DS Jessica Daniel series: Locked In/Vigilante/The Woman in Black - Books 1-3 (66 page)

The obvious theory was that the DCI was somehow planting blood or hair from the inmate at the scenes although, apart from to cover his own tracks, she had no idea why it was McKenna in
particular he was using. She knew from Adam how hard that would be but the chief inspector must have seen enough crime scenes over the years to have a pretty good idea how things should look.

She checked to see if McKenna had committed any offences out of the county that the DCI could have been involved with but there was nothing. Without going to the personnel department, she
wouldn’t be able to find out things like the chief inspector’s exact age or place of birth so couldn’t tell for sure if there was anything in the past that connected them. She
knew they must be roughly the same age and tried using the Internet to see if it threw up any links but there was nothing.

The thought occurred to her that perhaps the warden, Lee Morgan, had helped get the blood and hair samples for Farraday and maybe he had been killed to stop him revealing anything? There was so
little she had to go on though. The prison officer had no criminal record and all she had were his basic details. With her boss’s personnel file beyond her reach and the Internet offering up
nothing to pair him with McKenna, she had nowhere to go.

She thought about approaching Superintendent Aylesbury. The two of them had bonded before he had been promoted but it seemed like such a long time ago and he was always keen on using the correct
authority structure. Jessica knew she had no evidence anyway. She couldn’t hand over Carrie’s phone and the constable’s personnel file might well have been returned by now. Even
if it was still in the DCI’s drawer upstairs it didn’t show anything conclusive. The chief inspector being first at the scene could be easily explained by him being called by the desk
sergeant as well. It was all circumstantial and proved nothing.

Jessica sat at her desk and leant back in her chair with her eyes shut allowing the exhaustion to grip her. As she drifted off to sleep, she realised she had absolutely no idea what to do
next.

Jessica spent the next nine days trying to act normally but her nightlife was catching up with her. Each evening she would drive to the estate Farraday lived on, park two
streets away and then sit on a low wall opposite his house simply watching. Sometimes she would do it for half an hour but on one occasion she waited until half past five in the morning then went
home, had a shower, got changed and drove to the station.

Jessica had no idea what she was hoping to see but justified the way she was acting by the fact no one had been killed since. She knew the chief inspector hadn’t left his house overnight
and, in her mind, that meant she had prevented anyone else being murdered.

Sitting in on the daily briefings made her feel sick. She had to watch Farraday talk each morning and endure the cold way he said the word ‘Jones’. Jessica had hidden the mobile
phone she found under her bed but would take it out each morning, sliding the top part up and down over and over.

Her obsession with sleep was consuming her. Each morning she would add to the numbers written on the pad on her desk. Sometimes she felt as if she were deliberately keeping herself awake just to
have a little less sleep than the night before.

She felt an arm shaking her gently. ‘Jess?’

Jessica jolted awake and could hear the
rat-a-tat-tat
noise of the train she was sitting on speeding along its tracks. ‘Are you okay?’ the voice asked.

Jessica shook her head and opened her eyes. The flashes of green outside the window were disorientating as she tried to clear her head.

Rat-a-tat-tat.

‘Yeah, I just dropped off for a moment.’ She blinked a few times and looked across the table to see Rowlands’s concerned face. He had that sideways tilt to his head she so
hated. ‘Where are we?’ Jessica asked, pushing herself back into the seat and trying to get comfortable.

‘Not sure. Somewhere Welshy.’ Rowlands was smiling but Jessica could tell it didn’t have the same feeling behind it as it might have done a few weeks ago.

‘How long was I asleep?’

‘Dunno but you’d started dribbling so I thought I’d wake you.’

Jessica reached up to wipe her chin but it was dry.

Her colleague winked at her. ‘Gotcha.’

She forced a smile but there was no sincerity. ‘Have you ever been before?’

‘Aberystwyth? Nope.’

After over a week of tests, Carrie’s body had been released back to her family for the funeral. Jessica was always going to be one of the officers representing the force but Rowlands
insisted he wanted to go too. DCI Farraday said he had too much work to do and Jessica knew Cole had a lot on.

‘Did you see this?’ Rowlands said, holding up a newspaper.

Jessica shook her head but reached out to take it. She read through the front page and then turned inside, skimming through the article. ‘Changed their tune, haven’t they?’

‘Not surprising though, is it?’

‘Why did it have to take one of us dying before they finally decided killing people was wrong?’

A few days previously the labs had isolated the various samples taken from Carrie’s body and found a single hair that had a DNA match to Donald McKenna. There was a mixture of excitement
and disappointment around the station with people not knowing if it was a good thing. Cole had been consistently talking to the CPS about the possibility of a prosecution but there was no way they
felt a jury would convict.

The prisoner’s DNA was directly connected to four killings and one attempted murder and he was the prime suspect in Lee Morgan’s death too but they could do nothing. She and Cole
visited the inmate again but hadn’t found out anything more than they had managed before. For the first time since they started working together, Jessica told her boss she wanted him to lead
the questioning but the prisoner had nothing new to say.

Her own investigations into Farraday weren’t going anywhere either. She had even tried staying late on a couple of evenings in case the personnel department left their office unlocked but
they were more professional than that. She knew she was clutching at straws but couldn’t think of anything better to do.

‘Nice piece about Carrie in the
Herald
, wasn’t it?’ Jessica added as the train continued to thunder along.

‘Terrific.’

‘Did you tell Garry you liked it?’

Rowlands said nothing, still refusing to acknowledge he knew the journalist. ‘Did you see the bit about Daniel Wilkin?’ he said instead.

Jessica skimmed through the pages until she saw what he was talking about. Everything that had happened in the past few weeks was blending together for Jessica and had been utterly overshadowed
by her growing obsession with Farraday. She remembered the e-fit of the student and read the piece. He had pleaded guilty to a charge of manslaughter and been given bail with very strict conditions
to reside at his parents’ house with a tagged curfew. From experience, Jessica knew people accused of murder or manslaughter very rarely got bail but Daniel Wilkin really was no threat to
anyone.

She looked up to Rowlands. ‘I’m glad they gave him bail.’

‘He’s still going to end up going down.’

Jessica shrugged, knowing the constable was right. She wondered what Arthur and Jackie Graves would consider as justice for their son.

‘Have you heard anything from that stalker guy who confessed?’ Rowlands added.

‘Nothing. He’s tagged on a curfew as part of his bail. I didn’t really get the sense he was dangerous anyway, just weird.’

Jessica didn’t read the rest of the crime coverage in the newspaper but turned to the gossip and celebrity section. Usually these would be the pages she immediately skimmed past but
something about the inanity of it all was reassuring. No matter who had died and how much of a mess the world was in, there was always some orange-skinned semi-naked nobody whining to the papers
about her boyfriend.

In recent days, a few of the papers had started to carry angles about the mystery over the DNA evidence. Given the number of bodies and the people who knew within the station, there was always
likely to be a leak at some stage. Ultimately, the media didn’t know how to report it either. There were a few smaller stories about the bodies being linked to the prison but McKenna
wasn’t mentioned by name. Another article said there was confusion over the exact nature of the forensic evidence, which was true but not because they didn’t know what it was telling
them, simply because they didn’t know what to do about it.

The train finally pulled into Aberystwyth’s train station and they took a taxi to the church. Jessica and Rowlands entered through enormous thick wooden doors at the front and Jessica felt
tiny as she peered to either side and saw huge stained-glass windows stretching high towards the ceiling. The roof towered far above them, the soft organ music being played at the front echoing
around.

The venue was old and majestic and reminded Jessica of being young when her school would go to the local church once a week. Back then, she was at an age where Jesus was as mystical a figure as
Santa Claus and she firmly believed God had created everything around her in seven days. She enjoyed being in the school choir and singing hymns once a week was one of the things she looked forward
to most.

Jessica sat next to Rowlands on the hard wooden bench. She was on the end of a row and stretched her ankle out into the aisle, rotating it gently. She wasn’t sure if she had sprained it
jumping down from the gate but had strapped it tightly each morning to try to stop herself limping. If DCI Farraday had seen her shadow leaving his house he would have seen her hobbling and she
didn’t want to give him any clues by limping around the station too.

The service was far more positive than Jessica would have expected. One of Carrie’s old friends told a story about how she had gone missing for an afternoon when they were still at school.
It wasn’t like her to miss lessons and no one knew where she was. When people had realised she wasn’t at home either, there had been a panic over the missing girl. It turned out she had
somehow managed to lock herself in a toilet cubicle and, in an age before mobile phones, hadn’t been able to tell anyone. A caretaker found her in tears as the school was being locked up. As
the speaker finished the story, there was a mix of tears and laughs, which Jessica felt summed her friend up perfectly.

The woman’s mother spoke movingly about her daughter and, along with some readings and hymns, the ceremony engrossed Jessica more than anything had managed to in the last week or so. She
didn’t even feel tired and had a clearness of thought she’d not felt in a while.

The burial was in the graveyard attached to the church. The casket was closed, which Jessica assumed was because of the work the forensics team had had to do to the body. At the smaller ceremony
outside, the vicar said the Joneses were a major part of the local community and that Carrie was being buried next to her grandparents. It was heartbreaking for Jessica to watch the two parents say
goodbye to their daughter and, while the mother was holding things together, the father was a mess and couldn’t stop himself breaking down.

There was a wake in the church hall a few hundred yards away and Jessica wasn’t surprised to see Carrie’s father hadn’t made it. As soon as they entered the hall, the dead
officer’s mother sought them out.

‘You must be Jessica,’ the woman said before turning to Rowlands. ‘And David, yes?’ Her accent was far stronger than her daughter’s but there was a similarity to
Carrie’s voice that stretched beyond just the accent.

Jessica introduced herself and DC Rowlands properly and the woman gave them both a hug. ‘I’m so glad it was you two who came down,’ she said. ‘Carrie would talk about you
all the time. It was always hard for her being away from home but I know she valued the pair of you.’

Jessica felt embarrassed that, despite their friendship, she had never asked the obvious question about why Carrie lived so far away from home. She always assumed her friend had moved north to
go to university or something similar but it seemed very selfish she had not been interested enough to find out for sure.

‘That’s nice of you to say,’ Jessica said.

‘Are you able to tell me anything about . . . what happened?’

It was the question Jessica was dreading. She stumbled over some vague-sounding, ‘We’re doing all we can’ nonsense, which was exactly the kind of police-speak the general
public hated. In truth, she didn’t know what else to say. The only other options were either to give the official line, ‘No, the man we think did it is locked in prison and we
don’t have a clue,’ or instead tell her, ‘I think our chief inspector did it but I made a mess of hand ling the evidence and have no idea how to fix things’. Neither of
those options would be good enough even at the best of times, let alone now.

The woman looked disappointed but nodded sympathetically. ‘It’s okay, dear, I know you’ll be doing all you can.’

Carrie’s mother gave Jessica her phone number and both detectives left her a card just in case she wanted to call them. After that, they found a quiet corner and had a drink, trying not to
catch anyone else’s eye. Jessica felt they had to stay for a while out of respect but she didn’t want to get into any further conversations with people.

‘That was awkward,’ Dave said.

Jessica shrugged at him as if to say, ‘What can you do?’

‘How’s Adam by the way?’ he continued. ‘He seemed like a really nice guy at the quiz. I know we didn’t really get a chance to talk afterwards but I thought he was a
right laugh. Hugo was asking after him too.’

‘He’s all right.’

Jessica hadn’t seen Adam since the early hours of the morning after that night and he had stopped contacting her two days ago. She hadn’t replied to any of his texts and ignored the
messages he had left at the station for her. She couldn’t explain the way she was acting but put him out of her mind, hating herself and Farraday for making her waste evenings watching a
house instead of spending them with someone she liked.