DS Jessica Daniel series: Locked In/Vigilante/The Woman in Black - Books 1-3 (106 page)

Jessica felt a little silly as she finally got her head around the message. Firstly, she had somehow managed to miss three separate phone calls from the station. It would have
only been one or two people working their way through the list of names who had found the breakthrough and the person wouldn’t have been calling because they expected her to go back, simply
because they wanted to update her. If Jessica had noticed her phone going off in the pub, even with what she had drunk, she would at least have been only around the corner from the station.

Back at home, there was no realistic way she could get herself back to Longsight and, given how drunk she was feeling, it wasn’t as if she could do much good anyway. Jessica thought about
calling Cole to see if he knew any more but had enough self-awareness through her drunken haze to know she should probably leave it for the rest of the night.

She lay on her bed still wearing the clothes she’d had on all day and, as she watched the ceiling spin, Jessica thought the pizza wasn’t the best of ideas after all. She wanted to
think about the two people that had now apparently been identified but it wasn’t long before her mind gave up and she drifted off to sleep.

After the amount she had drunk, Jessica would have expected to sleep through to the moment the alarm on her phone went off the next morning but surprised herself by instead
being awake over an hour before she had to be and feeling just about as alert as she could be, given the circumstances.

Apart from an aching bladder, Jessica felt ready for the day. She listened to her voicemail one more time. The officer who had left the message sounded nervous but excited, a nuance which
Jessica had definitely not noticed the night before. They said they knew the final two people were called ‘Steven Povey’ and ‘Barry Newcombe’ but that Barry was already
dead.

From just that, it was difficult to know exactly what was meant. Had the man already died or had he recently been killed in a way that related to the case? None of the other victims they’d
found hands from were confirmed as deceased so something certainly sounded different. Jessica checked the times of the calls she had missed. They were all at a point where she would have been
sitting in the booth in the pub and it was only then she realised she had somehow muted the device. It wasn’t the first time she had managed to do something similar but it was the only time
she had missed something important through doing so. Her one crumb of comfort was that, given the time the calls had come in, she wouldn’t have been able to do much anyway.

Jessica again thought about calling Cole but, because it was early, didn’t want to disturb him while he might be with his family. Instead she caught the bus to the station, having left her
car there the night before. She read her emails and, from what she could tell, the officer responsible for the breakthrough had simply been a little lucky in that they had stumbled across the right
combination of names. After they had found the correct ‘Newcombe’, that had led them to work out who the other person was. It was always likely to be a matter of time before somebody
found the right people but Jessica would still make sure the person responsible got the credit they deserved.

It only took a few moments for Jessica to realise the message she had been left the night before was slightly misleading. Barry Newcombe was dead but, if it was down to foul play, then the
person involved had been very clever. He had been involved in a head-on collision in a car eight years previously in which he, his girlfriend in the passenger seat and the driver of the other car
had all been killed. The reports showed Barry had been almost three times over the drink-drive limit and, given the car’s positioning on the road, the only suspicions of anything being
untoward related to the man’s own decision to drink and drive.

If he had somehow survived the smash, he would have almost certainly been charged with causing death by dangerous driving and the witness reports were pretty damning. He had apparently been
drinking at a party with some of his friends and had not even pretended to hide the fact he was going to drive home. A few of his mates said they had tried to stop him but none had called the
police. Quite why his girlfriend had joined him nobody really knew but the poor guy he had crashed into left behind a wife and four children.

It wasn’t the first story of its type Jessica had read but it was one of the worst. A whole family had been destroyed because of the selfishness of one person.

She found it hard to concentrate on the other name that had been left for her, Steven Povey, but realised he was now the one person in the holiday photograph that was still unharmed. He was the
youngest of the six men pictured at twenty-nine, which meant he would have only just turned eighteen at the time they figured the photo was taken. Barry Newcombe was the eldest and would have been
twenty. The other four men would have been either nineteen or just about to have their birthdays.

Jessica had already checked with a few well-known travel operators but none of them had records going back eleven years. That meant Steven Povey was her one final link to finding out what the
reason could possibly be for what was happening. Although it wasn’t quite eight in the morning, Jessica couldn’t be bothered to wait and phoned the number the officer had left for him.
The man had moved out of the city a few years before and now lived in a village further north in Lancashire. He reluctantly agreed to meet Jessica later that day. Initially he wanted to put her off
but she insisted it was urgent and that it had to be as soon as possible. Jessica didn’t tell Steven about the holiday photograph or talk about possible links to the other men at first but
stressed it was important she was able to speak to him.

Jessica waited for Cole to arrive and told him where things were up to before going to grab either Dave or Izzy to take with her. Both constables were looking a little the worse for wear after
the night before – but had clearly caught up on the news about the final two faces from the photo. Izzy looked marginally less hung-over, so Jessica left Rowlands to dig up any other
information about the car crash which had killed Barry Newcombe, while the two women went to meet Steven Povey.

Jessica was a fierce defender of her car whenever colleagues wanted to give her stick about its age and the volume of the exhaust but she never trusted it to get her much further than from her
flat to the station. She certainly didn’t want to risk it on the motorway and so asked Izzy if she fancied driving. The other woman’s vehicle was only a couple of years old and was
definitely a lot less likely to break down. As it was, Jessica needn’t have worried, not that it gave her any comfort. There had been a major accident north of the city on the M60 ring road.
A tanker carrying diesel had spilled across the carriageway and not only were large parts of the throughway closed, but traffic was backing up into the city centre.

What should have been a simple forty-five-minute journey up the motorway turned into a two-and-a-half-hour inquest into everything that was wrong with the country, the police force, their
colleagues and, eventually, life in general as they sat in largely stationary traffic. After they finally got onto the M61 to take them north, the pair had pretty much come to the conclusion they
were the only two sane people left on the planet.

After they left the motorway, it had taken a lot longer than Jessica would have thought to get to their destination. On the online map she’d looked at, it wasn’t a long distance to
Steven Povey’s house but the single-track lanes with high-banked overhanging hedges took a while to negotiate because there wasn’t always room for two cars to pass each other and Izzy
frequently had to pull over.

As they drove into the village, the scene almost seemed to spring into colour. A large bank of flowers that spelled out the name of the place welcomed them, with baskets of plants hanging from
seemingly every house. The properties were all detached, with large driveways and patches of grass around them.

A sign proudly told visitors the village had won a ‘Britain In Bloom’ award for eight years running, another informing them the village’s summer fete would be taking place on
the following Saturday.

It was the kind of location Jessica figured people from overseas pictured when they thought of Britain because of the television shows that had been sold abroad through the years. If it
wasn’t for the smattering of satellite dishes and brand-new cars, it could almost have been as if they had travelled back in time forty or fifty years.

Although it was just a few centimetres on the map, the whole area felt a world away from the city. Ultimately Jessica knew people were prone to the same mistakes and cruelties regardless of
where they lived. She wasn’t sure whether she preferred the honesty you might expect from residents on a rough estate or the apparent tranquillity you would probably get in a village like the
one they were in.

There was only one main road through the village but, without a satellite navigation device, neither of them were entirely sure which of the side roads the house they were looking for was on.
Izzy pulled over next to where a man was sitting having a lunchtime pint on his own outside a pub. Although she had lived in the north-west of England her entire life, Jessica found his accent hard
to decipher but, between the two of them, they eventually worked out where they should be going.

Back in Manchester, a lot of the buildings were a mismatch of styles as diverse estates had been put up at different times, while other properties had been renovated or built by various people
working independently of each other. All of the houses in the village seemed to have been either built at the same time or at least created with an eye on the tone of the rest of the area.

Steven Povey’s house was no different and looked strikingly similar to the rest of the surrounding properties. There was a low stone wall at the front, edging onto the side road he lived
on. There were tidy neatly trimmed grass areas on either side of a concrete path leading to the man’s front door. The house itself was made of grey stone with an old-fashioned
authentic-looking wooden edge to the windows and door frames. The door was painted bright red, perfectly matching the shade of the rest of the trims. On the front was a heavy black metal knocker,
which Jessica used. A man soon answered. He had black hair swept away from his face with a small amount of equally dark designer stubble. He was wearing a T-shirt, three-quarter-length trousers and
a pair of brown sandals.

He looked nervous as they introduced themselves and he invited them in, confirming he was Steven Povey. He asked if they wanted to sit outside and led them through to his back garden. There was
a black metal table already set up, with four matching chairs around it. The grass was as tidily cut as it was at the front and went back a lot further than Jessica might have guessed from looking
at the front of the house.

Steven was still edgy as he sat opposite them. Aside from confirming his identity, no one had given him the full details of why they wanted to speak to him, except for the fact it related to
something from the past. He was clearly trying to force a smile as he looked from Izzy to Jessica. ‘How can I help you?’

Jessica took out the photograph of the six men on holiday from an envelope. It was a copy of the original she’d taken from the Markses’ house. She had spent the last few days almost
memorising the features of the unidentified duo in the photo and it had been clear to her straight away that the man in front of her was one of the two. She pointed to the image. ‘Can we
confirm this is you, Mr Povey?’

He picked the photo up, staring at it. Jessica carefully watched his reaction and there was an obvious flicker of recognition. ‘It was taken a long time ago but it is me.’

‘Do you know the other five men with you?’

‘I suppose . . . but it’s been years since I last saw any of them. I lived next door to Barry and he knew one of the other lads.’ Steven pointed to Lewis Barnes. ‘This
guy is Lewis, I went around his house a few times but I only remember that because his mum was a bit weird. I can’t really remember the names of the others. They were only sort of my
friends.’

‘Where was it taken?’

‘Faliraki, I think. It was the first time I’d gone abroad without my parents.’

‘Can you remember who took the photo?’ The man shook his head, so Jessica rephrased the question. ‘What I’m asking is if there were six or seven of you who went away? Was
it one of your friends behind the camera or a stranger?’

‘Oh, right. No, there were just the six of us. I don’t know who took the picture.’

‘How long ago was it taken?’

The man shook his head. ‘Maybe ten years? Eleven? I think I’d just turned eighteen.’

‘Why did you go if you didn’t really know them?’ Jessica asked.

‘It was through Barry. Someone he knew was organising a lads’ holiday and they were looking for people to go because it was cheaper if you had more. He asked me and I thought,
“What the hell”. I don’t really remember all the details. It was such a long time ago.’

Jessica nodded as everything he said pretty much backed up what they already knew, or at least thought they knew. The next set of questions was where things would begin to get complicated.
‘What happened while you were away?’ she asked.

Steven shuffled in his chair. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Just that. You went on holiday with a group of lads you didn’t really know, so what went on?’

The man shook his head a little but Jessica wasn’t convinced by his words. ‘Well, nothing. The accommodation was awful, we ate, we drank, we came home.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Like what?’

Jessica slid the photo back across the table. She pointed to Barry Newcombe. ‘This is your friend Barry, yes? Do you know what happened to him?’

Steven looked confused. ‘He was killed in a car accident years ago.’

‘Did you know him then?’ Jessica asked.