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

Автор книги: Kerry Wilkinson

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Текущая страница: 50 (всего у книги 56 страниц)

22

Jessica stared at Rowlands not knowing what to say. She took another step backwards, nearly tripping over the outstretched leg of a chair.

‘I’m sorry,’ Dave mumbled, staring at his own feet.

Jessica tried to reply but her thoughts weren’t clearing quickly enough for her to process any words. Before she could compose herself, the silence was broken by her phone ringing. She collapsed backwards into the chair she had almost fallen over and pulled it out of her jacket pocket.

‘Hello.’

At first, she couldn’t register who was trying to talk, the person’s words a cluttered mismatch of stops and starts. Jessica stood and stepped back towards the window to get a better reception, physically pushing Rowlands away from her.

‘Can you repeat that?’ she asked.

After hearing Cole tell her the news that had just come through, Jessica dashed across the room, grabbing her coat and shouting over her shoulder as she fumbled for her keys.

‘Nicholas Long is dead, let’s go.’

Jessica couldn’t remember the last time she had driven so recklessly. She broke every speed limit and eased through every traffic light, green or not, as she sped from Worsley towards the centre of the city. The rain wasn’t helping but she was as focused on the road as she possibly could be, looking for gaps in the traffic and opportunities to gain a few seconds, using the concentration to block out the double hit of information.

Dave Rowlands loved her.

It was no wonder he’d been so awkward over the past few months. Those knowing looks from Izzy suddenly made sense. Jessica didn’t know how she had missed it.

If that wasn’t enough, Nicholas Long was dead; the man she had spent the past few days hearing horrific stories about, the person she had vowed would be taken down one way or the other. Someone else apparently agreed with her.

Aside from swearing under her breath, the journey to Nicholas’s club was completed in silence. If Rowlands had dared say a word, she would have stopped the vehicle and made him get out, rain or no rain.

By the time they arrived, half of Albert Square was cordoned off, along with the streets around the club. Jessica parked behind one of the marked police cars and got out, not waiting for Rowlands to follow. She took out her identification and was waved towards the scene by an officer in uniform she didn’t recognise. There were four officers standing outside the front of the club, but they let her through. Jessica knew the inside layout all too well, walking along the dark corridor towards reception and then cutting through into the main area. A few officers were milling around and one pointed her towards the back offices.

Cole was standing in the hallway as Jessica entered, panting for breath. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, but Jessica didn’t know if he was referring to her breathlessness or if he somehow knew what else had been happening.

‘Is he really dead?’ she asked.

‘Definitely.’

‘You saw the body?’

‘He’s still there if you want to.’

Jessica wouldn’t usually go out of her way to see something so morbid but after everything she had heard recently, she felt an irresistible urge. The chief inspector stayed where he was as Jessica edged forward. At the far end of the corridor, there were people working in white paper suits and hair nets. One of them noticed Jessica but the look in her eyes must have told them that she was coming to look at the body regardless of what they thought.

The Scene of Crime officer nodded towards her and turned. Jessica stepped carefully along the hallway, being careful not to touch anything, as she was led to the entrance of a toilet at the end. From the doorway, she could see the unmistakeable shape of Nicholas Long’s body on the floor, a pistol lying next to his hand.

‘He was on his front when we arrived,’ the officer said.

‘Was he suffocated?’

‘Probably.’

Jessica treaded forward gently, glancing from side to side. She saw a chip had been taken out of the sink, a piece of the white ceramic on the floor next to Nicholas’s hand. Jessica crouched and leant forward to see the contorted look on his face as the officer said ‘steady’ over her shoulder. She looked down at a pool of liquid on the floor she had somehow missed. All of a sudden the smell hit her and she didn’t need to ask what it was. Jessica stood again, stepping backwards carefully, having seen everything she wanted to. She took no particular pleasure from viewing the corpse but couldn’t deny there was a definite feeling of satisfaction he couldn’t hurt anyone again. Facedown in a puddle of his own making seemed just about right too.

Rowlands was hovering uncomfortably next to Cole but Jessica ignored him as she spoke to the DCI. ‘It seems like it’s the same person who killed Oliver and Kayleigh.’

‘Yep.’

‘Can we have a quiet word?’ Jessica glanced sideways at Rowlands to indicate that meant without him. Cole nodded and pushed the door open to the main part of the club, walking across to the long sofa where Jessica had seen the girls lounging on her first visit to the place.

The red velvet material felt cheap and uncomfortable as Jessica slid in next to the chief constable, before telling him everything she had found out over the past few days from Eleanor, Leviticus and Ruby. If he was angry, he didn’t show it, instead replying with a simple: ‘So what you’re saying is that we have a few suspects?’

He smiled thinly at her.

‘I’m sorry for going around you.’

Cole scratched his head and laughed slightly. ‘I’m not as out of the loop as you might think.’

‘Oh.’

Jessica waited for him to elaborate but he said nothing, the knowing smile fixed on his face. Jessica broke the silence. ‘Who found him?’

‘The bar manager – Liam someone or other. He’s off being spoken to now. He says he came to open the place up and found his boss where we did, then called us straight away.’

‘Did you talk to him?’

‘No, we’ll get a statement today, then you can read it through and go back to him tomorrow to see if anything has changed.’

Jessica narrowed her eyes. ‘Are you suspicious of him?’

‘Maybe – he seemed a little too cooperative. Plus we’ve started going through the CCTV and it shows him arriving half an hour before he told us he did.’

‘Perhaps he got the times wrong?’

‘We’ll see. We’ve been talking to this other guy too, the bloke from the front desk.’

Jessica could still remember the way she had confused him by reading the name from his tag as if it were magic. ‘Scott?’

‘Yes, him. He was here when we arrived as well.’

‘Have you seen the CCTV yourself?’

‘I was about to have a look when you arrived.’

The chief inspector turned, beckoning Jessica towards the door that led to Nicholas’s office. Inside, a man was sat behind the large desk, pressing buttons on the computer as the images on the screen skipped forwards and backwards. Cole introduced Jessica to one of the members from their computer team and told her he was heading back to the station to deal with the media fall-out. He didn’t even blink when she suggested Rowlands would be better utilised back at the station. Jessica wondered if his comment about ‘not being out of the loop’ extended to more than what she had been up to in the course of the job.

Before he left, he nodded towards the filing cabinets lining the room. ‘These are all locked,’ he said firmly.

‘Okay . . .’

‘They have to stay that way.’

Jessica hadn’t thought about looking for a key to get into them and wondered why he was telling her before it dawned on her that the Serious Crime Division would be desperate to get to the contents. Finding a legal way to do that was by no means a certainty and simply helping themselves would likely create more problems than it solved if any of Nicholas’s associates were ever brought to court.

Jessica didn’t bother asking how he knew they were locked before nodding an acceptance. The other officer stood to offer her his seat and, although she wasn’t usually concerned if men opened doors and gave up their chairs for her, she didn’t complain.

‘Have you found anything?’ she asked when they were alone.

‘Not really. Obviously the body was found along the hallway but there are no cameras around there.’

‘Life’s not that easy.’

‘Exactly. Anyway, there are four cameras.’ He pointed towards a button on the keyboard which Jessica pressed to flick from one view to the next. Once she had the hang of it, he talked her through them, although she could see for herself. ‘There’s one outside of the front door pointing at the pavement outside, another in the lobby facing the sofas, a third above the bar directed at the row of stools, then a final one next door.’

‘In the changing rooms?’

‘Charming, hey?’

Jessica was only half-surprised. Nicholas Long didn’t seem the type to be that bothered about employment laws. She doubted ‘his’ women would report him considering everything she had heard about the type of person he was.

‘What have you found?’ Jessica asked.

The man directed her through a few screens until she reached a list of file names. ‘These are what I’ve already clipped up, although there isn’t a lot to look at.’

Jessica started the first one from the previous evening, which showed Liam and Scott leaving together, the bar manager securing and checking the door before they headed out towards Albert Square.

The next showed Nicholas staggering into the reception area, taking money from the till and then falling onto the nearby sofa. He seemed to be struggling for breath, before eventually composing himself and slowly making his way towards his office after leaning on the bar for support.

‘He doesn’t seem very well there,’ Jessica said, stating the obvious.

‘That was about an hour after the other two left. Watch this bit again.’

He reached across Jessica to scroll the footage back and she watched the door next to the bar snap firmly into place. She knew that you needed to know the code to get through from the bar side.

‘Did anyone else go through that door afterwards?’

‘No, I’ve checked through the whole night of footage, and the next person to come in was your guy who called it in earlier this afternoon.’

‘So whoever killed him was either hiding in this back area or came in through the fire exit?’

‘I guess so.’

‘They must have really wanted to kill him.’

‘Well, there is one other option . . .’ The officer turned and nodded towards an empty space on the floor. ‘There was a safe there. Your team have already been through it but the money had gone apparently. It could have been a robbery that went too far.’

It sounded unlikely considering the man had been killed in a similar way to Oliver and Kayleigh, but they could never discount anything.

‘Are there any cameras out back?’ she asked.

‘Not that are linked up to here – you’ll have to get your teams on it. There’ll be some around the square and probably the other streets nearby but whether you’ll get anything is a different matter.’

Jessica already knew that was true. Many of the cameras struggled to catch anything that wasn’t directly underneath a streetlight, making it easy enough to make your way around undetected if you really wanted to.

‘Will you feed all of these back to us?’ Jessica asked.

‘Of course but we’ll take everything back to the labs first. Who knows what else we might find?’

Jessica realised that this was exactly the type of opportunity the Serious Crime Division had been waiting for. Now that Nicholas was dead, they would finally be able to poke through a few things they would not previously have had access to. If they got really lucky, they might be able to implicate one or two other local ‘businessmen’.

As she exited into the hallway, Jessica stopped to watch the officers carefully removing Nicholas’s body through the fire exit. She followed them into the alleyway that ran along the back, looking up towards the tops of the buildings around to see if there were any CCTV cameras. There weren’t, leaving them with the question of how the killer got in. The obvious answer was that someone who worked there had left the fire door open, ready to either return themselves later, or for someone else to do the deed.

Jessica peered at the door, concluding it was pretty much like any other fire exit she had ever seen. It had a metal bar that ran horizontally across the centre, with another connecting vertically.

‘I’ve not touched it,’ Jessica said defensively as she saw one of the officers returning.

The man grinned an acceptance. ‘I never said you had but you’re thinking it must have been left open, aren’t you?’

Jessica stared quizzically at him. ‘Yes . . .’

‘That’s not strictly true, look.’ The officer pulled on a pair of blue latex gloves and pushed the door shut. ‘You think we’re locked out now, don’t you?’

Jessica accepted a pair of gloves from the man and put them on, stepping closer to the door. There was no handle on the outside; instead she ran her hands around the grooves between the door and the frame, wondering if they were wide enough to push her fingers into. She checked the hinges but the screws were on the inside, then stepped back, shaking her head. ‘Go on.’

The man began moving along the alley away from her, before stopping to pick up something from the floor. He walked back towards Jessica and showed her the object. ‘This is some sort of roof slate. I promise you I didn’t plant this. Hopefully it works now.’

He crouched and pushed the slate in between the bottom of the door and floor. He wiggled it gently at first then, after seemingly finding a spot he was happy with, stepped back and kicked it hard. To Jessica’s amazement, the door popped open. The man bent back down and picked up the slate, tossing it behind him.

‘How did you do that?’ Jessica asked.

‘It only works on old-fashioned fire exits. It would never work nowadays.’ He pointed at the vertical metal pole connected to the door. ‘What happens usually is that when you press down on the horizontal bar, it lifts this vertical one out of the ground so the door springs open. If you know what you’re doing, you can make the same thing happen by popping something hard but flat into the groove at the bottom of this pole.’

Jessica stared at him, open-mouthed. ‘All this time and I never knew that.’

‘No reason you should.’ The man shrugged. ‘I guess it depends where you grew up. Some kid at school showed me it years ago. We used to go into the locked classroom at lunchtimes and move our teacher’s things around. She could never figure out what was going on.’ The man suddenly seemed embarrassed. ‘I was only a kid.’

Jessica grinned. ‘Fair enough, who would have thought you’d now be putting that knowledge to good use?’

As she walked towards Albert Square, she thought that what she had just been shown put a new slant on things. Previously she had assumed someone who worked there must have been responsible, directly or not. This meant it really could be anyone.

As she left the alley to head for her car, Jessica could hear a commotion. To her right, towards the front entrance to the club, there were half-a-dozen police officers standing side by side in front of a line of police tape, their arms stretched out wide. Next to them was someone holding a video camera but it was the group of young men standing on the other side of the road who were the obvious concern.

A riot van skidded to a halt not far from where she was standing, officers pouring out of the back and dashing towards the scene. The young men were all wearing black, some with bandanas tied across their faces. Jessica came as close as she dared and could feel the tension in the air, with threats and abuse being shouted across the street.

As the riot squad lined up with their shields and helmets, the person with the video camera started running towards her, their gear making it clear they were from a television news channel. Jessica started edging towards her car as the stand-off continued: the police on one side of the road, the youths on the other.

As the cameraman slowed close to Jessica, a woman she recognised as a local news presenter came from somewhere behind her and stopped next to the man.

‘Did you get it?’ Jessica heard her ask.

Before the cameraman could reply, Jessica interrupted. ‘What’s going on?’

The presenter replied, ‘You police?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Have you been inside?’

‘What’s it to you?’

The woman smiled and nudged her colleague, who was looking into the viewfinder with the camera pointed at the floor. ‘How about we tell you what we’ve got and you tell us what you saw.’

‘I’m not talking on camera.’

The presenter exchanged a look with her colleague. ‘Fine, as long as we can still quote an unnamed source.’

The two women stared at each other, waiting for the other to go first. Jessica could hear the noise of the confrontation growing louder. ‘All right, fine,’ she replied, giving the briefest of details about what she had seen inside the club, omitting everything about suffocation, guns, stolen money, or fire exits that weren’t as secure as they first seemed.

The presenter seemed happy to have confirmation of the death. ‘So Nicholas Long is definitely dead?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

She looked at the cameraman. ‘All right, fine, show her.’ As the man turned the camera around so Jessica could see the digital screen, the woman continued, ‘There’s been all sorts of stuff on the Internet this morning that he was dead. One of our producers grew up on Moss Side and he said he’d heard chatter this morning.’

‘What about?’

‘You know Nicholas Long was idolised there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Watch.’

The footage had been taken around the corner where the police were now lining up. The person being interviewed on camera appeared to be a teenager, although the hood and bandana covered all but his young eyes.

‘Why are you here?’ a man’s voice asked off camera.

The youth’s eyes darted nervously away from the camera before staring defiantly into it. ‘It’s the feds, innit? They’ve gone and fucking killed him and now we’re gonna smash the place up.’

23

Jessica sat alone thinking the timing of Nicholas’s death and Dave’s revelation could not have been worse. She had already planned how her evening was going to go from the moment Adam told her he was going to be working late at the university. Usually, Jessica would have taken him at face value but something hadn’t sounded right, not to mention the way he had been behaving recently.

She was trying to block out what Dave had told her but using the job as a way to escape, as she so often would, was hard because he was a part of that. Izzy had allowed Jessica to swap cars with her for the evening without asking any questions other than ‘You’re not going to do something stupid, are you?’

Jessica tuned in the radio to the local stations, waiting to hear if anything was going to spiral out of the incident in the city centre. Although the news had mentioned a police presence, there was nothing more.

She realised she could be in for a long night sitting in a car if Adam genuinely was working late but she parked in between street lights on the road that ran adjacent to the university’s staff car park. With the lamps placed handily around the area, Jessica could see exactly where Adam had parked and there was little chance of him spotting her, even if he did somehow know to look for Izzy’s car.

A steady stream of students began to pass Jessica’s vehicle as the clock on her phone eased around to the time she knew Adam usually finished. She watched the groups passing, thinking they seemed to be getting ever younger, before realising she was one step away from complaining about ‘kids today’.

Jessica turned her attention to the door at the side of the building, wanting to believe Adam really was staying late and wouldn’t emerge. At five minutes past the time he was due to finish, she was feeling a little ashamed of herself for doubting him. By fifteen minutes past, she had put the key back in the ignition and was ready to pull away, before the voice at the back of her head told her to wait five more minutes.

As Adam emerged from the building with his bag over his shoulder a couple of minutes later, Jessica felt a sinking feeling in her stomach, a sense that something was about to go horribly wrong but that she was simply a bystander, unable or unwilling to step in. Jessica noticed he had on different clothes than he had been in that morning. He always wore similar things to work, dark trousers with a shirt, over which he would wear a lab coat. He was now wearing a pair of smart jeans with a casual shirt he usually only wore on a night out, along with his best jacket.

After he got into the car, Jessica watched him talking into his mobile phone, smiling and laughing. She tried to think of an innocent explanation of who it might be. Although he didn’t have any family, that didn’t mean he might not be meeting up with someone he used to know from school, or someone he went to university with, or perhaps even a work colleague.

None of that would explain why he had told her he was working late though.

He hung up and switched on the headlights. Jessica turned the key of Izzy’s car, feeling the power roar through it. She slid down into her seat as Adam drove past, waiting a few moments before slipping into the traffic behind him.

Although rush hour was over, there were still plenty of people trying to get home or to whatever theatre or concert was on that night. Or just driving around in circles specifically to annoy her. Jessica had never really done much in the way of vehicle surveillance, and now relied instead on what she had seen on television shows by staying two car lengths behind. She followed Adam along Oxford Road onto Deansgate, with no idea where he was heading as he kept driving north. The traffic was stop–start until they reached the outskirts, with all the signs pointing towards either Prestwich or the motorway ring road.

Just as she thought he was going to join the M60, Adam indicated, turning left off the main road. Jessica was so surprised, she almost missed the turn herself, swerving late as the person in the car behind beeped their horn.

It took her a few moments to realise where she had turned into. The road branched off into two, the left lane leading to a Tesco, the right twisting around on itself before ending up in a car park for a restaurant and hotel. She hoped Adam would turn left into the supermarket, as if he had somehow come this far out of his way to pick up some groceries. Instead, he stayed on the road that led to the hotel.

Jessica eased off the accelerator and stopped, checking her rear-view mirror to see with a small amount of relief that no one was behind her. She crept the vehicle forward, watching as Adam drove his car front-first into a space opposite the entrance of the restaurant. It was an American-style one with a black-and-red awning hanging over the door and branding everywhere, just in case you walked in the front door and forgot where you were. Jessica waited as Adam switched off the headlights. In the moment of darkness, she pressed the accelerator, powering around the corner past where Adam had stopped into the middle part of the car park, where she reversed into a space.

As she peered up, Jessica saw Adam hurrying across the tarmac into the restaurant. There were around a dozen seats at the front of the diner and perhaps half-a-dozen slightly further back. She picked up her phone, wondering whether she should call him, when a blonde woman stepped out of the car she had parked next to. As she had reversed, Jessica hadn’t even noticed her but the woman was holding her phone in one hand and a bag in the other. Her hair was bright and bleached, curled into a short bob, and she was wearing tight-fitting jeans with a matching jacket.

The woman tottered into the restaurant wearing heels Jessica wouldn’t have even attempted to try on and, for a minute or two, everything seemed to slow down. Jessica wondered if she would have to get out of the car and go in herself to see what was happening, or if there was a completely innocent explanation and that Adam had popped out for a bite to eat, with the woman nothing to do with him.

The car was beginning to steam up and Jessica balled her sleeve to wipe the window. She was halfway through clearing the windscreen when she felt her heart jump. A waiter was strolling along the front window with Adam and the blonde behind him. When they reached the table at the end, Adam and the female slid onto opposite sides, the server handing them menus and writing down what she presumed were drinks orders.

They were smiling and laughing. All of them.

Jessica swore at the condensation, before giving up and getting out of the car, leaning against the driver’s side door in the darkness and shivering as the breeze zipped across her. She folded her arms but it wasn’t the wind that was making her tremble. The blonde with the stupid curly bob reached across with her stupid tanned hand and touched Adam on his stupid arm.

Jessica could feel her throat tightening, the sickness that had been crippling her stomach so often recently ripping through the rest of her body. She pressed herself against the vehicle, using it to hold herself up. Somehow, she forced herself not to cry, fighting every instinct she had, trying to think of an innocent explanation for why he could be in a restaurant miles from their house with an attractive blonde after telling her he was working late.

Could it be because she was always working herself? Early mornings, late nights and everything in between? Perhaps it was because he was annoyed at her for not helping with the decision about where they should live? Maybe he was simply bored?

Perhaps it was because of what had happened in America?

Jessica bit her lip, remembering what he was like when they first met; always apologising, stammering over his words, clumsy, awkward, socially inexperienced. She watched him through the window laughing as the waiter passed them drinks and they raised their glasses in an unknown toast. Suddenly she was angry, furious that she had helped him become the person he now was and that he was using it against her, taking the confidence to chat up curly-haired blonde tarts.

She stared through the darkness as the lights from inside the restaurant illuminated the area in front of her. Even from a distance, when Jessica looked properly, she could see the woman was a bit older than her, which only made things worse. If Adam was going to dump her for some slutty student with a push-up bra, that was one thing, but it would be a humiliation too far if it was for someone born before her. Someone who spent half her life getting her hair dyed and curled instead of doing a proper job.

Jessica could feel the edges of her phone digging into her palm as she squeezed it tightly. She looked at the screen, unlocking it and scrolling through to Adam’s name on her contact list. Pressing the button to call him, Jessica watched as he broke off mid-conversation and reached into his pocket. He took out his mobile phone and glanced at the screen, presumably seeing her name and then pressed a button. Jessica was ready to start speaking, thinking he had accepted the call, but instead her phone beeped and went silent. The words ‘call failed’ appeared as Adam put his phone back into his pocket.

Jessica stared at the now-blank screen wondering what she should do next. In the moment it took her to breathe in, the rain started as suddenly as it had done when she had been watching the schoolchildren play lacrosse earlier in the day. She found it hard to believe that so much had happened in such a short period of time. That morning, she had been a different person, wondering how she could play a part in bringing down Nicholas Long. Now he was dead, one of her best friends was in love with her, Adam was copping off with some other woman, and Moss Side was seemingly on the brink of a riot.

And she was getting wet.

Jessica pocketed her phone and stood still, watching Adam and the blonde from across the car park, the rain dribbling down her face. She closed her eyes and breathed in the cool air, allowing her body to shiver as the freezing rain ran down her back.

By the time she looked up, the waiter was back at the table with two plates of food. The one he placed in front of Adam seemed to consist mainly of meat and chips; the woman’s was a big bowl of salad which made Jessica hate her even more. At least if someone was going to steal him away from her, they should have the good grace to get fat in the process.

Jessica ran her hands through her hair, pulling it away from her face and apologising silently to Izzy for getting the interior of her car wet as she opened the door and climbed back inside. She watched as Adam and the woman ate their meals, chatting, smiling and laughing the whole way through. Jessica continued staring, not knowing why she didn’t march into the restaurant and demand to know what was going on. The rain continued to rattle off the metal of the car, deafening her until, finally, they finished eating and stood.

There was a tiny inkling of solace as Jessica realised neither the woman nor Adam had brought a proper coat but even that was ruined as she watched him handing the blonde his jacket. The final straw came as they dashed side by side to the hotel next door, clattering through the front door to get out of the rain.

Jessica couldn’t describe how she felt, any anger she expected to have cancelled out by a feeling in her stomach of wanting to be sick. She continued to stare at the hotel but there was no movement.

Her throat was so swollen that it was hard to breathe but Jessica composed herself to turn the key just as the rain began to ease off.

The radio jumped into life halfway through the newsreader’s sentence but his message was as clear as it could be – the threats of the teenage protestors that morning that they would ‘smash the place up’ were in the process of coming true.