DS Jessica Daniel series: Locked In/Vigilante/The Woman in Black - Books 1-3 (94 page)

The man hadn’t acknowledged Jessica since her previous outburst but turned to face her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m not sure – it’s a big house. I’m sure a lot of people have internal video systems or alarms. I was just wondering if you had anything like that?’

Although she had only skimmed through the files, she hadn’t seen anything mentioned about a security system being present on the property and hadn’t seen any cameras herself. Given
the obvious wealth on display, and the fact the man spent long periods of time away from the house, she thought there was a good chance there could be something. She noticed Reynolds lean forward
in his seat, as if it was something he didn’t know the answer to.

‘We have an alarm but that’s only set at night,’ Mr Johnson said. As he spoke, the maid returned with a tray holding a large jug of water and three tumblers. She placed it on a
table in between them.

‘What about cameras? Even just one watching the entrance or the front gate?’ Jessica asked.

‘Not that I know of.’ As the maid poured water into the glasses, ice cubes tinkled while she moved from one to the other.

‘What other security measures are there?’ Jessica went on.

She was taken by surprise as the maid looked at her and spoke. ‘There is a camera.’

The three men stared at the woman who finished pouring and put the jug back down. ‘I’m sorry?’ Jessica said.

‘What camera?’ Mr Johnson added.

‘A video machine that points at the gate.’ The maid seemed confused, stumbling over her words with her accent more pronounced. ‘The other Mr Johnson put it in?’

‘My son?’

‘Yes. The other Mr Johnson.’

‘When? Why don’t I know this?’ Jessica couldn’t figure out if the man was angry or just confused.

The maid continued nervously. ‘Mrs Johnson was worried about who might come. I don’t know when.’

‘Where is your son?’ Reynolds asked.

The politician seemed stunned, his calm demeanour forgotten. ‘In Luxembourg. He’s been out there for five months now.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us this when we spoke to you before?’ the inspector asked the maid.

The woman looked confused and shrugged her shoulders. She used her hands while she spoke, as if constantly searching for the correct words. ‘You didn’t ask. I didn’t know
important.’ She looked back to her boss. ‘Am I in trouble?’

The man shook his head. ‘No, no, not at all.’

‘Do you know where the camera is?’ Jessica asked the maid.

The woman waved her hands from side to side. ‘I don’t know. The other Mr Johnson just told Mrs Johnson it was pointing at the gate. He wasn’t talking to me.’ She looked
around at the politician and hurriedly added, ‘I don’t listen in to things.’

The man nodded and Jessica couldn’t read his face. She looked to Reynolds. ‘We’re going to have to either talk to the son or get some electrical experts in who know more than
we do.’

Her boss had already started to stand, clearly thinking along the same lines. ‘I’ll try to contact the son first to find out if the camera that’s present actually stores the
images.’ He turned back to the maid who was standing next to the politician, addressing the pair of them. ‘Do you know why the camera was placed? Is it there for you to see who’s
at the gate?’

The man was shaking his head as he stood. ‘I have no idea. We have the intercom for people to say who’s at the front. I didn’t even know there was a camera. Until recently, I
didn’t spend much time here. I was either in our flat in London and we have a place in France where we usually spend the summer.’

Reynolds asked Mr Johnson to phone his son as Jessica went to look for the camera. The maid insisted she didn’t know where it was so she was on her own. It seemed almost inconceivable
there could be a camera on the politician’s property he didn’t know about. The maid said Christine Johnson had wanted it putting in but why would she do so without her husband’s
knowledge and, if he did know about it, why hadn’t he told them?

Jessica let herself back out of the front door, walking down the driveway towards the front gate. When she reached it, she turned, looking for areas that would have a decent visibility of the
opening. She peered at the large gateposts but there was nothing on top. Jessica walked back up the paved area, glancing from side to side. She couldn’t see anything on the house itself and,
even if there was, it would have had to be zoomed in significantly to have a clear view.

After walking to the house and back to the gate another time, she decided to have a look at a large oak tree that was sprawled on the edge of the garden. The main trunk was thick and must have
been many years old but the branches themselves had been trimmed at some point not too long ago. Jessica squinted up at the top of the trunk and, in a large circular knot, finally saw what she was
looking for. It was too high to reach but there was definitely some kind of metal-looking object angled towards the entrance.

She returned inside where Reynolds was standing next to George Johnson talking on a portable home phone. Not long after she entered, the inspector passed the phone to the other man and moved
next to Jessica.

‘I found it,’ she said. ‘It’s in a knot of that giant tree out there. It’s no surprise no one else saw it; you never would unless you were looking.’

Reynolds nodded. ‘The son says he put the camera in for his mother because she was worried about being on her own a lot. He doesn’t know if his dad knew or not.’

‘Does it keep recordings?’ Jessica asked.

‘He said the camera is wireless and stores a still image once every minute. I didn’t really understand it all but he said everything is recorded on a web server and, unless he
specifically deletes something, everything is kept.’

‘Why didn’t he tell you this before?’

‘Maybe he thought we knew? I have no idea. I’m going to talk to some of the computer team out at Bradford Park and get them to contact the son. The system only takes a photo every
minute but, unless she jumped over the hedge or left in between snaps, hopefully we’ll have something of her.’

With little more she could contribute, Jessica cheekily asked Garry Ashford for a lift back to the station as Reynolds was going to be a little while and would need the car.
The journalist obliged and she told him he might want to make a check-call or two to the police press office a little later.

Back at Longsight, Cole already knew what they had found and had been in contact with one of the computer technicians to discover how long things would take. Jessica didn’t understand the
technical talk entirely but there was some sort of problem they were trying to sort out with George Johnson’s son that wasn’t proving easy as he was having problems accessing the
Internet wherever he was.

Jessica checked in with Rowlands and Diamond, neither of whom sounded like they’d had a fun day. Cornish had made them talk her through each step of where they were up to in the
investigation, telling them how she would have done things differently. Jessica thought it was a sign she had matured, even if only a little, that those revelations hadn’t sent her into an
instant rage. A few years ago it certainly would have done but she was at the point where, if someone thought they could do a better job, they were welcome to try – and have severed fingers
addressed to them instead of her. Either way, it didn’t seem as if they had got any further and, once again, it looked as if they were going to have to work their way through the full list of
college-leavers in an effort to find anything to move the case forward.

That evening, Reynolds called Jessica at home. He thanked her for her help, refusing to accept her point that the afternoon’s discovery was just luck and not much to do with her. From the
tone of his voice, she figured a lot of the gratitude was simply down to relief that something had happened. She knew both the inspector and Cole were under a lot of pressure to make a
breakthrough. He told her the computer experts had finally managed to figure out with the Johnsons’ son what was going on with the stored images. There were tens of thousands to scan through
and the naming of the files wasn’t too efficient but, after hours of work, they had isolated three still-shots ‘of interest’.

From the day Christine Johnson had gone missing, one image showed the maid heading out via the gate at the front which was presumably to go shopping as she had told them, leaving Mrs Johnson
alone in the house. Twenty minutes later a faded red van pulled up outside the large double gates at the end of the driveway. The vehicle was in the next three pictures before disappearing, meaning
it had been outside for less than four minutes. In the final image, the rear door of the van had been open and there was a faded logo visible which they were now trying to identify.

The bad news was that, with the gap in between the photos, no actual people had been seen but it did at least give them something to work with. With the high-profile nature of the case, experts
were going to spend the weekend enhancing the images as best they could in order to release them to the media. Reynolds also said he was looking into either getting permission to go to Luxembourg
to visit the son, or seeing if they could arrange for him to return home to be interviewed. The man insisted he had set up the camera at the request of his mother and assumed it was done with his
father’s knowledge. Given the lack of time his dad spent at the family home, it was plausible but certainly unusual.

When she woke up the next day, Jessica had almost forgotten that she had to go to the summer fete as part of the dreaded community engagement plan. She had finally read
Cole’s email properly and it was clear a lot of it had been written under duress from people above him. Three separate times it mentioned that instructions had come down from the
superintendent, presumably to stop the rest of the officers thinking too badly of him. The event was at Crowcroft Park, the recreation area closest to their station, and there was very little
information other than the venue and a rota for the times they should arrive.

It was another scorching day and Jessica couldn’t remember a longer spell of uninterrupted good weather since she had moved to the area. When she arrived, Jessica could see the park itself
was parched with large areas of sand-coloured grass. A lot of people had come out seemingly because of the weather and the whole spectacle took Jessica back to a different age when she was
young.

In the village where she’d grown up, there would always be a summer fair once a year. The whole population would descend on their local park where there would be a funfair, stalls selling
homemade cakes and biscuits, various tables offering jumble-sale items for charities and all sorts of games going on. It was probably selective memory but it never seemed to rain on those days and
she could remember her father with his big tanned arms carrying her around on his shoulders.

Jessica thought it was amazing how one thing could give you flashes of another. It was the smell of candyfloss as she walked through the park gates that most reminded her of the village fetes
where she used to live. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d eaten any but the stall next to the entrance had a queue of children and she could almost see herself as one of
the younger girls in line.

Jessica had arrived early and didn’t know where the police’s stall was so decided to go for a walk. She had her work suit on as it wouldn’t have seemed right representing the
force wearing her everyday clothes but she was feeling a little sweaty given the heat. A small ferris wheel was the obvious thing Jessica noticed as she strolled around. It was playing a cheesy
fairground tune but the other noise that stood out was laughter. In doing a job that could be so dark at times, it was easy to forget the little things like this. Children weaved in between adults,
running around excitedly as parents pushed empty pushchairs. A group of youngsters had started a game of rounders against a hedge and Jessica couldn’t help but smile.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a tap on her shoulder. She turned around and Izzy stood there grinning. She wasn’t in her work clothes, instead wearing a long flowing white skirt and pale
vest top. Jessica thought the woman’s hair looked a brighter red, most likely because it wasn’t tied back or perhaps because her clothes were lighter than usual. She was arm-in-arm with
a man she introduced as her husband, Mal. He was a little older than her with greying patches of hair above his ears.

‘You not on the stall today?’ Jessica asked.

‘Nah, just thought I’d come down and have a look at everything seeing as the sun’s out.’

‘Do you know where we’re based?’

Izzy pointed towards an area on the far side of the park. ‘It’s over there. Jack’s on the stall but not looking too happy. I think his wife and kids are around somewhere.
It’s mainly uniform but there are a couple of other detectives from the area there too. It’s not just our lot.’

‘Was it looking busy?’

‘The press office team have got some games set up and are taking photos for the website. You can tell they’re mad keen to make us look good in all of this. They’d just collared
one of the local newspaper photographers too.’

Jessica didn’t think it sounded her type of thing. ‘I’ll hide over here for a bit then. If they’re looking for a good impression, the last thing they need is me telling
off a bunch of kids.’ Jessica remembered her colleague talking about the dispute over children she was having with her husband and saw what looked like an awkward glance sideways from Mal to
his wife. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ she added.

Izzy said goodbye and the couple walked away still arm-in-arm. Jessica slowly made her way around the rest of the park towards the direction the constable had said their stall was in. The
ambulance service and fire brigade had setups of their own and Jessica watched as the paramedics showed people how to perform CPR. She nodded at one of the workers she recognised and they shared a
‘What are we doing here on a Saturday?’ look.

The fire officers had a much larger stall and were showing people the dangers of chip-pan fires by deliberately pouring water on hot oil. Huge flames shot into the air and Jessica saw a group of
gathered youngsters gasping at the heat. She wondered if the display was aiding awareness or simply putting ideas in the minds of potential young pyromaniacs. She concluded her suspicious mind was
getting the better of her.