The Killer Inside: A gripping serial killer thriller (Detective Jessica Daniel thriller series Book 1) (4 page)

‘Exactly. Either a large group of people were having an awful lot of fun in those toilets – or no one wants to say anything.’

Jessica didn’t want to talk about Harry any longer. She glanced up at the clock. ‘If you’re done with whatever you’re on, you may as well get off. I’ve got a few things to sort, then I’ll be following you.’

Rowlands didn’t need telling twice. He had been on since the early hours, and there was a sunny Saturday afternoon to be enjoyed out there.

After the constable had left, Jessica tried phoning Harry to see how he was feeling ahead of the court case. As expected, he didn’t pick up. She had visited his flat twice in the past couple of months, but there had been no answer there, either. Whether he’d been in or not, Jessica didn’t know. Perhaps he’d returned to the north-east? Perhaps he wasn’t answering the door to anyone? Maybe it was specifically
her
he was avoiding? Although, seemingly, he wasn’t in any kind of contact with anyone from the station. She sent him a text message anyway.

With little else to go on for now, Jessica thought contacting a locksmith would be a good idea, if only to ask how easy it could be to break through a double-glazed door or window without a key. She picked a name from the Yellow Pages classifieds and called. His advert claimed he worked ‘24/7’ – but when he picked up, he informed her that he would only be available to talk to her if she had an actual job that needed doing.

In other words, he wanted a few quid.

He reluctantly agreed that he could spare her ‘a few minutes’ on his Monday lunch break, so she arranged to meet him at his house, a short drive from the station.

With that, Jessica decided she’d had quite enough of Saturday.

T
he next morning
, Jessica read the Sunday edition of the
Herald
while sitting in her flat’s kitchen eating some toast. She didn’t usually buy a newspaper but, given the phone call from the reporter the previous day, she had been out to the local shop to pick one up.

There was a small article under the main story on the front page that basically rehashed the media release she’d helped the press officer write the evening before. It seemed that the paper had played ball and stuck to the details the police had released. Garry Ashford’s name was nowhere to be seen and Jessica concluded he was probably all talk.

She’d already searched the Internet for Yvonne Christensen’s name, but it hadn’t turned up any news stories of note, certainly nothing relating to the case. At least that meant the department were still on top of things and she wasn’t going to have to explain to the DCI why his television appearance would be upstaged.

As Jessica was reading, her flatmate, Caroline, ambled into the kitchen in a white dressing gown and fluffy pink piglet slippers.

‘Morning,’ Jessica said. ‘I didn’t think you’d be up this early. I tried to be quiet...’

Caroline could sleep through anything. If there was an overnight alien invasion, she would wake up after eight hours of uninterrupted slumber and wonder who the grey-headed extra-terrestrial with the probe was.

The reply came through a watery-eyed, yawny smile: ‘If I had the choice of my sleeping superpower or your ability to eat anything and not get fat, I’d rather have yours.’

Jessica agreed. Saturday fry-ups and regular curries were the norm; she had never really put on weight, even as a child. Now approaching her dreaded thirty-somethings, she had been telling herself she had to start eating properly, but hadn’t yet got around to it.

‘Anyway,’ Caroline added. ‘I don’t know why I’m up. I guess I fancied doing something.’

‘You’re not turning into a morning person, are you?’

‘I hope not. I
hate
those people.’

Caroline Morrison was Jessica’s oldest and best friend. Her olive skin, long brown hair and wide brown eyes had always left Jessica feeling pangs of jealousy. Caroline really was pretty, whether she put any effort into her appearance or not. When they’d used to go out regularly – a lot more often than they ever managed now – Jessica had always felt the need to wear more make-up and spend longer on her own hair in order to not be the ‘ugly friend’. Compared to Caroline, she was always likely to be second choice.

She wasn’t bothered by anything like that now – a sure sign of age. Harry’s stabbing and subsequent downward spiral had matured her in a way she would never have expected.

She and Caroline came from roughly the same place not far from Carlisle, a hundred miles or so to the north of Manchester. They hadn’t really had any contact with each other until sixth-form college, when they were both sixteen. On the very first day, they had ended up sitting together in a history class. That one small, seemingly inconsequential, decision had had such an impact on the rest of their lives.

They had discovered that they were both only children and, bonding over this, they had quickly become more or less inseparable. They had spent a year travelling through parts of south-east Asia when they turned eighteen. Caroline had applied to go to university in Manchester and, although Jessica hadn’t been interested in further education, the pair had both moved to the city on their return. They hadn’t lived together at first. Caroline had stayed in university accommodation for her first year, while Jessica found a flat nearby. By the time Caroline had finished the first year of her course, the two of them had moved in together – into the same flat in which they still lived.

Caroline had spent three years studying, while Jessica tried to find something she was interested in doing. She’d applied to the police on a bit of a whim. While a lot of people joined the force because they had a family member who also worked in the emergency or security services somewhere, this was far from the case for Jessica. Her parents managed a post office in their home town, which was certainly something that ran in the family. Her father’s father had bought the building and started the business almost sixty years before. There had never really been any chance of Jessica hanging around to take over the reins, though, and both of her parents knew it. They never pressured her, and still ran the place themselves, happily looking ahead to retirement in a few years.

Caroline nodded towards the toast in Jessica’s hand. ‘Any bread left?’

‘You might have to cut the mouldy bits off.’

‘Eew… Oh, is that…?’

Caroline had noticed the main picture on the paper’s front page above the murder story. Jessica closed the pages and scowled at the photo. ‘Peter Hunt.’

‘I forgot that the court case starts tomorrow.’

When Tom Carpenter, the man who’d stabbed Harry, had handed himself in, it hadn’t been the police he had come to, but someone altogether more sinister – Hunt. Defence lawyers weren’t that popular with police officers in any case, but Hunt was truly the scourge of Greater Manchester Police.

He delighted in taking on cases to defend anyone with a high-enough profile to get his photo into the papers and on the news bulletins. There may have been rifts between colleagues in her department, but the one thing on which everyone Jessica worked with was united was that Hunt was as low, if not lower, than the people he represented.

It didn’t help that he was from the south. Being a lawyer was Hunt’s first crime; having coiffured blonde bouffant hair was another. Being born in Cambridge and speaking with a southern accent was an altogether bigger one. But representing all manner of hooligans and law-breakers was the final straw.

Even the DCI had it in for the lawyer. It was rumoured he regularly checked the status of Hunt’s car tax in case he’d forgotten to renew it on his £250,000 Bentley.

‘I saw him on TV last week,’ Caroline said. ‘He was on one of the news channels talking about some book he’s got out.’

‘He’s always somewhere. He was in the paper last week because he was launching some campaign with one of the local MPs. One of the younger lads at the station set up a dartboard with the picture on it. It was very popular.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought you had a good enough aim to get him in the face?’

‘Who said I was aiming for his head? It was a full-length photo.’

Caroline smiled. ‘You really don’t like him, do you?’

Jessica didn’t need to answer that. She didn’t really bring work home, but had ranted to Caroline about Hunt a few times.

When she and Harry had first met, he had been working on a case against Frank Worrall, a well-known local crook. Money-laundering is what they had tried to get him on, but people-trafficking, prostitution, loan-sharking or the odd beating could have been options, too. The Serious Crime Division had been trying to bring him in for a long time. Jessica had helped with some of the final bits and pieces before the Crown Prosecution Service had been called in.

Worrall was no fool and had an army of people working under him. The dealers on the street were easy to pick up, but they were always careful not to be caught with any significant amount of drugs. They were always out of court quickly, never turned anybody else in and, even if they had wanted to, they wouldn’t have known it was Worrall at the top of the tree. Eventually CID, along with the over-arching Serious Crime Division, had brought Worrall in and been given that go-ahead to charge by the CPS, who must have thought there was a case.

But they hadn’t counted on Peter Hunt.

A year previously, Hunt had gone to court and had painted Harry and the rest of the force as bitter, target-driven incompetents with a vendetta. Worrall’s wife had cried in the witness stand and told the jury what a good man her husband was. She’d sobbed as she’d spoken of him grafting every day to provide for her and their children, while Hunt had handed her a box of tissues to emphasise the point. Their kids had also been present at the back of the public gallery, along with the grandparents towards the trial’s conclusion. Worrall himself had spoken about inheriting his father’s building business and ‘wanting to do my dad proud’. He’d insisted the police had it all wrong and that he didn’t understand why they had it in for him.

Even Jessica had to admit it was masterful.

Against the emotion of that, the paper trail the police had put together was always going to be a hard sell. The jury had the choice of either the crying wife and scared-looking children at the back of the gallery – or a complicated series of circumstantial transactions that
could
be implicating. When it came down to picking between the sharp-speaking, good-looking lawyer or the tired officers reading from their notebooks, there had barely been a contest.

The eight men and four women had acquitted Worrall on all counts, with Hunt leading the now free man out onto the steps of the court house with their arms held aloft. He told the live news broadcasts that proving Worrall’s innocence was the highlight of his career and that the police would have to rethink the way they ran investigations. He wanted a full inquiry into their actions.

If that wasn’t enough to fully put himself in the force’s sights, when he had taken the Carpenter case, he had not only managed to get the man bail but had negotiated the CPS down from an attempted murder charge to one of wounding with intent. It was nowhere near as severe.

Harry’s lack of cooperation hadn’t helped, but Hunt had stood up in pre-trial court and vouched for the accused, saying he would be personally responsible for him between that date and the main trial. Despite having stabbed a police officer, Carpenter had been free to walk the streets on bail for the past eight months.

Jessica wasn’t bothered by Hunt’s hair, his birthplace or his occupation. but she felt that even for him trying to get Carpenter off was low.

She folded the paper over and put it down on the table. Given the anger she felt at the giant photo of Hunt, she decided there was only one thing for it that evening. Harry had given her many pieces of advice but one of the things she’d pledged to remember was to keep a normal life away from the job.

‘Do you fancy going out later?’ Jessica asked.

‘Aren’t you at work tomorrow?’

‘We don’t have to go crazy, do we? Something to get out of the flat.’

‘All right, but not that pub at the end of the road.’

Jessica nodded. ‘Fine. In the meantime, we should probably spend the day cleaning this place up...’

‘Is that your way of asking me to do it?’ Caroline asked.

‘Maybe…I’ll clean my room, though.’

‘You sound as if you’re eight years old.’

‘So we’re agreed,’ Jessica said. ‘You’ll tidy the hallway, kitchen and living room and I’ll pick up the clothes from my floor.’

‘Fine – as long as you buy the wine later.’

‘
I
did say
I didn’t want to come here…’

Despite Caroline not liking the pub closest to their flat, Jessica hadn’t fancied heading into the city centre. There would be too much temptation to turn a relaxing night into something that would not really be appropriate considering she had work the next day. This way, she could sneak in something from one of the takeaways on the way home, too.

‘It’s not
that
bad,’ Jessica replied.

‘Maybe not that bad for someone as cheap as you,’ Caroline said.

‘Whose top are you wearing?’

‘I wouldn’t dare wear something of mine in a place like this.’

They giggled to each other as the bottle and a half of cheap wine they had gone through started to take its toll.

Caroline had bought the booze. She enjoyed a successful advertising career with one of the local agencies and had been earning good money for a few years. Jessica hadn’t had much of a pay increase until very recently.

‘So… new boyfriend, then?’ Jessica said.

Caroline gave a non-committal shrug.

‘Let’s hear it, then.’

‘You remember a few weeks ago when I went over in those heels…?’

‘Of course,’ Jessica laughed. ‘It was really funny.’

‘I could have broken my neck!’

‘If there’d been any neck-breaking involved, I would have laughed around thirty per cent less.’

‘Anyway, I really like that pair, so I took them to that place on Gorton Market where they mend shoes. There was this lad who worked on the stall…’

‘A market lad... Nice bit of rough.’

That got a knowing smirk. ‘We had a few drinks and have been seeing each other since then,’ Caroline continued. ‘We’re going out again some time this week.’

Jessica understood her friend’s more frequent ‘I have to work late’ had been code. ‘As long as you don’t dump me to move in with this market man, then I hope you have a good time. What’s his name?’

‘Randall Anderson.’

‘Randall? What sort of name is that?’

‘I dunno. I kind of like it. It’s a bit different.’

‘Hmm…Caroline Morrison-Anderson. I guess it does have a ring to it.’

‘Don’t start…’

The wine was beginning to make Jessica’s head fuzzy and, as the final orders bell rang, she pulled her phone out to check what was in the following day’s paper.

She thumbed away at the screen, flicking through her bookmarks before finding the
Herald
’s news site. The front page loaded and she pinched to zoom in, before slamming her free hand down on the table.

‘What’s up?’ Caroline asked.

‘Garry Ashford,’ Jessica replied. ‘He is very much up.’