DS Jessica Daniel series: Locked In/Vigilante/The Woman in Black - Books 1-3 (117 page)

She pushed the boot down but didn’t lock it in place. As the ambulance drew up, she ran to her own car, opening the driver’s door and digging into the well before pulling out a pair
of scissors.

Her father had always been good about keeping things in their old family car just in case but Jessica hadn’t inherited his forward thinking. She had found the scissors not long after her
dad bought her the car second-hand a decade or so ago, left by the previous owner. She dashed across the junction again, silently thanking whoever that previous owner was and feeling justified for
never cleaning out her car.

As she arrived back at the black vehicle, paramedics stepped out of the ambulance. Jessica flashed her identification and told them the fate of the driver. One of them went to check on him
anyway as another walked to where Rowlands was still comforting the woman from the blue car.

More sirens blared in the distance as Jessica returned to the black car’s boot, opening it and moving the spade to the rear of the compartment out of her way. Layer upon layer of plastic
sheeting was wrapped tightly around the object and Jessica struggled to force through the blunt blades of her scissors. As she pushed harder, it started to rain more heavily, huge drops bouncing
off the tarmac road. Jessica could feel the force of the water smashing into the top of her head. She continued to cut and finally felt the scissors push through the top few layers of the plastic.
Reaching in with her hands, she pulled hard to try to tear the material apart. Slowly, it began to give and, with a combination of her hands and the scissors, she opened up part of the
wrapping.

With the plastic pulled back, all she could see was a piece of cloth that had a flowery pattern. It reminded Jessica of the curtains her parents used to have at their house when she was a child,
a hideous mixture of yellow and brown. Still reaching into the boot, Jessica tugged at the fabric, finally freeing it with a gasp.

Jessica tried to force herself to look away but the pale skin and clamped eyelids held her hypnotically: the haunting lifeless face of a dead child.

The final version of what you have just read has perhaps as much of a tale behind it as the story itself.

In 2010, I had the incredible misfortune of turning thirty. Wrinkles appeared overnight, all-new silvery strands of hair providing a taunting reminder that my youth was all but gone. Joints that
once allowed me to run around being terrible at football now ached, still allowing me to be equally terrible at football. All of a sudden, teenagers started listening to music I’d never heard
of and I had an overwhelming urge to talk about how things were better ‘in my day’.

Anyway, despite thirty ‘being just a number’, inside I had a sense that I hadn’t really done much with my life – not unless you count being pretty good on the PlayStation
and carefully cultivating a palate for ice cream, which most people wouldn’t. I figured I could either meander through the rest of my life and wonder what I might have managed to do had I
bothered, or I could actually try to do something.

So I made a list of everything I reckoned I was half-decent at, thinking that if I failed at the first then I’d move onto the next until I found something that made me happy.

It seems a bit crazy now but I never got beyond the first thing on that list – writing a book. I always thought I could, not because of the saying that ‘everyone has a book in
them’ – which I don’t believe is true – but simply because I had a lot of ideas.

Over the next few months, each time I heard, saw or thought of something I found vaguely interesting, I wrote it down. Sometimes it was something as small as a name I liked, other times a news
story, or perhaps a small flash of an incident. After a while, I had many Post-it notes littering my side of the bed and my car.

Back at school, my most impressive works of fiction had been the excuses I had for not doing my homework, why I was late, why I had missed a lesson, or why I was generally being disruptive. I
hadn’t written anything even approaching a story since then but soon thought I had enough to start stringing something together.

I’ll leave out all the boring sitting-around-on-the-sofa-while-typing bits – because they basically involve me being boring and sitting on a sofa. It may well be what you’re
doing now. It’s pretty boring, isn’t it? But it was a good feeling when I finished something so completely different to anything I had done before.

If I had written it a year earlier, there is every chance the document would still be sitting on my laptop now, gathering digital dust. As it was, I was messing around on Amazon.co.uk one day
when I saw a ‘self-publish with us’ link at the bottom. I had a quick read and figured I may as well give it a go.

There are a lot of books on Amazon, over a million in fact, but with mine something strange began to happen: people bought it. I’m still not entirely sure what started things rolling but I
began receiving emails from strangers within weeks, saying they had read it and wanting to know if there was another one coming.

My Giant Pad of Ideas, which by this time was actually a pad, had plenty left on it and was continually being added to. I have written more or less every day since – sometimes for half an
hour, one time for eighteen – but I always have something on the go.

The most astonishing thing is that people have bought, and continue to buy, the Jessica Daniel stories. Within three months, I had the number one fiction book – not just ebook – on
the whole of Amazon UK. The sequel to
Locked In
,
Vigilante
, was second only to its predecessor in the crime chart. Somehow I was in Amazon’s top ten list of British authors
worldwide for 2011, despite not having a book out in the first seven months of the year.

Everything happened incredibly quickly, culminating in Pan Macmillan buying the rights to the Jessica Daniel series in early 2012.

If you like what you have just read, books two, three and four should all be out with more to come.

Essentially, almost everything that has happened to me over the course of the past year and a bit is down to readers such as yourself. Saying a simple ‘thank you’ doesn’t seem
quite enough. You might say that to the person who held the door open for you this morning, or whoever made you a brew – even if they did put too much milk in it. The words themselves become
a cliché, so you’ll have to take my word for it that I really do appreciate everyone who has bought the books and liked them enough to tell someone, buy the sequels, leave a review, or
write me an email, tweet or Facebook message.

I’ve had emails from teenagers and parents alike; people who have heard about Jessica from their nieces, nephews, cousins, uncles, aunties, grandparents, parents and children; someone
whose cab driver told them about my books, someone who read one while recovering from a serious illness, someone else whose midwife talked about the books . . . and so on. Lots of very normal
people reading and passing the message on.

Essentially, the last few months have shown me how fundamentally great the majority of people are.

So these few rambling paragraphs are to offer my appreciation to all of you readers who have been so involved in making Jessica’s stories as popular as they have become.

Thanks to you all.

Kerry Wilkinson

Kerry Wilkinson
is something of an accidental author. His debut,
Locked In
, the first title in the detective Jessica Daniel series, was written as a
challenge to himself but, after self-publishing, it became a UK Number One bestseller within three months of release. Kerry then went on to have more success with the second and third titles in the
series,
Vigilante
and
The Woman in Black
. His new book,
Think of the Children
, will be available in both paperback and ebook soon.

Kerry has a degree in journalism and works for a national media company. He was born in Somerset but now lives in Lancashire.

For more information about Kerry and his books

visit his website:
www.kerrywilkinson.com

or
www.panmacmillan.com

Locked In
first published by Kerry Wilkinson 2011

Vigilante
first published by Kerry Wilkinson 2011

The Woman in Black
first published by Kerry Wilkinson 2011

This electronic omnibus edition published 2012 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com

ISBN 978-1-4472-3536-1 EPUB

Copyright © Kerry Wilkinson 2011

The right of Kerry Wilkinson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The Macmillan Group has no responsibility for the information provided by any author websites whose address you obtain from this book (‘author websites’). The inclusion of author website addresses in this book does not constitute an endorsement by or association with us of such sites or the content, products, advertising or other materials presented on such sites. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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www.panmacmillan.com
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