DS Jessica Daniel series: Locked In/Vigilante/The Woman in Black - Books 1-3 (57 page)

With little other option, Jessica formally started the interview. ‘What exactly are you confessing to, Mr Hancock?’

He gave the exact date and location of the first murder and then said: ‘I stabbed Craig Millar three times, once in the neck and twice in the chest.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘I had seen his name in the papers, causing trouble and that. I’ve just had enough. It’s not right, dealing drugs and causing trouble all the time.’

‘How did you know where to find him?’

‘I checked it all on the computer maps, then went and looked around the area during the day. He wasn’t hard to find so I waited for him one night.’

Jessica nodded. ‘What else are you saying you’ve done?’

He again gave the exact date and place and offered the correct details for the murders of Benjamin Webb and Desmond Hughes. He claimed he knew they often played snooker in a certain club through
asking around and had simply followed them. He said there had been a struggle but he managed to kill both men as they had been drunk and unable to react. He also knew their exact injuries.

Jessica thought it sounded possible. He made eye contact with both her and Cole throughout, speaking clearly. He obviously knew the areas involved and got the little details right. He stated
correctly that one of the men had been stabbed three times like the first victim, while the other one hadn’t.

‘Anything else?’

‘The prison guard, Lee Morgan, I killed him too.’

‘Why?’

‘I have friends inside and they told me he had been smuggling phones in and giving preferential treatment to certain people in return for money and other favours.’

If true, it was more than they knew.

‘Who are your friends?’

‘I don’t want to say.’

‘How did you know where he lived?’

‘It’s not hard – Internet searches, social networks and so on. They were in the phone book anyway.’

‘Anything else?’

‘No, that’s it.’

It was interesting to Jessica that he hadn’t confessed to the killing of Robert Graves. The media had connected all five murders together but he hadn’t mentioned the final one.

‘Why are you confessing?’

‘Because I feel my work is done for now. Others can continue my cause.’

Whether he was genuine or not, the idea of copycats was chilling. It crossed Jessica’s mind that perhaps the killing of Robert Graves was done by someone copying what they had read about
in the media.

‘Do you know we have DNA evidence from the scenes?’ Jessica hadn’t known whether or not she was going to reveal that but everything he had said so far had been accurate.

She saw his eyes flicker sideways slightly but he stayed calm. ‘It’s fine, you can test me.’ They didn’t need his permission to take a mouth swab but the fact he was
happy to offer one was confusing. He must know that if he were making it up, he would be found out.

Jessica almost always felt confident in an interview room and trusted her instincts but now she felt lost for words. She wanted to say the name ‘Donald McKenna’ and ask if it meant
anything but, at the same time, the last thing she wanted to do was give the man information he might not know.

Cole must have sensed her unease and spoke next. ‘What do you think the DNA test results are going to tell us, Mr Hancock?’

‘I know they’ll tell you I’m the man you’ve been looking for.’

‘Why are you so sure we haven’t already matched it to someone else?’ Cole asked.

It was the exact question Jessica should have asked and she didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to her. If the man had any doubts, he didn’t show them. ‘Why are you so
sure your results are correct?’

It was a fairly cryptic thing to say. Was he simply feeding from what Cole had said or was he implying that he knew their results had thrown up someone unlikely?

‘What do you mean, Mr Hancock?’ Cole demanded.

‘You tell me.’

The two men stared at each other.

‘What type of knife did you use?’ Jessica asked, breaking the impasse.

‘Just a regular kitchen one. It’s still in my house if you want to get it. I had to wash it because I used it to chop some vegetables up yesterday but it’s still in the
kitchen. It has a metal handle and is at the back of the knife rack next to the draining board. It’s not the biggest one, the one next to that. When I came in, they searched me and took
everything I brought in. If you go through those things, there’s a door key – just take that and let yourselves in. If there are any problems, my next-door neighbour has a key too.
I’ve got his just for emergencies.’

Jessica could feel Cole’s eyes on her and turned to look at him. He gave the merest nod to indicate the interview was over and then spoke the formal words for the recording. The officer
was called back inside to escort the man back to the cells below the station.

As soon as he was out of the room, Jessica turned to her superior. ‘What do you think now?’

Cole shook his head. ‘I honestly don’t know. He’s either for real or someone with a perfect memory who just happens to be one of the best liars I’ve ever met.’

It was pretty much the only way Jessica could have described him. Almost all of the details he had given them had been released by the media in some form but remembering them all down to the
smallest detail took some doing. He had even filled in small gaps, such as the prison warden smuggling in phones, something which had been alluded to but certainly not reported entirely as fact. If
he were a fantasist, he was a first-class one.

‘What are we going to do?’

‘Check with Farraday. Even with this guy’s keys and permission we’ll still need a warrant to make it legal. If we get his mouth swabs straight off to the labs, they can start
their tests while we go check his place out.’

‘Have you ever known someone offer you the keys to search their house?’

‘Only after we’ve smashed the door in.’

‘How long do you think we’ve got?’

‘We have the usual twenty-four hours without charge but the super will give us an extra twelve if we have to wait for the lab results. If they’re not back by then for whatever
reason, we can always go to the magistrates for a few more days. It’s all going to come down to forensics anyway.’

Cole went to talk with Farraday to make sure a warrant could be quickly put in place as Jessica arranged a team to take to Graham Hancock’s property. She and Cole would be going, along
with a couple of uniformed officers and some members from the Scene of Crime squad. They would be in charge of collecting anything that could be needed for evidence. It took a couple of hours but
everything was in place by mid-afternoon and Jessica ended up letting everyone into the house after borrowing the door key from the house next door, exactly as their suspect had suggested. Legally,
taking the key that had been confiscated from him at the station could cause problems because that property had to be locked away and shouldn’t be tampered with.

Jessica knew instantly their job wasn’t going to be as simple as she’d hoped. As she opened a door, she took a step back because of the smell, exchanging looks with one of the other
officers as if to ask, ‘What is that?’

She grimaced but walked across the threshold. The cream wallpaper in the hallway had turned brown at the bottom and was peeling. She couldn’t even tell what colour the carpet was as it was
barely visible. A bicycle was leant across a door at the opposite end of the hall and various electrical parts and broken plastic toys were left everywhere she could see. She led the way in,
stepping over the various items and trying not to trip.

The hallway led into a living room and Jessica gasped as she entered. The curtains were shut and there was minimal light seeping through. She walked over and swished them open, turning around.
To her left were row after row of newspapers stacked from the floor to the ceiling. They ran the full width of the room and halfway down the length too. There were thousands of publications. She
moved further into the room, allowing others to enter. On her right was a television that looked older than she was. There were dials on the front and a chunky remote control that was connected to
the set via a bundled-up wire on the floor in front of it. There was only one chair in the room, a battered brown armchair with light yellow foam spilling out of the side.

The smell was almost overpowering but Jessica blinked through it and walked over to the nearest pile of papers. She took a set of rubber gloves out of her jacket pocket and put them on, turning
over the publication on top. It was a national newspaper from the previous day and sat on top of one from the day before that. Jessica put them back down and reached up high to take a paper from
the next stack. It had a date from three years ago and the one directly under it was from the day immediately prior.

It seemed clear Graham Hancock had been storing newspapers each day for a very long time. She put the two papers back where she had got them from and then walked over to the very first stack,
standing on the tips of her toes to reach two more from the top of the pile. They were both dated from consecutive days twenty-seven years earlier.

She showed them to Cole, shaking her head. ‘This is unbelievable.’

Jessica again returned the papers to the stack and walked through to the kitchen. The Scene of Crime officers had already put the knives into evidence bags and were looking through the rest of
the drawers.

The smell was certainly stronger in the kitchen and Jessica saw why. Resting against the back door was a pile of rotting food, with maggots and small flies on the top. She quickly turned around
and walked back into the living room. Cole was crouched down, unwrapping a balled-up piece of paper that had been left on the floor. ‘We’ll never get through all of this,’ Jessica
said. ‘This guy hoards everything, be it newspapers or leftover food.’

Cole dropped the paper back on the floor and hunched further over to pick up another ball of paper from the ground. He started to open it out as Jessica continued speaking. ‘Unless
there’s some dead body under the bed upstairs I have no idea what we’re going to get from this place. I just hope his DNA comes back as a match for . . . something. God knows how
McKenna fits into it all.’

She tailed off as she saw Cole’s expression. ‘What?’ she said. The DI reached back across for the first piece of paper and held both sheets up for her to see. The pages had
been torn from a lined notebook and the horizontal guides clashed with the crumples in the paper. On both pages was a beautifully drawn pencil illustration, the likeness terrifyingly perfect.

It was a picture of Jessica.

Jessica had gone face-to-face with many characters most people would find intimidating but nothing had ever shocked her quite as much as the images Cole was holding up. She
wanted to speak but couldn’t even form the words. The pencil drawings were so accurate and it dawned on her she knew exactly which photos they had been copied from.

She looked around the room but couldn’t see what she was looking for, so walked back through to the hallway, opening doors in equally cluttered cupboards and then heading quickly but
carefully up the stairs. More junk littered the wooden steps and Jessica could hear Cole behind her. ‘Jess, are you okay?’ In the years she had worked with him, he had called her
‘Jessica’ less than half-a-dozen times but she could never remember him calling her ‘Jess’.

‘Jess?’

She carried on walking to the top and kicked a toy car out of the way as she reached the landing. She didn’t know where she was going but opened the first door in front of her.

‘Whoa,’ she said quietly.

Cole arrived just behind her and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Are you all ri—’ he started to say then interrupted himself. ‘Whoa.’

Jessica pushed the door all the way open and the pair went inside. In complete contrast to the rest of the house, the room was immaculate. There was a new clean cream carpet on the floor and the
only smell was the faint odour of paint. The room was decorated light brown, the only furniture an easel with a stool and a small table facing it directly in the centre. The new-looking curtains
were pulled open, letting light spill in. Her eyes took a few seconds to adjust from the gloom of the rest of the house to the brightness of this room. She looked behind her to make sure there was
nothing else there but it was completely empty apart from the items in the middle.

Then she saw what she was looking for.

Jessica walked over to the small table and picked up two folded newspapers from underneath. She held the top corner of one, allowing it to flap open for Cole to see.

‘Remember this?’ she said.

Jessica had been in the news the previous year. On the first occasion she was on the front page of the
Manchester Morning Herald
and they had used an old photo of her taken from the
police’s website. On the second, Garry Ashford had written a large profile of her. The main photo for each article was an exact match with the drawings Cole still had in his hand.

She no longer felt intimidated, just creeped out. Cole looked at the papers and then the drawings he had. He didn’t say anything at first but his expression said it all.

Jessica responded in the only way she could. If she didn’t try to laugh, there was a good chance she would cry.

‘If he wanted a date, he could have just asked.’

The formalities had to be gone through but Graham Hancock’s mouth swab hadn’t matched anything relating to the case they were working on – or anything else on
file. The knives had been tested too but there wasn’t even a faint trace of blood on any of them. Given his hoarding of the newspapers there was every chance he could have memorised as many
details as he felt necessary.

The truth was no one would know anything other than the fact he was a very talented artist. The likeness of her had been unerringly accurate compared to the photos they were based upon.

In subsequent interviews, which Jessica chose not to sit in on, he insisted he was the vigilante killer but refused to speak to anyone except her. Farraday claimed he always suspected the guy
was a ‘loony-bin nutcase’, despite never talking to him but had at least been sympathetic to Jessica and told her to go home for a day.