Locked In (6 page)

DI Cole had been promoted when it was clear Harry wasn’t coming back and it was a sad fact she had almost certainly been promoted to Detective Sergeant to fill a gap left by him walking away. It had seemed like a quick promotion but a lack of recruitment in the local area meant sergeants were getting younger all the time. In theory it meant she got to supervise the Detective Constables but in practice, she still took orders and was given only slightly better jobs to do.

Jessica didn’t want to talk about things any longer. ‘You may as well get off Dave. I’ve got a few things to sort out then I’ll be following you.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah, just sort that bloody hair out when you get home. You look ridiculous.’

DC Rowlands just laughed. ‘You’re one to talk. It still looks like you only got out of bed twenty minutes ago.’

‘Whatever, see you Monday.’

After the constable had left, Jessica tried phoning Harry to see how he was feeling ahead of the court case. As expected, he didn’t pick up. She had been round to his flat twice in those months too but there had been no answer. Whether he was in or not, she didn’t know. Seemingly he wasn’t in any kind of contact with anyone from the force. She sent him a text message just in case.

With little else to go on, she thought contacting a locksmith would be a good idea, just to ask how easy it could be to break through a double-glazed door or window without a key. She picked a name from the Yellow Pages classifieds and called. His advert claimed he worked “24/7” – but he said he would only be available to talk to her if she had an actual job that needed doing.

In other words, he wanted a few quid.

He did reluctantly agree that he could spare her “a few minutes” on his lunch break on Monday so she arranged to meet him at his house, which was a short drive from the station. Jessica could have kept ploughing through the phone book to find someone who would speak to her today but she just wasn’t in the mood any longer.

The next morning Jessica was sitting in her flat’s kitchen eating some toast and reading the Herald. She didn’t usually buy a newspaper but, given the phone call from the reporter the previous day, she had been out to the local shop to pick one up.

There was a small article under the main story on the front page that basically rehashed the media release she’d helped the Press Officer write the evening before. The officer had been “working from home” so it had been a short conversation but at least the paper had played ball. Garry Ashford’s name was nowhere to be seen either and Jessica concluded he was clearly all-talk. Some of the national papers had a paragraph or two on their websites but there was no way she was going to buy all the papers just to check what had gone in.

She used her phone to search the Internet for the victim’s name but it hadn’t turned up any news stories of note, certainly nothing that related to the case. At least that meant the department were still on top of things and she wasn’t going to have to explain to the DCI why his television appearance would be upstaged.

As she was reading, her flatmate Caroline came into the kitchen wearing a white dressing gown and fluffy pink slippers that looked like piglets.

‘Morning,’ Jessica said. ‘I didn’t think you’d be up this early. I tried to be quiet, not that it would make much difference.’ Jessica was always amazed by her friend’s ability to sleep through anything. If there was an overnight alien invasion, she thought Caroline would just wake up after eight hours of uninterrupted slumber and wonder who the grey-headed extra-terrestrial with the probe was.

Caroline laughed. ‘If I had the choice of my superpower of being able to sleep through anything, or yours of being able to eat any old shite and not get fat, I’d rather have yours.’

Jessica knew her friend had a point; Saturday fry-ups and regular curries were just the start, she had never really put on weight, even as a child. Now in her dreaded thirty-somethings, she had been telling herself she had to start eating properly but hadn’t got around to it.

‘Anyway,’ Caroline added. ‘I don’t know why I’m up. I guess I just fancied doing something.’

‘You’re not turning into a morning person are you?’

‘I hope not. I
hate
those people.’

Caroline Morrison was Jessica’s oldest and best friend. She was slim with naturally slightly olive skin plus long brown hair and wide brown eyes to match. If she was honest, Jessica had always been a tad jealous of her friends’ looks and especially those eyes. Caroline really was pretty whether she put any effort into her appearance or not. A few years ago, when they used to go out a lot more often than they ever managed now, Jessica always felt the need to wear more make-up and spend longer on her own hair in order to not be the “ugly friend”. She didn’t really feel unattractive but, compared to Caroline, she was always likely to be second choice.

At the time Jessica was frustrated her skin was frequently pale, her hair wasn’t quite blonde, while her hazel eyes weren’t quite any colour. Some days they seemed green, others brown or grey. She wasn’t bothered by anything like that now; Harry’s stabbing and subsequent downward spiral had matured her in a way she couldn’t have expected. Caroline nodded towards the toast in Jessica’s hand. ‘Any bread left?’

‘Yeah, you might have to cut the mouldy bits off though.’

‘Eew... oh is that...?’

Caroline had noticed the main picture on the paper’s front page above the murder story. Jessica closed the pages and scowled at the photo. ‘Yes. Peter Hunt.’

‘Is that because the court case starts tomorrow?’

‘I tried not to read it but probably.’

When Tom Carpenter, the man who stabbed Harry, handed himself in, it wasn’t the police he had come to, instead it was someone altogether more sinister, Peter Hunt. Lawyers weren’t that popular with police officers in any case but Hunt was truly the scourge of the Greater Manchester Police force.

He was a barrister that delighted in taking on cases to defend anyone with a high enough profile to get his photo into the papers and on the news bulletins. There may have been rifts between colleagues in her department but the one thing everyone Jessica worked with was united on was that Hunt was as low, if not lower, than the people he represented.

It didn’t help that he was from the south. Being a barrister was Hunt’s first crime, while having coiffured blonde bouffant hair was another. But being born in Cambridge and speaking with a southern accent was an altogether bigger one. The fact he represented all manner of hooligans and law-breakers was the final straw.

Public Enemy No.1 for the force wasn’t the array of drug dealers, gang members and other ne’er-do-wells that blighted their life, it was Hunt. Even the DCI, disliked by most of the officers under his care because of his pomposity and adhesion to strict form-filling, had it in for the lawyer. It was rumoured he himself regularly checked the status of Hunt’s tax disc just in case he’d forgotten to renew it on the £250,000 Bentley he drove around in.

‘I saw him on TV last week,’ Caroline said. ‘On one of the news channels talking about some book he’s got out.’

‘He’s always on somewhere giving his version of the truth. He was in the paper last week because he was launching some campaign with one of the local MPs. One of the younger lads set up a dartboard with the picture on. It was very popular.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought you had a good enough aim to get him in the face?’

‘Who said I was aiming for his head? It was a full-length photo.’

Caroline smiled. ‘You really don’t like him do you?’

‘He’s an arse.’ Jessica didn’t like bringing work home but had ranted to Caroline about Hunt a few times in the past.

When she and Harry had first met, he had been working on a case against Frank Worrall, a well-known local crook. Money-laundering is what they had tried to get him on but people-trafficking, prostitution, loan-sharking or the odd beating could have been options too. Worrall was involved in many things that caused misery for others but proving it was never going to be easy. As well as the year of on-off work Harry had already put into it, Jessica had helped with some of the final bits and pieces before the Crown Prosecution Service had been called in.

Worrall was no fool and had an army of people working under him. The dealers on the street were easy to pick up but they were always careful not to be caught with any significant amount of drugs on them. They were always out of court quickly, never turned anybody else in and, even if they wanted to, they wouldn’t have known it was Worrall at the top of the tree. Eventually CID, along with the over-arching Serious Crime Division, had brought Worrall in and been given that go-ahead to charge by the CPS, who must have thought there was a case.

But they hadn’t counted on Peter Hunt.

A year ago in court, Hunt had painted Harry and the rest of the force as bitter, target-driven incompetents with a vendetta. Worrall’s wife had cried in the witness stand and told the jury what a good man her husband was. She sobbed as she spoke of him grafting every day to provide for her and their children, while Hunt had even handed her a box of tissues to emphasise the point. The kids were also present at the back with the grandparents towards the trial’s conclusion to ramp up the pressure and Worrall himself spoke about inheriting his father’s building business and how he had just wanted to do his dad proud. He insisted the police had it all wrong and he didn’t understand why they had it in for him.

Even Jessica had to admit it was a masterful performance.

Against the emotion of those performances, the paper trail the police had put together was always going to be a hard-sell. The jury had the choice of either the crying wife and scared-looking children at the back – or a complicated series of circumstantial transactions that could be implicating. When it came down to picking between the sharp-speaking, good-looking barrister or tired detectives reading from a notebook, there had barely been a contest.

The eight men and four women acquitted Worrall on all counts with Hunt leading the now free man out on to the steps of the court house with their arms aloft. He told the live news broadcasts that proving Worrall’s innocence was the highlight of his career and that the police would have to rethink the way they ran investigations.

If that wasn’t enough to fully put himself in the force’s sights, when he had taken the Carpenter case, he had not only managed to get the man bail but had negotiated the CPS down from an attempted murder charge to one of wounding with intent - or section eighteen grievous bodily harm in legal terms.

Harry’s lack of cooperation hadn’t helped but Hunt had stood up in court and vouched for the accused, saying he would be personally responsible for him between that date and the main trial. Carpenter had been free to walk the streets on bail for the past eight months.

Jessica wasn’t bothered by Hunt’s hair, his birthplace or his occupation but, even for him, trying to get this guy off was low.

She folded the paper over and put it down on the table. Given the anger she felt at the giant photo of Hunt, she decided there was only one thing for it that evening. Harry had given her many pieces of advice but one of the things she pledged to remember was about keeping a normal life away from the job. ‘Do you fancy going out later?’ Jessica asked.

‘It’s a Sunday. Aren’t you at work tomorrow?’

‘Yeah but we don’t have to go crazy, do we?’

‘All right but not that pub at the end of the road.’

‘Okay fine. We should probably clean this place up a bit before we go out.’

‘Is that your way of asking me to do it?’

‘Maybe. I’ll clean my room though.’

Caroline laughed. ‘You sound as if you’re eight years old.’

When the two of them had first moved in, Caroline had gone for the bedroom with the more girly colours while Jessica was happy with the one that had a light blue-type colour to it. Caroline’s had lilac walls and she had bought herself a matching duvet cover, while Jessica was using the same bedding she’d had for as long as she could remember. The walls may have been a pale blue but her sheets were dark brown. Her room was consistently the messier of the two as well, with a most of her clothes left on the floor.

‘So we’re agreed,’ Jessica said. ‘You tidy the hallway, kitchen and living room and I’ll pick up the clothes from my floor.’

‘Whatever – as long as you buy the wine later.’

‘I did say I didn’t want to come here...’

Jessica knew her friend didn’t really like the pub closest to their flat but she didn’t fancy going into the city centre; there would be too much temptation to turn a relaxing night into something not really appropriate considering how much she would have to deal with the next day. This way she could sneak in something from one of the takeaways on the way home too, although she hadn’t mentioned that part when she and Caroline had made plans to go out.

‘I know but it’s close and it’s not
that
bad,’ Jessica replied.

‘Maybe not that bad for someone as cheap as you,’ Caroline said with a huge grin.

‘Right and whose top are you wearing?’

‘I wouldn’t dare wear something of mine in a place like this.’

The two women giggled to each other as the bottle-and-a-half of cheap wine they had gone through was beginning to take its toll.

‘I think you should give me the top anyway,’ Caroline continued.

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Well I distinctly remember lending you fifteen quid for a taxi a few years ago when you were going out with that Graham fella and I’m pretty sure I never got it back.’

That was possibly true, although money had never been an issue between them. Jessica hadn’t been on that much of a salary at first and, because she had switched to CID after a couple of years, hadn’t had too much of a pay increase until very recently. Caroline, on the other hand, was enjoying a successful advertising career with one of the local agencies. She had been earning good money for a few years, certainly enough to move out of their flat if she so chose.

They laughed again. ‘Eew, Graham.’