The Killer Inside: A gripping serial killer thriller (Detective Jessica Daniel thriller series Book 1) (14 page)

J
essica slept well
, thoughts of faltering investigations and dead ends as far from her mind as they had been in weeks. She woke in the early hours, and it was nice to have someone next to her. She didn’t make a habit of inviting strangers into her bed but she’d had a great evening.

She closed her eyes and let herself drift back to sleep. It only seemed moments later that she awoke with a start. She opened her eyes as the light poured through the too-thin curtains.

She was alone in the bed.

‘Ryan?’

She didn’t say it very loudly, but he wasn’t in the room.

Well, wasn’t that terrific?

She opened her eyes fully, wondering if he was still in the flat. She picked up a large jumper from the floor and put it on over the nightie she didn’t remember putting on the previous night. She opened her bedroom door and walked out into the hallway, before first checking the empty kitchen. She couldn’t hear any voices but headed for the living room anyway.

As she opened the door, she saw Ryan sitting on the sofa in his boxer shorts, reading Yvonne Christensen’s police file.

‘
W
hat do
you think you’re doing?’

Ryan’s head spun around and he dropped the papers onto his lap, where the second file, Martin Prince’s, lay. ‘Jess. Sorry. I… They were on the table; I was curious.’

‘What gives you the right? Do you get your kicks from this kind of stuff? From seeing dead bodies?’

‘No, sorry; I wondered what they were.’

Ryan stood and dropped the files onto the coffee table, but Jessica’s raised voice had stirred Randall and Caroline. Caroline might normally have slept through the noise but Randall must have heard it. The two of them stumbled into the living room, Caroline wearing an unfastened dressing gown which looked as if she had hastily grabbed it. Randall was a little behind, half-asleep and wearing only a pair of boxer shorts.

‘What’s happening—?’ Caroline started speaking but Jessica was still glaring at Ryan and cut her off.

‘Get out,’ she said to him. ‘You’re lucky I’m not going to arrest you.’

Jessica didn’t know what she would have arrested him for, but was annoyed at herself as much as anything. Taking the files out of the station could be a disciplinary matter, especially if someone was as careless with them as she had been.

Ryan quickly moved past Jessica, Caroline and Randall. ‘Sorry… I’ll get dressed.’

Jessica picked the files up from the table and started flicking through them, making sure everything was still there. Most details were kept on the central computer system, but hard copies were still useful. As well as the private information the police had on the victims and their families, there were photographs of the crime scenes and details of the interviews they had carried out. The link to Wayne Lapham was clear in both files.

‘What did he do?’ Caroline asked.

Jessica ignored the question, spitting a reply at her friend: ‘And what did you think you were trying to pull last night? I told you I wasn’t interested in meeting anyone.’

Caroline reeled back at the venom in Jessica’s tone. ‘Sorry, I thought—’

‘Well, don’t.’ Jessica stormed past the two of them, files in her hand, back into her room, where Ryan was only half-dressed, still looking for his shirt.

‘Get
out
.’

‘Sorry, I’m going, I’m going.’

Ryan finally found his shirt and snatched it from the floor before leaving the room with a final ‘sorry’. Jessica slammed the door behind him.

J
essica’s mood
hadn’t cooled by the end of the day. She had deliberately remained at the station after hours and had gone to the pub with a few of the other officers. She knew she wasn’t great company; she didn’t even have the willpower to take the mickey out of Rowlands. The talk of the station that day was that the new girl had dumped him.

She was annoyed at letting her guard down and not sending Ryan packing in his taxi the night before. She didn’t even know his last name. She wondered if she had overreacted – could it be true that he had picked up the files out of curiosity? Then she remembered she had left them underneath her bag on the floor, not on the coffee table. He had gone out of his way to look through them.

The only thing she
did
regret was the way she had spoken to her friend that morning. Caroline had been trying to cheer her up and hadn’t done much wrong, aside from some clumsy matchmaking. Jessica, not Caroline, had made the choice to let Ryan stay the night. It wasn’t Caroline’s fault, but Jessica was too stubborn to say sorry. As usual, she would wait for Caroline to apologise and then make a big deal over accepting it.

When she got home that evening, the flat was empty with a note on the coffee table that read:

Caroline was presumably staying at Randall’s that night.

In contrast to the day before, Jessica had a terrible night’s sleep, waking up frequently before finally giving up in the early hours and going to watch the rolling news on television.

I
t was a Saturday and
, even though she could have had the day off, Jessica didn’t want to be in the flat if Caroline returned, wanting to make her friend suffer a little longer. Having already been up for hours, Jessica got dressed to head into the station. She was going to have to go in at some stage, having left her car there the previous day because she had been to the pub after work.

The station was only a bus ride and five-minute walk away and Jessica figured that she might as well put in a few hours if she had to pick up her car anyway. When she arrived not long after nine in the morning, reception was busier than usual for a weekend. By this time, usually all the drunks and troublemakers from the night before would be in the cells, and things would be fairly steady.

She asked one of the uniform officers what was going on. ‘Nothing much,’ came the reply. ‘Probably a missing person. The call came in last night. We’re off to support the tactical entry team.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. You now know all I do.’

Jessica checked the details with the desk sergeant, who seemed to be the bearer of all knowledge. ‘That’s pretty much it,’ he said. ‘A call came in from a woman last night who said she’d not seen or heard from her mother in a few days. She wasn’t answering her front door and the daughter reckons she can hear her mum’s mobile phone going off inside.’

‘Why doesn’t she let herself in?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose she doesn’t have a key.’

Jessica headed off to get the address from one of the men in uniform. Something seemed a bit too familiar. Missing persons reports came in all the time, but how many left their phones at home and locked the door before going missing?

She got in her own car and drove towards the address. Jessica knew roughly where it was, but not exactly. It was in the same general area as the first two victims but on a main road, where not many would want to be out after dark. The street was notorious for street prostitutes and kerb-crawlers and there had been a couple of vicious assaults in the past year. Jessica found the address fairly easily, mainly because there was a police van parked outside.

It was a ground-floor flat at the end of a row of dingy-looking shops. The main door was next to another, on the side of the building, which backed onto some sort of delivery yard. Beyond that was a patch of grass and some wasteland.

Jessica went to talk to the two members of the tactical entry team, introducing herself and showing her identification. The biggest bloke said they were under instructions to wait for the uniformed officers to arrive.

A girl who looked as if she was still a teenager came storming up to her, pointing a finger. ‘Are you in charge?’

‘No.’

‘Well, who is?’ The girl looked back towards the tactical entry officer. ‘Why can’t you hurry up and go through the bloody door? My mum could be hurt in there.’

It dawned on Jessica why there had been a delay. Tactical had arrived ready to go in but, given the daughter’s hostility, had called in for uniform to escort them. They were worried about what might be inside…

There was another woman standing smoking on her own, not far from the flat’s front door. She was quite a bit older, certainly in her fifties. Jessica headed over.

‘Hi,’ she said.

The woman looked sideways at her without a smile, replying, ‘All right?’

‘What are you waiting for?’ Jessica asked, trying not to sound too aggressive.

‘I live upstairs,’ the woman said, pointing towards the second door next to the first. ‘Kim woke me up with all the shouting. She was round yesterday, wanting to know if I’d seen her mum.’

‘Have you?’

‘Have I heck.’ There was a clear hostility.

‘You don’t get on?’

‘Would you get on with someone working as a whore in the flat underneath you? Door going at all hours of the night and all that
noise
? You lot don’t do anything.’

Jessica hadn’t introduced herself as a member of CID but the woman already knew. Jessica also had to admit the woman had a point. Kerb-crawling was illegal but prostitution in itself wasn’t. Her ‘lot’ almost certainly hadn’t done anything – but there wasn’t much they could do. The daughter, whom Jessica assumed was Kim, came pounding back across the yard towards the two of them.

‘I bet you’re loving this, aren’t you?’ she shouted at the woman.

‘Leave off, Kim. I told you yesterday I haven’t seen Claire.’

‘Oh, piss off. You were always moaning, banging on the bloody ceiling. Calling the old bill.’

Jessica stepped in between the two of them, pointing towards a piece of grass separating them from the tactical team. ‘I think you should go over there, Kim. It won’t be long.’

Kim glared at her. She was wearing jeans and a tight-fitting dark T-shirt. Her long blonde hair was tied into a loose ponytail.

She turned from Jessica to the other woman, hissing a reply – ‘You’d better not have anything to do with this’ – before walking towards the spot Jessica had indicated.

‘That’s what I get all the time,’ the woman said to Jessica. ‘You’d think I was the one causing trouble.’

‘How long have you lived here?’

‘A year or so. I want to move out but I’m stuck on the Housing Association waiting list. Because I’ve got a place to live, I’m not a priority.’

‘Has the mother lived below you this whole time?’

‘Claire? Yes – it’s a convenient location for her, ain’t it?’

There wasn’t much else they could say to each other.

Moments later, a marked police car pulled up next to Jessica’s Punto, behind the van. Two officers clambered out and crossed to the two tactical entry officers, who were taking some heavy-looking equipment out of their van. The flat’s door was double-glazed and very similar to the Christensens’ and Princes’. From everything the locksmith had told Jessica a couple of weeks ago, they weren’t very easy to kick in.

As the other officers arrived, Kim again marched over to the tactical team before all four officers and the girl went towards the front door. Jessica joined them and everyone was asked to stand back while the team smashed their way through using a two-man battering ram.

Jessica wanted to be first through the door, but Kim appeared as if from nowhere. She was small and nimble, barging through before anyone could move. She dashed inside and disappeared from view. Jessica was starting to lead the other officers in when she heard the ear-piercing scream; she knew exactly what they would find.

C
laire Hogan might have been
a prostitute and she might have made life difficult for her neighbours, but she hadn’t deserved to die in the brutal way she had. Jessica followed the scream to where Kim was standing over a double bed, hysterical.

Kim had blood on her hands and had already contaminated the scene. The biggest uniformed officer physically picked up the shouting, kicking daughter and took her outside.

The woman sprawled across the bed was naked and face down. Aside from her unclothed limbs, there was a mass of splayed bleached blonde hair, discoloured in parts by the deep red blood. Jessica prevented any of the other officers from entering the room, waiting at its entrance.

Now they’d found a dead body, they’d need a crime scene manager.

She told them to help calm down Kim, and to ensure the woman who lived upstairs went nowhere either. Jessica took her phone out of her pocket and called the station to report what they had found, then called Cole. She would leave it to him to pass the news up the chain, while a Scenes of Crime team would be requested.

This scene seemed much more vicious than the first two. Jessica surmised that Claire must have fought harder than the previous victims. The obvious assumption was that whoever had killed her was a client, but then again, a locked door was no obstacle if the killer was the same as that of the first two victims.

The kitchen was a grubby room at the end of the hall. It had once been white but now had a distinctive yellowy-brown tinge. There was a handbag, mobile phone and some cash on the counter top. Jessica didn’t want to risk touching the notes in case the killer was a client and had left fingerprints. It seemed unlikely. There was a crumpled, dirty ten-pound note and a much newer, crisper twenty.

Jessica used a polythene bag from the drawer as a glove over her hand as she hunted through the woman’s bag. She found precisely what she was searching for straight away – a set of keys in the main section.

As she moved back to the hallway, Jessica could hear raised voices outside as the officers presumably tried to calm Kim.

She tried the door opposite the bedroom, entering a second room. There was another bed here, but this one was neatly made. The room had a lot of purple in it, both the duvet cover and carpet a matching colour. The walls were light and the room was full of clothes. Jessica didn’t enter but scanned the scene from the doorway. She could see a wardrobe towards the back with the doors open. Even from this distance, Jessica saw it was packed with dresses, outfits and attire that would only be suitable for indoor use, or at best on the main road on the other side of the flat. The floor was scattered with more regular clothes: jeans and tops.

She backed out and re-closed the door, then tried the other one leading from the hallway. It opened into a basic bathroom, containing a shower, toilet and sink. She could see a few soaps and shampoos but nothing out of the ordinary, so closed that door and made her way to the living room.

The main room of the house was cluttered, but a lot cleaner than the kitchen and second bedroom. There was a large flatscreen TV pinned to the wall and a couple of comfy-looking light pink sofas facing it. There were some assorted celebrity-type magazines on the floor, and tidy racks full of DVDs and CDs.

On top of the racks were some photographs. Jessica could see the smiling face of a woman – most likely the woman lying face down in the other room. There was a picture of her with a younger-looking Kim and another of her with a different teenage girl. In the third and final photo, Kim looked around twelve and was with the girl from the other photograph, and a boy. They were all young children, standing on a beach, grinning at the camera. In none of the pictures was there a sign of a man or anyone who could be the children’s father.

Jessica returned to the first bedroom to have a final scan before the SOC team arrived. The main light on the ceiling was glowing, but a black lampshade ensured the room’s dimness. The brightest thing in the room was the victim’s hair, despite the blood that had seeped into it. The bed had dark purple satin sheets but there were obvious bloodstains there too. Jessica couldn’t see any cuts in the victim’s neck as it was shielded by the woman’s hair.

With little else she could do, Jessica left the flat. There was only one door by which to enter and exit, while the only two windows were in the living room and in the purple bedroom. The curtains were pulled and Jessica hadn’t bothered to see if they were locked, but she knew they would be.

Misdirection.

Kim was allowing herself to be comforted by an officer as the neighbour spoke to one of the others. Jessica could hear sirens in the distance. She told one of the tactical officers that they needed to take both Kim and the neighbour to the station and that she would follow shortly.

It was going to be another busy Saturday.

J
essica hung
around long enough to see them gently turn over Claire’s body and reveal the deep wounds in her neck, like those of the other victims.

Back at the station, the neighbour had been spoken to first, with Kim given time to calm down in a holding room. The woman didn’t have an awful lot to add. She hadn’t seen or heard anything out of the ordinary that week.

‘The only thing different is that it has been quiet the past two nights’ was perhaps the only useful piece of information she had.

It gave them a rough time of death to work with, until a more accurate one came in from forensics. Presumably, the victim had been killed at some point in the previous forty-eight hours.

Before speaking to Kim, they first had to ensure she was eighteen or older. It was hard to tell from her appearance. If she was younger, it would have been necessary to have someone there to act as her guardian. Kim was old enough – just.

Although Kim continued to veer from sheer aggression to outright grief, it was quickly established that there was another daughter who lived nearby. Because of the state Kim was in, it was decided it might be better to get both sisters together, and a police car was sent out to pick up her older sister: Emily Hogan.

There was definitely no father present.

‘I don’t have a dad,’ was all Kim would say.

Jessica wanted to ask about the boy she had seen in the photos in the living room, but figured that could come later. Kim didn’t like the police and hadn’t been overly cooperative. She kept shouting, ‘You lot never gave a stuff when she was alive’ and other similar phrases.

It was a balancing act between giving her space to grieve and getting the information they needed by speaking to her. The Scenes of Crime team had taken over the flat and the coroner would soon be involved. Hopefully, it wouldn’t take too long to get an accurate time of death.

It didn’t take long for Emily Hogan to arrive. Jessica met her in reception and took her through to see her sister. Emily and her sister looked a lot alike, although Emily was an inch or two taller than Kim. She didn’t seem too upset, but cradled her younger sister, who cried loudly.

Jessica gave them space until Emily turned to her. ‘I presume you want to talk to us?’

Before Jessica could answer, Kim cut across them. ‘Come on, Em, they were never bothered before. They were only interested in Mum when they wanted to bring her in.’

Emily had a softer tone than her sister. ‘That’s gone now. We’re not going to find out who did this on our own.’

Kim shrugged and sat down as Emily stayed on her feet. ‘Do we do this here?’

‘There’s an interview room set up,’ Jessica replied. ‘You’re not under arrest and can leave any time you want, but sometimes it’s better to get things on tape. It’s for your own protection.’

‘Okay.’

Jessica took Emily to the interview room, where she had sat across from Wayne Lapham seven days before. A uniformed officer was left with Kim, who hadn’t run out at the mention of them being able to leave. Cole was already waiting for them, and Jessica said there was a solicitor available if Emily wanted it.

‘I’ve not got anything to hide,’ Emily replied. Before Cole could start the tape, she added, ‘Don’t mind Kim. She’s had it tough. She was always the closest to Mum too.’

Jessica nodded as Cole made the introductions. ‘When did you last see your mother?’ Jessica asked.

Emily spoke clearly and eloquently. She came across well. ‘Not for a while; we didn’t really get on. Maybe a month ago?’

‘Why didn’t you get along?’

‘I didn’t approve of her… job.’

‘For the record, can you say what she did?’

Jessica already knew the answer.

Emily was defiant and firm: ‘She slept with men for money.’

Jessica didn’t want to dwell on the point. ‘What was she like the last time you saw her?’

‘The same as always. High.’

‘She did drugs?’ Jessica hadn’t seen any obvious paraphernalia at the house, but hadn’t gone looking too closely.

‘Where do you think all the money went?’ Emily asked, as if it was obvious. ‘She somehow scraped together enough to buy that dump a few years ago and the rest went up her arms.’

‘How long ago did you move out?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t spend a lot of time at home anyway. Maybe five years? I’m twenty-three now so, work it out. That place was never going to be big enough for us all.’

Emily went on to tell them that she now lived with her boyfriend and year-old son in the north of the city. Somehow, despite everything, Emily had turned into a rounded adult. She and her partner had founded a promotions company and were apparently doing well for themselves.

‘Tell me about your sister,’ Jessica said.

‘Kim? She’s only turned eighteen a fortnight ago. She moved out a few months ago and got a job selling bags and stuff. I would have set her up with something better but she wanted to do it for herself. For a while, I thought Claire was going to drag her down to her level.’

It was the first time she had directly referred to her mother. She hadn’t called her ‘Mum’ or anything similar.

‘“Claire”?’ Jessica queried.

‘If someone doesn’t act like your mother, you can’t really call them that, can you?’

Jessica nodded, trying not to give anything away through her expression. ‘So your mother lived alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘No boyfriend?’

Emily snorted. ‘What do you think? A different boyfriend every night, maybe.’

‘What about your father?’

‘Who knows? He left a long time ago.’

‘How long?’

‘Eight or nine years back. Kim wouldn’t have even been ten by then.’

‘Do you know why he left?’

‘No.’

‘Wasn’t it something you ever talked about?’

Emily shook her head. ‘Claire did all of her talking through a bottle back then.’

‘Have you seen your father since he left?’

‘No.’

‘Whose choice?’

‘What choice? I wouldn’t know where to start looking. One day he was there, the next he wasn’t. I was only fifteen or so. Claire spent the first two weeks telling us he was away on business.’

‘How long has your mother been… working like this?’

‘Not forever. We had a pretty decent childhood, believe it or not. Two-up, two-down, summers at the seaside and all that. Then Dad moved out and Claire fell apart. A few years later we all ended up moving to the flat. There was never much space for me, so I left straight away.’

Jessica took down Emily’s dad’s name – they would check him out, if they could find him. Some people dropped off the face of the earth when they walked out on their wife and kids. Others hooked up with different women and paid child maintenance but, given that Emily said she hadn’t seen her father in all that time, it seemed more likely he would fall into the first category.

She stopped to think what to say next. From what she had seen at the scene, the neck wounds and the way the flat was secured, her first thoughts were obviously that this murder was related to the other two. But while the first two had happened to people most of the public would consider ‘normal’, this was a bit different. That wasn’t to devalue a life, but a drug-addicted prostitute was always going to be more likely to attract people who might see her as vulnerable and want to do her harm. Could Claire Hogan really be connected to Yvonne Christensen and Martin Prince in some way?

Cole had brought in the hard-copy files they had for the other victims, the ones Jessica had caught Ryan looking through. She removed a photo of Yvonne Christensen taken before she had been murdered and handed it to Emily. ‘Do you know who this is?’

Emily looked at the photo and narrowed her eyes. ‘She sort of seems familiar.’ Jessica felt her heart give a slight jump but her hopes were instantly let down again. ‘She’s been in the papers and on TV, hasn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘She was killed too. This “Houdini” guy.’

Jessica still hated that nickname but it wasn’t the time to argue about it. ‘Yes.’

‘Do you think whoever killed her, killed Claire too?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I just thought… When the officer told me…’ Emily tailed off, struggling to find the words. ‘I suppose I’ve been expecting something like this for ages now. Given what she did for a living…’

Jessica let the thought evaporate and then handed Emily a picture of Martin Prince. Emily recognised him too – but only from the media coverage.

‘Do you know of anyone who might want to harm your mother?’ Jessica asked.

‘Her clients? I don’t know. No one specifically. Kim is closer to her than I am. She visits her a couple of times a week.’

‘Do you have a key for the flat, Emily?’

Emily laughed, again with nothing really behind it. ‘I’ve never had one.’

‘What about Kim?’

‘You’ll have to ask her, but I doubt it. Claire never gave any of us keys – she didn’t want anyone walking in on her. Kim used to come and stay at ours some nights when she couldn’t get in. There was no room there, anyway. When it was the three of them – Claire, Shaun and Kim – Shaun used to sleep in one bed with Claire and Kim sharing the other. It was ridiculous.’

‘Is Shaun your brother?’