Vigilante (18 page)

TWENTY

Cole hadn’t even let Jessica thank him as they walked back down the stairs to their own offices. As she went to speak, he cut her off. ‘Don’t worry, you did well today. Now find the killer.’

Jessica went back to her office and immediately called Garry Ashford. Even though Reynolds was in earshot, she thanked the journalist for his article about Craig Millar’s mother and then told him the news about the type of person they now suspected had killed Robert Graves. She told him he had a two-hour head start to get a story on his newspaper’s website before she called in the local television and radio stations.

She phoned back the witness to the murder and re-checked each detail with her, especially focusing on the time and description of the killer. After that, Jessica went to the press office and told the woman who worked there exactly what she wanted doing. The small team on site were well-known for being tetchy with officers in trying to balance the needs of both sides but Jessica didn’t make it a negotiation. The press officer was obviously nervous about going to the media and admitting they had made a mistake but Jessica was clear the only way people would pay attention to a new appeal was if they started from scratch.

Jessica sat in their office taking phone calls and giving statements to local radio stations and other newspapers with Farraday reluctantly agreeing to go on camera for that evening’s news broadcasts. Officers were brought in to answer the phones and Jessica took Carrie to the main road near the universities later that evening. They had arranged for the press office to print out flyers of the e-fit and handed them out to the young people walking past. Being two youngish women standing on the street, they got a fair amount of attention and inappropriate suggestions but the sight of their respective police identification cards sent people scurrying quick enough.

As the passing foot traffic dried up, with everyone either in or out for the night, Jessica sent Carrie home, telling her to make sure she took the hours back in lieu and then drove herself to the station. Jessica watched the late-evening news on the television in the reception area. It replayed everything that had been on the earlier broadcasts, which was good as their story was still high on the bulletin. She walked through to the incident room where a bank of half-a-dozen phones had been set up at the back. Given the time, the area was fairly empty. Four of the officers were chatting with each other, with two others on calls.

Jessica pulled up a chair and sat behind them. ‘How much have you had in?’

‘Bits and pieces. Loads earlier but nothing much recently,’ one of the officers said.

‘Any names being repeated?’

‘Two or three.’

Each call would have been logged through the computer system but she had instructed the officers working earlier to make a hard-copy note of any names suggested. The officer used a pencil to point Jessica towards a clipboard at the end of the line. It was about as low-tech as she could have imagined – literally a tally chart. The full length of the page had around twenty-five names listed. Most had just one mark next to the name but three instantly stood out. One had four ticks, another six and one name near the top – Dan Wilkin – had seven. Jessica noticed there was even one for a ‘Danny Wilkin’ lower down the sheet where someone hadn’t realised it was likely the same person. As Jessica was scanning the list, one of the officers who had been on the phone hung up and beckoned for her to hand the list over. She passed them the clipboard and they very deliberately put one more mark next to Dan Wilkin’s name.

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

The next morning, Jessica took DC Jones and four uniformed officers with her to arrest Daniel Wilkin. His name had been added to the tally chart twice more the night before and, from the full call records registered through their computer system, his address had been given too. He lived in a block of privately owned student flats around ten minutes’ walk away from where Robert Graves’ body had been found.

The building was arranged in a large semicircle with a courtyard at the front. There were half-a-dozen doors, each listing twenty flats inside that particular area. If their suspect was looking to run, he wouldn’t have too many options but one of the officers was sent around to the back in case he jumped out of a window.

Inside the main entrance, there were five more doors to choose from, each apparently hosting four flats. One door was on the ground floor, with two on each of the levels above. Jessica and the other officers made their way up to the top floor and knocked on the flat’s main door. A man seemingly asleep in his underwear answered it. Jessica had woken people up many times but couldn’t remember anyone looking quite as tired as the young man in front of her. He could barely open his eyes and she wasn’t entirely sure how he was standing.

‘Is Daniel Wilkin in?’

The person in front of them clearly didn’t understand and rocked slightly on the back of his feet. ‘What, man? Who’s been sick?’

Jessica ignored his ramblings, pushing past him into the flat. One bedroom door was wide open, which she presumed belonged to the man who had let them in, while an opening at the opposite end of the corridor clearly showed a fridge. There were four more doors to choose from. Jessica first tried pushing each of them. The final one on the left swung open to reveal an empty but filthy bathroom.

With only three options, she indicated for Carrie to stand at one door, while one of the officers took another and she took the third. The final two officers stood by the front door. Jessica counted down from three and, on one, they all banged on the remaining bedroom doors. ‘Daniel Wilkin,’ Jessica shouted loudly.

No one could have slept through the noise. The door in front of Jessica and the uniformed officer opened almost simultaneously. There was a young man wearing only a pair of boxer shorts in front of her. Jessica had her identification in her hand. ‘Daniel Wilkin?’

The man was clearly puzzled and tired but pointed to the still-closed door Carrie had been knocking on. ‘That one.’

Jessica told him to go back into his room, as well as the man who had answered the main door and then indicated for the officers to clear a bit of space around the remaining bedroom door.

She knocked one final time. ‘Daniel, if you’re in there open the door now or we will break it down.’

She heard it unlocking and the door was pulled open to reveal a man standing there fully dressed in a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and denim jacket as if he were on his way out. He looked exactly like the e-fit. Jessica didn’t know if he had just got dressed because he had heard them or if he had been looking to make a run for it. Ultimately it didn’t matter.

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

Jessica left Daniel Wilkin in the cells under the station talking to a duty solicitor. She checked his name in their records but there was nothing. Being a student it was likely he lived elsewhere but she couldn’t find any matches on the national database for anyone with his name and age who had a criminal record.

She asked Cole if he would join her in the interview room and, after getting everything ready, they finally called for the suspect to be brought upstairs. The student confirmed his name, date of birth and address, both his university one and that of his parents, who lived in Portsmouth. Jessica asked him where he was on the night Robert Graves had been killed.

‘No comment,’ Daniel replied.

‘Did Robert try to rob you?’

‘No comment.’

‘Have you ever seen this man?’ Jessica asked, showing a photo of Robert Graves before he had been killed.

‘No comment.’

Jessica turned to the duty solicitor. ‘Did you tell him to do this?’

The solicitor just shrugged at her. ‘You know you can’t ask me to disclose what I say to my clients.’

Jessica sighed and looked back at the suspect. ‘Look, Daniel, I’ll be completely honest with you. We’ve got fingerprints and we’ve got DNA. You know that swab you gave us when you were brought in? That’s on its way to our labs right now to be tested. I don’t know if it’s you who did this or not but we
will
know for sure within the next forty-eight hours. No commenting is just going to look bad in court. If you’re completely innocent, by all means refuse to answer the questions but if you’re not – if I were you – I would go back down to the cells, call your parents and get them to arrange a proper solicitor for you.’

The young man looked to the solicitor next to him and Jessica knew they had their man.

‘I want to do what she said.’

Two hours later and they had a full confession. Daniel told them how he had been walking home from the local shops when some guy had jumped out at him and demanded his phone. With all the reports about students being attacked, he acted on instinct and punched the assailant hard in the face. From there, things got out of hand. Before he knew what had happened, the other man had stopped moving.

‘It was almost like it was someone else, like a movie or something. I don’t know what happened,’ he said.

He told them about the nightmares he’d had since and how, because of the e-fit, his mates had joked he was the vigilante. They knew he wasn’t of course because he had been out with them on the dates the other victims had been killed. He felt guilty he had got away with it but had kept quiet. Then he had got home from a student bar the previous night and saw his face again on an Internet news site but this time they knew what he had done.

‘I wanted to hand myself in,’ he added. ‘I even went to call the number you put up but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I…I’ve never been in trouble before. I’d not even been in a fight until then.’

Jessica found it hard not to feel sorry for him. He had initially been a victim but had completely overreacted. Jessica thought he would probably end up on a manslaughter charge as opposed to murder but two lives had been ended that night.

He was led back to the cells and would be in front of magistrates in the morning. Jessica was applauded as she walked back onto the main office floor but didn’t feel like taking people’s praise. Cole told her he would deal with Farraday and that she should enjoy the night. Tomorrow they would both get to work on figuring out who killed Craig Millar, Benjamin Webb, Desmond Hughes and Lee Morgan.

Back in their office, Reynolds gave her a hug and told her he was determined to push on with his case, if only to get a justice of sorts for Robert Graves’ parents. ‘I’ll let you off that tenner too,’ he added.

Jessica went back through to the canteen to find DCs Rowlands and Jones. ‘Hey, are you two still off to the quiz later?’

‘Yep, are you gonna come embarrass yourself?’ Rowlands said.

‘Yes and I’m going to bring my boyfriend too.’ Jessica didn’t even wait for any witty comebacks, turning and walking towards her car. She had three phone calls to make.

The first was to Adam to make sure he was interested in going to the pub quiz. Then she phoned Garry and talked him through the day’s events. She felt she owed him one if only for listening to her in the supermarket car park and gave him a full exclusive. Other publications would get the standard lines from the press office but he would end up looking the most impressive.

The final call was simply to check if the people she wanted to visit were in. They were and invited her round so she drove the few miles to their house. It was the one job she promised herself she would do without any help.

Arthur Graves answered his front door and invited her in. Jessica knew they would be upset with what she had to tell them but it would be as much closure as they could hope to get.

TWENTY-ONE

The killer hadn’t enjoyed the previous week or so. His project had been going well and then they had started accusing him of murdering someone he didn’t know. It was an insult to what he was trying to achieve. Three druggie scumbags and a bent prison warden had been removed from the streets and then they started saying he had taken out some kid who hadn’t done any real harm.

Until the newsreader had given the boy’s name, the killer hadn’t even known who he was. It was a complete disgrace to his legacy and he had stopped working his way through the list in protest. But then, last night, finally the police retracted their accusations, admitting somebody else had killed the boy and leaving him with the credit he deserved.

He didn’t know if it was a deliberate game but he had spent the day smiling and trying not to let on to those around him.

That night he could get back to work.

The killer had enjoyed the news bulletins and papers over the past couple of weeks. There were a few people that couldn’t get their heads around what he was trying to achieve but a decent amount were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. They knew there were people who could only act like animals and had to be put down as such.

He looked through the list of names he had made. Three people at the top and one three-quarters of the way down had been crossed out. At first he had thought he would work his way through them in order, from the easiest to the hardest.

Millar had been no problem whatsoever. He was just a big mouth who stayed safe through the number of people he kept around him. Without them, he was always going to be the first to go.

Webb and Hughes had been part-impulse, part-necessity. He had been planning to deal with them one at a time but had then seen them swaying their way down the road and smiply acted. If sober they would have been near the bottom of the list given their brutality but, from what he had seen, they were both keen drinkers.

The warden had been a special case. Originally he would have been near the bottom of the list, not because he would be physically hard to despatch, simply because of the attention it would have brought to the mission. Unfortunately certain police officers were getting a little too close for comfort and at least with the warden out of the picture it showed he was willing to go to any lengths.

There were five names left on the killer’s list. All of them deserved exactly what was coming to them: drug dealers, rapists, those who were a little too handy with their fists and others who put money above anything else.

The next name would be interesting, although a bit of a challenge. The next victim truly was a wolf in sheep’s clothing who couldn’t keep his hands to himself.