Thicker Than Water (23 page)

The Scene of Crime officer nodded towards her and turned. Jessica stepped carefully along the hallway, being careful not to touch anything, as she was led to the entrance of a toilet at the end.
From the doorway, she could see the unmistakeable shape of Nicholas Long’s body on the floor, a pistol lying next to his hand.

‘He was on his front when we arrived,’ the officer said.

‘Was he suffocated?’

‘Probably.’

Jessica treaded forward gently, glancing from side to side. She saw a chip had been taken out of the sink, a piece of the white ceramic on the floor next to Nicholas’s hand. Jessica
crouched and leant forward to see the contorted look on his face as the officer said ‘steady’ over her shoulder. She looked down at a pool of liquid on the floor she had somehow missed.
All of a sudden the smell hit her and she didn’t need to ask what it was. Jessica stood again, stepping backwards carefully, having seen everything she wanted to. She took no particular
pleasure from viewing the corpse but couldn’t deny there was a definite feeling of satisfaction he couldn’t hurt anyone again. Facedown in a puddle of his own making seemed just about
right too.

Rowlands was hovering uncomfortably next to Cole but Jessica ignored him as she spoke to the DCI. ‘It seems like it’s the same person who killed Oliver and Kayleigh.’

‘Yep.’

‘Can we have a quiet word?’ Jessica glanced sideways at Rowlands to indicate that meant without him. Cole nodded and pushed the door open to the main part of the club, walking across
to the long sofa where Jessica had seen the girls lounging on her first visit to the place.

The red velvet material felt cheap and uncomfortable as Jessica slid in next to the chief constable, before telling him everything she had found out over the past few days from Eleanor,
Leviticus and Ruby. If he was angry, he didn’t show it, instead replying with a simple: ‘So what you’re saying is that we have a few suspects?’

He smiled thinly at her.

‘I’m sorry for going around you.’

Cole scratched his head and laughed slightly. ‘I’m not as out of the loop as you might think.’

‘Oh.’

Jessica waited for him to elaborate but he said nothing, the knowing smile fixed on his face. Jessica broke the silence. ‘Who found him?’

‘The bar manager – Liam someone or other. He’s off being spoken to now. He says he came to open the place up and found his boss where we did, then called us straight
away.’

‘Did you talk to him?’

‘No, we’ll get a statement today, then you can read it through and go back to him tomorrow to see if anything has changed.’

Jessica narrowed her eyes. ‘Are you suspicious of him?’

‘Maybe – he seemed a little too cooperative. Plus we’ve started going through the CCTV and it shows him arriving half an hour before he told us he did.’

‘Perhaps he got the times wrong?’

‘We’ll see. We’ve been talking to this other guy too, the bloke from the front desk.’

Jessica could still remember the way she had confused him by reading the name from his tag as if it were magic. ‘Scott?’

‘Yes, him. He was here when we arrived as well.’

‘Have you seen the CCTV yourself?’

‘I was about to have a look when you arrived.’

The chief inspector turned, beckoning Jessica towards the door that led to Nicholas’s office. Inside, a man was sat behind the large desk, pressing buttons on the computer as the images on
the screen skipped forwards and backwards. Cole introduced Jessica to one of the members from their computer team and told her he was heading back to the station to deal with the media fall-out. He
didn’t even blink when she suggested Rowlands would be better utilised back at the station. Jessica wondered if his comment about ‘not being out of the loop’ extended to more than
what she had been up to in the course of the job.

Before he left, he nodded towards the filing cabinets lining the room. ‘These are all locked,’ he said firmly.

‘Okay . . .’

‘They have to stay that way.’

Jessica hadn’t thought about looking for a key to get into them and wondered why he was telling her before it dawned on her that the Serious Crime Division would be desperate to get to the
contents. Finding a legal way to do that was by no means a certainty and simply helping themselves would likely create more problems than it solved if any of Nicholas’s associates were ever
brought to court.

Jessica didn’t bother asking how he knew they were locked before nodding an acceptance. The other officer stood to offer her his seat and, although she wasn’t usually concerned if
men opened doors and gave up their chairs for her, she didn’t complain.

‘Have you found anything?’ she asked when they were alone.

‘Not really. Obviously the body was found along the hallway but there are no cameras around there.’

‘Life’s not that easy.’

‘Exactly. Anyway, there are four cameras.’ He pointed towards a button on the keyboard which Jessica pressed to flick from one view to the next. Once she had the hang of it, he
talked her through them, although she could see for herself. ‘There’s one outside of the front door pointing at the pavement outside, another in the lobby facing the sofas, a third
above the bar directed at the row of stools, then a final one next door.’

‘In the changing rooms?’

‘Charming, hey?’

Jessica was only half-surprised. Nicholas Long didn’t seem the type to be that bothered about employment laws. She doubted ‘his’ women would report him considering everything
she had heard about the type of person he was.

‘What have you found?’ Jessica asked.

The man directed her through a few screens until she reached a list of file names. ‘These are what I’ve already clipped up, although there isn’t a lot to look at.’

Jessica started the first one from the previous evening, which showed Liam and Scott leaving together, the bar manager securing and checking the door before they headed out towards Albert
Square.

The next showed Nicholas staggering into the reception area, taking money from the till and then falling onto the nearby sofa. He seemed to be struggling for breath, before eventually composing
himself and slowly making his way towards his office after leaning on the bar for support.

‘He doesn’t seem very well there,’ Jessica said, stating the obvious.

‘That was about an hour after the other two left. Watch this bit again.’

He reached across Jessica to scroll the footage back and she watched the door next to the bar snap firmly into place. She knew that you needed to know the code to get through from the bar
side.

‘Did anyone else go through that door afterwards?’

‘No, I’ve checked through the whole night of footage, and the next person to come in was your guy who called it in earlier this afternoon.’

‘So whoever killed him was either hiding in this back area or came in through the fire exit?’

‘I guess so.’

‘They must have really wanted to kill him.’

‘Well, there is one other option . . .’ The officer turned and nodded towards an empty space on the floor. ‘There was a safe there. Your team have already been through it but
the money had gone apparently. It could have been a robbery that went too far.’

It sounded unlikely considering the man had been killed in a similar way to Oliver and Kayleigh, but they could never discount anything.

‘Are there any cameras out back?’ she asked.

‘Not that are linked up to here – you’ll have to get your teams on it. There’ll be some around the square and probably the other streets nearby but whether you’ll
get anything is a different matter.’

Jessica already knew that was true. Many of the cameras struggled to catch anything that wasn’t directly underneath a streetlight, making it easy enough to make your way around undetected
if you really wanted to.

‘Will you feed all of these back to us?’ Jessica asked.

‘Of course but we’ll take everything back to the labs first. Who knows what else we might find?’

Jessica realised that this was exactly the type of opportunity the Serious Crime Division had been waiting for. Now that Nicholas was dead, they would finally be able to poke through a few
things they would not previously have had access to. If they got really lucky, they might be able to implicate one or two other local ‘businessmen’.

As she exited into the hallway, Jessica stopped to watch the officers carefully removing Nicholas’s body through the fire exit. She followed them into the alleyway that ran along the back,
looking up towards the tops of the buildings around to see if there were any CCTV cameras. There weren’t, leaving them with the question of how the killer got in. The obvious answer was that
someone who worked there had left the fire door open, ready to either return themselves later, or for someone else to do the deed.

Jessica peered at the door, concluding it was pretty much like any other fire exit she had ever seen. It had a metal bar that ran horizontally across the centre, with another connecting
vertically.

‘I’ve not touched it,’ Jessica said defensively as she saw one of the officers returning.

The man grinned an acceptance. ‘I never said you had but you’re thinking it must have been left open, aren’t you?’

Jessica stared quizzically at him. ‘Yes . . .’

‘That’s not strictly true, look.’ The officer pulled on a pair of blue latex gloves and pushed the door shut. ‘You think we’re locked out now, don’t
you?’

Jessica accepted a pair of gloves from the man and put them on, stepping closer to the door. There was no handle on the outside; instead she ran her hands around the grooves between the door and
the frame, wondering if they were wide enough to push her fingers into. She checked the hinges but the screws were on the inside, then stepped back, shaking her head. ‘Go on.’

The man began moving along the alley away from her, before stopping to pick up something from the floor. He walked back towards Jessica and showed her the object. ‘This is some sort of
roof slate. I promise you I didn’t plant this. Hopefully it works now.’

He crouched and pushed the slate in between the bottom of the door and floor. He wiggled it gently at first then, after seemingly finding a spot he was happy with, stepped back and kicked it
hard. To Jessica’s amazement, the door popped open. The man bent back down and picked up the slate, tossing it behind him.

‘How did you do that?’ Jessica asked.

‘It only works on old-fashioned fire exits. It would never work nowadays.’ He pointed at the vertical metal pole connected to the door. ‘What happens usually is that when you
press down on the horizontal bar, it lifts this vertical one out of the ground so the door springs open. If you know what you’re doing, you can make the same thing happen by popping something
hard but flat into the groove at the bottom of this pole.’

Jessica stared at him, open-mouthed. ‘All this time and I never knew that.’

‘No reason you should.’ The man shrugged. ‘I guess it depends where you grew up. Some kid at school showed me it years ago. We used to go into the locked classroom at
lunchtimes and move our teacher’s things around. She could never figure out what was going on.’ The man suddenly seemed embarrassed. ‘I was only a kid.’

Jessica grinned. ‘Fair enough, who would have thought you’d now be putting that knowledge to good use?’

As she walked towards Albert Square, she thought that what she had just been shown put a new slant on things. Previously she had assumed someone who worked there must have been responsible,
directly or not. This meant it really could be anyone.

As she left the alley to head for her car, Jessica could hear a commotion. To her right, towards the front entrance to the club, there were half-a-dozen police officers standing side by side in
front of a line of police tape, their arms stretched out wide. Next to them was someone holding a video camera but it was the group of young men standing on the other side of the road who were the
obvious concern.

A riot van skidded to a halt not far from where she was standing, officers pouring out of the back and dashing towards the scene. The young men were all wearing black, some with bandanas tied
across their faces. Jessica came as close as she dared and could feel the tension in the air, with threats and abuse being shouted across the street.

As the riot squad lined up with their shields and helmets, the person with the video camera started running towards her, their gear making it clear they were from a television news channel.
Jessica started edging towards her car as the stand-off continued: the police on one side of the road, the youths on the other.

As the cameraman slowed close to Jessica, a woman she recognised as a local news presenter came from somewhere behind her and stopped next to the man.

‘Did you get it?’ Jessica heard her ask.

Before the cameraman could reply, Jessica interrupted. ‘What’s going on?’

The presenter replied, ‘You police?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Have you been inside?’

‘What’s it to you?’

The woman smiled and nudged her colleague, who was looking into the viewfinder with the camera pointed at the floor. ‘How about we tell you what we’ve got and you tell us what you
saw.’

‘I’m not talking on camera.’

The presenter exchanged a look with her colleague. ‘Fine, as long as we can still quote an unnamed source.’

The two women stared at each other, waiting for the other to go first. Jessica could hear the noise of the confrontation growing louder. ‘All right, fine,’ she replied, giving the
briefest of details about what she had seen inside the club, omitting everything about suffocation, guns, stolen money, or fire exits that weren’t as secure as they first seemed.

The presenter seemed happy to have confirmation of the death. ‘So Nicholas Long is definitely dead?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

She looked at the cameraman. ‘All right, fine, show her.’ As the man turned the camera around so Jessica could see the digital screen, the woman continued, ‘There’s been
all sorts of stuff on the Internet this morning that he was dead. One of our producers grew up on Moss Side and he said he’d heard chatter this morning.’