Nothing but Trouble (27 page)

As Jess walked back into the living room, she was greeted with the smell of real coffee. Good, just what she needed to give
her a kick-start and get her moving again. She had a lot to do this afternoon. Already she was going over the list in her
head, prioritising a visit to the bank and a call to the insurance company. Automatically she glanced down at her left wrist,
but of course her watch wasn’t there. That was something else she’d have to buy.

Harry came out of the kitchen brandishing a plate of scrambled eggs on toast. ‘Grab a seat,’ he said. ‘I made you some breakfast,
or brunch or whatever you want to call it. I know you might not feel that hungry, but you should try and eat something.’

Jess pulled out a chair and sat down. She went for the mug of coffee first, adding a splash of milk and then blowing on the
surface before she took a couple of fast gulps. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘That hit the spot. And actually I am quite hungry.’ She
picked up the knife and fork and dug into the eggs.

While she ate, Harry went to stand by the window. He stared out at the street for a while with his hands in his pockets.

She glanced over at him. ‘Is everything okay?’

He didn’t answer straight away.

‘Harry?’

‘I’ve got some news,’ he said, coming back over and sitting down opposite her. His face was solemn, his eyes full of concern.

‘I can guess,’ she said. ‘The fire was deliberate, right? Don’t worry. I’d pretty much figured that out already.’

‘Yeah, someone poured petrol through the main letter box and then set it alight. Course, it could have just been your friendly
passing arsonist, but—’

‘But it’s unlikely. Especially with everything else that’s been going on recently. And anyway, I’m sure someone was watching
me when I went to the shops last night. I had this really creepy feeling. I looked around and couldn’t see anyone, but I’d
swear I wasn’t imagining it.’

‘No,’ Harry said. ‘I don’t think you were.’

Jess put down her knife and fork and pushed the plate to one side. ‘So someone’s probably trying to kill me. That’s a cheery
thought. Not that I can prove it. I mean, there are six flats in that block. Theoretically, any one of us could have been
the target.’

Harry put his elbows on the table and sighed. ‘There’s something else,’ he said. ‘I’ve just come back from Cowan Road.’

She only had to hear the tension in his voice to know there was more bad news on its way. ‘Tell me,’ she said softly.

He hesitated, unwilling or perhaps just unable to find the right words.

She stirred uneasily in her chair, alarm starting to grow inside her. ‘Harry?’ she prompted.

‘It’s Becky Hibbert,’ he said finally. ‘She’s dead.’

The shock of the announcement was like a thump to her stomach. The breath caught in her throat. ‘What? How? I don’t understand.’

‘They found her this morning on the Mansfield. She’d been strangled.’

‘She was
murdered?
Oh my God! Do they … do they know who did it?’

Harry shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. Not yet. The police found your card in her flat and it had my number written on the
back. Val called me this morning. I went down to the station and told her what I could.’

Jess was still desperately trying to absorb the information. ‘Right,’ she murmured.

‘But she’s going to want to talk to you too,’ he added gently. ‘I can come with you if you like.’

Jess raised a hand to her mouth and chewed on a fingernail. She could feel her heart beating faster, thumping in her chest.
For a while, unfocused, her eyes gazed off into the middle distance. Then suddenly, as if all her bones had turned to jelly,
she slumped forward and covered her face with her hands. ‘Jesus,’ she groaned. ‘What have I done? This is all my fault.’

‘How the hell is it your fault?’

But Jess could only think of the pressure she’d put on Becky
Hibbert, of how she’d deliberately targeted the girl she believed to be the weakest link in the chain. And Becky
had
_talked and now she was dead. Had someone guessed that she wasn’t going to keep her mouth shut, that she couldn’t be trusted?
Was that why she’d been murdered?

Harry leaned forward and laid the tips of his fingers on her arm. ‘Jess, you’re not to blame for this.’

She dropped her hands and stared at him. ‘And how do you figure that out? If I hadn’t gone round there, if I hadn’t—’

‘You can’t go down that road. We don’t know why she was murdered.’

‘What does Valerie think? You told her about Minnie Bright? About Sam? About everything that’s been happening?’ She could
hear the hysteria in her voice and tried to swallow down the panic. A combination of fear and guilt and remorse was running
through her head, a dizzying rush that made her feel sick.

‘Of course I did. But she has to keep an open mind. They’re still waiting on forensics.’

Jess rubbed hard at her temples, fighting a fruitless battle to get her thoughts in order. ‘But it must be connected to Minnie.
It has to be.’

‘We don’t know anything yet – not for sure.’

Jess stood up quickly, but her legs felt so weak she had to grab hold of the edge of the table. ‘I have to go to the station.
I have to see Valerie.’

‘There’s no rush,’ Harry said.

And of course there was no rush. Not really. Becky Hibbert was dead, and nothing Jess could say would ever bring her back.
But she still felt the need to be doing something, to be moving, to be contributing in any way she could. Her legs, however,
refused to cooperate. As her knees buckled, she dropped back into the chair.

‘You’d better give her a call first,’ Harry continued. ‘Or I can ring for you and arrange an appointment. She may not be able
to see you today.’

Jess was only half listening, the words washing over her. She was remembering Becky Hibbert standing on the walkway at Haslow
House, her hands gripping the handles of the pram, her face sullen and wary. She was remembering how she had tried to manipulate
her into revealing the truth about the past. ‘I pushed her too hard. I forced her into making that call to you.’

‘You didn’t force her into anything,’ Harry insisted. ‘And you didn’t kill her. You’re an investigative journalist. It’s your
job to put pressure on people. If you recognised that she was the one most likely to break, then someone else could have realised
it too. Maybe Becky panicked, maybe she called someone else and … I don’t know. But that’s the thing. Neither of us knows
at the moment, so let’s not start jumping to any conclusions.’

Jess rubbed at her forehead again. She wanted to believe him, wanted to find a way out from the tugging quicksand of guilt,
but nothing he said could free her from her conscience. And then another shocking thought suddenly occurred. Her eyes widened
with alarm. ‘Oh God, what about Sam? What if—’

‘She’s fine. I called her a couple of hours ago and told her about Becky. I don’t think she’s in any danger. Whatever’s being
covered up has nothing to do with her. At the beginning someone clearly wanted to warn her off, to stop her getting involved
with you, but I think that’s as far as it goes. She obviously doesn’t know enough to be a direct threat to anyone.’

‘I hope you’re right.’

There was a short silence, broken only by the sound of the rain falling gently against the window pane. The room was warm,
the pungent smell of paint still lingering. Jess felt a desperate need to get outside and breathe some fresh air. Heaving
herself to her feet again, she swept up the keys, the cash and the phone from the table.

‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘I’ve got things to do.’

Harry stood up too. ‘I’ll come with you.’

‘I don’t need a bodyguard,’ she snapped, but then immediately felt bad about it. ‘Sorry, I’m sounding like an ungrateful bitch.
I don’t mean it like that. I just want to be on my own for a while.’

Slowly, he sat back down again. ‘It’s okay, I understand. But watch yourself, yeah? Come straight back when you’ve finished.’

‘Sure. I’ll see you later. And thanks again – for everything.’

‘No problem.’

Jess was aware of his eyes on her as she walked across the room. Her legs still felt unsteady, but sheer determination got
her into the hall and out through the door. She gripped the banister as she descended the stairs. Pausing on the first-floor
landing, she could hear the rhythmic tapping of fingers on a keyboard coming from the office of Mackenzie, Lind. Should she
go and thank Lorna now, or leave it until later? Later, she decided. She wasn’t yet strong enough to face all the inevitable
questions about how she was and how she felt and what she was going to do next. She was already standing on a precipice. Lorna’s
maternal instincts might just be enough to tip her over the edge.

Jess went quietly down the last flight of stairs and out into the street. She raised her eyes to the cooling rain and let
it trickle down her face. It seemed like a long time since she had tried to open that window in her flat, since she had lain
down on the floor and curled up into a ball, since she had felt the hot grey smoke creeping into her throat and lungs. She
had been lucky. Becky Hibbert had not.

Shaking the rain from her hair, she opened the door of the Mini and climbed in. She dropped the keys, the phone and the
money on to the passenger seat. Then, as if it might anchor her, she grabbed the wheel tightly with both hands, leaned forward
and breathed deeply, in and out, in and out. What now? She didn’t know where to start. What she wanted was to make things
right, but it was way too late for that.

Detective Inspector Valerie Middleton leaned over the shoulder of DC Lister and viewed the grainy images from the CCTV. There
was no coverage from inside the estate – cameras had been installed a few years ago, but they’d been vandalised with such
frequency that the council had long since given up repairing them – but there was one surviving camera on the Mansfield Road,
set up high and covering the main entrance.

‘That’s him,’ DC Lister said, staring at the image that was frozen on the screen. ‘That’s Dan Livesey. I’m sure of it. We
pulled him in when I was still in uniform – it must have been about ten months ago. A fight broke out at the pool hall, the
usual carnage, and he was interviewed along with several others.’

Valerie wasn’t surprised to hear about the trouble at the Lincoln. It was one of the Streets’ businesses, a place where the
Kellston lowlifes gathered to get hammered, do their dodgy deals and make contact with other local criminals. The building
had burned down a few years back but had since been rebuilt.

She peered down at the screen. Livesey was in his mid-thirties, an ugly, thickset man with a square face and a shaven head.
Dressed in a long dark overcoat, he had his hands deep in his pockets, thus making it impossible to tell if he was wearing
gloves or not. She checked the time on the screen: 00:03, about twenty minutes after Becky and her two friends had arrived
back from the Fox.

‘Have we got him leaving?’

‘Yes,’ Lister said, pressing a button and fast-forwarding the tape. ‘Here it is. A quarter past twelve.’

Valerie stared hard at the screen. Did he look like a man who had just strangled his ex? Livesey was walking quickly, his
shoulders hunched, his collar up, head down. Was he hurrying to escape the scene of a crime? Was he trying to hide his face
or simply protect it against the chill of the night air?

‘Play it again,’ she said.

The second and third viewing didn’t help her come to a decision. The camera picked up Livesey as he approached the gateway,
exited the estate and turned left along Mansfield Road. He disappeared from view within a few yards.

‘I take it we’ve got the victim on tape too?’

‘Yes, guv,’ DC Lister said. She pressed the button again, rewinding until the time read 23:40. Valerie saw a few seconds tick
by, and then suddenly the living breathing version of Becky Hibbert appeared, her elbows linked into those of her mates, the
three of them walking through the gates in a line. They were laughing and joking, clearly drunk but not completely inebriated.
Valerie felt a lurch in her stomach. She was watching a smiling woman who was heading towards her death.

‘And then a few minutes later we get the lads they passed,’ Lister said. She forwarded the tape again, and four boys came
in to shot. They were all wearing the familiar garb of the young, low-slung jeans, trainers and hoodies. Their faces, framed
by the pulled-up hoods, were no more than a blur. How old were they?
Valerie reckoned mid- to late teens. Beyond their age – and she couldn’t even be sure of that – there was nothing to identify
them. They could have been any four lads from anywhere in the country.

‘Let’s run off some prints and show them around the estate. Someone might come up with a name.’ It was a shot in the dark,
bearing in mind the residents’ general reluctance to talk to the law, but it had to be done. The lads could be potential witnesses.
They might have seen or heard something vital.

‘So,’ Valerie continued, ‘Livesey’s on the estate for about twelve minutes. Not long, but long enough. We haven’t got an exact
time of death for the victim, but it seems to fit in with the ME’s estimate. He could have gone looking for Becky Hibbert,
got into an argument with her and …’ She stopped and frowned. ‘But if Becky had arrived back twenty minutes earlier, why wasn’t
she in her flat?’

‘Maybe she got talking to someone,’ Lister suggested. ‘Or maybe she was in the flat but didn’t want him there. Especially
as she was on her own. If the relationship was as stormy as her mates claim, she may have felt safer talking to him in a more
public place. Even at midnight, there are always people milling around on the Mansfield.’

‘Or maybe
he
didn’t want to go up to the flat in case he was spotted by one of the neighbours. He might have given her a call and asked
her to meet him in the foyer. He could have suggested going for a drink at some club while they talked things over.’ Valerie
gave a light shrug. There were a lot of maybes. ‘Have we got an address for him yet?’