Crossing the Line (Kerry Wilkinson) (35 page)

entire length of her arms, which were like sticks. Her eyes had shrunk because of the sagginess of her

skin and her hair was so thin and spindly that it was like the wire wool that sat under the sink unused

in Jessica’s house. The past eighteen months had hit Jessica hard but it’d had an effect on her mother

too.

Jessica fixed her eyes on the screen; it was one of the other reasons she hated visiting – it was so

hard to see the person who had brought her up in a state like this. She knew that made her a horrible

person but it didn’t mean she could push back those feelings.

Her mum nodded towards the television. ‘Reykjavik.’

On the screen, the man answered ‘Helsinki’ as his final answer.

‘It’s Reykjavik, you idiot.’

The presenter informed the disappointed contestant that the capital of Iceland was indeed

Reykjavik, not Helsinki, and that he’d just lost sixteen thousand pounds.

‘Buffoon,’ Jessica’s mother said.

‘How are you, Mum?’

Lydia’s eyes didn’t leave the screen. ‘Oh, now you want to visit me, do you? I’ve been trying to

call you for weeks.’

‘I’ve been busy. It’s been on the news all the time – first the guy in the mask attacking people, then

the missing kids. I’ve hardly stopped.’

Her mum wasn’t buying it. ‘So you never get a day off? I’m only up the road. Adam finds time to

call me and say hello.’

Of course he bloody does.

‘Okay, Mum, can we agree that I’m a bad daughter and have a conversation about how we’re both

doing before it’s time for me to go again?’

‘Brian Jones.’

‘Sorry?’

Jessica’s mother nodded at the screen. ‘Founding member of the Rolling Stones. This idiot thinks

it’s Bill Wyman.’

‘I thought Bill Wyman founded the Rolling Stones.’

Lydia peered at her daughter with a didn’t-I-teach-you-anything? look. Sure enough, the answer

was Brian Jones.

‘Can I turn the telly off, Mum? I can’t stay all evening and we’re never going to have time to talk

about anything.’

‘I like having it on.’

‘Can I at least turn the sound off?’

‘Fine.’ Jessica stood to pick up the remote control, leaning across to the windowsill. When she sat,

her mother was watching her disapprovingly again. ‘What?’

‘You’re getting very thin. Are you eating properly?’

‘I’m eating fine, Mum. I’m just busy.’

‘All right, no need to snap.’

Jessica took a breath. She
wasn’t
snapping but she bloody well would be if this carried on for

much longer. Every time they had a conversation where Adam wasn’t present, this is what it ended up

like. Adam was the calmest of all influences. Quite how he’d been so awkward around girls when

she’d first met him, Jessica had no idea, considering how he always seemingly knew the right thing to

say.

‘How have you been?’ Jessica asked, calmly.

‘Not too bad – I’ve taken up cross-stitching.’ Her mum pointed towards a canvas on the bed with a

partially completed fabric house. Jessica crossed the room and picked it up, unsurprised by how

perfect and neat it was. ‘I was watching a documentary the other week.’

Oh God, not this again.

‘It was about women who couldn’t have babies – some new treatment thing they’ve been working

on.’

Please stop.

‘They had this woman on whose doctor said she couldn’t have a baby. There was this operation

and then she was on these tablets and it happened within a month. They kept saying it was a miracle.’

Jessica continued staring at the cross-stitch frame. This was precisely why she didn’t come.

‘They say it’s going to be available for wider testing this year. I wrote down the name of it.’

‘I saw that too,’ Jessica lied. ‘I called our doctor the day afterwards but he says we’ve got different

conditions, so it would never work on me.’

She might be a terrible liar sometimes, but she was terrific at others.

Her mother had been trying to get out of the rocking chair again but pushed herself back,

disappointed. Jessica had no doubt this was why she’d spent the last fortnight trying to get in contact.

‘Have you and Adam still been . . .’

Jessica cringed, thinking her mother was actually going to say the word but she thankfully stopped

herself.

‘Everything’s fine, Mum. We’re relaxed about things. The doctor says there’s no chance of me

getting pregnant but if it ever happens, then it happens. I promise, if there’s ever any change, I’ll call you first.’

‘All right, no need to snap, I was only trying to help.’

Grr.

Jessica sat on the bed, listening to her mum give her the lowdown on everyone who lived around

the home. There seemed to be two classes of people – the ‘idiots’, of which Walter and Brian were

full members, and those her mum called ‘lovely’. With no apparent middle ground, Jessica’s mother’s

mind was made up about everyone.

A few tactical ‘uh-huh’s were enough to make it seem as if Jessica was listening, when really she

had completed a couple of stitches on her mother’s house which didn’t look
too
dissimilar to the others. She was half-watching the muted television thinking that if the object of the show was to know

absolutely nothing, then this contestant was going to win a fortune.

‘What do you think of that?’

Jessica jolted back into the room. ‘Yeah, really interesting.’

‘That’s what I thought. I mean Irene’s always going on about what a saint her son is but the

grandchild could be anyone’s. What does that tell you?’

Jessica was halfway through a non-committal ‘I know’, before she stopped herself. ‘Sorry, what

did you say?’

‘I was saying that you hear all sorts around here. Irene walks around like butter wouldn’t melt but

then Joyce told me all about her son’s little secret. I mean, you’ve got to think of the kids in all this, haven’t you? If he knows his wife’s been going around doing all sorts, then you’ve got to be a brave

type to raise someone else’s child.’

‘I . . . yeah.’

Jessica reached into her pocket and took out the piece of paper with Beverley Marsh’s name and

workplace on it, reading the words over and over until she’d convinced herself. She spent ten minutes

saying goodbye as her mum piled on the guilt about finally coming over and then not staying for very

long. Jessica eventually got out of the front door and called Izzy, asking the constable if she fancied

meeting her at the station for a bit of Sunday-night digging.

37

Three minutes past two in the ridiculously early hours of Monday morning and they had it. There was

no shame in missing the link from Luke Callaghan to Alan Hume to Victor Todd to Humphrey Marsh.

All shits, all cheaters, all with one thing in common: they were normal. In the end, it had taken

Jessica’s gossiping mother to make her see it.

‘
You hear all sorts around here.
’

Unsurprisingly, Izzy knew the theory. Stanley Milgram was a New York scientist famous for his

electrocution experiment in which test subjects were instructed to give shocks to other people who

answered questions incorrectly. The shocks got increasingly harsher until they were effectively killing

the person on the other side of the machine. It was a test that apparently showed the perils of

obedience – something of which Jessica could never be accused.

Jessica had heard of that test but what she’d never known was that he was also responsible for the

theory of six degrees of separation – the idea that any one person could be linked to anyone else on

the planet within six steps. He’d called it the small-world phenomenon.

And that was the biggest problem they’d had in trying to connect the four victims: anyone could be

connected to anyone else if they looked hard enough – but how deep can you go? The only reason they

had any idea who might be responsible for the attacks was that their hoody had finally gone for

someone connected
too
closely.

Humphrey Marsh was married to Beverley Marsh, who worked at the St Trinity Hospice in

Swinton. It was barely a mile from Jessica’s house.

Victor Todd had a child with someone whose grandmother worked at the same hospice.

The mother of one of Alan Hume’s current tenants was a patient at St Trinity Hospice.

Luke Callaghan was married to Debbie Callaghan, whose next-door neighbour’s late father had

lived at the hospice. Debbie had even told Jessica that her friend had recently lost her father.

All four were tenuous connections but Beverley had told Jessica the only people she spoke to were

her friend Paula and a couple of the others from work. Whoever their attacker was had to be someone

connected – a male who worked there, someone’s husband, a caretaker, cleaner . . . someone who

wanted to humiliate those who had been causing misery for other people connected to the hospice. It

even explained the reduction in violence; the goal was never to kill anyone but the attack on Luke had

gone too far with his blinding.

They knew roughly the type of male they were looking for, including the height and build. Although

they had the ‘where’, the best way they could get the ‘who’ was to visit the hospice in clothes that

didn’t make them look too obviously like police officers and have a poke around. They’d have to

inform the manager but nobody else, or else risk alerting the person they were looking for.

As the members of the night crew looked on, confused, Jessica and Izzy exchanged mutual yawns

and quick hugs, and then away they went – home to get some sleep.

Barely six hours later and Jessica was out of bed, yawning for England. She called Cole to let him

know she was close to closing a case but that she needed Izzy. He probably suspected that she simply

wanted to be away from the station when the news cameras returned for another day of round-the-

clock broadcasting. He wasn’t wrong – but he didn’t object.

Jessica met Izzy at the bus stop outside the hospice a little before nine in the morning, both dressed

down in jeans and jumpers. Add a waterproof coat and that was the unofficial uniform of the north.

With the minimal amount of detective work – waiting to see who parked in the manager’s space –

Jessica and Izzy showed their identification and explained that they needed access to the staff records.

The manager was a tall, suited man with too-shiny shoes and an officious manner who blathered on

about the data protection act. Jessica pointed out that a lot of the people here were very poorly and

the last thing they needed was a full-on search team with a warrant, heavy boots and loud, shouty

voices. Put like that, the manager decided she was right and let them into his office, logging them onto the computer and showing them which filing cabinet had the hard copies in.

‘Can I ask what exactly it is you’re investigating?’ he asked nervously, slightly loosening his tie.

Jessica shook her head. ‘We can’t divulge that but it would be really useful to have a tour of your

premises.’

She left Izzy hunting through the computer records as the manager led her into the main area of the

hospice. It was a strange mix of the residential home where her mother lived and a hospital. Some of

the rooms were almost like her mother’s bedroom – televisions, dressing tables, homely rugs,

wardrobes – others were whitewashed, equipped with drips and breathing equipment.

Jessica didn’t know what to make of it. Everywhere she went there were people who looked as ill

as anyone she’d ever seen. Working in uniform, you became used to meeting people who couldn’t

look after themselves – you became used to that degree of sickness, but what was around her almost

needed a new word. The greyness in people’s skin, the struggle some were having to lift their arms,

let alone do anything else. If she hadn’t visited, she would have assumed somewhere like this would

be full of older people but it wasn’t like that at all. She found herself looking into the faces of people her age – younger – wondering what was wrong with them. It felt wrong to be here, imposing upon

their final few months, weeks and days under a false pretence.

‘It’s hard, isn’t it?’ the manager said as he and Jessica took a seat in the dining room.

‘I didn’t think it would be like this.’

‘Now do you mind if I ask why you’re here?’

A few tables away, one of the nurses was feeding porridge to a patient with a spoon, like a mother

with a child. Jessica felt awful for bullying him into letting them into the private records. The thought of ever bringing a search team here – warrant, heavy boots, shouty voices – now appalled her. Why

couldn’t she keep her mouth shut sometimes?

‘We’ve linked a few crimes to people who might have connections here. I really can’t tell you too

much more than that. Hopefully my colleague is ruling out as many people as possible.’

‘Is it someone who works here? Everyone is fully CRB-checked and there are rigorous interviews.

I’m always thorough before I hire anyone.’

‘We’re really not sure.’

‘Is there anything I can help you with?’

Jessica had to make a judgement: the manager would have as much knowledge as anyone about the

people who worked here. He was too tall to be their hoody but that didn’t mean he hadn’t spoken to

someone about the issues around the workplace who had then talked to someone else. That was their

entire problem in the first place: too many degrees of separation.

‘How much do you know about Beverley Marsh?’