DS Jessica Daniel series: Locked In/Vigilante/The Woman in Black - Books 1-3 (60 page)

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’s 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 who’d seemingly been 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’s parents. ‘I’ll let
you off that tenner too,’ he added.

Jessica went back through to the canteen to find DCs Row lands 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.

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 simply 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.

She wouldn’t have predicted it beforehand but Jessica was actually looking forward to a night out at the pub quiz Rowlands had invited her to. He lived near the edge of
the student area of the city and the pub contained a mix of young professionals like them, students and the locals.

Jessica was always fascinated by the regulars who went to the same pub day after day regardless of who owned it. She would often look for them, either sitting at the bar with a pint of cheap
bitter or occasionally feeding pound coins into the fruit machines. She couldn’t get her head around how some people’s lives literally revolved around getting up, going to the pub, then
going home.

The place itself was what she would have expected. The ceilings were low and parts of the floor were sticky from either spilled drinks that hadn’t been cleaned up or something she would
rather not know about. It reminded Jessica of her younger days when she and Caroline were more interested in the price of a drink than the fancy decor.

Dave was at the pub on his own when Jessica arrived with Adam. After visiting the Graveses, she had gone home to clear her head. She couldn’t switch from something so serious into either
going back to the station or meeting up with friends. She changed into a clean pair of jeans and one of her favourite going-out tops, which hadn’t been worn in well over a year. Adam had
caught the train to the station closest to her flat and they had both taken a taxi together to the pub.

When they arrived, Jessica had quickly spotted Rowlands sitting in a booth off to the side, guarding it by stretching himself across the seat in case anyone else tried to sit down. ‘Thank
God you’re here,’ he said. ‘I’ve been dying for the toilet but didn’t want to lose the seats.’

He stood and offered his hand for Adam to shake. ‘You must be Adam. I’m Dave. Apart from your name, which someone else told me, I’ve heard absolutely nothing about
you.’

All three of them laughed together and Dave disappeared towards the back of the pub. Jessica and Adam sat in the booth.

‘There’s nothing bad about me not talking about you,’ Jessica said.