Nothing but Trouble (3 page)

‘Don’t worry. It suits you. It gives you a look of statesmanlike distinction.’

‘Yeah, right,’ he said, instantly spotting a line when he heard it. ‘So what are you really doing here, Vaughan? And none
of that I-was-just-passing-by nonsense. Don’t forget you’re talking to a trained detective.’

Jess perched on the corner of Lorna’s desk and lifted her eyebrows in mock offence. ‘Heavens, can’t a girl look up an old
friend without her motives being questioned?’

‘Most girls, perhaps, but not the ones who do what you do. How’s it going on the journalism front?’

‘Moderate to good. I’m getting by.’ She paused, her mouth curling into a smile again. ‘But this has nothing to do with my
brilliant career. As it happens, I do have a friend who needs some help. Trouble is, she’s not exactly well off, so I was
wondering …’

Harry folded his arms across his chest and tilted his head. ‘You were wondering?’

Jess gave a tentative lift of her shoulders. ‘Mates’ rates, perhaps?’

‘I’m suspecting that’s a euphemism for no charge at all. You know, believe it or not, I am actually trying to run a business
here. I can’t afford to—’

‘No, she’ll pay you. I promise. Only … er, it might have to be in instalments. But hey, money’s money even if it doesn’t come
in all at once.’

Harry grinned again. ‘Is that what you say to yourself when
you
don’t get paid?’

‘Ah, come on. You owe me.’

Harry barked out a laugh. ‘And how do you figure that out?’

‘The last time we worked together, I got shot.’

‘Winged, actually. And how was that in any way my fault? In fact, if my memory serves me correctly, it was your idea to go
there in the first place.’

‘But after it was all over and I wrote up the story, I kept my mouth shut about how involved you were with Ellen Shaw.’

At the mention of her name, Harry felt a familiar pang. It was always the ones who got away, the might-have-beens, who lingered
in your thoughts. He still hadn’t figured out how Ellen had got so completely under his skin. Small, dark and fragile, she
hadn’t even been his type, or at least not his physical type – he preferred tall, leggy, confident blondes – but her
memory continued to haunt him. ‘You trying to blackmail me, Vaughan?’

‘Absolutely,’ she said, ‘but only for the greater good.’

‘Glad to hear it. And, just to put the record straight, Ellen and I were never involved. We were just …’ But just what they
had been continued to elude him. ‘Nothing happened.’

Jess’s grey eyes widened as she placed her hand dramatically over her heart. ‘God forbid.’

Harry gave up and waved towards his office. ‘Okay, grab a seat and I’ll get some coffee.’

Jess jumped up off the desk and gave him a quick peck on the cheek. ‘Thanks, Harry. You’re a star.’

‘I’m not promising anything.’

She gave him one of her knowing smiles. ‘Course not.’

Harry went through to the kitchen. There was coffee in the percolator, still hot from when he’d made it earlier. He poured
it into two mugs and carried them through to his office, along with a bowl of sugar and a spoon. He put the bowl down in front
of her. ‘Do you take sugar? I can’t remember.’

Jess, who’d sat down in one of the new chairs, was busily testing its swivelling abilities. Like a kid with a new toy, she
swung left and right and left again. Then, putting her feet back on the floor, she stopped and gazed up at him. ‘Boy, you
really know how to flatter a girl. I can see I must have made a major impact.’

‘It’s been what, three, four years? Do you remember if I take sugar or not?’

‘You could have stayed in touch.’

‘So could you.’

Harry wondered why they hadn’t. He and Jess had always got on, give or take the odd disagreement, but his life back then had
been complicated. When they’d last seen other, their paths crossing on a difficult case, he’d still been trying to come to
terms with the fact that he’d never be a cop again. His head had
been all over the place, his long-term relationship with Valerie Middleton on the rocks, his emotions in freefall. ‘You want
to tell me what this is all about?’

‘Take a seat,’ she said, ‘and I’ll reveal all.’

Harry walked around his desk, sat down and peered at her over the rim of his mug.

‘Well?’

Jess smiled again, but this time it was more tentative. She let a few seconds pass before she glanced down at the floor and
then up at him again. ‘You remember the Minnie Bright case?’

Harry’s face instantly grew serious. ‘The Kellston girl, the poor kid who was murdered.’

‘That’s the one.’

The lines between his brows grew deeper. No cop, no matter how hard they tried, ever forgot a case where a kid was involved.
And Minnie’s had been a particularly tragic one. ‘That was years ago.’

‘Fourteen,’ she said.

Harry ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Jesus, is it really that long?’ He’d been a DS back then, one of the officers who’d
gone in to search the terraced house on Morton Grove. Minnie’s lifeless ten-year-old body, found stuffed under the bed in
the spare room, was a horrifying discovery that would never leave him. ‘That sick bastard Peck, yeah?’

‘That’s right, Donald Peck. He hanged himself in prison a few years after he was convicted. Always swore he was innocent.’

‘Don’t they all,’ Harry said.

Jess placed her elbows on the desk and put her chin in her hands. ‘Except, I mean, Minnie wasn’t … er … interfered with in
any way, was she? She wasn’t raped or sexually assaulted.’

‘He killed her,’ Harry said. ‘He broke her neck and then hid the body.’

‘But why leave her in the house? The body was there for over forty-eight hours, wasn’t it? He had plenty of time to move her,
and he must have realised that someone would come looking eventually.’

Harry’s blue eyes narrowed. ‘What’s this all about, Jess? What’s going on?’

‘Don’t look like that. I’m not here to screw anyone over. You know me better than that. But maybe what happened wasn’t as
straightforward as everyone thinks.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning exactly that. This mate of mine, the one I want you to see, was one of the girls who were hanging out with Minnie
that day. Sam Kendall. Do you remember her?’

‘Vaguely,’ he said. Minnie’s five friends had all been interviewed by female officers. He had an impression of a group of
small pale-faced girls, their eyes full of panic and fear. They’d come forward after Minnie had eventually been reported missing
by her mother. Hannah Bright, a crack-addicted tom, had failed to notice her daughter’s absence for two whole days.

‘Sam’s a cabbie. That’s how I got to know her. She works for one of those all-women taxi firms in Hackney. Anyway, we got
talking one night and she told me about the murder and about how a year or so ago one of the other girls, Lynda Choi, had
drowned in the River Lea. The coroner reported a verdict of accidental death, but Sam thought it might have been suicide.
She reckoned Lynda couldn’t get over what had happened. And that got me thinking about how some people find a way of coping
with these kinds of trauma and others don’t. I thought it might be an interesting subject for an article.’

‘Hang on,’ Harry said, leaning forward. ‘So you’re writing a story about this?’

Jess gave a sigh. ‘You’ve got that expression on your face
again. Look, I’m not writing about the original investigation, only about what happened after. There’s not a problem with
that, is there?’

Harry considered it for a moment. ‘Except you said earlier that you thought the cops might have got it wrong.’

‘I did
not
say that.’

‘Not in so many words, perhaps, but—’

‘I didn’t say Donald Peck was innocent. I merely mentioned that there could, possibly, have been more to the case than came
out at the time.’

‘Peck had form. He was a known sex offender.’

‘Okay, okay, but forget about that for now. Sam agreed to be interviewed and she also pointed me in the direction of the other
girls who were there that day. Lynda was the only one she’d kept in touch with, but two of the others, Paige Fielding and
Becky Hibbert, are still living locally.’

‘And I bet they were simply overjoyed to hear that the past was going to be raked up again.’

Jess frowned. ‘I didn’t put any pressure on them, if that’s what you’re thinking. I do have a few scruples.’

‘Now who’s the one being defensive?’

Her forehead quickly cleared and she smiled again. ‘Okay, point taken. Anyway, as it happens, they were both more than willing
to talk to me. Paige especially. She was mad keen on the idea of having her picture in a magazine. I made arrangements to
interview them, one in the morning, one in the afternoon – this was about two weeks ago – but the night before we were due
to meet they suddenly pulled out. Paige called me, said they’d changed their minds and weren’t prepared to go through with
it.’

‘So they had a change of heart.’ Harry shrugged. ‘It’s not that surprising. Maybe they thought it through, decided not to
open old wounds.’

‘Or maybe someone warned them off.’

‘That’s a bit of a leap. You got any evidence?’

Jess delved into the pocket of her jacket and took out her phone. She scrolled through the menu, found what she wanted and
passed the mobile over to him. ‘Here, take a look at this.’

Harry stared down at the photo on the screen. It was of a dark blue minicab parked in a street. ‘What am I looking at exactly?’

‘It’s Sam’s car. The tyres have all been slashed and someone’s run a key along the paintwork. It was done a couple of days
ago. She found it like that when she got up in the morning.’

‘Could have been yobs.’

‘Except it’s the second time in a fortnight.’

Harry still wasn’t convinced. ‘Or a disgruntled customer. Maybe she overcharged someone or nicked a neighbour’s parking space.’

‘Sure,’ Jess said, going into her pocket again, ‘and maybe a disgruntled customer sent these too.’ She pulled out two folded
sheets of A4 paper. ‘These are only photocopies. The police have the originals. They were sent through the mail to her home
address. The envelopes were typed and they were posted in Kellston.’

Harry reached out, took the sheets, unfolded them and flattened them on the desk. The first one read:
Keep yer mouth shut BITCH,
and the second:
YOU killed Minnie Bright.
They’d been put together from words cut from a tabloid – the
Sun,
he guessed, although he couldn’t swear to it. In this world of high-tech communication there was a curiously dated feel to
the messages, as if the perpetrator had seen something similar done on an old TV crime show and believed it was the obligatory
way to send threats. Or maybe they just had an overly heightened sense of drama. ‘Very nice,’ he murmured.

‘Aren’t they just.’

‘But she has reported it?’

Jess gave a nod. ‘Yes, but what can the cops do? They’ve put it all on record, but a few slashed tyres and a couple of poison-pen
letters hardly make her a priority. Sam’s scared, and she’s not the type who scares easily. Someone wants to shut her up,
and the question is why?’

Harry gazed down at the sheets again. ‘It could just be a crank.’

‘But how did they even know that she was speaking to me? And why should they accuse her of killing Minnie? That’s what’s so
weird. It’s freaking Sam out. She’s had a few odd phone calls too, the sort where the person leaves a long, unpleasant silence
and then hangs up. The number was always unidentified.’

‘I’m still not sure what you want me to do about it.’

Jess gave him one of her wide-eyed, pleading looks. ‘Just have a chat with her.
Please.
You can do that, can’t you? I don’t see why anyone should be this concerned about Sam talking unless they’re frightened of
something incriminating coming out.’

Harry pulled a face, aware that he could be treading on sensitive toes if this all led back to the original investigation.
DCI Saul Redding, now Detective Superintendent Redding, had been the officer in charge of the case. Although Harry was convinced
that Peck’s conviction had been a safe one, he also knew that even the cleanest of cops could get antsy when their judgement
was called into question. ‘What about the other girl? You’ve mentioned Paige and Becky and Lynda, but there were five in all,
weren’t there?’

‘Kirsten Cope,’ Jess said. ‘Or Kirsten Roberts as she was back then. She’s an actress in one of those minor TV soaps, lives
out in Essex now. She refused point blank to see me.’

‘Maybe she didn’t fancy the publicity.’

Jess gave a snort. ‘That would be a first. She spends most of
her time falling in and out of nightclubs trying to be noticed. Barely a week goes by when she isn’t in the gossip column
of one magazine or another.’

‘Yeah, but there’s publicity and publicity. Perhaps she doesn’t want to be reminded of the Minnie Bright murder. What happened
back then must have been pretty traumatic for all those girls.’

‘I guess,’ Jess said. ‘Maybe that’s why she changed her name. But there’s something more going on here, I’m sure of it.’

‘Anyone else know about this article you’re intending to write?’

She shook her head. ‘If they do, it’s not come from me or Sam, but I’ve no idea who the others might have told. Look, I wouldn’t
have come here unless I thought it was serious. I’m genuinely worried for Sam. I’ve got a bad feeling about all this.’

Harry picked up a biro off the desk and tapped his teeth with it. He was silent for a while. Unlike Jess, he was more inclined
towards the view that the threats against Sam Kendall were malicious rather than dangerous, but it wouldn’t do any harm to
hear the girl out. ‘Okay. How about if I see her tomorrow?’

Jess’s face lit up. ‘You mean it?’

‘But like I said earlier, no promises, right?’

‘No promises. I get it.’ She glanced at her watch, pushed back the chair and rose to her feet. ‘I’ve got to go, but thanks,
Harry. I really appreciate it. Sam works late on Friday nights, but she could be here by … say, one o’clock?’