DS Jessica Daniel series: Locked In/Vigilante/The Woman in Black - Books 1-3 (65 page)

She wasn’t going home.

Jessica couldn’t remember the exact directions but knew roughly which area she was going to. She found the estate fairly easily but drove through the maze of roads for fifteen minutes
looking for the exact one she wanted. Eventually she parked on the side of the road and turned her headlights off. She had no plan or no real idea what she was going to do but in the darkness she
sat and watched DCI Farraday’s house.

She had known the rough location because of the party he had thrown when he had first started the job. It was in a fairly affluent area and she knew her car would stand out. Jessica made sure
she was stopped between street lights in the shadows and stared at the house. There was a light on downstairs but the rest of the property sat in darkness. Around the house was a mixture of fences
and hedges around six feet high or so with an automated gate at the end of the driveway. It was the type where you pressed a button and waited to be buzzed through.

Jessica was thinking as clearly as she had done the whole day. She stepped out of the car and walked quietly up to the gate, making sure to avoid the glow of the street lights. She looked for a
security camera but couldn’t see one. She first tried opening the gate but it wouldn’t budge, so instead she pushed it roughly to see if it was fixed sturdily enough in place to let her
climb. It felt as if the bolts fixed into the ground were solid so she squinted into the distance towards the house to see if there were any obvious motion lights that would come on. She
couldn’t see anything and, after looking both ways to check for approaching cars, Jessica quickly jumped up onto the middle bar of the gate and then flipped herself over the top.

She landed a little awkwardly on her ankle on the other side but gritted her teeth and refused to cry out. She followed the line of the hedge towards the house, stepping carefully in an effort
to leave no footprints.

Jessica reached the garage attached to the house. The front door was only a few yards in front of her and a small alley on her right presumably led towards the back of the house.

She jumped as the downstairs light went out and held her breath, ready to duck into the alley if any of the doors opened. She wondered if it had gone out because someone had seen her but she
started to breathe again as a light upstairs went on, figuring it was just the occupant going to bed. She gently rattled the garage door to see if it would open but it was locked from the
inside.

Jessica realised she had no idea what she was doing. She had acted on impulse but ended up doing exactly what she had told the officers not to do at the briefing; she had let her anger cloud her
judgement. She crept backwards but her heel clipped something hard, making it rattle noisily. Jessica quickly ducked, pressing herself towards the hedge. The sound might have seemed louder to her
but she again held her breath, waiting for what seemed like an age. She could feel the wind starting to whip around the garden but nobody came.

When she was sure no one was going to discover her, Jessica looked to see what she had bumped into and noticed a black wheelie bin. Her head was telling her to turn and run, to get into her car
and drive home to get some sleep but her eyes felt fixed on the plastic container that came up to her chest. She stepped towards it, flipping over the lid. A smell of rotting rubbish hit her but
she looked inside anyway. She used the light of her phone’s screen to see in the dark but on top was an apple core and two banana skins, plus some sloppy leftover food.

Jessica knew it was time to go and could feel a voice in her head practically screaming at her but, without thinking, she was suddenly digging through the bin. It stank and she didn’t want
to think about the slime she could feel on her hands but she pulled out small carrier bags full of rubbish, digging her nails in to rip them open and then dumping the contents back into the
container as she fingered through whatever was in them.

She took out a supermarket carrier bag, which had been tied at the top, ripping the sides open. Some sort of liquid oozed down her arm as she dropped it back into the bin but, as she did so,
something heavier fell out. She used her phone to light up the area and reached in to see what had dropped. In among a small pile of old filtered coffee and drained tea bags, Jessica used her thumb
and forefinger to pull out a small plastic object. It was sticky and clearly damaged but Jessica had no doubt what it was and who it belonged to.

It was Carrie’s mobile phone.

It might have been the wind or the drying dampness stuck to her arms but Jessica felt a chill spiral down her back. She was fixed to the spot, sliding the top part of the phone
upwards then downwards and staring into the pile of rubbish. The smell was no longer affecting her, the stinking aroma was nothing compared to the shock she felt at what she was holding. Jessica
tried pressing the button to turn it on but then realised there was no back panel and no battery. She used her finger to scratch into the compartment where there should have been a SIM card but it
was empty.

She quickly realised her mistake. Her fingerprints would be all over the phone now too. Even if she took it to a superior officer and said she found it in DCI Farraday’s bin, all he would
have to do was deny it. If he had used gloves to lift it from the scene there would be only her marks on it and who would believe a mad woman who claimed to have found it rooting through other
people’s rubbish?

Jessica had a connection from Farraday to Carrie’s death and John Mills’s stabbing. If the lab results came back the way they all expected them to, the latest attacks would also be
linked to the killings of Craig Millar, Benjamin Webb, Desmond Hughes and Lee Morgan. That meant she had an indirect link from the DCI to everything that had happened but she couldn’t believe
her own stupidity. She had blown it and was holding evidence she couldn’t use and a theory she would have to keep to herself. The only thing she could console herself with was that her
paranoia hadn’t been misplaced. It wasn’t much of a relief though, given she knew she would have to act on her own.

There were still so many things she would have to figure out, not least how Donald McKenna tied into it all, but at least she knew who she was up against.

Jessica pocketed her own phone and Carrie’s, not even being careful to keep the mess that was on her hands from getting on her clothes. She put the lid down on the bin and stepped back
towards the hedge line to walk towards the gate. She was almost halfway towards the exit when she froze. A car had turned off the road and its headlights were now shining through the gate. If she
had been five yards further ahead, the lamps would have been pointing straight at her.

Jessica quickly walked backwards as she saw a silhouetted figure get out of the car and walk towards the gates. The person stood next to the box that was by the gate, presumably typing in some
sort of code as Jessica dashed backwards towards the garage. She didn’t want to be caught by the headlights and moved into the alley that ran alongside the house.

There was a large plastic water butt next to a side door. Jessica was beginning to feel the pain in her ankle from where she had landed after jumping the gate. Each time she pressed down, she
felt jolts flaming up through the joint. She could hear the car moving down the driveway and risked a look around the corner of the house but saw straight away she had made another error. The bin
had initially been in an alcove next to the garage but she had bumped it so it was now partially blocking the door.

She watched as Farraday stepped out of the driver’s seat and walked towards the object. Jessica knew she should move backwards so there was no danger of being seen but instead felt
transfixed. He pulled the bin backwards and Jessica thought he was going to move it back into place but then felt a twinge in her chest as he flipped the lid over and looked inside. She knew
straight away there was something wrong. She had just dumped the torn-open bags on top and, instead of the sealed-up rubbish, he would have seen the unfiltered mess. The car lamps were illuminating
the scene for her as she saw him reach in but quickly withdraw his hand, not wanting to touch what was inside. He closed the lid but stood next to the container apparently not knowing what to
do.

Jessica crept backwards and hunched behind the water butt, grimacing because of the pain in her ankle and waiting to hear the garage door open or the engine rev again. Instead there was just the
sound of the wind and the quiet hum of the car idling in neutral. The size of the water container shielded her from view but she felt watched. She didn’t want to risk peering around towards
the end of the building. She closed her eyes and held her breath before finally hearing the garage door sliding upwards. She breathed out slowly as the car pulled in and then the door slid shut
again. Jessica didn’t know if the man would have to come back out of the garage to go into the house or if there was an internal door. During the party they had all been to, she hadn’t
really left the main living-room area.

Apart from the wind, Jessica couldn’t hear anything. She sat and waited, gently rubbing her ankle before eventually stepping back towards the side of the house. She almost expected to see
the chief inspector standing beside the garage door as she looked around the corner but there was nothing. Gritting her teeth and ignoring the pain from her leg, Jessica ran as fast as she could to
the gate. She could feel her ankle wanting to give way but ignored it, pushing off on her stronger leg and jumping up onto the gate. It had been much easier to get over the first time around but
she used her shoulders and upper arms to pull hard on the top of the gate frames and haul herself over, carefully lowering herself down on the other side.

She didn’t look back as she half-ran, half-hobbled over to her car. She immediately realised that if Farraday had ever taken notice of the vehicle she drove, there was a good chance he
would have seen it parked on the road as he pulled his own car in. But seeing as he didn’t seem to know anyone’s first name, that was far from a given.

She unlocked the door and slumped into the driver’s seat, finally feeling able to breathe properly. Jessica dug the key out of her pocket and realised for the first time just how dirty her
hands and arms were. She turned the key and felt the engine roar to life but didn’t risk putting the headlights on.

Before she pulled away she looked back at the house and saw a lone silhouette standing in an upstairs window illuminated by the light from inside.

It took three people to ask if she was all right the next morning before Jessica finally snapped and launched into a barrage of swear words that would have shown them she
definitely wasn’t.

She had showered when she got in the night before but barely slept, with vivid dreams waking her each time she dropped off. By the time she got to the station, it had almost become a game to add
up how little sleep she’d had. She even wrote it down on the notepad she kept on her desk. Her head struggled with the maths but the computer’s calculator helped. She didn’t feel
the same person as she wrote ‘6/48’ on the pad.

She estimated she’d had six hours of sleep in the last forty-eight – and that was being generous, adding up the ten minutes here and the fifteen minutes there from the night
before.

For some reason she worked out how many hours that would equate to over a week, writing ‘21’ on the pad. Then she looked on an Internet site and read you were supposed to get eight
hours’ sleep a night. Again using the calculator to do the maths, she wrote ‘56’.

You were supposed to sleep for fifty-six hours a week but she was on for twenty-one, not even a full day. Jessica looked at the numbers and let her eyes drift in and out of focus.

Her mobile phone beeped and stunned her out of the daze. It was another text message from Adam. She had deleted two more the night before but clicked to open the latest one.

‘RU OK? Miss U. Worried. Pls call. Ad. X’

She read the words over three times and then deleted the message.

In the hours since finding Carrie’s phone, Jessica didn’t know if the figure in Farraday’s upstairs window had seen her or not. A couple of times when she had woken up in the
night she had reached out onto her nightstand to make sure Carrie’s phone was still there and that she hadn’t dreamed it. When she finally pulled herself out of bed feeling worse than
she had when she got into it, she knew she was on her own. Unless DCI Farraday challenged her directly, she would say nothing to him and not risk testing his authority again.

Herself, Reynolds and Cole had their regular briefing with the chief inspector that morning and if he had recognised Jessica the night before, he didn’t say anything. The first set of
autopsy results were back but all they showed was that DC Jones had bled to death due to the stab wound in her neck. The weapon was consistent with the knife that had been used to kill the other
four victims but the lab team still had a lot to do.

John Mills had stabilised in hospital and his life was no longer under threat but the doctors still had no idea if he would regain consciousness. He too had been stabbed in the neck and once in
the chest but nothing major had been hit. Jessica thought about the injustice that he could survive while her friend hadn’t.

After the briefing, she went back to her office and phoned the labs. Jessica asked the receptionist to put her through to the supervisor directly, knowing there would be no risk of having to
talk to Adam.

The lab manager explained that it would be a while until any results would be available because there was such a jumble of blood at the scene. As well as that of DC Jones and Mills, the
man’s girlfriend had contaminated the scene by touching the bodies before calling the police. There was also diesel on the driveway which had complicated matters and it would take time to
separate it all out.

So far, nothing else had been found.

It didn’t really matter to Jessica if the results came back with another link to Donald McKenna, her priority was to try to connect the prisoner to Farraday. Given everything she had
found, there had to be something. On the surface she was working with the rest of the team in the same way she should be but, when she had time alone, she was hunting for that link.