DS Jessica Daniel series: Locked In/Vigilante/The Woman in Black - Books 1-3 (63 page)

‘Are you deaf? I said leave me alone.’

‘I’m Jessica.’

‘You’re a pig is what you are.’

Jessica sat opposite the woman, wriggling into the chair to get comfortable. The row of hardened seats were screwed onto thick metal bars that were bolted into the ground and offered little
relief except for thin pads underneath and behind her.

‘Whoever stabbed your boyfriend killed my friend.’

The woman said nothing for almost a minute before finally spitting her words out. ‘I already spoke to someone at the house and told them everything. I’m not talking to you
too.’

Jessica knew she could read the statement when she got back to the station but there was one thing she wanted to ask which definitely wouldn’t have been brought up by the officers at the
scene. ‘Perhaps I’ve got better questions?’

The woman snorted with mock laughter and finally looked across at Jessica, putting her feet down onto the floor. ‘Fine, here you go. No, I didn’t
see
anything. No, I
didn’t
hear
anything until the girl screamed and, by the time I got out there, it was just them. No, I don’t know who might want to harm John. No, I don’t know why your
girl was on our drive and no, I don’t know why she had no shoes on. Yes, I called you straight away and, finally, yes, I walked into a door. Now piss off.’

It sounded pathetic but Jessica could only think of one thing.

‘She wasn’t wearing shoes . . . ?’

Whether it was the tone of her voice, she wasn’t sure but Jessica glanced up to see the woman staring directly at her.

She was running her fingers through her long hair and letting it fall back over and over. Her manner had changed again by the time she spoke next. ‘I know she was one of yours but
I’ll always remember the red of the blood and the blue of her dress.’ The woman sighed loudly and looked back at the floor. ‘Her shoes were on her own pathway with her bag or
something like that. I only know because I heard one of them talking. It was dark and then they took me inside to talk.’

Jessica took a deep breath. ‘The man who just stormed out of here, was he there?’

‘What, afterwards? He was the one directing people.’

‘But before that, did you see him?’

The woman looked back at the floor. ‘I’m not doing your job for you.’

Jessica could tell straight away the moment was lost. She wasn’t sure what she had expected. Cole had told her Farraday was at the incident. It was the first time she had known him go to a
crime scene but it was likely he would have been the first call when the dead body’s identity was discovered by the paramedics or responding officers.

She wondered if he was already there somewhere, watching and waiting for his phone to ring. Jessica stood and stepped closer to the woman. As she was leaving her flat, her business cards had
been next to her identification and she had picked them up just in case. She took one out of her pocket and put it on the seat next to the woman. ‘Just in case you do want to talk.’

She turned around and walked back out of the waiting room, heading downstairs towards the room Cole had been outside of. As she approached the double doors, she was almost hit by Cole pushing
them out towards her. She stepped backwards quickly to avoid them and he did the exact same thing.

‘I was just leaving,’ he said. ‘They’re taking the body back to the labs to do the tests.’

‘So was she alive in the ambulance?’

‘I guess so; she wouldn’t have been brought here otherwise.’

‘Sorry, of course. I’m not thinking clearly this morning.’

‘I’m going to go home for a bit and then I’ll be back at the station in an hour or so. You should go home too.’

‘Maybe.’

Jessica had no intention of going anywhere except for the station.

The sun was beginning to come up as Jessica drove along the nearly deserted roads from the hospital to Longsight. She kept to the speed limits for the second journey and felt
guilty about her selfishness earlier on. Given her state of mind and the speed she had driven at, she could have ended up causing harm not only to herself but someone else through her recklessness.
Her mind was still in overdrive, not knowing if her suspicions of Farraday were irrational and down to shock, or if Carrie’s death had instead given her the jolt needed to put the pieces
together.

Finding out what had happened the night before would be crucial. DC Jones had been found on John Mills’s property so was he the target and the officer had been killed accidentally, or was
something else going on? Until Mills woke up, she was unlikely to know.

Although it was early and most officers would still be at home, Jessica could sense the atmosphere of sadness and anger as she walked into the station’s reception. The overnight desk
sergeant asked if she had any updates on what exactly happened but Jessica shook her head. ‘Do you know if we’ve had a list of things recovered from the scene yet?’ she asked.

‘No idea. I know Bradford Park have called some of their staff in to start working straight away because they phoned here to check some details. It’s still a bit early but it could
be on the system.’

Jessica knew the procedure anyway and had only said it to stop the sergeant asking how she was. She nodded and walked towards her office but instead found Rowlands in the corridor. He looked as
if he were still in shock. The skin around his eyes was red and, while he was usually smartly groomed, his hair hadn’t been spiked and his clothes were creased. ‘Jess . . .’ he
said when he saw her.

‘Dave, I should have called you.’

‘Do you know what happened? I read the first report through the system but there’s pretty much no detail and no one here knows anything other than the fact she’s . .
.’

Jessica wanted to put an arm around him. She had long known his outward confidence was the side he showed to everyone else and he was a different type of person when you got to know him.
‘No one’s really sure yet. I’ve come from the hospital. Her body has been taken to the labs while her neighbour is unconscious. Both of them had been stabbed.’

‘I saw the stuff about John Mills, she was always talking about him. Do you think it’s our vigilante?’

‘I don’t know.’ Jessica didn’t want to expand on what she had actually been thinking through the morning.

‘What’s going on now then?’ Rowlands asked.

‘Jack will be here soon. We need to get people out knocking on the other neighbours’ doors to see if they heard anything. I think she took a taxi home last night so we’ve got
to find out who the driver was. The labs are doing their thing and someone’s going to have to talk to the media this morning too.’

Rowlands was nodding, clearly wondering what he could do. ‘Hey, are you okay?’ Jessica added.

‘Yeah, I . . .’

‘Did you say you’d read the initial reports?’

‘There’s not much in them, just the emergency call log and a few other bits.’

‘Was there a list of evidence recovered?’

‘There was something, I don’t remember completely.’

‘Show me.’

Rowlands and Jessica walked through the hallways to the main floor and his area of the room. He was already logged in to the force’s computer system and clicked to bring up the file that
had been created just a few hours ago. Jessica asked if she could sit and the constable stood behind her watching as she read the screen. First she scanned through the emergency call details and
then looked for the attached information.

Something John Mills’s girlfriend said had stuck with Jessica.

Because of the seriousness of the incident, the Scene of Crime officers had taken the evidence from the location. Once they had analysed everything, most, if not all, of the items would be
released back to the investigating force to be kept in evidence storage, in the anticipation of a trial. Items could be kept locked away for a long time in case a suspect was found many years down
the line. The first thing the SOCO team would do was list everything they had taken and pass it back to the police force – that way officers could start to work on certain aspects of the case
even while items were still being examined by forensics.

Jessica wondered if Adam was one of the staff members who had been called in. Someone had already filed a list of evidence recovered and Jessica skimmed through it. As the girlfriend had said,
Carrie’s abandoned shoes were on the list, as was her bag and a few other objects. They had been picked up from her own pathway, while her body had been found on Mills’s driveway
half-a-dozen doors down. There was no knife or other type of murder weapon listed and Jessica closed the file.

‘She wasn’t wearing shoes?’ Rowlands said.

‘Seems not.’

A new thought entered Jessica’s head though and she quickly reopened the file, checking through the list of items again. ‘No phone,’ she said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Her phone isn’t on this list. She definitely had it in the pub.’

‘Yeah, she was texting all the time.’

‘She obviously didn’t go into her house else she wouldn’t have left her bag and shoes on her pathway. You saw her dress, it’s not as if it could be hidden away in a
pocket, so if it wasn’t found in her bag then where is it?’

Rowlands stepped away from the chair to let Jessica push it back and stand up. ‘I’ll phone the officers left at the scene to see if they can see it anywhere, then get on to the taxi
company to make sure she didn’t drop it,’ he said.

‘Okay, good. I’ll be in my office, come let me know.’

Jessica didn’t know if it would be significant or not but Carrie had certainly been agitated leaving the quiz the previous evening. She said she was feeling a bit ill but had her phone in
her hand as she departed and Jessica felt at the time there was something she wasn’t letting on. If someone had called her, the phone’s logs could be crucial. Without the device, they
could apply to the phone company to release certain records but she couldn’t do that without permission from Farraday and probably even the superintendent.

She walked back through the halls of the station towards her office. All of the day-shift workers were now in and the news about Carrie’s death had spread, the atmosphere of defiance and
anger rising. Jessica had those feelings herself but was trying to bury them and focus on seeing it as a death she should be investigating, not the death of a close friend and colleague.

She walked into her office and Reynolds spun around in his seat. ‘Jess,’ he said sadly. ‘I only heard a few minutes ago. I didn’t know if you were in or at the hospital
or the scene. I was going to call but didn’t want to interrupt anything.’

Jessica hadn’t heard what he was saying, staring towards the opposite half of the room where her desk was. ‘What’s happened in here?’ she said, trying not to sound angry
but with a clear edge to her voice.

Reynolds was clearly confused. ‘Sorry?’

‘My things have been moved around.’ She walked over towards her side of the room and started picking up papers from the floor, before flicking through a separate pile on her
desk.

‘Um, I don’t know. I mean you’re always a bit messy, it looks the same to me.’

‘You’ve not gone through any of this?’

‘What? No, I only just got in here ten minutes ago or so. Farraday was walking out and said something about wondering where you were.’

Jessica looked across the room at her colleague. ‘You actually saw him in here?’

Reynolds seemed a bit confused but pointed over his shoulder towards their office door. ‘Sort of, he had just come out of the door as I walked into the corridor. I asked him if he had been
talking to you in here but he just mumbled something and walked off. I didn’t really catch it but assumed he was looking for you when I saw you weren’t around.’

Jessica tried to calm herself and not show Reynolds there was any obvious problem. She wasn’t ready to share her ideas with anyone else just yet and still feared she was being paranoid.
‘I did tell him I was going to be in my office. Maybe he just knocked something over by accident? It’s fine.’

Reynolds looked at her with his head tilted at the angle she hated as it indicated someone was about to ask if she was all right. Before he could speak, she started walking back towards the
door. ‘I’ll check with him now.’

Jessica again didn’t know what to think. Her side of the office was always a mess but she knew where everything was and could tell someone had gone through her things. What could Farraday
have been looking for?

She headed for reception and then up the stairs. On the first floor, aside from the chief inspector’s office, there were only storage areas and miscellaneous rooms for officers from other
districts who were working with them temporarily. If ever the superintendent was at their station for a day he would be given one of the spare rooms to work from. The floor was a lot quieter than
the rest of the station and, apart from the DCI himself, very few people spent much time upstairs.

Farraday’s office had glass that ran all around it and Jessica could see instantly he wasn’t there. She hadn’t even known what she was going to say to him but, given Jason had
said he was looking for her, it would at least be a start. She stopped and motioned to turn back towards the stairs but then had a thought. Jessica walked towards the door of the office and pushed
the handle down. The office would usually be locked overnight but the grip allowed her to open it. She paused at the door knowing she shouldn’t go in but the theories in the back of her mind
urged her forwards.

She didn’t know what she was looking for as she stepped carefully behind his desk. Jessica realised she was on tiptoes even though she had no reason to be creeping; it wasn’t as if
someone downstairs would hear her. At first she fingered through some papers on the desk and then looked on top of the filing cabinets behind her. There was nothing of any significance but she
turned back to the desk and tried the drawers.

The top one was full of pens, rubber bands and paper clips, and she closed it quietly before opening the middle one. There were a few documents inside and Jessica looked through their contents.
They related to a separate case that was being worked on but there was nothing untoward in him having them.