‘Same as always. High.’
‘She did drugs?’ Jessica hadn’t seen any obvious paraphernalia at the house but then again hadn’t gone looking too closely.
‘Where do you think all the money went? She’d somehow scraped together enough to buy that dump a few years ago and the rest went up her arms.’
‘How long ago did you move out?’
‘I dunno. I didn’t spend a lot of time at home anyway. Maybe five years ago. I’m twenty three now so work it out. That place was never going to be big enough for us all.’
Emily went on to tell them that she lived with her boyfriend and year-old son in the north of the city. Somehow, despite everything, Emily had turned into a rounded adult. She and her partner had founded a promotions company and were apparently doing well for themselves.
‘Okay, tell me about your sister,’ Jessica said.
‘Kim? She’s only eighteen, a kid. She just moved out a few months ago and got a job selling bags and stuff. I would have got her something better but she wanted to do it for herself. For a while I thought Claire was going to drag her down to her level.’
It was the first time she had directly referred to her mother. She hadn’t called her “mum” or anything similar. ‘Claire?’
‘If someone doesn’t act like your mother, you can’t really call them that, can you?’
Jessica nodded while trying not to give anything away through her expression. ‘So your mother lived alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘No boyfriend?’
Emily laughed but not with any conviction. ‘What do you think? A different boyfriend every night maybe but nothing more than that.’
‘What about your father?’
‘Who knows? He left a long time ago.’
‘How long?’
‘Eight or nine years back. Kim wouldn’t have even been ten by then.’
‘Do you know why he left?’
‘No.’
‘Wasn’t it something you ever talked about?’
‘Claire did all her talking through a bottle back then.’
‘Have you seen your father since he left?’
‘No.’
‘Whose choice?’
‘What choice? I wouldn’t even know where to start looking. One day he was there, the next he wasn’t. I was only fifteen or so. Claire spent the first two weeks telling us he was away on business.’
‘How long has your mother been… working like this?’
‘Not forever. We had a pretty decent childhood, believe it or not. Two-up, two-down, summers at the seaside and all that. Then dad moved out and Claire eventually fell apart. A few years later we all ended up moving to that shithole. There was never much space for me though, so I left straight away.’
Jessica got Emily’s dad’s name from her. They would check him out if they could. Some people just dropped off the face of the earth when they walked out on their wife and kids. Others hooked up with other women and paid child maintenance but, given Emily said she hadn’t seen her father in all that time, it seemed likely he would fall into the first category. Jessica doubted there was any Child Support Agency file on him and thought finding him would prove quite a task – and that was if he had even kept the same name.
She stopped for a moment to think what to say next. From what she had seen at the scene, the neck wounds and the way the flat was secured, her first thoughts were obviously that this murder was related to the other two. But while the first two had happened to people most of the public would consider “normal”, this was a bit different. That wasn’t to devalue a life, just that a drug-addicted prostitute was always going to be likely to attract people who might see her as vulnerable and want to do her harm. Could Claire Hogan really be connected to Yvonne Christensen and Martin Prince in some way?
DI Cole had brought in the hard copy files they had for the other victims, the ones Jessica had caught Ryan looking through. She took out a photo of Yvonne Christensen, a regular one from before she had been murdered and handed it to Emily. ‘Do you know who this is?’
Emily looked at the photo and narrowed her eyes. ‘She sort of seems familiar.’ Jessica felt her heart give a slight jump but her hopes were instantly let down again. ‘She’s been in the papers and on TV, hasn’t she?’
‘Yes.’
‘She was killed too. This “Houdini” guy.’
Jessica still hated that nickname but it wasn’t the time to argue about it. ‘Yes.’
‘Do you think whoever killed her killed Claire too?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I just thought… y’know when the officer told me. I mean, I guess I’ve been expecting something like this for ages now. Given what she did for a living…’
Jessica let the thought tail off, then handed her a picture of Martin Prince. Emily knew them both but only from the media coverage. ‘Do you know of anyone who might want to harm your mother?’
‘No. Her clients? I don’t know. Kim’s closer to her than me. She visits her a couple of times a week.’
‘Do you have a key for the flat, Emily?’
Emily laughed, again with nothing really behind it. ‘I’ve never had one.’
‘What about Kim?’
‘Don’t think so. You’ll have to ask her. Claire never gave any of us keys, she didn’t want anyone walking in on her. Kim used to come and stay at ours some nights when she couldn’t get in. There was no room in there anyway. When it was the three of them, Claire, Shaun and Kim, Shaun used to sleep on the sofa while Mum and Kim shared. It was ridiculous.’
‘Is Shaun your brother?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where is he?’
‘You should know.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You lot banged him up two years ago.’
Shaun Hogan had been very easy to track down. He was currently three months away from potentially being paroled in HM Prison Leeds.
Jessica had first gone to talk to Kim then returned to her desk to look up their brother. Kim hadn’t been too keen to speak at first but they brought her sister in to sit next to her and the aggression levels dropped. Much of what she said simply confirmed what they had already been told by Emily. Kim lived in a flat half-a-mile or so away from her mother and had reluctantly admitted she’d simply had enough of living with her mum a few months previous. When she had lived at home, Kim wasn’t allowed a key and there were certain hours of the day where she wasn’t permitted in the property, instead spending her time roaming the streets. Despite only being eighteen now, she had done that for the best part of five years.
Kim obviously cared for her mother and had wanted to try to help but had reached the end of her young tether. As she cried and made her admissions, Jessica felt devastated for her. She was so young but her childhood had been ruined, having seen everything she must have done. Yet, despite all of that, she adamantly refused to criticise her upbringing.
Given what connected the first two victims, there was one question Jessica had been waiting to ask. ‘Do you know if your mother was ever burgled?’
‘What would you have cared?’
‘We would always respond to something like that.’
‘You didn’t do much when those kids were harassing her.’
‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘You weren’t too bothered when your lot were threatening to arrest her and scaring her off the street.’
Emily helped calm her sister and Jessica eventually got her answer. ‘No.’
The detective already knew Claire Hogan’s flat wasn’t one of the addresses Wayne Lapham had been caught in possession of stolen goods from but he was still their only link to the first two victims. “Was” now seemed to appropriate word. If the prostitute’s murder was linked to the other two, the one connection they thought they had – burglary – was no more.
Shaun Hogan was an interesting character though. He was now twenty one and there were a few minor crimes on his record, things like shoplifting when he was in his teens. But he had been jailed two years ago for a serious assault on a man outside a bar in Leeds city centre. Emily and Kim had both seemed reluctant to talk about him but the older sister had told them her brother had moved out of the area shortly after Claire had moved into the flat.
For reasons that seemed obvious, given the lack of room, he had apparently not been too keen on living with his mother and younger sister. That meant that, when Claire had moved out of whatever house she had shared with her husband and moved into the flat, both her eldest children had left home fairly quickly, Emily at eighteen, Shaun at sixteen. Emily had somehow managed to turn her life around, while Shaun had gone the other way; he’d moved to another city and ended up in jail. Kim, meanwhile, had stayed at home for almost the entire time.
Jessica thought it was a very mixed-up family, while realising how lucky she had been to be brought up well. It put her silly argument with Caroline into perspective.
She put in a call to the prison, arranging to visit Shaun on the Monday. Someone would break the news about his mother to him in the meantime. After that, she spent the rest of the day in meetings with DCI Aylesbury and DI Cole. At the moment, there was nothing concrete to link the latest killing with the previous two. They would probably have initial results back from forensics the next day, which should at least confirm a similar murder weapon. Jessica felt sure everything was somehow connected. She thought the property had been locked almost to taunt them. Whoever the killer was could easily have got access to the flat given Claire’s profession. Getting out may have been more difficult but whoever was responsible had set the scene up similar to the first two for a reason. She told DCI Aylesbury she thought the murder was linked to the first two and they decided that, after the results came back, if they confirmed her thoughts, the DCI would give another media briefing once again asking for help.
A firm plan of action would be hard to come up with. Even if someone had seen a strange person entering Claire Hogan’s flat it wouldn’t have been anything out of the ordinary, while the police wouldn’t expect too many of her clients to phone up either. It was going to be a hard thing to manage via the media. Getting members of the public to pay attention to a murder appeal for someone who seemed a bit like them, suburban and respectable, was easy. Getting people to care about the murder of a prostitute would be harder to pull off. It was the last thing they wanted to do but DI Cole had suggested embracing the “Houdini” name. Jessica hated the idea but had to admit it would keep the media on-side and give them their best opportunity of getting people to contact them with information.
As she emerged from the discussions to head home, she noticed there were three missed calls on her phone. She’d had it on silent all day, given she had gone from interviews to meetings. The caller’s identity was obvious, her only surprise being he hadn’t called earlier. Jessica thumbed the redial button and the other person answered on the first ring.
‘Mr Ashford,’ she said. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’
Garry Ashford still felt as if he were constantly riding his luck at work. The big profile on DS Daniel had somehow managed to get him into everyone’s good books. He had even had a text from her saying she owed him. He would have settled for any kind of communication that didn’t involve copious but impressively creative swearing but that was even better.
He wasn’t entirely sure how it was going to go down in the office but the Editor had been upbeat about the piece. Garry had claimed it as an exclusive, even though much of it hadn’t come from the detective herself. That along with the background piece he had put together on Wayne Lapham had given him two more days of decent coverage.
The pay rise still hadn’t materialised though.
Despite the text he received from DS Daniel, he didn’t respond and hadn’t contacted her since. Garry figured it was probably best to keep that goodwill stored up in case something else significant happened. This particular Saturday he was hoping for a quieter day given what he had ended up being asked to do the past few weeks.
When he saw his source’s number ringing his phone, he groaned. He half-thought about ignoring it but then took the call. He listened to the details and wrote everything down, then hung up and called DS Daniel. There was no answer and he wondered if she was avoiding him. He phoned his Editor then set off to catch a bus out to the latest victim’s address. His source said they didn’t know a name but knew where the crime scene was. He tried DS Daniel one more time but there was still no answer.
‘Another fine Saturday,’ he moaned to no one in particular.
‘Hi,’ said Garry. ‘I guess you know why I was calling.’
‘You’re still going to have to tell me what you think you know.’
The journalist told Jessica how he had visited the murder site and spoken to the upstairs neighbour. He said he had Claire Hogan’s name and that the woman who lived upstairs had been very keen to talk about the dead female’s chosen profession, as well as telling him all about how the police had smashed the door in that morning. He wanted Jessica to confirm this murder had been committed by the same person as the first two.
‘I don’t know that yet.’ Jessica was being honest.
‘What do you think, though?’
‘I think you’re putting me in an awkward position. We don’t have any results back yet. I still shouldn’t really be talking to you.’
‘I don’t have to use your name.’
Jessica thought for a few moments. ‘Who will you quote?’
‘A senior source close to the investigation.’
‘“
Senior
?”’
‘Okay. A “source” close to the investigation.’
‘“
Close
?”’
‘Come on… You’re taking the mick now.’
Jessica laughed. ‘Yeah I am. okay fine, I do think it’s the same person but that was it, yeah? I owe you no more. We are even.’
‘All right.’
‘And no more phone calls. You’ve got to go through the Press Office like everyone else.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Look, I know my sexy phone voice is a big turn-on for you but talking to the media can get me into trouble.’
Garry Ashford laughed awkwardly. ‘Okay.’
When Jessica arrived home, Caroline was waiting for her in the living room, alone. Jessica had gone to leave her bag and shoes in the usual position, on the floor by the main room’s door, when her friend turned around to look at her. ‘Hi,’ Caroline said.