Scarred for Life (31 page)

Jessica stood and headed towards the door, turning at the last moment. ‘Oh, by the way, it’s a rip-off.’

Aylesbury and Cole exchanged a confused look. ‘What is?’ Aylesbury asked.

Jessica pulled the door until it was almost closed. ‘The price of Velcro.’

Slam
.

37

Jessica hurried down the stairs, ignored Fat Pat bleating about something or other, and went to find DC Rowlands. He was at his desk but barely visible behind a stack of ring binders, cardboard folders and printouts.

He acknowledged her with a nod but was clearly occupied.

‘Got a minute?’ Jessica asked.

‘No – and I mean it this time.’

Jessica perched on the edge of his desk anyway but he continued working. She lowered her voice. ‘We’re definitely onto something – I’ve just been bollocked by Lord Aylesbury himself.’

Dave nodded but seemed nervous.

‘What’s up?’ Jessica added.

‘Nothing – be quick; I’m busy.’

‘It sounds like Pomeroy’s throwing his weight around – and given the size of him, that can never be a good thing. You’re going to have to keep your head down—’

‘What do you think I’m doing?’

Jessica glanced up from the desk, looking around the rest of the main floor. As she did, she felt a dozen pairs of eyes shoot down towards their desks, pretending they hadn’t been watching. The only person who was still looking in her direction was DI Franks, who had moved to Longsight recently. They had equal rank but Jessica had ended up with her own office largely by accident, while he had to share. They rarely worked together and, if anything, were in a constant silent competition over who had the most outstanding cases. Jessica wasn’t overly competitive – but it was always better to be ahead of the other inspectors.

Franks was a greasy corporate type: all neat side-partings and crisp suits. He’d have been in his element at the press conference that morning and was exactly the kind of person who’d go far. If he ever left the station, then Jessica didn’t know about it. He got on with his job, brown-nosed the right people and had the initiative of a plank of wood.

And he was smirking at her, half-pretending to be reading a document.

Dave was still tapping away on his keyboard and Jessica lowered her voice even further: ‘What’s going on?’

‘I’ve been moved over to work for Franks. There was that raid on the post office van last week and—’

‘Franks the Fanny?’

‘Yes.’

‘Funtime Frankie?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wanky Frankie?’

‘Jess . . .’

‘You’ve got to work for him to stop you working with me?’

‘I didn’t ask – I was
told
this was what I was doing, so I got on with it.’

Jessica stood. ‘I think I’m going to—’

‘Don’t.’
Dave’s eyes were wide, pleading with her. ‘Leave it,’ he hissed. ‘It’s not going to do any good if you get into some stand-up row with Franks in front of everyone. Why do you think everyone’s watching you? That’s what they’re expecting. It’s not as if this was his idea anyway; this has come from higher up.’

Jessica tapped him on the shoulder, acknowledging he was right – but she also had no doubt that her hastiness in taking him with her to visit Freddy Bunce had brought this on. Bunce had complained to someone, which had led to DSI Aylesbury turning up and laying down the law. There wasn’t an awful lot they could do to her while she was still the golden girl from arresting Timothy Stoddard – so Dave was collateral damage.

She broke into a smile, gave a nod to Franks to show all was well and then whispered the word ‘sorry’, before heading to her office.

The final few hours of Jessica’s shift were a waste of time. The one thing worse than getting to your office to find a pile of messages, memos and emails was getting to your office to find nothing. With Timothy Stoddard in custody, she found herself scratching around for work. Cases had been coming in as ever – it wasn’t as if scroats stopped scroating and thieves stopped thieving – but, for whatever reason, they’d been picked up by, or assigned to, other people around the station. It wasn’t paranoia any longer: Jessica was being marginalised and she knew it. Dave had been looking into the logo for her but there was no way he’d have time to do anything now, while Jessica’s increasing anxiety about her position meant that she was wary of doing anything on her computer that wasn’t one hundred per cent work-related.

For once, Jessica allowed herself to do nothing other than catch up on the paperwork that had been building over the past few weeks. She signed everything she had to, got her unread emails down to the hundreds, rather than thousands, and even risked a sandwich from the canteen. For many, it was the ideal shift; not for Jessica. She hated sitting around, detested doing nothing, bristled enough at the papers she had to file, let alone spending the best part of an afternoon doing it. But she did it anyway – because somewhere there was someone waiting for her to step out of line. The moment she did, they’d come down hard upon her, bringing up every previous transgression or questioning of authority. For now, she had to play their game and follow Dave’s lead: keep her head down and smile.

She finished her shift exactly on time, a little after the sun had set. Mist had drifted in from the coast, hugging tight to the canal and river, bathing the city in its wintry, ghostly grip.

Jessica had spent so much time in pool cars that driving her own felt slightly alien. It was certainly a lot smoother than the clunky gearboxes and loose brakes that the shared cars offered. She waited at the traffic lights around the corner from the station as Manchester’s usual rush-hour traffic hummed angrily back and forth.

She sat, watching in silence as the traffic lights across the four-way junction flicked back to orange before changing to red. Ahead of her, cars squealed as the lights for Jessica’s direction changed. Hurry, hurry, hurry. All too quickly they were back to orange and Jessica did what everyone else did – accelerated through, getting across the line narrowly before the lights were red again. She heard car horns blaring behind, wondering who had beeped her, then she realised it wasn’t her they were angry at. She had sneaked through the lights but so had the car behind.

As Jessica drove, she kept an eye on the car in her mirror. It was hard to identify the exact make and model; all Jessica knew was that it was a dark hatchback that appeared relatively new. For a reason that she wasn’t quite sure of, Jessica turned off the main road, heading towards Eccles, rather than her own Swinton home.

The car followed.

As she reached another line of traffic, Jessica turned right without indicating, heading into a quiet housing estate.

The car followed.

Knowing something was up, Jessica eased off the accelerator, staying below the 20 m.p.h. speed limit, passing a closed primary school next to a church and then edging into a slow-moving line of traffic on the parallel main road. She watched her mirror as the hatchback moved into the row of cars two behind her. Cars stop-started along the main road, bright headlights puncturing the growing fog. Jessica turned up the heater to stop the windows from misting but the drop in temperature made her think of Bex, who was out somewhere in this.

Brake-clutch-accelerate.

Slowly, the vehicles moved forward, a car-length at a time, until Jessica reached a four-way junction. She turned right, heading in the direction she actually wanted to go, stamping on the accelerator and powering into the murk. Behind, she heard the roar of an engine. Conditions weren’t overly hazardous but visibility was poor, so Jessica allowed herself only the briefest of glances in the mirror to see that the car had followed. In the gap she had given herself, Jessica could see the number plate, repeating it over and over to herself until it was almost chant-like.

Easing off the accelerator and back under the speed limit, Jessica used her car’s Bluetooth to call Izzy’s mobile. ‘Jess?’

‘Have you got a pen? Write this down.’

‘Hello to you too. Hang on.’ There was a muffled clattering of objects and then: ‘Go on then.’

The car was now too close for Jessica to see the plate clearly but she had repeated it so often to herself that the letters and numbers had a rhythm to them anyway. She read the details out twice, making sure Izzy had them correctly.

‘Is this a normal check?’

‘No – don’t put it through our system and definitely don’t use your own name.’

‘What do you want me to do then?’

‘Don’t get yourself in trouble but I know that you know people. If you can be creative . . .’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

Jessica took the most direct route she could towards Swinton, trying and generally succeeding to avoid the Salford traffic and then taking the side streets until she was almost home. All the time, the car stuck close to her, the driver apparently unconcerned that it was obvious he was trailing her. Every now and then, Jessica would catch a brief glimpse of the driver as the street lights cut through the fog. It was definitely a male with a dark beard but aside from his hairy knuckles, the tinted glass and sun visor made it hard to see anything else.

She turned onto her street but kept driving past her house, taking a brief glance at the empty driveway that meant Adam wasn’t yet home. On colder days, he usually drove. Sometimes he took the bus, and if he was feeling particularly unhinged, he’d even been known to walk.

Jessica wasn’t sure what to do. She doubted the car was following her to find out where she lived – they could discover that if they
really
wanted – but, on the other hand, if it was someone trying to scare her, they were doing a bang-up job.

She reached the end of the street, turned left, then left again, and made her way along the road that ran parallel to hers. When her phone began to ring, she pulled over and answered it.

Izzy’s voice sounded tired: ‘I’ve got it.’

‘You didn’t do anything to get yourself in trouble, did you?’

The car that had been following glided past Jessica’s, the driver not turning his head to look at her. She watched as the red tail lights disappeared into the fog.

‘It’s all fine,’ Izzy replied. ‘Have you got a pen?’

‘Hang on.’ Jessica dug into her door well and tugged out a pad and pen. ‘Go on.’

‘The car is registered to a company that deals with golf course maintenance. The address is an actual course in Northenden.’

‘Aren’t there about five courses out there?’

‘No idea but I’ve got the name.’

Jessica wrote ‘Brooklands Golf Club’, thanked Izzy and then spent five minutes on her phone looking up its details. Apart from using its website to declare the forward-thinking policy of allowing women to become members, and to advertise that the function room was available to hire, Brooklands seemed to be the same as any other golf club: boring and green.

With no sign of the car that had been following her, Jessica drove back around the estate and parked on her drive. Adam’s Smart car was already there, so she blocked him in as she usually did. She turned off the headlights and spent a few more minutes sitting by herself in the dark, watching the mist swirl, breathing the cool air, all the time trying to ignore the relentless, overwhelming sensation that someone in the gloom was watching her.

38

The mist clung on through the night, eating into the fabric of the city until the streets resembled a Victorian postcard. Jessica slept in short spurts, waking every couple of hours and finding herself inexorably drawn to the window where she peered out towards the dim orange glow of the street lamps that were fighting a losing battle against the light-devouring clouds. Each time, she persuaded herself there was somebody close by, watching the house, watching her; each time she spotted nobody. One time she woke convinced there was somebody downstairs, waking Adam and asking if he could hear it too. As soon as he was awake and listening, the sound went away again – he said she must have imagined it but she couldn’t have done.

She wasn’t paranoid.

There really were things going on around her. The dark hatchback
had
followed her home. DCI Cole
had
been acting strangely and had isolated her. She
had
been put on nights at short notice and then the colleagues closest to her had been moved onto other cases.

But then there were reasons too. Perhaps he had isolated her
because
she’d gone off on her own one too many times. She
had
let Bones run, she
had
visited Tim and missed the significance of Mandy hitting him, she
had
dropped out of a late-night surveillance and gone off on a wild-goose chase after a van because it had a strange logo on it. Then she’d gone and harassed the company’s owner and his wife about it. Those weren’t the actions of someone completely in control of themselves, and especially not those of a competent police officer who was supposed to be supervising other people.

Then there was Holden Wyatt: DSI Aylesbury had a point, didn’t he? How many times had Holden lied to her? He first failed to tell her about the party, then denied knowing Damon, then stayed quiet about all aspects of the initiation and abuse. By his own admission, he’d done awful things to Damon – so why wouldn’t he be prime suspect? Perhaps it was one more piece of hazing that had got out of hand – a drinking game, or some sort of forfeit. Damon had drunk too much, taken drugs, and then Holden had panicked and got rid of the body in a bin that would have been emptied the next day if the bin men hadn’t been on strike. It wasn’t that far-fetched. Yet instead of getting to the bottom of it all, she’d gone off and done her own thing, convincing herself that DCI Cole was against her, despite everything he had done for her over the years.

And now, she couldn’t sleep, climbing out of bed over and over to stare out of the window into the night where no right-minded person would be.

The only thing Jessica had to cling onto was the letter that had come through her door – ‘You’ve got the wrong man’ – and that symbol, whatever it meant. Anyone could have sent that, though. One of Holden’s friends, his family. Even a colleague having a joke at her expense. She’d annoyed enough people over the years.