Behind Closed Doors (Season One: Book 7) (Jessica Daniel) (34 page)

Charley’s eyes widened. ‘Is it rigged?’

‘I’m not sure. There were wires running away from it but I don’t know enough to say. We’ve got to get everyone out.’

Charley stepped backwards, holding her arms out to stop anyone passing. ‘I can’t let any of my men enter if there’s a chance it could blow up.’

‘But there are innocent people in there!’

‘People who chose to be there.’

‘If you retreat now, they could go into lockdown. Everyone will be used as hostages.’

Charley took two more steps backwards, pushing the closest officer away. ‘We’ll have to call the bomb squad anyway. This goes way above either of us.’

‘But they’re real people! They have families; parents and kids looking out for them. They’re not numbers.’

‘We have to call—’

‘Bollocks to that. You know what they’re like; they’ll spend three hours talking about what they’re going to do, by which time everyone will be locked inside.
There’ll be news helicopters over the top and we’ll each spend three months giving evidence to some prick in a suit about what went wrong – even though what actually went wrong
was the sheer number of pricks in suits sticking their oars in.’

Charley shook her head. ‘We’ve got to go.’ She turned to the officers, shooing them away and telling them to get off the grounds.

Jessica heard a clatter of footsteps behind her, stepping out of the way just in time to avoid being trampled by Ali and two others. They all stopped as they saw the police officers retreating,
afraid of the outsiders.

Jessica couldn’t remember the name of the person nearest to her but she grabbed his arm anyway, pointing towards the far side of the grounds and telling him to run.

‘What’s happening?’ Ali asked. ‘Glenn’s at the front door stopping people leaving. He says the police are here to take us all.’

‘There’s a bomb in the basement. The police are here to get us all to safety.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I just do.’

Ali seemed torn between following the other two or running back into the house to be by Glenn’s side.

‘Heather’s still in there,’ Jessica said, knowing the effect it would have.

Ali glanced behind him, then back to Jessica.

‘There’s definitely a bomb in the basement?’

‘I think so. We need to get everyone out.’

‘Fine.’

Ali turned, running back into the house. Jessica started to follow but Charley had hold of her top.

‘You don’t have to do any more,’ she said, tugging Jessica backwards.

‘I want to get Heather and everyone else out.’

‘What about Glenn? Zipporah? Moses?’

Jessica raised the hammer. ‘What about them?’

‘Are you really going to use that?’

‘I hope not.’

Charley sighed, signalling towards her officers who were disappearing over the top of the ridge. ‘Let’s get to safety first. When I was talking to your DCI about using you after our
first meeting, I told him no because I could see this rash streak. He assured me your instincts were good and that you wouldn’t do anything stupid. Why are you so reckless?’

Jessica pulled herself free. ‘What else have I got to lose?’

The need to escape had been driven largely by fear of being trapped in the basement, but now that dread had gone Jessica was ready to finish what she started. She ran back inside, bounding
through the kitchen into the main part of the house. Ali was in the corridor, shouting at Katie and two more people to get out through the back door.

‘Can you get people out?’ Jessica called to him.

She couldn’t hear his reply over the racket going on around him but it wasn’t difficult to lip-read his one-word reply: ‘Yes.’

Jessica gripped the hammer tighter, heading for the basement. She didn’t just want to get everyone out, she wanted to stop Zipporah entirely.

The corridors now felt familiar, even with the overhead lights still flickering. Jessica took the most direct route to the basement, skidding to a halt as Moses hurried down the stairs. He was
tugging at his beard, eyes wide, knowing the game was up.

‘It’s Glenn,’ he shouted. ‘He’s at the front door shouting about a bomb. He’s trying to keep us all in.’

Jessica took him at his word that he didn’t know about the potential explosives. There was no reason for him to be faking it. ‘That’s because your mad wife has fertiliser
packed into the basement.’

‘It’s true? How do you know?’

Jessica raised the hammer slightly, making Moses take a step backwards. Realising she must have been down there – and escaped – he didn’t bother waiting for a reply, pushing
past her and running for the front door, no doubt to get himself to safety.

A coward to the end.

Jessica started to call after him that the back door was unlocked but stopped herself – he could find his own way out.

She continued on, past the games room and Moses’s office, through the unlocked door down to the basement. Before she turned into the main room, Jessica could see in the mirror that
Zipporah was no longer on the floor. She dashed around the corner, taking one look at the pool of blood before racing through the opening on the far side into the area with the fertiliser.

Zipporah had gone. The lights were still off, the only sign of life the cleaning bucket which had toppled onto its side. In the computer room, the monitor was still on, illuminating the darkened
space with a hazy blue glow, but otherwise everything was as it was when she had last been here.

Determined not to let her get away, Jessica ran out of the basement, heading through the empty corridors up the stairs towards the bedroom with the wide double doors. One of them was open a
crack and Jessica pushed her way in. A huge oval-shaped window was at the far end of the room, allowing a perfect view of the sun rising in the distance. Opposite was a four-poster bed next to a
smaller double bed. The covers were tossed to the side, clothes strewn across the floor.

At the other end of the room, a chest had three drawers hanging open, with an empty jewellery box upside down on the ground. In the corner, a safe had been opened and was bare except for two
cleared-out metal cash boxes.

Jessica went to the window, looking out over the front of the property as the blue lights of the police vehicles continued to whirl. A few of them were pulling away, with other uniformed
officers waiting in the distance close to the gates. There were fewer officers than she had first thought but her email to Charley had clearly caused some sort of panic, as an early-morning warrant
would have been essential to make all of this happen.

With no sign of Zipporah, Jessica went back down the stairs, following the sounds of raised voices towards the front door. The hallways were empty but the alarm was still going off. She pressed
against the wall, peering around the corner to see a scene of pure relief.

In the main entrance, the front door was open, Glenn and Moses both on their knees, hands cuffed behind their backs as Charley stood over them, half-a-dozen officers at her shoulder.

Charley waved Jessica across, not taking her eyes from the two men in front of her.

‘I thought you were retreating and calling for help?’ Jessica said quietly enough that only Charley would hear, even though the alarm would have drowned it out to listening ears.

‘What can I say? We didn’t want to leave anyone behind. People are people.’

Jessica couldn’t stop a small grin from creeping onto her face. ‘Did you stop Zipporah? She’s not in the basement and she isn’t upstairs.’

Charley pulled a radio from her back pocket, checking with the person they had at the back door, before shaking her head. ‘She must still be in here. We’ll check the basement first
and then send a team through. There are only two doors, right?’

‘Shite.’

Jessica turned, running as fast as she could until she reached Moses’s office. The door was ajar, the window wide open. She approached it anyway, peering out towards the woods and the
orange sky, knowing Zipporah was gone for good.

Jessica cradled the mug between her fingers, using it to warm her hands. ‘How come we get tea from a machine that tastes of washing-up liquid and you get proper hot
drinks up here?’

Charley leant back in the chair, yawning, before turning to DCI Cole. ‘I’m not the person to take it up with.’

Cole had a drink himself. ‘Luckily I keep a kettle in my office, so I don’t go near the machine anyway.’ He winked at Jessica. ‘Perk of the job.’

Jessica pulled the blanket around herself that she had been cradling since it was given to her by an officer as she left the house. ‘This incident room is quite nice too,’ she said.
‘Your tables don’t wobble, the lights don’t flicker, the walls aren’t crumbling.’

‘Our toilets flooded while you’ve been off,’ Cole added.

Jessica shook her head, unsurprised. ‘Let’s hear it then,’ she said, turning to Charley. ‘I’ve been here most of the day giving statements and I want to go home.
Your lot can visit if you want to hear any more.’

Charley put down her mug, stifling another yawn. ‘There’s no sign of Zipporah – Sophie. We found a few spots of blood on the grass leading towards the woods but lost them
pretty quickly. We assume she slipped away as we were dealing with everyone else coming out of the house. Her photo has gone to all of the local forces and the media but she had a big head start.
We can’t be sure because it’s such a big place to search but it also looks like she took a large amount of cash. We found a few loose twenty-pound notes at the bottom of a drawer in the
office she left through and we suspect she took some from the bedroom too. She could have thousands of pounds on her.’

‘What about the bomb?’ Cole asked, looking disapprovingly at Jessica.

‘We’ve got a team at the house removing the fertiliser now. It wasn’t primed and was quite basic. Without being able to ask her, we suspect Zipporah didn’t try to set it
off either because she didn’t know how, or because she wanted to make sure she got away.’

‘I think it was to do with the house,’ Jessica replied. ‘Moses said something about money being awkward and I reckon it all came down to that. It was the one thing she actually
seemed to care about.’

Charley shrugged. ‘You might be right. We’re trying to get warrants for the off-shore bank accounts, so we’re not sure what sort of a state they might be in.’

‘Is Moses speaking?’ Jessica asked.

‘He’s denying all knowledge, saying it must have been Glenn in it with his wife. Glenn’s doing the same, saying it was down to Moses and Zipporah. Her involvement is the only
thing they agree on. When we’ve finished going over your statements, we’ll go back to them, but we’ve taken the computer equipment and our guy says there are still videos on that.
There are IP addresses of the users, plus we’re doing some work to trace the credit cards people used for access. This could end up being massive. The videos weren’t just produced at
the house, there was a whole underground network thing.’

‘All creating these torture videos?’ Jessica asked, staring into the remnants of what was left in her mug, trying not to think about it too much.

Charley nodded. ‘I’ve not seen them but we’ve had someone on it all day in case there was any clue to where Zipporah might have headed. They found something of Liam being
drowned and another of Wayne being beaten to death.’

Jessica shivered involuntarily, knowing it had happened to Wayne as she slept upstairs; knowing it could have been her.

‘Anything else?’ she asked.

‘Glenn’s wife . . .’

‘Naomi.’

‘Yes, she’s been very helpful. It sounds as if she’s been trapped in there for a fair while wanting to get away. She’s been giving statements most of the day too. With
that, the videos and everything else, there should be enough to charge Glenn at the very least. In the next day or two, we’re going to sweep the woods to see if there are any bodies there.
It’s very unlikely these were the only two.’

‘What about Moses?’

‘Charging him might be harder because we don’t have Naomi’s direct evidence and, from what you say, he wasn’t necessarily a part of what went on in the basement –
even if he knew about it. You know what the CPS are like – they’d rather have a single nailed-on charge for Glenn than something against him and Moses if there’s anything flimsy.
None of the residents seem to have anything bad to say about Moses – that’s if they are talking at all.’

Jessica put her mug down a little forcefully, the clang betraying how annoyed she was. ‘He sent Kevin down to the basement – he knew something went on down there.’

‘We’ll have to see. It’s looking a little circumstantial at the moment. Glenn’s statement probably won’t be enough because he’s trying to get himself
off.’

‘So let’s do him for sexual assault then.’

Charley and Cole froze, both staring at Jessica, waiting for the other to speak. Unable to make eye contact with either of them, Jessica explained the occasions he had touched her, insisting she
would go to court and do whatever was necessary to make sure he was charged with something.

They each asked if she was okay, pointing out there were specially trained officers to deal with these types of cases, but Jessica said she would sort things in her own way.

Feigning resilience even after everything she had been through.

Charley led Jessica and Cole into the hall of the police station, halting in reception to say goodbye. The area was buzzing with activity, with some of the house’s former residents sitting
in chairs, staring uncomfortably at the floor and other officers hurrying in and out. Jessica wondered what would happen to them. Despite everything that had gone on at the house, it was their
home. Now they only had the lives they had run away from.

‘Hey!’

Jessica looked up to see Heather standing and pushing past an officer towards her. Jessica started to ask if she was all right but Heather took her by surprise, shoving her hard in the chest and
then, as she was pulled back by two officers, pursing her lips and spitting in Jessica’s face.

Charley reacted furiously, ordering the officers to take her to the cells, but Jessica wiped the saliva away with her sleeve, saying she should let it go. Heather was shouting hysterically, her
words vicious but uncomfortably close to the truth for Jessica.