DS Jessica Daniel series: Locked In/Vigilante/The Woman in Black - Books 1-3 (19 page)

‘It was complicated. I think he wants to meet you.’

‘You are joking?’

‘No, really. Look, it was just a thought.’

‘A shit one.’

She instantly felt bad about saying that. Rowlands was a cocky so-and-so but his face fell ever so slightly before returning to its previous state. In the briefings, they constantly encouraged
people to ‘think outside the box’. That phrase was beyond a cliché but the intent behind it was the same: try to think around a problem rather than just go for it directly. A
situation like this, where they genuinely had no idea how the murders had been committed, was exactly the time that type of thinking could possibly come up with a solution. Besides, she knew full
well forces in other areas of the country used psychics in their investigations. From her point of view illusionists and psychics were more or less the same, except that magicians were upfront with
their deception.

‘All right, fine . . .’ Rowlands said.

‘Look, I’ll tell you what. I’m in court tomorrow but come with me back to the scenes later today. If we don’t get anything from that, we’ll go see your mate on
Wednesday. If you tell anyone that’s what we’re doing, you’re on your own.’ Jessica didn’t want it getting out that she was seemingly desperate enough to stoop to this
line of thinking.

‘I’ll give him a call.’

‘He’s not a weirdo, is he?’

‘At university, he once nailed his trainers to the ceiling of his room in halls. He then set up a webcam and hung from the roof all the while streaming the whole thing over the
Internet.’

‘Why?’

‘He said it was something to do with endurance and showing how differently the mind could work when it was put under stress but I think it was more to impress a girl.’

‘Did it?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Great, not a weirdo at all then.’

Garry Ashford was only a couple of days away from being fully back in his editor’s bad books. ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ had been the media’s motto for
years and the
Herald
’s recent sales had borne that out. The day of Garry’s first exclusive had seen sales double. The attacks on the police force had helped keep the numbers
up, while Garry’s second big story about the ‘Houdini Strangler’, which was his editor’s headline, had seen numbers almost triple.

It hadn’t all been good news for the reporter though. His colleagues had pretty much ostracised him, wondering how the hell some scruffy kid who had done nothing previously had suddenly
managed to stumble across such good stories. On the other hand, his editor had been talking of awards, promotions, pay rises and all sorts of other positive things. Garry was fully aware he
hadn’t yet been elevated, or given any extra money, and wondered how long he could keep his run going.

It was now Monday and it had been made abundantly clear by his editor that he had to come up with something good. His boss had questioned him about his source and asked if there was any more
information they could use. It was all very polite on the surface but there was definitely an undertone.

That left Garry with something of a problem. He wasn’t going to just make things up and, while he had sent a text to his source’s unregistered number, he had not had any response
yet. The last time they had spoken, his contact said they would have to talk sparingly and that information would be a little light on the ground for a while.

His meeting with DS Daniel the previous week had gone better than he expected. That said, anything that hadn’t ended with him being sworn at and threatened with varying degrees of physical
violence would have been better than his previous phone calls with her. She had now slated his dress sense and name, so he thought his actual looks were the only thing she had left to go after him
for.

He was supposed to be off over the weekend but received a call from the news editor on Friday evening asking what he knew about Wayne Lapham. He knew as much as anyone else, seeing as he had
seen the same media releases and photos as the rest of the office when the police had put out the request for help finding him. Somehow, he had still been told to spend his Saturday getting some
background on the investigation’s prime suspect. There seemed to be some assumption that he would know what he was doing.

He didn’t.

Lapham didn’t appear to exist on the electoral roll or in the phone book, which was unsurprising. Garry had texted his source for help but, with no reply, had ended up doing what all
journalists hated doing: door-stepping. As part of their appeal, the police had put out information that Lapham had last been seen in the Prince of Wales pub in Moston. Garry didn’t really
know the area but had found the address of the place on the Internet and taken two buses to get there. He kept the tickets, hoping he would at least get expenses, and armed with a copy of that
day’s
Herald
– which had a photo of Lapham on the front, had marched into the pub hoping someone would be willing to point him in the right direction.

The barman, who Garry assumed was also the landlord, was a large bald-headed man with intimidating accusing eyes and a deep voice. Garry showed him the paper’s front page and started with
a polite, ‘Hello, I was wondering if . . .’ but the barman finished his sentence for him.

‘. . . you were wondering if you could buy a drink? Yes, you can.’

Garry had ordered a coke and asked for a receipt. That would be going to the expenses department too. That first drink had got him the information that Lapham had been in the pub the day before
and that ‘your lot’ had been on the phone all morning.

The second drink uncovered the fact that Lapham was often in the pub but wasn’t at that exact moment. Garry could see that for himself.

The third coke and first packet of crisps had helped Garry find out that Lapham didn’t live too far away and that this place was his local. With each ordered drink, the barman’s
smile got wider and wider. Garry had always had a weak bladder and needed two trips to the men’s room already. In some ways, he thought, it was a bizarre type of torture that he was paying
for the privilege of.

Garry’s first beer of the day, ordered out of exasperation, and second packet of crisps had finally prised out that Lapham lived in a row of flats not too far away.

‘Dunno more than that I’m afraid, mate,’ the barman told him after Garry had finished that final drink. Garry thought the word ‘mate’ was something of a subjective
term.

After a third trip to the toilet on his way out, Garry followed the barman’s instructions to the row of flats where Lapham apparently lived. He had no answer from the first door, while the
man behind the second looked at him as if he had two heads then slammed it in his face. After a rather sweary inquiry as to his identity from the woman behind the third door, he was surprisingly
informed this
was
Lapham’s house and that the female was his ‘fiancée’, Marie Hall. Even more astoundingly he was invited in, with the woman promising to tell him
how the police were ‘stitching up’ her partner.

The woman was still in her dressing gown, a particularly peach monstrosity. She invited him into her kitchen and chain-smoked throughout their conversation, which was more of a one-sided rant.
Garry thought his flat was a mess but Lapham’s made his look like a hospital ward.

Despite the swearing, lack of cohesion and seemingly baseless accusations, Marie had at least given him some useful information. She said some officer had not long been sent back from her place
because her fiancé had handed himself in and was currently at the police station being questioned. That was the first Garry knew of it. She reckoned the police had nothing on him and were
‘dredging up old things ’cos they’ve got it in for him’. But she gave him plenty of background on her fiancé and even let Garry borrow a photo ‘as long as you
bring it back’. From what she said, Lapham was a misunderstood soul whom the police delighted in picking on.

Garry thought that, although those claims seemed unlikely, behind the bravado, Marie actually did care for Wayne Lapham and was genuinely worried for him. She certainly didn’t like the
police and more than once went off on a tangent about ‘that posh bitch officer forcing her way in here’. Garry didn’t push the point but had an idea about who the
‘bitch’ could have been.

He thanked her for her time and caught the buses back to write the story up. By then news had come out that Wayne Lapham had been released. Garry linked everything together and turned it into
something of a profile piece about the investigation’s prime suspect. His editor had called and said the piece was okay but sounded disappointed his reporter hadn’t got more. Quite what
he’d expected, Garry wasn’t sure.

It was that tone which had continued into the Monday meeting but perhaps all that was about to change. On Garry’s phone was a text from the pre-pay number he had memorised.

‘Call me. It’s good.’

Garry phoned the number, feverishly taking notes throughout the call. It
was
good. Good enough to wreck the career of a certain detective sergeant.

Jessica’s day hadn’t been too productive. She had first taken Rowlands with her to Yvonne Christensen’s boarded-up house. They were let in through the back by
the victim’s ex-husband, Eric, who had been given his son’s keys. Jessica didn’t know what she thought she would get from the visit and hadn’t expected a flash of
inspiration where she discovered something others had missed. Things didn’t work like that.

Eric didn’t want to enter the house and told them he hadn’t been in since the murder. He said he was in the process of organising a company to go in and clean the house up. When that
was complete, he would look to put it on the market. Finding a set of cleaners keen enough was proving a problem when he explained the situation.

Jessica wasn’t surprised.

The house itself looked more or less the same as it had the last time she had been there. The bed upstairs had been stripped with the sheets taken by the Scene of Crime team. Blood had soaked
through to the mattress and was clearly visible.

Jessica and Rowlands walked around the house looking for something that might have been missed. She checked the attic for the first time herself, having seen the report that said there was no
connection to the neighbouring property but wanting to check herself for completeness. It was exactly as the account had said – there wasn’t much to see with no way in, obvious or
not.

She tried to walk herself through what would have happened, the direction Yvonne must have been facing when the wire was wrapped around her neck. She thought about where the killer’s feet
must have stood and the angle their body must have been at as they held the murder instrument. None of it really helped.

She visited Sandra Prince at her house. It seemed odd that the woman had gone back to living at the property where her husband’s murdered body had recently been found but Jessica knew some
people did that because there was nowhere else for them to go. The woman wasn’t in the best frame of mind but did say she was bemused as to why Wayne Lapham had been released. Sandra
hadn’t been angry exactly but kept saying that he had already got away with it once, meaning the burglaries. It was hard to argue with her. Jessica asked if she knew of any connection to the
Christensen family but Sandra didn’t recognise the name or photos.

In terms of the case itself, neither of the visits had really helped but it had focused Jessica’s mind on the bodies again with the viciousness of it all. It made her appreciate even more
that the person she was looking for was definitely no fool. Setting up this kind of scene took the attention away from themselves because the police were busy trying to find out
how
the
murders were carried out, rather than
who
carried them out. As for the why, they had as much idea about that as they did about the other aspects. She didn’t believe Lapham could be
their killer but the connection he gave to the victims surely couldn’t be a coincidence either.

After returning to the station, Jessica checked in with Cole but there was little to report. The victims of the other three burglaries for which Lapham had been convicted of handling stolen
goods had been visited again but reported nothing untoward. Jessica went to her office to get rid of some paperwork. Reynolds wasn’t in and she had the space to herself but she couldn’t
focus on the work, her thoughts turned towards her appearance in court the following day and round two with Peter Hunt. Not to mention the case she was working on.

She had just pushed back into her chair and shut her eyes when her phone rang. She picked it up from the desk, looking at Garry Ashford’s name on the screen. She had reprogrammed his name
properly into her phone after meeting him, reluctantly admitting that perhaps he wasn’t that bad after all.

He still dressed like a prat and couldn’t spell his own name though.

‘Mr Ashford,’ she answered. ‘How’s life in the gutters?’

‘Oh . . . hi. Are you alone?’

‘Yes but this isn’t a sex line. Well, unless you’re paying . . .’

‘Can I run something by you?’

Jessica’s first thought was that another body had been found and somehow the journalist knew about it before she did. Her mind was racing. ‘What?’

‘At lunch today, I spoke to a lawyer named Peter Hunt.’

Jessica winced at the mention of that name. She was aware that, even if she was exonerated by Aylesbury and the superintendent, there wouldn’t be too much they could do if a story about
her threatening a suspect got into the papers. The police couldn’t be seen to have someone in such a prominent position who was embroiled in a scandal like that. As someone who could work as
part of a big investigation, she would be finished, hard evidence or not.

Her response aptly summed up her mood. ‘Shit.’

‘He was only confirming what I had already heard.’

That was the problem the station’s whispers had caused. The legend of what had actually happened in the interview room had grown out of all proportion. In the car on their way to the
Christensens’ house earlier, Rowlands had asked her about the incident. She hadn’t told him much – or anyone for that matter – but he had told her the things he had heard.
They ranged from something actually approaching the truth to her having Peter Hunt up against the interview room’s wall by the throat. Other versions included her turning the table over and
bellowing a string of abuse at both Hunt and Lapham, while somebody else had apparently said she’d attacked the pair of them with a fork from the canteen. She had realised on the journey
things had got out of hand. People had obviously been talking and word would have been around most of the Greater Manchester Police force by now. That wasn’t even counting the people Peter
Hunt had spoken to. It hadn’t crossed her mind at the time but this was exactly the kind of thing that could have happened.