Scarred for Life (19 page)

Jessica couldn’t stop herself from grinning as the solicitor caught her eye. ‘You did tell him we don’t do deals, didn’t you?’ she said.

The solicitor let himself into the room and closed the door behind him, taking a seat on the edge of the empty desk. His suit was a fraction too big for him and he looked as if he could do with a good night’s sleep.

‘Are we all right to talk in here?’ he mumbled.

Jessica shrugged. ‘I’m not being bugged by MI5 if that’s what you’re asking. Well, not that I know of.’ She peered up to the corners of the room, wondering.

He glanced towards Izzy. ‘Off the record?’

‘Whatever you want,’ Jessica said. ‘Sergeant Diamond is sound. Well, she’s a bit slow at getting out of cars when there’s a chase on but she’s fine apart from that.’

Izzy scowled. ‘Hey!’

The solicitor perked up, lowering his voice and grinning in a way that didn’t suit him. ‘You really know how to find them around here, don’t you? I’ve been looking to do some work up in Lancashire because they only get half the wankers you get down here.’

‘Is that your professional legal opinion?’

‘Something like that. Anyway, Mr, er, Harrison—’

‘Bones.’

‘Yes, him. He claims to have information about the death of Damon Potter. He won’t tell me what it is, so it’s not that I can even give you a steer . . . not that I would . . .’

‘I get it,’ Jessica replied. ‘Did you tell him we don’t do deals?’

‘I told him, but he’s seen it on television.’

‘So what? Godzilla was stomping around New York City on television the other week; it doesn’t mean it’s true.’

‘You know that and I know that – but he’s insistent.’

‘Tell him to sod off – he held up four off-licences with a knife and we found the money at his house. Then he went on the run and left me doubled over like someone twice my age. Believe it or not, I don’t have that much sympathy for anyone that makes me run, especially not in this weather. I could’ve ended up on my arse – did he think of that?’

Another grin flickered across the solicitor’s face before disappearing again. ‘It doesn’t matter to me what he knows and what he doesn’t. He knows you’ve got him bang to rights and he’ll probably tell you as much. He’s hardly the shy and retiring type. I’m trying to help you – if you can give him something, anything, he’ll tell you what he knows. Either way, he knows he’s going down for this, he just wants an olive branch.’

Jessica sighed and exchanged a brief glance with Izzy. Bloody TV shows and the bloody idiots that watch them. ‘I could probably swing it for him to get a Twix? Perhaps a KitKat? That would even be out of my own pocket – and you know what’s happening to the price of chocolate nowadays. In my day you could get a Freddo for ten pence. They’re probably a quid now.’

The solicitor shook his head. ‘Perhaps if I bring him up in fifteen minutes, you might be able to think of something?’

Jessica thanked him for the tip and then waited for him to leave before turning to Izzy. ‘Any ideas?’

Izzy screwed up her bottom lip. ‘Actually I do . . . but I’m not sure you’re going to like it . . .’

Jessica sat on one side of the interview room with Izzy, watching Bones on the other next to his solicitor. He glared down at the Twix and KitKat and then glanced sideways. ‘I’m not telling them for that.’

‘Bollocks.’ Jessica swept the chocolate bars off the table and pocketed them. ‘So what do you want, Mr, er, Bones?’

Bones nodded at the solicitor. ‘I told ’im – I want a reduction in whatever sentence I’m going to get.’

‘How about half a mil in used notes and forty virgins in your cell too?’

‘Really?’

‘No, of course not really!’

With his piercings removed, it was hard for Jessica to look anywhere other than Bones’ hanging flap of skin and large round hole through his nose. It was as if he had an extra nostril. She sighed and leant back in her seat. ‘Look, whatever sentence you get is nothing to do with us. We investigate, we hand the evidence over to the Crown Prosecution Service, they take you to court, we might give evidence, and then a jury decides if you’re guilty. It sounds as if you’re going to confess, so it won’t even get that far. A judge will give you a sentence, then they’ll give you a third off for pleading guilty. That’s it – if I’m really lucky, I’ll be sunning myself on a beach by then.’

‘There must be something you can do?’

Jessica glanced at Izzy. Always with the clever ideas.

‘All right – first, you tell us everything about the robberies, and then I’ll see what I can do before we discuss anything you might or might not know about Damon Potter.’

Bones looked at his solicitor, who gave a small nod, and then he was away, regaling them with the shoddy financial situation of his business. He’d come up with the idea of the temporary tattoo and, at least for a while, thought he’d got away with it. He’d been caught out by the Manchester rain, of course.

With his shop leaking money, his main point of contention was he didn’t want to prove his mum correct by having to shut it down. Apparently, she’d always said he was going to be a failure, and going out of business would show she was right. Quite what she’d think about having a son in prison for a series of knife robberies wasn’t exactly certain. The truth was, they didn’t need his confession because they had all the necessary evidence, but it did make things a little clearer. Jessica clarified a few details of the timings and dates, plus queried what had happened to the small amount of cash they hadn’t accounted for – ‘I spent it, dint I?’ – and then that was one more case officially moved from the unsolved side of the whiteboard to the solved side. Well, if anyone could be bothered to find the pen.

Jessica terminated the interview, stopped the tape and waited until the recording light on the video camera in the top corner of the room had gone off, which she pointed out to Bones.

‘Why have you done that?’ he asked.

‘Because there’s one thing we didn’t mention in interview. We can either include it in our reports, or selectively leave it off. DS Diamond here has a shocking memory and I’m not much better. That whole incident with you running off and hiding for a few days, not to mention scarpering this morning, could be conveniently omitted from our paperwork – or it could be written in big fat red capital letters. You might think that doesn’t mean much but judges take a very dim view of people who try to evade justice. If we can drag them out of the lunch room for long enough, they tend to plonk another six months or so onto a sentence for things like that.’

Bones scratched the hole in his nose and glanced at his solicitor, who nodded a fraction. ‘It’s not necessarily six months,’ he said, ‘but you’d likely get something. Plus it stays on your record forever. After you’re released, if you’re ever arrested again, there’s very little chance of you getting bail because they’d consider you a flight risk.’

‘It’s up to you,’ Jessica said. ‘Personally I don’t care either way, but after all this arsing around, you’d better have something interesting for me.’

‘Can I have the Twix, too?’

Jessica delved into her pocket and slid the chocolate bar across the table. ‘Right, get talking, I haven’t got all day.’

‘On the news, they were showing the photo of the dead kid who was dumped in the bin.’

‘Damon Potter.’

‘I recognised him straight away because he’d been in my shop.’

‘When?’

Bones started counting on his stubby fingers. ‘Sorry, I’ve lost track of days. When did you find him?’

‘Thursday night.’

‘So he would’ve been on the news on Friday?’

‘Right.’

‘It would’ve been Wednesday then.’

Jessica was about to ask why he hadn’t come forward if he’d seen Damon on the day the teenager died but it was a stupid question considering the last thing Bones wanted to do was attract the attention of the police.

‘There weren’t any tattoos on his body,’ she said.

Bones nodded. ‘Rose was off for the morning and I was by myself. He was a nervous kid anyway but I was probably a bit much for him.’ He indicated unnecessarily towards his head.

‘So he didn’t go through with it?’

‘He said he might come back another time, but you get a lot of people who change their minds when they realise you actually have to use a needle on them.’

‘Did you talk to him about anything?’

‘He knew what he wanted, so I was all ready to go. When you’ve got nervous people, you usually try to calm them. You ask about their lives, what they’re into, that kind of thing. He said he was part of some rowing club and studying business. I thought it was a strange mix but you never know with kids today.’

‘Did he seem worried about anything other than the tattoo?’

Bones stuck out his bottom lip, exposing another gaping hole from where he’d had his piercings taken. ‘He seemed happy enough until the needle came out.’

‘He wasn’t worried when talking about the rowing club?’

‘Nope.’

He couldn’t have been that worried about Holden then . . .

‘You said he knew what he wanted . . . ?’

Bones nodded enthusiastically. ‘He had a picture of it – some sort of three-pronged thing.’

Jessica felt that chill again. It couldn’t be. She delved into her pocket and took out a notebook and pen, sliding it across the desk. ‘Can you draw it?’

Bones’ penwork was as crisp and clear as the tattoos on his head. When he turned the pad around and slid it back, there was no doubt what he had drawn: it was an exact match of the logo someone had etched on the top right of the envelope that had been delivered through Jessica’s door.

22

Jessica managed to hide her recognition of the symbol from Bones, the solicitor and Izzy. Somebody knew her address and wanted her to believe that Holden Wyatt was innocent. They’d even drawn a symbol on the envelope that, for whatever reason, Damon Potter had wanted tattooed onto himself hours before he died.

Couldn’t they have picked someone else?

After the interview was over, Jessica found a quiet moment to talk Rowlands through what Bones had drawn. The fact that it was now a part of an official case meant he didn’t have to be quite so quiet about investigating it – even if Jessica did tell him to be as discreet as he could. She didn’t want news getting back to Cole about what she was looking into. If he wanted to trawl through the logs to find it then he could but there was no need to make it obvious.

With Bones dealt with and ready for his court appearance, which he seemed surprisingly chipper about given the circumstances, Jessica was back to investigating the deaths of Cassie and Grace. Forensic results were now officially in for Grace, and endorsed many of the initial indications. The killer of the two women was almost certainly the same person: taller, male, right-handed, thick fingers, comfortable with a knife, and so on. It didn’t add much because that was who they were already looking for.

Just as she was about to go and find him, Archie came hurrying out of the corridor that led to Jessica’s office, Post-it pad in hand, grin on his face. ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ he said.

‘Is that why you’re dribbling?’

Archie wiped the non-existent saliva from his face, grin disappearing. ‘I’ve been wading through your taxi list. There’s an ANPR camera a quarter of a mile along the road from where Cassie disappeared. We checked it at the time but it hadn’t thrown up anything unusual. When I ran the list of taxi number plates, there were a few but all on duty, all easy to account for because the offices know where their drivers are. There’s one exception.’

He couldn’t stop himself from grinning. Trawling through endless lists of numbers and names might not seem like
real
police work but it was how most crimes were solved. For a new constable like him, getting things to move on was as good as it got.

‘Go on,’ Jessica said, suppressing a smile, letting him have his moment.

‘I’ve got a plate registered to a black cab that was definitely
off
-duty. The driver went past that camera on the night Cassie went missing and the night Grace disappeared, too.’

‘Is there a picture of the driver?’

‘No, the angle’s shite, but we’ve got the name and the plate.’

He was bouncing on his heels, waiting for the metaphorical pat on the head. Jessica gave him a literal one instead.

‘Good boy,’ Jessica said. ‘Now let’s go get a bad guy.’

Linking the cab to Hamish Pendlebury had been the easy bit – finding him was not proving quite so straightforward. He wasn’t at home, and although he was technically supposed to be at work, he couldn’t be raised on his mobile phone, while there was some sort of problem with the radio system that connected the cab office to the vehicle. Officers were keeping an eye on ANPR cameras around the city in case he did pop up anywhere but there was every chance he’d nicked into the offy for his break and was currently sat in a park somewhere having a fag. Or doing whatever else it was taxi drivers did when they weren’t taking the long way round the ring road to get a few more quid from unsuspecting punters.

It was almost dark by the time Jessica, Archie, Rowlands and a uniformed PC – brought along because he looked like he worked out a bit – arrived at the taxi office. It had taken them almost half an hour of driving and walking around to find the place, before realising the door marked ‘Benny’s Lunchtime Supplies’ was actually ‘Tim’s Taxis’.

Jessica eased the frosted-glass door open and entered the reception area. Maroon velvet chairs lined a small room with peeling cream wallpaper and an overall smell of stale shoes. It was what seasoned observers might call ‘a bit of a hole’, with décor that harked back to the types of working men’s clubs that used to be so prevalent in the area. When she’d been in uniform, Jessica once had to visit one on the outskirts of the city. The older members had stuck a piece of white tape across the floor which they insisted females weren’t allowed to cross. When a pair of students had popped in for a cheap drink, the woman had naturally refused to abide by what she saw as an archaic law. After taking a seat on the ‘wrong’ side of the tape, all hell had broken loose, with threats of physical violence, allegations of sexual assault because they’d physically lifted the chair she was in, a riot squad, and two dozen other officers sent in to enforce the peace. When the police had pointed out that the club wasn’t allowed to segregate in the way it had, members had gone to the papers saying it was political correctness gone mad. Within four months, the whole place had shut down.