Vigilante (3 page)

For now the team would get cracking on a list of people who had a grievance with the victim. Starting with a suspects list of zero was always a big problem. Beginning with a list that would comfortably reach double figures was barely a better result.

Jessica would leave compiling that list to someone else – seniority did have its advantages and she knew just the man for the job: Detective Constable David Rowlands.

THREE

Jessica found Rowlands sitting in the canteen with DC Carrie Jones. Jessica outranked both of them but had great relationships with the pair of constables. Rowlands was cocky and frequently bragged about his female conquests but, underneath all that, Jessica saw him almost as an annoying younger brother who was there for her amusement. She was an only child, so didn’t really know what it was actually like to have a sibling.

Fifteen months ago, Jessica had been involved in the first big case of her career. A complicated trail of murders had ultimately led back to her best friend Caroline’s boyfriend, Randall, who had tried to kill Jessica. She had caught him and he was now secured in a hospital having been deemed unfit to stand trial. He hadn’t spoken a word to anyone since being arrested.

It had been a tough year back at work for Jessica. Given her injuries, both physical and mental, she had been granted leave but wanted to quickly return to the job. Any officers hurt in the line of duty were obliged to undergo counselling sessions and Jessica had gone along with everything asked of her. It had been the support of the two DCs that had really helped her get her mind back on the job.

For one, Rowlands continued to poke fun at her, even when other officers were going out of their way not to say anything that could accidentally upset her. It was that normality which helped her as much as any formal counselling.

Her friendship with Carrie was something that had grown enormously since her return to work. Before they had just been colleagues but now they were firm pals. It was a bitter-sweet friendship however as it had most likely grown because Jessica and Caroline had drifted further and further apart since the incidents of last year. It wasn’t that they had fallen out but they had become different people. They had been friends for all of their adult lives but had gone from living together and talking every day to simply not speaking and seemingly having very little in common. At the time, Caroline had been planning to move in with Randall but, following his arrest, she had ended up moving out of the flat she and Jessica shared and settling into a place on her own.

The two constables were sitting opposite each other at a table with four seats. Jessica sat next to Carrie, who wasn’t eating but cradling a mug of tea, pulling out the chair with a scrape. Both were in their late twenties, although Rowlands was due to turn thirty in a few months – a source of much amusement to Jessica.

‘Is that a new wrinkle around your eye, Dave?’ she asked with a grin.

The man looked up from the food he was eating. ‘Hardee-har-har. You do know you’ll always be those few years older than me, don’t you?’

‘Yeah, but I look younger. No greys either,’ Jessica replied, holding out a few strands of her long dark-blonde hair as if to illustrate her point.

Rowlands was eating some sort of spaghetti concoction but put his fork down and touched his own spiky dark hair. ‘I don’t have any grey hairs.’

‘Only ’cos you dye it,’ chipped in Carrie with a wink to Jessica. DC Jones had a strong Welsh accent. She was short and slim with light blonde hair and a cackling laugh that carried across rooms. Jessica always marvelled at how even her laugh sounded as if it had an accent. She was the type of person that, due to her slight frame, was easily underestimated by people who didn’t know her. She was incredibly sharp though and Jessica liked her a lot.

‘Oh aye. Female union again, is it?’

Jessica and the other woman laughed together. ‘I’ve got a job for you actually,’ Jessica said when things had settled down.

Dave had now finished eating and was fiddling with something stuck between his teeth. ‘It’s something you don’t want to do, isn’t it?’

‘You’re very perceptive in your old age.’

‘Go on then.’

‘The body we found this morning, Craig Millar, he will have annoyed a fair few people…’ The constable rolled his eyes, guessing where the request was heading as Jessica continued. ‘We’ve got a few uniforms on his estate knocking on doors but you know what it’s like around there, people won’t want to be seen talking to us. I want you to put together a file of people who may have had it in for him. It’ll be a big list.’

Rowlands sighed. ‘Didn’t you bring in two brothers this morning?’

‘Yeah. Their flats are being searched as we speak but I’m not convinced we’ll get anything linking them to the actual killing.’

‘When are you expecting results from the scene?’

‘Dunno. Maybe tomorrow for the initial bits? It depends how busy they are with other stuff and what they found.’

‘When do you want the list by?’

‘Tomorrow’s briefing. We’ll go over it then and divide it up among officers so we can start ruling people out.’ He scowled back at her. ‘You’ve gotta be careful screwing your face up like that at your age, Dave. It’ll only add more wrinkles.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Rowlands slid his chair back and stood up. ‘I guess I’m going to have to go get on with this ubiquitous list then.’

Jessica looked at her colleague with a look of bewilderment on her face, while Carrie gave a small laugh. ‘A
what
list?’ Jessica said.

‘Ubiquitous. I figured it’s about time someone around here tried to raise the standard of conversation.’ He was grinning, clearly joking.

‘Can you even spell it?’ Carrie asked.

‘Did you get into a fight with a dictionary or something?’ Jessica added.

‘I figure at least one of us should be well-read.’

‘The only thing you’re well-read in is mucky magazines and pizza menus,’ Jessica snorted. Carrie laughed loudly, the familiar accent clear.

‘You look like you’re pretty good at reading pizza menus yourself,’ Dave replied with a laugh of his own, patting his stomach and pointing at Jessica. He turned around and strolled off still chuckling before anyone could say anything back.

Jessica was mock-outraged and the other woman was clearly trying not to laugh. ‘Cheeky bastard,’ Jessica said.

In the same way that Rowlands wasn’t really going grey or wrinkly, Jessica knew she wasn’t getting fat. It was banter that got them through the days. Jessica turned to face Carrie more directly. ‘So how’s this new bloke of yours then?’ she asked.

The two had forged a good friendship that had been littered with the Welsh detective’s various disasters with boyfriends.

Since an encounter she regretted with one of Randall’s friends and the way things had turned out with Randall himself, Jessica hadn’t had anything that might even begin to count as a boyfriend. Not that she was bothered; the job was what drove her at the moment.

Just recently, it seemed as if Carrie had settled on someone she actually liked. Jessica could tell because, whereas before they would hold regular wine-fuelled inquests into disastrous dates, her friend had stayed pretty quiet about the latest man in her life.

‘He’s okay,’ she replied with a small smile, slightly more quietly than usual.

‘Still don’t want to talk about him, then?’ Jessica didn’t really mind. Her friend would open up when she was ready.

‘Nope.’

‘So what else is going on? Still having problems with the house?’

While a lot of police officers rented places while they were young because they could be moved around or apply for posts with other forces, Carrie's father was insistent that renting was throwing money away. Because of that, her parents put up the money for a deposit on a two-bedroom house where she lived on her own a few minutes’ walk away from the Longsight station. Jessica had stopped over the odd night in the spare room after they had gone out together or following team drinks in the station’s local pub. It was in a great area for getting to and from work but not in a terrific place considering the neighbours.

It wasn’t as rough as the estate where Craig Millar had been killed but it wasn’t too much better. The fact the locals knew she was a police officer just made things worse for her. Bricks had been put through her windows twice in the past year and, while targeting a law-enforcement officer would be an aggravating factor if someone was arrested for the damage, no one had been found.

‘It’s not been too bad. That Mills guy is back out of prison.’

‘How long was he in this time?’

‘Not long. His girlfriend didn’t want to give evidence in the end and they dropped the charges.’

‘Did you really think she would?’

‘No. It’s always the way, isn’t it? Boyfriend smashes up his girlfriend’s face. She calls us when she wants protection then changes her mind the next day. At least it got him out of the area for a few weeks.’

John Mills was somebody else very well-known to the local police officers. He was in his fifties but had a long record of being in and out of custody for various, usually violent, offences. He also happened to live half-a-dozen doors down from Jones after buying two houses and converting them into one much bigger property. A few months ago, Carrie had conducted some research in her own time and shown Jessica that crime rates on the estate where she lived directly correlated to whether Mills was in prison. When he was on the outside, he would have a network of low-level drug dealers working for him and things like burglary rates would go up without fail. It was hard to pin very much on him directly, though. There were always middle men to take the fall, with Mills set up as a legitimate businessman, owning a nightclub in the city centre. It was almost certainly where he laundered money but proving that was something far beyond either of their expertise.

Jessica nodded and the woman continued.

‘She visited him every day. She still stayed at his house and I’d see her driving off to the prison for visiting hours when I wasn’t here. You could still see the bruises on her face. The Crown were relying on her to give evidence but she was spending each day going to check on the guy who beat her up. It’s ridiculous.’

Jessica couldn’t disagree but knew from experience it often happened in instances of domestic violence. So many cases fell apart before they reached trial. Given his violent record, Mills would have been denied bail due to the likelihood of interfering with the one witness but that witness was happily visiting him each day in jail. The system was farcical.

‘Does he actually cause you any direct problems?’

‘Of course not. He wouldn’t dare put himself on the line like that. If he really wanted to get at me, he’d have someone unconnected do it.’

‘That’s how cowards operate.’

Carrie had said nothing at first. There was no specific reason why Mills would target her, other than his hatred of the police. He wasn’t stupid and wouldn’t risk his empire crumbling just for a cheap laugh at the expense of a detective who lived nearby.

‘He still stares…’ DC Jones said quietly. ‘Every time I walk past or anything like that. You can see him in the window or if he’s outside. He stares and watches until I’ve shut my front door.’ She didn’t sound scared but there was something in her voice. Mills obviously intimidated her.

Jessica had seen the man herself. He was perma-tanned with cropped hair, big muscles and an imposing physique two or three times the size of hers. There was no law against watching someone but the intimidation of her friend was hard to accept. They just had to hope the Serious Crime Division, a department Jessica had had issues with in the past, would pull their fingers out and nail him for something.

‘Are you coming out on Friday night then?’ Carrie asked, changing the subject.

‘I don’t know, maybe. You always get the idiots out at the weekend. What do you reckon about that midweek pub quiz Dave’s always going on about?’

‘Yeah, we should go sometime. It sounds like a laugh. We’ll find out how
ubiquitous
his knowledge is.’ Jessica met her eye and both women laughed.

‘The problem is he reckons there’s karaoke afterwards,’ Jessica said.

‘So?’

‘Do you know “karaoke” is the Japanese word for “arsehole”?’

‘Is it?’

‘No but it should be.’ Jessica smiled but, from the look on Carrie’s face, he wasn’t convinced her friend had got the joke. ‘Right, back to work,’ she added, scraping her chair backwards and standing up. ‘Have you got much on?’

‘No, I might go give Dave a hand before he has a proper strop or tries to rope in one of the blondes from uniform to help him out.’

Jessica smiled, knowing full well that was almost certainly the type of thing Dave would be doing at that exact minute.

‘I’ve got some paperwork and bits to go over,’ Jessica said. ‘I want to try to get it out of the way before Craig Millar’s test results come back. I’m hoping it’ll be simple but I’m not going to hold my breath.’

The constable looked at Jessica, squinting slightly with her head held at a sympathetic tilt. ‘Are you going to be all right?’

Jessica hadn’t dealt with a murder case since Randall. She knew what her friend was really asking. ‘I’m fine.’

‘You don’t have to do it all on your own.’

Jessica had missed an opportunity to get help with that case and had almost paid for it with her life.

‘I know.’

There were a few moments of silence before DC Jones lifted the mood by standing up and bounding past Jessica towards the exit. ‘Good. Let me know about Friday, yeah?’

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

After an uneventful two days, Jessica wasn’t in a great mood and still regretting her choice of accommodation. Caroline had moved out of the apartment she shared with Jessica in the Hulme area of Manchester a few weeks after Randall had been arrested and now had her own place at Salford Quays. Jessica had visited a few times and it was very nice but the atmosphere was always awkward between them. They had gone from being able to chat about everything and anything night after night to having nothing to say.

Rent prices in Manchester very much related to the quality of the area you wanted to live in. There were plenty of cheap apartments if you were happy to reside somewhere like Craig Millar did. The road they lived on in Hulme hadn’t been too bad but Jessica had opted for a newer one-bedroom flat in the Didsbury district when she moved. She could have afforded to stay in the old one if she’d wanted but, having nearly been choked to death on her own bed, that was never going to be something she was happy with.