Vigilante (10 page)

‘Hmm, yeah. Do I know what’s going to happen next? No. But it could be interesting.’

The constable burst out laughing and Jessica turned to look at him. ‘What?’

‘You’re talking like the DCI now, asking yourself questions and then answering them.’

Jessica grimaced as Rowlands changed his expression. ‘What do you reckon?’ he asked.

‘I think McKenna’s lying to us – but I don’t believe he was the only one.’

ELEVEN

Lee Morgan slammed the pint glass down on the bar a little harder than he meant to. He felt the vibration ripple through his hand but luckily it didn’t smash. ‘Another one of those, love,’ he said, pointing at the pump for the local brand of bitter. ‘You want one?’ he asked the man sitting on a stool next to him.

‘Nah, I’ve probably had one too many already. I still have to drive home tonight.’

‘There’s a word for people like you – “lightweight”.’

Lee Morgan was at the bar in his local pub. When he had first moved into the area twenty or so years ago, he thought this place was magnificent. It was a proper man’s pub with smoke drifting around the room, quality booze on offer and barmaids who wore low-cut tops and enjoyed the odd glass of wine themselves, if not a bit more. Over the years, it had gone further and further downhill. The gradual increase in women coming into the place had been the start and then they opened the patio at the back and started letting kids in. After that it was a slippery slope. They shut the members’ bar, turned it into a kitchen and started serving food. The smoking ban was the final straw. It had gone from a place to get away from the wife to an establishment that openly courted the business of women and kids.

‘This place has become a right dump,’ Lee complained to the man sitting next to him. Even the stools wound him up. Men should stand up to have a pint. It was the way his father had taught him to drink. He said nothing though, he didn’t have too many friends – let alone among the people he worked with.

‘I’ve seen worse,’ the man said, pointing towards the corner of the room. ‘They’ve got a good TV. It might be worth popping in for a match sometime?’

Lee held his tongue again. He hated football and the big television screens just attracted drunken screeching buffoons, the very type of people they were supposed to spend their days keeping an eye on. He nodded to hide his displeasure. ‘What do you reckon about today then?’

The man blew out through his teeth but didn’t get a chance to reply before the barmaid put a fresh drink down next to them. ‘That’s two fifty please,’ she said.

‘Two pounds fifty?’ Lee replied, clearly annoyed.

‘That
is
what the last one cost,’ the barmaid answered.

‘Yeah, but he paid for that,’ Lee said, nodding towards his friend and pulling a crumpled five-pound note out of his pocket. ‘How much are crisps?’

‘Eighty pence.’

‘What, even for ready salted? You’re having a laugh, love.’

‘We don’t do ready salted,’ the barmaid said. She crouched down to look at the boxes of crisps on the floor. ‘We’ve got chilli twists, then beef and mustard, tomato ketchup and, er, pickled-onion flavour.’

As she stood back up to face them, Lee stared at her, eyebrows raised. ‘Nah, forget it, darling. I’ll just have the drink.’ He looked at the man next to him. ‘It used to just be ready salted, cheese and onion and salt and vinegar in my day.’

The barmaid took the note and returned a few seconds later with his change.

‘So what do you reckon?’ Lee repeated.

‘I don’t know,’ the man said. ‘It sounds serious, doesn’t it? The guv sounded pissed off at the briefing yesterday and then the coppers didn’t even turn up. I could have done without all that tidying up and everything. Then, when they did come around today, they didn’t even get round to my area. What did they make of your wing?’

‘Not sure. Gallagher took them down there but he didn’t say anything to me afterwards. All the prisoners were bundled down into the games room. They were fuming. It was hilarious when they all filed back through. Some of the worst ones had been dumped out in the rec yard just to keep them away in case the Old Bill wanted to talk to any of them.’

The other man laughed nervously. ‘No one caused any trouble, did they?’

‘No chance. They wouldn’t want to risk having their TV taken away for a day or two, would they?’

‘What did that woman detective say to you?’

Lee knew his friend was referring to the moment when she had asked him about McKenna. He took a gulp of his drink and shook his head. ‘Nothing really. Stuck-up cow probably on her time of the month or something.’

The other man laughed. ‘What was it you shouted after her?’

‘When?’

‘In the monitoring room. She was walking out the door and you called after her?’

‘Oh yeah. I don’t remember, sorry. Probably something about her arse.’

The other man laughed again. ‘Have you heard the rumours?’ he said.

‘Why, what have you heard?’

‘Only bits. It’s all about McKenna obviously. They’ve pulled him off your block twice to talk to him. People have been saying they’re trying to get him to confess to other crimes. Someone was going on about some kiddy stuff but others reckon it’s some new murder.’

‘Nah, I’ve not heard anything.’ Lee was feeling beads of sweat on the palms of his hands.

‘What about McKenna though? I don’t really know anything about him but you must?’

‘Nah. He’s just some guy on the block, ain’t he? Like all the others. Always banging on about God-this and Jesus-that. It’s not done him much good though, has it?’

‘Oh right…It’s just one of the other guys reckoned you got on and that…’

Lee spun around quickly, spilling part of his drink over the top of the glass. ‘Who said that?’

The other man was clearly taken aback. ‘Oh, no one. I don’t remember. It was nothing bad or that…’

Lee looked at him and then downed the rest of his drink in one go. ‘Aye, well, there’s a few too many in that place who’ve got a lot to say.’ With the pint finished, Lee put the glass back on the bar, slightly more carefully than the previous one.

‘I’ve gotta go,’ the other man said. ‘I’m back on earlies tomorrow plus the missus will be wondering where I am.’

‘You’re not one of
them
, are ya?’

‘One of who?’

‘Y’know, one of
them
who goes running home when their wife flashes her knickers or gets a strop on.’

The man laughed nervously. ‘No, no. It’s just late and she’s had the wee kids all day.’

‘All right, I should probably be off anyway,’ Lee replied. ‘Mine will probably be snoring by the time I get in.’

The two men said their goodbyes and left the pub together. The other man walked around towards the car park at the back while Lee put his hands in his jacket pockets and started to walk along the thin pavement that ran next to the main road. Aside from the odd passing car, it was a nice quiet journey, exactly what he wanted after the day he’d had.

He was still fuming with the way that female detective had spoken to him. He could remember the day when coppers, prison officers and journalists would mingle together in the local he had just left. They’d drink most of the night, enjoy some cheap imported cigars and then go to work the next day as normal. Women like her wouldn’t have even been allowed in the pub back then, let alone the police force.

‘’Kin joke,’ he said to no one in particular.

He pulled the collar up on his jacket and turned right to go along his usual cut-through. It wasn’t too cold but the seasons were definitely beginning to turn.

The main road had been well-lit but there were no street lights down this particular path. It only stretched for around forty yards, linking the road to the estate where he lived. There were metal barriers at either end to stop cars using it, with three lines of cracked paving slabs separating two patches of grass on either side. Houses backed onto the grassy areas, the moon casting a shadow from the building on his right across the walkway.

Lee squinted as his eyes adjusted slowly to the gloomier area. He upped his pace ever so slightly. He had never really been a fan of this shortcut but it saved him ten minutes by not having to walk all the way around the front of the estate and then back through again.

His boots echoed as he walked, clipping the hard slabs as he moved. All of a sudden, he thought he saw movement from the right. He didn’t want to stop but his eyes flickered sideways and then he saw the shape coming at him. It was dark but he saw a face he recognised in the partial moonlight as the man crashed into him.

He went to shout but felt an enormous burst of pain in the middle of his neck. ‘You…’ was the last word he managed to gurgle as the man hammered the knife straight through his chest.

TWELVE

Jessica had been battling with her conscience the day after Lee Morgan had been discovered. As soon as she arrived at the station, she had been told the prison officer’s dead body had been found. Emotion flooded through her, as she wondered if the way she had wound up both Donald McKenna and the guard himself had directly led to it.

At first she thought the warden could have committed suicide if he did have something to hide but that was ruled out as soon as she was told his wounds were identical to Craig Millar and Ben Webb’s.

After that, her thoughts moved to the prisoner. Had McKenna done something to prove a point to her that no one was untouchable? She didn’t even know if the warden had been corrupt. The previous day she had been fishing for information and might have had suspicions but couldn’t have expected this. The only thing she felt relatively sure of was that McKenna had to be involved. There was no way it could be a coincidence that Lee Morgan had turned up dead a few hours after she had been to the prison and asked about the potential relationship between the two of them.

After being at the scene in the morning, the body had been taken away for testing and Jessica returned to the station in the afternoon. She went straight up to the first floor to see if Farraday was in his office, assuming he would want to see her anyway. He noticed her walking down the corridor through the windows of his office and waved her in before she had even knocked. He phoned downstairs for Cole and, a minute or so later, the three of them were sitting in his office as they had done a few days previously.

The DCI spoke first. ‘Okay, Daniel, while you’ve been out, the secondary results have come back from the labs for the other bodies. I spoke to the head person there half an hour ago and she told me the new swabs taken confirm Donald McKenna is linked to the three deaths.’

It was exactly what Jessica had been expecting but the confirmation was still a shock. She breathed out loudly. ‘What do we do now?’

‘Do I think we have a case? Not a chance. What we do now is keep trying to link McKenna to the victims. The DNA evidence is essentially worthless at the moment. I spoke to someone from the CPS briefly and he pretty much laughed down the phone. As we all thought, given our suspect is firmly behind bars, it’s unusable in court unless we have some other link between him and the victims. The fact they were all in prison together isn’t enough.’

He shuffled through a handful of Post-it notes stuck to his desk, continuing. ‘What about this prison guard guy, er, Morgan?’

He turned the Post-it note around that had the prison guard’s name written on it as if to remind Jessica who it was. She certainly didn’t need her memory refreshing. ‘I saw him yesterday. He is the warden responsible for the area where McKenna is housed…’

The chief inspector cut straight across her. ‘So, some bent warden’s turned up dead then. McKenna must be involved somehow.’

Jessica didn’t want to sound like she was correcting him but did have to make a point. She wasn’t sure why he had jumped to that conclusion. ‘We’re not sure he’s, er, corrupt, Sir.’

Farraday nodded. ‘Yeah, yeah, I know. It will be there somewhere, though. What did he say to you yesterday?’

‘Well, the governor told me individual head wardens are responsible for cell allocation. Lee Morgan was the warden responsible for McKenna, who was living in a cell on his own. Most prisoners are two to a cell and I just asked him why McKenna instead of one of the other prisoners? He didn’t really have an answer.’

Even Cole was nodding now. ‘It does sound a little
off
,’ he said.

The DCI spoke across them. ‘Off? I’ve seen paper clips less bent than this guy will turn out to be, you mark my words.’

Jessica was feeling increasingly frustrated. It wasn’t that she thought the guard was whiter than white, she just wasn’t convinced they should be condemning a dead man before they knew the truth. The increasing feeling of guilt that she had accused Lee Morgan of just that, albeit it not directly, was still playing on her mind too.

Neither Jessica nor DI Cole said anything, not really knowing what their boss might say next. Farraday was rocking back and forwards in his chair. ‘Right, this is what we’re going to do,’ he said. ‘Daniel, first go see this guy the warden was drinking with last night.’

He was hunting through the Post-it notes again. Jessica had already been given a very brief run-down of the prison officer’s movements the night before. She knew he had been walking home from his local pub after stopping out for a drink with one of his work colleagues. The other warden hadn’t been a suspect because, at the exact time Lee Morgan was being killed, his friend’s car had been pulled over for speeding.

The DCI quickly found the note he was looking for. ‘Just see what he’s got to say and then go see this warden’s wife. Suss her out, that kind of thing. Look around the house, see if there’s any expensive jewellery and all that. Cole, you stay here and start sniffing around their bank records. Dodgy deposits, any hidden accounts, all that. I want this guy nailed as soon as possible so we can lump him in with those three other shites who copped it off McKenna. When that’s all sorted, we’ll get back to connecting him to the victims.’

Jessica wondered what their boss was going to spend the day doing but he didn’t take long to tell them. ‘I’m going to get the media boys round. Get the cameras in, then shove this vigilante killer thing right up their arses.’

It was the first time any of them had used the word ‘vigilante’. In police stations it was almost as dirty a term as ‘serial killer’. Generally they didn’t like to make assumptions and would hold back with such labels until they were sure. Jessica felt uneasy hearing it. That McKenna, or whoever the killer might be, was tracking down criminals was something obvious to them all. The fact it could be deliberate vigilantism was also a thought that had crossed her mind but it was a big leap from thinking it to feeding it to the press.

‘Are you going to tell them about McKenna, Sir?’ she asked.

‘Do I think it’s a good idea to tell them our chief suspect is already in prison? No, Daniel, I don’t. For now, we’ll just get the victims’ names out there and see if anyone can link them together for us. If it brings McKenna into the mix then all the better.’

As uneasy as she felt with the idea, Jessica had to admit it wasn’t a bad one. They had tried their usual searches to try to connect the three victims with little luck. Maybe someone who watched the news or read the papers would know something they didn’t?

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Jessica had first gone to visit Lee Morgan’s fellow prison guard, who had been drinking with him in the pub the night before. He had already been visited that morning by officers asking about his movements the night before. He still appeared to be in shock but Jessica had never seen anyone quite so relieved to receive three penalty points on their driving licence. He explained he had only had one drink to make sure he stayed under the drink-drive limit. He was feeling guilty about staying out late, however, and ended up driving at 55 m.p.h. along the 40 m.p.h. main road in a hurry to get home.

At the time, he had been angry and annoyed at being pulled over but when the police officers knocked on the door the next morning with the news of his friend’s death – and questions about his own whereabouts – his annoyance had turned to relief that he had an alibi. With his wife in bed when he arrived home and witnesses in the pub quite happy to say they saw the two men leaving together, he knew he could have been in big trouble if he hadn’t been stopped.

By the time Jessica arrived, that relief had turned back into shock at his friend’s death. He told Jessica he and Lee just made small talk at the pub and that they went out for a quiet drink once a month or so.

‘I don’t think Lee had many friends,’ he said. ‘I always felt sorry for the guy. He was a bit of a moaner but harmless enough.’ Jessica figured they would find out quite how harmless he was in due course. She asked if he had heard any rumours of malpractice around the prison but he insisted he hadn’t.

From there, she drove to Lee Morgan’s house. A family liaison officer was already there to support the man’s widow. Carla Morgan looked a lot older than her husband had done. Jessica now knew Lee had been fifty-six but his wife looked as if she was in her late sixties. The officer let Jessica into the house and showed her into the living room. Carla had been sitting in a comfy-looking recliner but stood gingerly to greet her.

She apologised needlessly for her lack of mobility. ‘Sorry, dear, I had to have my hip replaced six months ago,’ she said.

Jessica said it was not a problem and helped the woman back into her seat. Given the marks around her eyes, it was clear Carla had been crying that morning but she now seemed relatively fine. Farraday’s suggestion to ‘suss’ the woman out seemed ridiculous given the state of her. The other officer went to make some tea, leaving Jessica and Carla alone in the living room.

She asked some relatively harmless questions about how the couple had met and how long they had been together. The information wasn’t essential but Jessica knew she couldn’t dive straight in and ask the woman if she knew whether her husband, who had only been killed the night before, took money on the side or not. She did take those moments to look around the room. Ultimately she knew it was very likely the house would be searched thoroughly by a trained squad in the next day or so anyway – especially if Cole found anything suspicious in the couple’s bank records.

The television certainly looked new, large and flat, pinned to the wall and surrounded by large speakers with other media players and a digital box underneath. Jessica had already noticed the black hatchback car parked on the drive. It had a registration plate from the year before and was sparklingly clean. The whole house was incredibly well-kept, not something out of the ordinary in itself but perhaps surprising because of Carla’s clear difficulties in getting around. It was those types of detail Jessica was trained to spot. She knew the couple had no children, so unless Lee Morgan was an avid tidy-upper after a long day at work, then the pair were likely paying a cleaner.

As the other officer returned with some drinks, Jessica asked where the toilet was. Carla gave her the directions and she made her way out into the hallway then went up the stairs, not looking to go snooping but wanting to get a feel of the house. There were no obvious illustrations of wealth but there were framed photographs on the wall the entire way up the staircase. All of the pictures were of the two Morgans and seemed to be from recent years given the similarity in their appearances. Each one was taken in an exotic location with beaches, attractive-looking palm trees or clear blue ocean in the background.

There wasn’t much more for Jessica to see at the top of the stairs but an overall impression was emerging that the couple might not be overtly rich but were certainly comfortable.

Back downstairs, Jessica sat on the sofa close to Carla. The other officer left them alone again. ‘It’s a nice place you have here, Mrs Morgan,’ she said.

The woman nodded. ‘Thank you. Lee was always talking about having somewhere nice to retire to. It’s taken us a while but we’ve got the house the way we wanted.’

‘I liked the photos on the way upstairs…’

The woman smiled sadly. ‘Yes. Can you believe I’d never been on a plane until three years ago? Lee had been talking about it for years but we never had the money and I was always a bit scared of flying.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘We went to Egypt first of all. Lee wanted to go to the Caribbean but I didn’t want to go too far. It was nice but a bit too hot. The year after, I let him have his way and we went to Antigua. The island was amazing but I didn’t like being on the plane for so long.’ She motioned towards her back. ‘Last year we just went to France. It was warm but I don’t think Lee really took to the food and neither of us could speak the language so it wasn’t easy.’

‘A new car too…?’

‘Yes. Lee always wanted a brand-new vehicle. We always had old ones that kept breaking down. I never learned to drive, so it was all down to him.’

‘How did you pay for the car?’ Jessica tried to ask the question in as innocuous a way as possible.

‘I don’t really know. Lee always wanted me to stay at home and he took care of the money.’

‘Didn’t you ever ask questions?’

Jessica could see that the penny had dropped for Carla. The woman spoke slowly, deliberately choosing her words and shuffling nervously in her chair. ‘Why are you asking?’

‘Because I have to, Mrs Morgan.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we are trying to find out why your husband was killed and these things could all be important.’

Jessica knew she had lost the woman. She did ask further questions but everything was met with one- or two-word answers. She wasn’t going to get any further worthwhile information and didn’t see the point of pushing a clearly upset widow any further. After saying goodbye to Carla and the family liaison officer, Jessica called Cole when she got back into her car.

She asked if he had dug up anything on the family’s finances. ‘Sort of,’ he said. ‘It’s not what’s in the accounts that’s odd, it’s what isn’t there.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, you can see Lee Morgan’s monthly salary going into his account but the only bits that come out are large things like money for a holiday that was paid off in one go. The items you or I might pay for; groceries, petrol, even things like household bills, there’s no sign of that at all.’

‘So you think they’ve been using cash?’

‘Yes but there are no actual withdrawals from the account. No credit cards, no loans and no outstanding debts, either. Most people would owe some amount of money but there’s nothing. Their current account acts as if it’s for savings because, aside from the odd large purchase, the money is rarely touched.’

‘No direct debits or standing orders?’

‘No but you can pay things like electricity bills in cash at the post office, can’t you?