DS Jessica Daniel series: Think of the Children / Playing with Fire / Thicker Than Water – Books 4–6 (90 page)

‘Yep.’

‘Actual purple.’

‘That type of observation is why you should be up for Jason’s old job.’ The constable was grinning while she ate the remainder of the sausage.

‘When did you have that done?’

‘Well, you saw me two days ago . . .’

Jessica couldn’t stop herself from yawning. ‘Sorry, I’m not quite with it.’

‘Dave says you’ve been locked in your office all morning.’

Jessica put down her fork and picked up a sausage with her finger. ‘I wasn’t locked in there.’

‘Do you need a hand?’

Jessica shook her head, not wanting to say that she had spent the morning looking into Leviticus Bryan. Because she did not want to take Eleanor’s secret to anyone else unless she had to,
she was determined to find something, or someone, who would give her another angle on Nicholas.

‘I’m fine,’ Jessica said, a little too sharply.

‘Did you read the autopsy report on Kayleigh?’

Although Jessica wasn’t particularly hungry, she was eating for the sake of it and finished chewing before replying. ‘Exactly what we thought – killer taller than the victim,
possible knee mark in her back, pretty much identical circumstance to Oliver.’

‘No sexual assault.’

Jessica nodded. ‘Can you cover for me this afternoon if Jack or anyone else asks where I am? I don’t think he’d mind anyway but I don’t want to go through him.’

‘You’re not going back to . . .’

‘No.’

‘Promise?’

Jessica looked up to catch Izzy’s eye and laughed. ‘How old are we?’

Izzy smiled too but her eyes didn’t. ‘He’s dangerous.’

‘I know.’

‘Some things we should leave to Serious Crime . . .’

‘I know!’ Jessica spoke far more loudly than she intended, instantly silencing her friend. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that,’ she added.

‘I don’t want you doing anything stupid.’

‘That’s what I specialise in.’ Jessica meant it as a joke but Izzy didn’t laugh. ‘Anyway, it’s a bit rich to be told off about doing silly things by the woman
with long purple hair.’

The constable did at least smile second time around. ‘I fancied a change.’

‘Then why not have your nails done, or go away for a weekend? There’s change and there’s
change
.’

‘Do you like it, though?’

Jessica smiled. ‘I wish I had either the time, patience or guts to do something like it myself. What did Jack say?’

‘Not much, if it was going to be an issue then it would have been when I had bright red hair.’

‘True. What about Mal?’

The constable’s face lit up as she grinned widely. ‘Oh, he
really
likes it . . .’

Jessica rolled her eyes. ‘All right, let’s leave it there.’

Izzy smirked. ‘How’s married life?’

Jessica picked up the final sausage and bit the top off, chewing slowly and deliberately.

‘You didn’t do it, did you?’ Izzy added.

Jessica held up her ring finger, waggling it to show her wedding band before taking another bite as the constable squinted at her, trying to work out what was going on. ‘You can tell
me.’

Jessica took a moment to swallow her food before replying. ‘Tell me what’s going on with Dave and I’ll tell you what’s going on with me.’

Izzy met Jessica’s gaze but didn’t waver. ‘So how’s Adam?’

‘He’s being a man.’

Izzy nodded knowingly. ‘That’s the problem with blokes, they’re all so . . . male.’

Jessica put the rest of the sausage in her mouth and wiped her fingers on a napkin, before dropping it on the plate. The constable reached forwards and touched her hand. ‘Seriously,
you’re not off to do something stupid, are you?’

‘No.’

‘Promise?’

‘On Adam’s life.’

Sat nav or no sat nav, Jessica didn’t have a clue where she was. After she’d been directed into a cul de sac and then instructed to take a right turn into a field,
Jessica told it exactly what she thought of it, before turning it off. Its final words had been ‘after three hundred yards, take the second exit’, even though she was facing a wide
metal gate with half-a-dozen cows on the other side.

She decided to do things the old-fashioned way and reached into the pocket behind her seat, pulling out a map and opening it on the passenger’s seat, trying to figure out where she needed
to go.

Leviticus Bryan lived just outside Southport, north of Liverpool on the coast where there was all the drizzle and grey of Manchester, along with the added bonus of a bitter sea breeze. Getting
to the approximate area had been easy enough but that was when the navigation device decided it fancied a day out at the seaside and stopped cooperating.

It took Jessica another half an hour to eventually find the right house. Each property was set back from the road with large, winding driveways. Most had large, imposing walls or hedges along
the front, with huge gates to put off any potential trespassers. Or coppers.

Despite numbers being hard to spot, Jessica saw Leviticus’s straight away because of the large ‘LB’ letters which were part of the metalwork of the gate. His property was
perhaps the most imposing on the street. Although each had a large plot of land, his seemed to be wider than anyone’s and the thick brick walls were certainly taller.

Jessica parked on the road and got out, staring up at the height of the wall, thinking that even if someone gave her a piggyback she would struggle to reach the top. Security lights were placed
intermittently along it and it was clear you would have to really want to get in if you were going to go over the wall.

As she peered through the gate, Jessica could barely see the house itself. The driveway arched up, then looped around to the right out of sight. The metal of the gate was painted black, with
nothing to place your feet on horizontally if you were to attempt climbing it. There was a wide lush green lawn on either side of the drive and a red car was just about visible far off towards the
house.

Jessica walked to the speaker box to the side of the gates and pressed the buzzer, shuddering as the sound instantly made her flash back to standing outside Nicholas’s club trying to get
in. After a few further attempts with no one answering, she returned to her car, reversing until she was parked directly in front of the gates before turning the engine off.

She had spent the morning reading up on Leviticus and knew a ridiculous amount about him. On paper, it seemed as if the man she was waiting for had an awful lot in common with Nicholas. They had
both been brought up in poverty and then made something of themselves through less than legitimate methods. While Nicholas had gone out of his way to offer a genuine front for his enterprise,
Leviticus had been less careful. He had a conviction for possession of a dangerous weapon and another for grievous bodily harm. He’d spent time in prison for both offences but had apparently
been out of trouble since being released four years ago.

Whether that meant he was crime-free was a completely different matter.

Nicholas’s business had been exclusively based around the Manchester area, while Leviticus operated out of Liverpool. If the two setups running out of roughly the same area hadn’t
caused enough tension between the two powerful, wealthy and egotistical men, Leviticus then took things one step further by starting to open places in Manchester as well. On the surface, the
launching of a rival pub wouldn’t necessarily cause such an escalation of hostilities but Jessica figured most of the businesses were a front in one way or another for laundering money and
selling drugs. That is what would have undoubtedly caused the ‘war’ Eleanor had described.

It probably didn’t help that Leviticus was black and surrounded himself with other people of the same race. Having seen Nicholas at close quarters, Jessica doubted he was the type to
openly welcome most people he didn’t know, let alone someone who looked different to him.

Jessica had still been at school herself at that time but knew from the officers senior to her that policing had changed immeasurably since those days. Although most stories about corruption
were apocryphal, there had undoubtedly been certain officers who’d turned a blind eye to such behaviour, hoping one side would wipe the other out and make life a lot easier for everyone.

Whether or not he was a changed man, Leviticus had shut down his businesses in Manchester after going to prison. There was little sign of him doing much in Liverpool either. Certainly from the
official records, Leviticus had retired from obvious criminality.

In theory, Jessica should have approached the local police if she was crossing borders to interview someone but that would have meant escalating things through Cole and probably the
superintendent. Because she wanted to keep as much of Eleanor’s story to herself as she could, Jessica figured she would take the disciplinary if it came. It wouldn’t have been the
first time she was in trouble.

Jessica sat in her car, waiting. She played with her phone, skimming through the names and thinking of the people she had lost contact with over the years. Although she had few very close
friends, there was a wealth of people she had met through her job, or through others who simply drifted in and out of her life. She thought about Eleanor and Kayleigh and the way they had once been
so close, experiencing all sorts of adversity together, and yet, somehow, they still grew apart.

As she was lost in her thoughts, a car horn blared loudly, making Jessica jump. She turned to her right where there was a large silver car angled across the road with Leviticus Bryan in the
driver’s seat gesticulating angrily at her.

Jessica gave him a cheery wave as she stepped out of her vehicle and walked towards his door. His window was humming down as she approached and he rolled his eyes as he leant out towards her.
His voice was deep and powerful as he uttered a single word: ‘Bizzies’.

‘How did you guess?’ Jessica asked.

‘You walk like one.’

The man’s accent was broad Scouse, although there was an element that sounded as if he had tried to teach himself to sound more posh at some point.

Jessica crouched by his window so they were at the same eye level. ‘My mum would be so pissed off at hearing that. She used to make me walk in a straight line because I was pigeon-toed as
a kid.’

She was surprised when Leviticus broke into a grin. ‘You’re funny,’ he said.

‘That’s not what they said when I got bottled off at the Comedy Store.’

He smiled wider, eyes twinkling in the dwindling sunlight. ‘What do you want, Bizzie girl?’

‘Just a quick chinwag, I’ll probably have a brew if there’s one on offer too.’

‘What makes you think I’ll invite you in?’

Jessica only needed two words to make the smile leave his face: ‘Nicholas Long.’

‘Nice place you’ve got here,’ Jessica said, climbing out of her car and walking along the driveway towards the front of Leviticus’s house. The top of
the drive had a tarmac circle for cars to turn around and there were already three different vehicles parked along the edge, each large and expensive-looking.

Leviticus was waiting by the door as Jessica approached and she turned to point at the other cars. ‘Are these all yours?’

‘I paid for them.’

‘Still got a few quid then?’

He ignored the insinuation as he unlocked the front door. Jessica stepped into a vast circular hallway, with a cold marble-like white floor and huge stone pillars on either side of a wide spiral
staircase. Jessica could not stop herself from looking impressed, something which Leviticus noted with a grin.

As she glanced away from the interior towards him, Jessica noticed how grand Leviticus looked. He was well-built but it was muscle, not fat, his broad chest and strong shoulders padding out a
perfectly fitted black pinstripe suit. His shoes gleamed in the artificial light, matched by the chunky gold rings on his fingers. Jessica didn’t feel the same sense of trepidation she had
experienced when meeting Nicholas. There was a sinister aura of aggression and danger that surrounded the club owner but Leviticus’s cropped, slightly curly, silver hair made him seem
grand-fatherly.

Jessica had to keep reminding herself of everything she had read on his record as he led her through to an equally impressive living room that was dominated by an enormous fireplace, with white
pillars running floor to ceiling and a firepit built into the wall. ‘I can get this started up if you’re cold,’ Leviticus said, noticing Jessica’s interest.

‘I’ll have a tea if there’s one going.’

‘Are you going to have a poke around while I go to the kitchen?’

For a moment, Jessica said nothing – she had never been called on her trick in the past. ‘Why? Have you got something to hide?’

Leviticus smiled. ‘Milk? Sugar?’

‘Just milk.’

As the man left the room, Jessica had a walk around. The living room on its own took up roughly the same floor space as the entire flat she was living in, while she doubted she would make enough
in a lifetime to pay for something as extravagant as this property.

She ran her hands along the pillars, wondering if they only looked expensive, but they were solid stone and had probably been crafted solely for this house. Although there wasn’t a lot of
furniture in the room, it didn’t feel empty. There were three large brown leather sofas and two more armchairs made of the same material. Jessica sat in one, bouncing up and down, wondering
if that was a good gauge of how expensive it might be. Her feet echoed on the wooden floor, which Jessica noticed seemed cleaner than any kitchen table she had ever owned.

There were strong oak bookcases in the corner but no books; instead each shelf was filled with framed photographs.

‘Do you like what you see?’

Leviticus’s voice echoed as he strode into the room, carrying a tray with two cups, saucers, a milk jug and a small teapot. He placed them on a table in the middle of the room, before
walking across to where Jessica was standing.

‘Cute kids,’ Jessica said, pointing towards a photograph of Leviticus with a woman and three boys of varying heights.