Vigilante (24 page)

Jessica reached into one of the envelopes she was carrying and took out a clipping from the previous week’s newspaper. Originally it had been a story about Carrie’s death but at the bottom of the page had been a photograph of DCI Farraday that was taken at a press conference. Jessica had cut the photo out without its caption so it wasn’t obvious who the image was of. She handed it over to Dennis. ‘Do you know if this man has ever visited here? Maybe in the past six months or so?’

Dennis took the picture and looked at it, narrowing his eyes and then pushing out his bottom lip. ‘He sort of seems familiar but I wouldn’t want to say for sure. I can ask around if you want?’

‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you my number.’

She didn’t want to give him an official card so instead wrote her mobile number on the back of the picture. ‘Can you try to be discreet. Only call me if someone’s sure they’ve seen this person. It doesn’t really help if people aren’t one hundred per cent certain.’

Dennis nodded nervously at her.

Jessica left the reception for the second time in a few minutes and headed back to the car. She knew it was a gamble but thought of Carrie’s mother and the funeral she had been at the previous day. She wanted a result for them. If news did somehow make its way back to the chief inspector she would simply say Dennis had misunderstood what she asked him to do. She doubted the man would end up reporting anything though. Cole had been right on their first visit and the man’s nervousness had given him away; he definitely had a thing for her. Jessica hoped he didn’t follow it up by calling her for no reason.

As she was approaching her car, Jessica took her phone out to turn the volume back up having muted it for the visit. She had a few unimportant emails but also a missed call and another text message from Adam. She thought about deleting it but out of pure curiosity she clicked to open it.

‘Call me pls. Urgent. Not abt us.’

Jessica had reached the car but didn’t open the door to get in. She didn’t particularly want to talk to him but the way he had worded the message was different to the others he had sent. Jessica ducked to look through the car’s window and catch Cole’s eye. She pointed to her phone to let him know she had to make a call. He nodded and she turned around, leaning back on the car before dialling Adam’s number.

He answered after one ring. ‘Hello?’

‘Hi, Adam.’

‘Oh God, look, um, thanks for calling.’ Jessica hoped she hadn’t been duped into contacting him for personal reasons. She knew it was all her fault but couldn’t face things just yet. He soon told her the reason for calling. ‘I’ve not told my boss yet, Jess, but I think I’ve got something. I’ve tested and re-tested all morning. I think Donald McKenna has a sister.’

TWENTY-NINE

Jessica felt an enormous sense of familiarity as it had only been a day ago she’d had a phone conversation where she couldn’t quite take in what she was being told. ‘I’m sorry, what?’

‘A sister. I know there’s nothing in his birth records or anything like that but there’s something not right here.’

‘Are you at Bradford Park?’

‘Yes.’

‘We’re coming over.’ Jessica hung up and quickly got in the car, telling Cole they had to go to the laboratories. When he asked why, she said she wasn’t completely sure but something big was happening.

She knew from experience the inspector was a steady driver but tried to stay patient during the journey across the city. Jessica had seen the records herself which all said Donald McKenna was an only child. An officer had even photocopied his birth certificate and related family documents from the local register office and they knew there were no other known relatives. The idea of him having a sister was barely believable.

Eventually they pulled into the labs’ car park and Jessica dashed into reception, Cole lagging behind. Her haste didn’t do her any good as they had to wait for someone to lead them through to the lab areas anyway. They were greeted by a woman Jessica didn’t know and Adam, who nervously kept his eyes on the floor. She introduced herself as the head scientist for the facility and knew Jessica because they had talked on the phone. She led them into a small office where the four of them sat around a table.

‘I know why you’re here,’ the woman said, ‘but I should tell you we don’t have one hundred per cent confirmation for you yet. I think Adam should be able to fill you in.’

Adam looked at Cole and his boss but refused to acknowledge Jessica. She didn’t blame him but hung on everything he said. ‘We had a routine request come in this morning from the Avon and Somerset Police force. They arrested a woman in Bristol last week on suspicion of grievous bodily harm. Because of the severity of the incident she was remanded but in the meantime they logged her swab onto the National DNA Database. That’s all completely normal but what happens on the system is that it links together family members.’

His boss cut in. ‘The reason it does that is if we go to a scene and get a blood sample or something like that, we might not find an exact match for it in the database because the person has no criminal record. But we could end up with something like a fifty per cent match which would indicate the culprit was a parent or sibling of someone we already had registered.’

‘That’s pretty clever,’ Cole said. ‘So even if you don’t have the person on your system you can tell if they’re related?’

‘Right,’ said the woman. ‘Sorry, Adam, you tell them.’ Jessica said nothing, eagerly waiting to hear what they had found.

‘After they logged the DNA, it gave them a quarter match to Donald McKenna, which might mean this woman was his half-sister or aunt or niece or something like that. Because Mr McKenna has no known relatives, they called this morning to say it looked like there might be a mistake on the system. It wouldn’t usually happen but an error like that would be so rare the guy down there thought he would check.’

The female scientist cut in again. ‘With the notoriety of McKenna at the moment, Adam did a full retest on the sample and passed it back through to the Bristol labs where they confirmed it. This woman is definitely related to him.’

‘Do we know how?’ Jessica asked.

‘I don’t want to baffle you all with science but we check something called “mitochondrial DNA”,’ the woman said. ‘This is only inherited from your mother and is how you can follow a family line backwards. Through looking at that, we know McKenna and the woman in Bristol are half-siblings and have the same mother but different fathers.’

‘Does that mean this woman could be responsible for the murders up here?’ Jessica asked.

‘No, it’s not as simple as that,’ the lab manager answered. ‘We know this woman is related but, at the same time, her sample is still different to her half-brother’s. It’s only a partial match.’

‘Has anyone told this woman or asked her if she knows McKenna?’ Cole asked.

‘I can’t tell you if she already knows but, from our end, the only people aware are us and the Bristol lab.’

‘Good work,’ Jessica said.

‘It’s Adam you should thank,’ his boss replied. ‘He was the one who spotted it. We have one final round of testing to do but you’ll have confirmation one way or the other by the end of the day.’

Adam kept his head down as Cole congratulated him and Jessica made sure she spoke at the exact same time as her boss so her words would be drowned out.

‘While we’re here,’ Jessica said, ‘is this where McKenna’s phone was brought?’

‘Yes and no,’ replied the female scientist. ‘It is this building but on a different floor. I can take you up if you want?’

Jessica was relieved that Adam stayed behind as the woman led them upstairs towards a department that worked with electronics. They didn’t get anything new from the people who had been testing the phone though. The expert said they had only been able to extract the numbers that had been stored in the phone book, which they already had. As far as they could tell it had never called a different number, had never received a call and no text messages had either been sent or opened.

Pretty much the only thing it did tell them was that, whatever was happening, it was likely McKenna was calling the shots in one way or another as people weren’t calling him, he was phoning them.

Back at the station, Jessica was looking forward to telling Farraday what had happened. Cole did the speaking but Jessica didn’t take her eyes from the DCI. She wondered if he already knew about McKenna’s sister and if she was somehow connected to everything that was going on. If he did know, or if he was surprised, he showed no emotion at all.

Having already spent large parts of one day on a train to Wales that week, Jessica had another journey to Bristol, this time with Cole. Neither of them were big on small talk and Jessica spent the trip flicking through a magazine and reading Internet sites on her phone. She had half-expected either Adam or Dennis to message her the night before but there had been no contact. For the second evening running she felt confident enough not to watch the chief inspector’s house and had another uninterrupted night of sleep.

After their train arrived at the station, they caught a taxi from the rank outside but the driver didn’t know where he was going. Jessica checked the papers she had printed out the night before and told him the prison they were looking for was next to a village called ‘Falfield’ north of the city.

Eastwood Park Prison was about as different to Manchester’s as Jessica could have imagined. The one in the north handled 1,300 of the most serious male offenders with the one McKenna’s half-sister was at held holding 350 lower-risk females. Strangeways was full of heavy metal doors and cells that stretched three storeys high but the building Jessica and Cole were shown into had a mixture of one- and two-storey rooms and everything was decorated in more delicate cream and red colours.

Back at Manchester, even when the wing had been cleared for her to look at McKenna’s cell, Jessica had felt an air of menace that wasn’t present at the women’s prison. She didn’t doubt there were still plenty of unsavoury things that went on behind closed doors but thought the atmosphere was more geared towards education and rehabilitation than it was where McKenna was based.

The governor greeted them both at the entrance of the prison and was far cheerier than the one at Strangeways. The previous evening, Cole had established the prisoner’s name was Mary O’Connor and spoke to the governor, assuring him the woman wasn’t suspected of any further crime but that they wanted to speak to her as a potential witness.

On arrival, they first went to the governor’s office where they explained to him their situation and said there was a good chance Mary might not know she had a brother. It was good practice given as the man’s staff would have to deal with the prisoner once they had left.

He led them through to an empty visiting room and Mary O’Connor was brought through uncuffed and sat opposite them. Two prison guards stood close enough to act if there were any problems but far enough away so they weren’t in earshot. Jessica introduced herself and DI Cole and explained they had travelled down from Manchester to see her.

The woman had long black hair with grey strands around her ears. Facially she wasn’t similar to McKenna but Jessica could see her light blue eyes were identical; they must have inherited them from their mother. The colour seemed familiar to Jessica in another way too but she couldn’t place them.

Jessica checked the woman’s name and then her age. ‘What I’ve got to say may or may not come as a shock to you, Mary,’ Jessica said. ‘But do you know you have a brother?’

The woman smiled at them. ‘Not me, you must be thinking of another Mary O’Connor. I was brought up on my own and my ma and dad died years ago.’

‘I’m sorry, Mary, but we’re not telling you this because of your name, it’s because of the mouth swab you gave when you were arrested. I don’t want to make it too complicated but basically that sample was matched to someone else in prison and it shows you’re related as you have the same mother.’

Mary’s smile had begun to slip as Jessica spoke and her expression was now a look of pure puzzlement. She had an accent that was hard to place. There was definitely a twinge of Irish but something from the local area too. ‘Is he younger or older than me?’

‘Younger by a couple of years.’

‘See, that’s why it must be a mistake. My ma couldn’t have children after me. She always told me they wanted to have a big family but there was some medical problem so I ended up on my own.’

‘I can’t tell you whether what you were told was right or not, Mary, but these tests aren’t wrong. I know it’s a bit scientific but we brought these papers down for you.’

Jessica reached into an envelope and pushed some sheets across the table. She had looked over them herself on the train. The language wasn’t the clearest but even from the graphics you could see that whatever it was displaying matched the other part. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t read well,’ the woman said. Jessica told Mary the man’s name was Donald McKenna and did her best to show her the parts of the chart she should be looking at but felt hampered as she wasn’t completely certain either.

The woman rubbed her head and grimaced. ‘If this is right, what are you saying? That my mum is his mum?’

‘Well, that’s partly why we’re here, we don’t know. We have a copy of Mr McKenna’s birth certificate and wondered if we could compare it to yours?’

‘You’ll do well, I’ve never had one.’

Jessica looked to Cole and back again. ‘How is that possible?’

‘My ma and dad were travellers and we moved around a lot. There was always some kind of work. Usually you’d get married in the community but they died before I was an adult and it wasn’t the life for me. I ended up settling around this area.’

‘But how did you get work, a passport or driving licence?’

‘Never had a passport or driving licence but I did get a national insurance number. I don’t know if it’s easier now but I got passed from agency to agency back then. Eventually someone was given my case and sorted it out. They told me it’s not completely uncommon for traveller children to be unregistered and reckoned they get three or four every year. It didn’t stop them arsing me about for a couple of years but I ended up with a number that lets me work. I still don’t have a birth certificate though.’

Mary looked as if it was a story she was familiar with telling. Given the employers, councils and other organisations that would have asked the question over the years, it wasn’t surprising.

‘That’s mad,’ Jessica said.

‘You’re telling me. I’ve had to put up with this all my life.’

A possibility was occurring to Jessica. ‘Mary, can I ask you something personal?’

The woman looked back at her. ‘I think you’re going to ask me something I’ve had in the back of my mind for the past fifty-odd years.’

‘Do you think there’s a chance your parents weren’t actually
your
parents?’

Tears suddenly formed in the prisoner’s eyes and Jessica felt guilty for asking it. Given she was locked up, Mary was about as calm an inmate as Jessica had ever met. She found herself wondering how on earth this mild person in front of her had assaulted someone seriously enough to end up here. Jessica motioned for one of the guards, who picked up some tissues from one of the other tables and brought them over. Mary took one and blew her nose. ‘I guess it would answer a lot of questions,’ she finally said through the tears.

‘The problem is, Mary, that Mr McKenna’s mother has also passed away and there’s no father listed on his birth certificate. Without your parents, the way I understand it is that we have no way of knowing whether you and he shared “your” mother or “his” mother. All we know is that you definitely had different fathers. Your dad could well still be your own.’

‘So you’re saying that, one way or the other, either my ma or my dad was definitely not mine? Either my dad went with his ma or my ma went with someone else?’

Jessica took a deep breath, trying not to look confused. ‘I think so, yes. I’m sorry.’

The woman had tears in her eyes again. ‘Does my brother know?’

‘Not yet, no.’

‘Why is he in prison?’

‘An armed robbery. He’s serving life.’

Mary looked down at herself and flung her arm into the air. ‘I guess we have something in common straight away. It must run in the family.’ Jessica said nothing. The woman carried on sniffing. ‘Do you think there’s any way they would let us meet?’

Jessica felt out of her depth, not knowing the answer. ‘I don’t know how these things work. You’re on remand here, I guess some of it depends on what happens at your trial.’

The woman leant back on her seat, wiping away more tears. ‘Not gonna be a trial, m’dear. I’m pleading guilty.’

With little more they could get from the woman, they said their goodbyes and one of the prison officers gave them a lift back to the train station.