DS Jessica Daniel series: Locked In/Vigilante/The Woman in Black - Books 1-3 (103 page)

Jessica nodded, knowing it was hard enough dealing with the legal issues when someone had died, let alone when they had just disappeared. ‘I don’t really need to stay for long, I was
wondering if you might be able to take a look at a photo for me to see if you recognise the person?’

‘Sure, but if it’s anything to do with my brother, I’m not sure there’s much I’ll know. You’re aware of the . . . problems between us.’

Jessica slid the photo of Matthew Cooper out of an envelope. Charlie scanned it but stuck his bottom lip out and shook his head. ‘No idea, I’m afraid.’ He handed the photo back
and she put it away.

‘Do you want a drink? I can sort you a tea or something? Maybe a cold drink?’

Perhaps it was because she didn’t fancy an afternoon in the stifling police station but Jessica surprised herself with her answer. ‘Sure.’

She followed the man as he led her through the house and Jessica glanced from side to side while they walked. Ed’s art was hung throughout the area, a stark contrast to some of the clutter
which had simply been left around. Their footsteps echoed from the hard floor until they reached the kitchen.

While the rest of the property seemed a strange mix of being half-finished as well as old and new, the kitchen was impressive. There was a huge American-style fridge on the wall directly
opposite the door, with a gas cooker that had six hobs and a huge extractor hood overhanging it pressed against the wall to her right. The rest of the area was taken up with thick worktops. Jessica
blinked, trying to take in the difference in the room compared to what she had seen before.

‘Do you cook?’ she asked, almost feebly.

‘A little. None of this was here when I left, I guess my brother had it all put in. I’ve been playing around over the last couple of weeks though. It would be almost a shame not to,
given everything that’s here.’

‘Why do you think so much effort went into this room?’ As Jessica asked the question, a mobile phone started to ring. Charlie at first looked surprised as the sound clearly
wasn’t coming from his pockets. He tried a couple of drawers before eventually finding the device. Without answering it, he pressed a button to silence it.

‘Sorry about that. I have no idea what it was doing in there.’

‘Is it yours?’

‘Yeah, yeah. I’ve been looking for it for a couple of days.’

‘But I called your mobile not long ago to see if you were around,’ Jessica said, a little confused.

‘I’ve got a couple. I had one for work that I never ended up giving back. I should probably send it down to them to be honest.’

Jessica didn’t say anything but it seemed odd. He put the phone into his shorts pocket and opened the fridge. ‘I went shopping the other day. I’ve got lemonade, Coke, water,
fruit juice . . . ?’

‘Lemonade’s fine.’

Charlie sat on a stool with his drink as Jessica walked slowly around the room. ‘Can I help you with anything?’ he asked.

‘No, sorry, just being nosy – force of habit. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a kitchen this nice before.’

‘I don’t know what to tell you. It’s not really mine.’

‘Can I look around the rest of the house?’

‘I guess . . . is there anything you’re after specifically? I know where most bits are now.’

Jessica shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. You found that rugby picture, perhaps there’s something else? People other than your brother have gone missing and it must be for a reason.
There’s so much stuff here, maybe there’s something we’ve all missed because we’ve been looking in the wrong place?’

Charlie smiled and downed his drink. ‘That’s fine. I was going to be around all afternoon anyway, though I’ve got a few phone calls to make. All I’d say is to be careful
if you go into the pool area. I’m still trying to get to the bottom of that. From what I can tell some contractors took the money, did half a job and that was that. Lot of gippos around here,
so who knows? I’m getting someone in to do a proper job but he’s good so there’s a waiting list. He’s working on some footballer’s house just over the back at the
moment then he’s going to come here. I need to get a bit of money released before then but it’s all with the solicitors.’

Jessica nodded but didn’t really have any need to go to the half-built room. She didn’t know what she was doing and was acting more on a whim than with any great purpose. After
finishing her drink, she asked Charlie if he minded her going upstairs on her own but he was fine. Jessica walked across the hard white-stoned floor of the entranceway then up the carpeted stairs
to the wooden landing. The kitchen also had a wooden floor and Jessica wondered quite why it was all so mismatched.

She felt strange about being given such free rein to root through someone else’s possessions. It wasn’t as if it was the first time she’d done something like it but there was
usually a warrant involved. It occurred to her that Charlie didn’t mind because so little of it was directly his.

She ignored the room she had identified as Ed’s bedroom the last time she had been in the house and instead looked in the ones she had only glanced at before.

The first was in keeping with the rest of the half-finished house. The ground had bare floorboards with boxes stacked in one of the corners. She opened the flaps of the card but it contained
only decorating items, with stiff old paintbrushes and tins of paint with logos that looked outdated.

In the second room was a single bed on a clean-looking carpet. It didn’t look new as such, more untouched, as if it had been set up for a guest who never arrived. Jessica looked out of the
arched window over the back garden where Charlie was pacing, talking to someone on the phone. He saw her and gave a cheery wave which Jessica returned slightly less enthusiastically. She was
finding him an odd man to read but there were a lot of strange things in his life. He had not long made up with his brother, only for Ed to disappear. That left him as the sole heir to the house,
something he didn’t really seem to know what to do with. It seemed pretty obvious Ed was a little eccentric, given the state of the house he had been living in apparently alone since his
father’s passing.

Jessica had never had money to spare, not that she had struggled financially for a long time either. She earned enough to pay her bills, tried to save a little, then have some left over for
whatever she fancied during the course of a month. As she looked around at the vast expanse, she wondered how she would have reacted to inheriting something so large. Maybe it would have been in
the same way Ed and apparently his father before him had – by only half-dealing with things. Some rooms, such as the kitchen and Ed’s own bedroom, were nicely maintained, others were a
shambles. It seemed they had created as much comfortable space as they needed to live in and not much more.

Jessica had looked into the family dynamic as much as possible and couldn’t help but feel there was something not quite right. At the same time, everything Charlie said had been verified
and it wasn’t as if there was anyone else to check the family issues with. She wondered why neither of the sons had any type of relationship. Charlie was apparently single while Ed, who had
also been a decent-looking young man with artistic talent and plenty of money, was apparently unattached too.

Jessica knew she wasn’t exactly an authority on relationships but it wasn’t as if she had found any trace of former girlfriends, or boyfriends, connected to the brothers. When the
media got hold of big cases, things such as murders or something akin to what Jessica was working on, people would often contact the police because they knew the victim. It might be a former
girlfriend or boyfriend, sometimes distant relatives or old friends. They wouldn’t necessarily be able to add anything to the case itself but it might help them build up a picture of who the
person was. With Ed, they’d had next to nothing, almost as if he lived in the giant house on his own and didn’t have anyone else in his life.

Jessica continued to look through the house. The bathroom was as impressively decked out as the kitchen – one large wet room with a tiled, slanted floor for the water to run into a drain
in the centre. The taps and shower unit were made of stainless steel, the sink and toilet the same colour as the shiny black walls. Jessica had only seen a bathroom quite so well equipped once
before. On that occasion, she’d had to visit Edinburgh for work purposes and the force had paid for a hotel room. Because the place was oversubscribed, the staff had put her in a suite at the
top of the building. It had been so much classier than anything she’d experienced before, she ended up taking two showers and using a remote control to open and close curtains in the bedroom
just because she could.

She finally found her way back into the room where Charlie had handed her the picture of the rugby team. She felt drawn to the window again, spending a few minutes watching birds flit into the
back garden and chase each other before flying away. There was no sign of Charlie outside and the scene seemed incredibly peaceful. She could understand why Ed had spent his time painting in the
room that looked out onto the back.

Jessica eventually turned away, peering towards the clutter of boxes around the room. She didn’t know what she was after but started to look through the one closest to her. Even the
contents seemed to have no order to them. In the first one was a certificate for Ed from primary school because he had finished fourth in a maths quiz but underneath it was a tin of shoe polish,
four wall brackets you would use to put up shelves, an empty glass milk bottle and a board game that had an old television presenter’s face on the box, despite the fact he’d been dead
for over a decade.

After putting the items on the floor, Jessica did her best to repack them into the box they had come out of, although she wondered if they would ever be taken out again. The contents of the
second crate were just as mismatched as the first. It contained golf balls, some old curtains, a snow globe, some tacky old sunglasses, a few candles and three newspapers from over twenty years
ago. Jessica looked through the papers in case they had been kept for a reason but, if they had, she couldn’t see it.

As she put all the items back into the box, Jessica was beginning to question her own judgement about what she was hoping to achieve. She opened a third box and took out some wire coat hangers
plus four empty tobacco tins. Underneath those were a set of framed photographs.

The first one was of two boys around nine or ten years old building a sandcastle on the beach. One was blond, the other had dark hair. Both were grinning at the camera and Jessica could just
about see the resemblance to Charlie. When they were younger, the two brothers were fairly similar, although the brown-haired Ed was a little shorter. Jessica continued to look through the
pictures. The next one was of Ed on stage in what looked like a school play. He was a little older, maybe thirteen, and appeared to be giving some sort of sincere soliloquy. Charlie was the subject
of the next photo, riding a bike around a park though it could possibly have been the garden. There was also a photo of Charlie fishing, another of him playing football and a final one where he and
Ed seemed to be doing their homework. The pair were sitting opposite each other at a table concentrating on separate work books.

Jessica thought the photo underneath those was hauntingly beautiful. It looked as if Ed hadn’t even known it was being taken. He was around sixteen years old and sat painting in the room
underneath. Light streamed through the windows ahead of him with a misting of rain on the glass. She found the image incredibly compelling and wondered who had taken it. Perhaps confused by the way
she had been drawn to that photo, Jessica almost failed to notice what the next picture was showing. She had gone to put it face-down on the other photos before realising its significance.

She turned it back over and stared at the contents. There were six young men, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, all toasting the camera with glasses of beer in their hands. They were all a mixture
of tanned brown and burnt red and it seemed clear they were on a holiday of some sort. After studying it the second time, Jessica could clearly see Ed Marks in the middle with a huge grin on his
face. Next to him on one side was someone who looked like a younger Matthew Cooper. She had only just got hold of an up-to-date picture of him but felt sure the resemblance was there.

Next to Matthew was someone she couldn’t place but, on the other side of Ed, Jessica could see something she had been waiting for since the first hand was found. There was one more face
she didn’t know but the final two tanned faces grinning out of the photo undoubtedly belonged to Lewis Barnes and Jacob Chrisp.

On almost every occasion where Jessica heard or saw something that excited her relating to a case, she would feel her heart racing, ready to leap into action. Instead, she
simply stared at the photo of the men. She looked at the hints of blue sky above them, wondering where it had been taken and who had been behind the camera. Was it a barman or a passing stranger?
Was it a seventh young person somehow related to whatever the picture was showing her?

Jessica walked back down the stairs still looking at the photo, also holding onto the image of the two brothers doing their homework. She found Charlie in the kitchen. ‘Are you all
right?’ he asked, adding: ‘What have you found?’

She handed over the holiday picture. ‘Do you know anything about this? When or where it was taken? Who might be in it?’

Charlie stared at the image and then looked back at her. ‘Are these . . . ?’

‘Four of them, including your brother, are missing. I need to find out who the other two people are, then what happened with the six of them.’

‘I don’t really know,’ Charlie said, slightly stuttering his words. ‘I vaguely remember him going to Faliraki when he left college but we had different
friends.’

‘At least one of these people didn’t go to college with him though,’ Jessica said, thinking of Matthew Cooper.