an escalation of hostilities but Jessica figured most of the businesses were a front in one way or another for laundering money and selling drugs. That is what would have undoubtedly caused the ‘war’ Eleanor had described.

It probably didn’t help that Leviticus was black and surrounded himself with other people of the same race. Having seen Nicholas at close quarters, Jessica doubted he was the type to openly welcome most people he didn’t know, let alone someone who looked different to him.

Jessica had still been at school herself at that time but knew from the officers senior to her that policing had changed immeasurably since those days. Although most stories about corruption were apocryphal, there had undoubtedly been certain officers who’d turned a blind eye to such behaviour, hoping one side would wipe the other out and make life a lot easier for everyone.

Whether or not he was a changed man, Leviticus had shut down his businesses in Manchester after going to prison. There was little sign of him doing much in Liverpool either. Certainly from the official records, Leviticus had retired from obvious criminality.

In theory, Jessica should have approached the local police if she was crossing borders to interview someone but that would have meant escalating things through Cole and probably the superintendent. Because she wanted to keep as much of Eleanor’s story to herself as she could, Jessica figured she would take the disciplinary if it came. It wouldn’t have been the first time she was in trouble.

Jessica sat in her car, waiting. She played with her phone, skimming through the names and thinking of the people she had lost contact with over the years. Although she had few very close friends, there was a wealth of people she had met through her job, or through others who simply drifted in and out of her life. She thought about Eleanor and Kayleigh and the way they had once been so close, experiencing all sorts of adversity together, and yet, somehow, they still grew apart.

As she was lost in her thoughts, a car horn blared loudly, making Jessica jump. She turned to her right where there was a large silver car angled across the road with Leviticus Bryan in the driver’s seat gesticulating angrily at her.

Jessica gave him a cheery wave as she stepped out of her vehicle and walked towards his door. His window was humming down as she approached and he rolled his eyes as he leant out towards her. His voice was deep and powerful as he uttered a single word: ‘Bizzies’.

‘How did you guess?’ Jessica asked.

‘You walk like one.’

The man’s accent was broad Scouse, although there was an element that sounded as if he had tried to teach himself to sound more posh at some point.

Jessica crouched by his window so they were at the same eye level. ‘My mum would be so pissed off at hearing that. She used to make me walk in a straight line because I was pigeon-toed as a kid.’

She was surprised when Leviticus broke into a grin. ‘You’re funny,’ he said.

‘That’s not what they said when I got bottled off at the Comedy Store.’

He smiled wider, eyes twinkling in the dwindling sunlight. ‘What do you want, Bizzie girl?’

‘Just a quick chinwag, I’ll probably have a brew if there’s one on offer too.’

‘What makes you think I’ll invite you in?’

Jessica only needed two words to make the smile leave his face: ‘Nicholas Long.’