The Killer Inside: A gripping serial killer thriller (Detective Jessica Daniel thriller series Book 1) (5 page)

S
unday night hadn’t ended
in the way Jessica thought. The top headline on the
Herald
’s website had read:

Underneath that was:

and the byline:

Pretty much all the details were there: the victim’s name, the fact the house had been locked and that the police had taken two days to respond to Stephanie Wilson’s concerns. That sounded bad straight away. The journalist had also spoken to Mrs Wilson, who had blabbed pretty much everything she had already told the police.

Worse than that, Ashford had quoted her: ‘Detective Sergeant Jessica Daniel insisted she had no extra comment to make’. There was a complimentary line about her being ‘trusted to head up the inquiry’. That write-up almost certainly meant her bosses were going to think she was the leak. If things got serious, Ashford’s phone number would be discovered on her records, too.

Jessica still had Garry’s details in her previous callers’ list on her phone. Figuring she could be in enough trouble already, she called him back as she left the pub. She wasn’t sure whether to go straight in with the full barrage of abuse or to build up with a particularly obscene crescendo. Afterwards, she couldn’t quite recall the full details of the one-sided conversation, but she definitely remembered promising to do something not at all pleasant with his lower intestines.

She wasn’t sure he realised how much trouble she could be in.

On Monday, she arrived at the station early to be greeted by a hard copy of the paper sitting on the reception desk in front of that morning’s desk sergeant. The article itself was even more terrible than she’d thought. In the absence of any photos of the victim, they had used a picture of her. Under a big banner headline about a murder, there she was, grinning like an idiot. Worse still, it was a horrible passport-type photo that the press office had taken to use on the force’s website. There were spots around her mouth and she’d been going through a stage where she’d been swooshing her hair to the side for no particular reason. It was not flattering.

Just as she was thinking her morning couldn’t get much worse, Detective Chief Inspector William Aylesbury bounded through the big double doors into reception.

DCI Aylesbury’s father and grandfather had been senior officers in the Met, while his son had recently joined Greater Manchester Police’s uniformed ranks, based at a different station. Jessica had no doubt he would be superintendent in no time, as the current one, DSI Dominic Davies, was well-known to be retiring in under twelve months.

DCI Aylesbury was in his early fifties but could have passed for someone ten years younger, despite his short grey hair. He was tall and imposing when he wanted to be, and was almost always perfectly turned out, with expensive-looking suits. The ideal management type – they liked their suit-wearing family dynasties.

‘Been making friends with the press, have we?’ Aylesbury said, eyebrow cocked, indicating the paper in Jessica’s hand. She hadn’t been quick enough to put it down.

He beckoned her into a meeting, along with Cole and the woman in charge of press relations. It seemed he wanted to find out what was going on. Jessica admitted that she had spoken to Garry Ashford on Saturday afternoon, but only because he had called her. She explained she had not given away any details and didn’t know how the information had appeared in that morning’s paper, although pointed out there were plenty of people who had been at the crime scene.

Cole probably believed her but Aylesbury was far too difficult to read, and the press officer definitely didn’t buy it. The woman stared daggers at Jessica throughout the meeting but, given she was outranked by everyone present, that was about as much dissatisfaction as she could get away with showing. Jessica’s opinion of the DCI improved a tiny amount when he dismissed the press officer and told Jessica and Cole that he would inform Internal Investigations he didn’t believe there was any need for them to be involved. Not that it was his decision…

Leaks could be very serious. If someone gave out crucial details of a murder investigation, what else might they be giving up?

That meeting led straight into a second one with the three of them. The next discussion was about how the case would run. Aylesbury confirmed Cole would work from the station with Jessica reporting directly to him. Cole would keep Aylesbury up to date. A mix of uniformed and plain clothes constables would also be assigned to the case.

After their meeting, the three of them headed downstairs for the main team briefing. For this, they stood at the front of the station’s large meeting room, which was in the basement hall. With no natural sunlight, it had a bit of the morgue about it. In all, there were between twenty and thirty officers of varying ranks sitting on uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs, or standing near the doors at the back, sipping cups of grim machine-made coffee and waiting to be filled in.

Two huge whiteboards were pinned to the wall. One had an enlarged photo of Yvonne Christensen’s neck wounds, next to a recent photo to show how she had usually looked. Her name was written underneath in marker pen, along with the husband and son’s names in smaller writing under that.

Aylesbury started by reminding everyone of their responsibilities to
not
talk to the media without prior permission, then thanked everyone for being there and said he had every faith they would catch the person responsible. He sounded quite impressive as he spoke, despite his over-pronunciation. He told the listening officers that Cole would be their link person at the station and then handed the floor over to Jessica.

He gave her a full introduction for the benefit of the visiting officers, but even they would have known exactly who she was because of the ridiculous photo of her gurning on the front of that morning’s paper. Jessica ignored the murmurings of amusement from the officers, and explained how the house had been found locked up.

After that, she moved on to the morning’s developments. ‘We’ve got the initial results back but there’s not an awful lot to go on,’ she said. ‘Yvonne Christensen was killed some time late on Tuesday night or in the early hours of Wednesday, which fits in with Stephanie Wilson’s timings. She lay in her house for three days before we got to her. She was strangled with some type of steel rope or wire, but we don’t have anything more specific on that yet. They’ve been running tests on the bed sheets and the body, but haven’t yet found any samples that don’t belong to the victim.’

‘Do we know why she was in the bedroom?’ someone asked.

Cole answered: ‘Given the estimated time of death, it seems likely she was throttled in her sleep. There were no defensive wounds, like cuts to the victim’s fingers.’

Jessica nodded along and then picked things up. ‘Even if Yvonne had let someone in, it’s not clear how they got out again. We’re also struggling for a motive. She has no life insurance policies; she doesn’t seem to have any particular enemies; she doesn’t have a lot of money; nothing was stolen. It’s all a bit odd.’

There were a handful of mutterings from the floor as Jessica continued. ‘We have been able to pretty much rule out the husband, Eric, and the son, James. James has a door key – but he is at university in Bournemouth and, given the distance, along with everything we’ve been able to verify, there aren’t any gaps long enough for him to have come up here and been able to return again.’

Jessica looked at Cole and raised her eyebrows. He took the hint and picked up the story. ‘James still has that door key, so it wasn’t stolen. The husband, Eric Christensen, says he gave his set back to his wife when he moved out. We don’t know if this is true, but his alibis for the past few days certainly do check out.’

He turned back to Jessica: ‘Essentially, with the lab teams not coming up with anything and the only family members we know of unlikely to be involved, we don’t have an awful lot to go on. We’re not even sure how the killer got in and out, let alone who it was. We’ve examined all the usual things and know there is no basement in the house, while the attic is full of junk. There was certainly no one hiding up there, waiting for us to clear out.’

‘Can you cross over into the attic from the attached property?’ someone asked from the floor.

‘No – good thinking, though. The house is semi-detached but the brickwork goes all the way up to the top of the roof. It was one of the last things we checked.’

Another officer took her chance to shout up: ‘Did she hide a key in the garden? Under a gnome? Plant pot? That sort of thing?’

‘No,’ Jessica replied. ‘Or at least, that’s what father and son say. We only know of two keys: the one James has in Bournemouth and the one that was hanging
inside
the house.’

Jessica asked the assembled officers if anyone had any suggestions for how someone could have managed the murder. One constable got a laugh by putting forward the name of a popular TV magician – and there was a sensible suggestion to look at the previous owners. It had already been established that the Christensens had lived in the place for a little over five years – but theoretically, the previous owners might have kept a key.

‘Did the door-to-door enquiries come up with anything?’ one of the constables asked.

Jessica and Cole snorted at the same time. ‘Nope,’ Jessica said.

Cole expanded: ‘The best we got was one neighbour at the other end of the street, who thinks they saw the same person walk past their house three or four times in a short period. She was a little elderly and it could have been the postman for all we know. Her description was fairly bland and didn’t really give us too much. We are going to work with the profilers today, see what we can come up with. If Yvonne was killed in the early hours, all her neighbours would’ve been sleeping.’

Someone made a crack that any picture without a gormless grin being on the front of tomorrow’s papers would be an improvement.

Cole continued. ‘We’ve set up a phone line for people to call with information, but we haven’t had anything yet, despite the media coverage.’

Neither the DCI nor Jessica had anything further to add.

‘There will be a press conference at three this afternoon,’ Aylesbury finished off. ‘You should all look busy.’

As the floor thinned out while various people were given their jobs for the week, Jessica waved Rowlands over and told him he was coming with her to meet the locksmith.

The two of them walked out to the car park at the back of the station. The morning’s activities had taken a lot longer than Jessica had thought, but at least things now seemed to be moving. She wished she had thought to bring a jacket to work; her trouser suit was offering little resistance to the chilly spring breeze as they headed towards the car pool. Saturday’s warm weather seemed long gone. Rowlands must have taken one look at the morning’s grey skies and thought ahead, as he was wearing a long trench coat to guard against the cold. His hair was back to its full spikiness, like a glued-on hedgehog.

‘We’re not going in your car, are we?’ Rowlands asked sarcastically, as they reached the bank of vehicles.

‘I’m not sure; we do need something to distract from your flasher’s mac.’

‘Careful with that smile, there might be a
Herald
photographer around...’

They took a marked police car anyway, with Rowlands driving. Jessica’s mood was better than it had been in days, but she still couldn’t be bothered with the other idiots on the road. Sometimes being in a marked car aggravated things. The worst drivers slammed on their brakes and pretended they were doing the speed limit the minute they saw a police vehicle in the mirror.

They had barely reached the bottom of the road when Jessica’s phone rang.

It was one of the other officers from the station. They had done some checking on the house’s previous owners. The couple who had owned it before had emigrated to Canada when they’d moved out five years ago, and were still living there.

‘Not a bad alibi,’ Jessica remarked. She hadn’t thought the previous occupiers would be a serious avenue to explore, but also hadn’t reckoned another lead would fall through quite so quickly.

T
he white van
with company branding made the locksmith’s house easily identifiable. Just to fit the stereotype, a red-top tabloid could be seen flopped across the dashboard of the van. Jessica knocked on the front door. The locksmith answered and invited Jessica and Rowlands inside.

‘Can I make you a cup of tea?’ he offered, and the two of them accepted as he showed them through to the living room.

Jessica had never really drunk hot drinks when she was younger, but it had become inescapable as an officer. Every time she visited a house to interview a witness, tea was on offer, and tea was more or less the only thing that could get a sane person through a day on a training course.

Based on her initial phone call with the locksmith, Jessica had imagined that this would be a quick ten-minute trip where he would want them out of the door as soon as possible. But, far from keeping an eye on his watch, he actually seemed to enjoy showing off his knowledge. He talked about multipoint locks, five-lever dead locks, security hinges, double-locking handles – and all types of other things that generally washed over both Jessica and Rowlands. Rowlands wrote it all down, but he might as well have written ‘super special double-locking lock locks that can’t be opened, not even with special fairy dust’ for all the use his notes were going to be.

‘Could someone pick this type of lock?’ Jessica asked.

The locksmith rocked back in his chair, almost spilling the cup of tea he was cradling, and laughed as if Jessica had told a particularly funny joke that no one else got. ‘You’ve been watching too much TV, love.’

‘What about a skeleton key?’ she asked, which brought even more laughter.

‘Look, love,’ said the locksmith. ‘As long as double-glazed doors and windows are fitted correctly and secured properly, it is more or less impossible to break through them.’

Aside from the fact their visit hadn’t really got them anywhere, being called ‘love’ twice in a row was the final straw for Jessica. She and Rowlands said their goodbyes to the locksmith and set off back to the station, Rowlands trying to suppress a smirk.

T
he desk sergeant
pulled Jessica to one side as soon as they arrived back at Longsight. ‘Has anyone told you about what happened in court?’

Harry’s case had been in the back of Jessica’s mind all morning. With so much going on, though, coupled with the fact Harry was still ignoring her, there didn’t seem much she could do. She was supposed to be acting as a prosecution character witness at some point during the proceedings. It was booked into her schedule, but she wasn’t completely sure when her court appearance would be. Most trials were allocated a set number of days or weeks, and both sides had a rough idea what the order would be. Witnesses had to be booked in, whether civilian or professional, but there could sometimes be a day or two’s leeway.

‘I’ve been out,’ Jessica replied.

‘Harry hasn’t turned up. They’ve delayed selecting the jury for now but, if it goes on much longer, the case will be dismissed. Apparently they can get through the first day or two without him, as they have all the photos and the knife and so on but, after that, if there’s no Harry, they don’t have a case.’

Jessica sighed.

‘We’ve sent uniform around to knock on his door but there’s no answer,’ the desk sergeant added. ‘His phone’s off too, so no one knows where he is.’

‘That lawyer is going to be furious.’

Jessica had met with the prosecutor heading up the Crown’s case on a couple of occasions. First, he had visited to ask what she could offer as a character witness for his side, and then he had returned not too long ago to give examples of the types of question he would ask her in court. All officers were trained in court procedure, but this was a case the CPS really wanted to win. Peter Hunt would be claiming Harry was an alcoholic who had started some sort of fight, suggesting that Tom Carpenter had defended himself against a violent drunk.

Jessica wasn’t going to have to lie to refute that. Harry did drink, sometimes more than he could handle, but she had never seen him get aggressive with it. The opposite was true, in fact. He would calm down significantly and start to tell his stories from the ‘old days’. Some of them weren’t very politically correct, and certainly not in keeping with the modern police force, but he knew how to tell a good anecdote. . He’d laugh and mutter to himself, sometimes even hum a few songs.

Jessica knew what she would say on the stand: Harry was a good man and, though she hadn’t been present on this occasion, she didn’t believe he was the type of person to instigate something that would end up with him being stabbed.

None of what she had planned to say would matter, though, if they couldn’t get Harry himself to court.

‘Hunt can’t believe his luck,’ the sergeant added. ‘The guy I spoke to reckons he’s had a huge grin on him all morning. He’s been swanning around like it’s already in the bag.’

‘Any other good news?’

‘The computer system is down again.’

‘
Again
? What’s happened this time? Did someone stop feeding the hamster?’

‘The what?’

‘Y’know, giant hamster wheel, powering the station…? All right, forget it.’ Jessica could see that her humour was obviously not on the same wavelength as her colleague’s. ‘Is our glorious leader the chief inspector around?’

‘Getting ready for the press conference.’

A few years before, somebody had decided the force wasn’t open enough to the general public. The plan had been to get the police to be far friendlier with the media, who would in turn get across a more positive message to the public on their behalf. To do this, some of the ground-floor offices had been knocked through, repainted and reassigned as an area where press conferences could be hosted, or select members of the media be brought in for cosy briefings.

For some reason, that same somebody had called the new room the ‘Longsight Press Pad’. No one really knew what the name was supposed to mean; anyone with any sense would have called it a media or press room. Even the journalists had thought it ridiculous. The whole initiative had been swiftly forgotten, with the police effectively given the green light to go back to treating journalists with the contempt most of them thought they deserved.

Despite that, the name of the room had stuck, almost as a badge to remind people not to be so stupid in the future. That afternoon, the Pad was almost full: DCI Aylesbury sitting in the middle of a table at the front, with the Greater Manchester Police branding across the wall behind him; Cole was on his right, Jessica on his left. It was warm – if only whoever had named the room had spent more time getting air-conditioning installed and less time coming up with a ludicrous title for it.

There were three local television cameras on tripods at the back of the room, blocking the door. If there was a fire in the station they would all no doubt be burnt alive – but at least the cameras would have a good angle on it all. In front of them were around fifteen people: some journalists and some seemingly technical people to deal with the audio and visuals. Jessica recognised a couple of the faces; one or two she had watched on the local television news and another female print journalist she had seen a few times over the years.

In the past, she had never really had cause to speak to the media because there had always been someone above her to do the talking. She didn’t get particularly nervous, but might have dressed up a bit if she had known she was going to be on TV. Either way, Aylesbury was wearing enough make-up for the three of them.

One face she did make a special point of looking out for was that of Garry Ashford. Jessica didn’t know what he looked like but, as everyone had assembled in front of them, she started to narrow down her list of suspects. She ruled out the females and the older male journalist from TV. There were a couple of technical types, which left her with three possible options.

First was a grossly overweight bloke sitting in the front row. She had never seen him before, but he looked as if he was in his early forties. He had short, patchy black hair and blotched skin. He was talking to a much younger female journalist next to him who didn’t seem too interested in making conversation.

Second was a guy in his late twenties, or possibly early thirties. He was tall, good-looking and seemed far too sharply dressed to be a journalist. He was in the second row of seats, sitting behind the station’s press officer, already writing in his notepad and seeming attentive, which was more than the others were doing. If this was Garry Ashford, she might feel guilty about kicking his proverbial arse. Of course, he could be doodling love hearts or swastikas for all she knew.

Suspect number three was sitting at the back and had barely looked up since Jessica had started watching him. He was young, maybe mid-twenties, and had shoulder-length scruffy black hair which stood out against his pasty white skin. She stared closely at him and noticed he was wearing a brown tweed-like jacket with elbow patches.

Tweed? Elbow patches?

He had that kind of look some people seemed to think made them look like a quirky rock star, or tortured writer. It didn’t, in Jessica’s opinion. It made them look like they’d been sleeping rough.

As she compared all three ‘Garry Ashfords’, Jessica hoped this final guy was the real one. She would actually enjoy bullying him.

Aylesbury opened the conference, introducing himself and the other two officers and welcoming everyone present. Without naming names, he criticised ‘uninformed reporting’ and said that any leaks should be properly checked with the station’s press office. Having told the assembled media off, he then effectively confirmed that every detail already reported by the
Herald
was true.

Each journalist had been given a pack with the photos and details the force was happy to release. It included the phone number the public should call if they had any information, as well as the sketch based on the person the neighbour had seen walking past the victim’s house a few times the previous weekend.

Jessica had seen the sketch and didn’t expect any useful leads to come from it. It looked so lacking in detail that it could be anyone. Whoever was manning the phone lines the following day would have a lot of useless information to wade through. A lot of people suspected their neighbours of being mass murderers whenever a composite photo was released to the media.

Aylesbury said that Yvonne Christensen’s husband and son had helped the inquiry but were not suspects, and reinforced the point that the public should feel safe. He made a special instance of looking into the camera to emphasise his words, as if making an Academy Award acceptance speech. He did seem the amateur dramatics type.

After that, he opened the floor to questions. Most of what was asked was simply going over what was already known. The first question came from the obese man at the front, who immediately ruled himself out of Jessica’s list of suspects by saying, ‘Paul Davies,
Bury Citizen
’, before asking something particularly bland.

One down, two to go, she thought.

After a few more questions, the DCI pointed at the hand from the back – suspect number three. The man ruffled his hand through his hair and said, ‘Garry Ashford,
Manchester Morning Herald
. I was wondering why it took the force a full two days to respond to Stephanie Wilson’s concerns about her friend?’

Jessica narrowed her eyes and stared at him.
Got you
, she thought.