Scarred for Life (9 page)

‘Was she happy at work?’

A shrug: ‘You’re never that pleased at work, are you? It’s just what you do to get a few quid. I don’t think she was unhappy.’

‘What time did you leave?’

‘Just after eight. We were laughing because I’m always late for things and this time it wasn’t even my fault. We were just chatting and lost track of the time.’

‘What was the restaurant like?’

‘Normal – everyone was waiting for us. We had more wine in the bar bit while we were ordering, then we ate.’

‘Was there anything unusual?’

‘Only that the food came out really quickly. We chatted and laughed. Zoe fell off her stool because she was so pissed. It was one of those evenings. The waiters are friendly but that’s just because they’re after a tip, isn’t it.’

Jessica was making notes on the places that had been visited. She knew the area and it was only a few hundred metres from the pub to the restaurant. There would be CCTV cameras nearby, hopefully inside the places too. When she’d finished with Jade, she’d get someone onto tracking it all down. Officers would interview the people behind the bar in the pub and the waiters at the restaurant. No one would remember anything; they never did.

‘What time did you finish eating?’

‘I don’t know but because the food had come out so quickly, some of us were up for going on somewhere else. We all paid and said our goodbyes, then Cass, Zoe, me and Vee went on to this cocktail bar across the road. They have a little dance floor.’

‘Was it busy?’

‘Sort of – not packed but not empty. It’s nice going out in the week because there’s a good atmosphere but you can still move around. They were playing some good tunes and the barman was giving Zoe the eye.’

‘What about Cassie?’

Jade stopped to dry her eyes again but only succeeded in making a bigger mess of the mascara that had already smeared across her face. ‘I should’ve let her go.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She wanted to go home to Carl after the restaurant but I persuaded her to stay out for one more. Then it was two more. If I’d let her go in the first place then . . .’

What an awful thing to live with.

‘You can’t blame yourself.’

Jade closed her eyes but there were tears again. She waved a hand dramatically in front of her face, whispering: ‘It wasn’t just that.’

Jessica reached across the pile of celebrity magazines and grabbed the box of tissues, joining Jade on the sofa. ‘Someone did this. I want to find out who.’

Jade pulled out three tissues and dabbed at her face again; the result made her look like a painting of a panda that someone had spilled a mug of coffee over.

‘What happened next?’ Jessica asked.

Jade slowly composed herself. ‘There’s a taxi rank on the main road, so we decided we’d all go together and then split it. I took my shoes off because they were bloody hurting and I was feeling a bit pissed. Zoe was just giggling.’

‘What was Cassie like?’

‘I think she wanted to go home.’

‘What happened?’

Jade gulped deeply. ‘I’m seeing this lad, Ben. He’s a dick. I know he’s a dick, Cassie knew he was a dick, the other girls know he’s a dick. I know he’s only using me for . . . well, y’know . . . but sometimes you don’t care, do you? I know I should but I’m getting stuff out of the relationship too – if you can call it that. It’s not as if I’m going to be settling down with him.’

‘Cassie didn’t approve?’

A shake of the head sent rogue tears splattering onto Jessica’s arm. ‘She’s my mate, so of course not. She was always saying he wasn’t good enough for me and that I should dump him for someone better. It’s not as if I disagreed but I guess I was so drunk that it touched a nerve.’

‘So you had an argument?’

The reply was so quiet that Jessica almost missed it, even though she was next to the other woman. ‘Yes.’

‘What happened?’

‘We were right next to the taxi rank. Vee said something about wanting to get home because her lovely boyfriend would be there. She reckoned he always waited up and that she was going to jump him. Zoe was saying she might go back to see if she could cop off with the barman and Cassie was smiling. She really loved Carl – they were beginning to think about getting married and the like. Usually, that would make me happy, but just for a moment I felt so angry. It was like I was someone else, I was so furious. I was thinking, “You bitch”. How dare she be so happy when I was stuck with that prick Ben. It must have been the booze, I’m not usually like that, honest.’

Jessica waited for Jade to blow her nose again.

When she continued, she couldn’t face Jessica. ‘I had my shoe in my hand and felt this rage, like I wanted to kill her. I don’t even remember it properly – Vee and Zoe were holding me back and I was shouting and going crazy. It was like I was watching myself.’

‘Did you hit her?’

‘I don’t think so, I just threatened to.’

‘What did she do?’

‘Nothing. She looked at me and said she was sorry for whatever it was she’d done. I knew she hadn’t done anything but I was still furious. I was screaming, “Go on, fuck off” – and she did.’

‘She started walking?’

‘Our taxi turned up a minute or two later and she was already out of sight. When I woke up the next morning I didn’t even remember at first, then I was having flashbacks. I texted her about ten times. When I didn’t get a reply, I assumed she was still annoyed – which was fair enough. I was going to go round later today to say sorry in person but then Carl called me this morning, asking if I’d seen her. I phoned the other girls and none of them had – then I realised that no one had seen her since the argument . . .’

At that, Jade finally lost it, doubling over and sobbing into her hands. Jessica rested a hand gently on her back but there wasn’t a lot she could say. It wasn’t likely you’d forget the day you argued with your best mate and never saw her again.

11

After spending Sunday at home, taking and making calls, replying to emails and generally working in a not-working kind of way, Jessica found herself standing in front of the chattering, biscuit-eating, tea-drinking masses in the incident room of Longsight Police Station the following morning, trying to stifle a yawn. Even DCI Cole had come down from his high horse, or upstairs office as it was better known, to see the proceedings.

‘All right, all right,’ Jessica said loudly. ‘It’s too early, I’ve got a headache and if you can’t all shut up then I’m going to confiscate the biscuits.’

An outraged hush descended as Jessica turned to the pair of whiteboards behind her. On one, there was a large photo of Damon Potter, with Cassie Edmonds on the other.

‘Damon died on Wednesday, Cassie on Thursday evening – one murdered, the other we’re not sure,’ Jessica said. ‘There’s no obvious connection from one to the other but the fact we’ve got them both to investigate means numbers are tight, so it’s all hands on deck, to the pump, or however the saying goes.’

Jessica paused to have a sip of her tea: ‘At around half eleven on Thursday night, Cassie had an argument with her friend as they were waiting for a taxi. We have CCTV of her walking along Great Ancoats Street and then turning onto Oldham Road but that was the last anyone saw of her until a dog-walker discovered her body in the woods close to Ellesmere Golf Course on Saturday morning. Forensics say she was likely dumped in the early hours of Friday morning, meaning she was killed relatively quickly after disappearing. Her boyfriend has an airtight alibi and we don’t have any obvious suspects.’

A hand: ‘Was she assaulted?’

‘Not sexually, which means we don’t have a motive either. But she was beaten very badly.’

Izzy was operating the laptop connected to the projector and Jessica asked her to flash through the photographs of the body. Any murmurings around the room quickly stopped as the horror dawned.

‘Our crime scene was a bit of a mess,’ Jessica continued. ‘For one, the weather was at its usual welcoming best and then our dog-walker had a bit of an accident. Forensics did what they could but they’re mainly relying on what they can get from the body, not what was at the scene. Because Cassie was dumped on the night she disappeared, they’re not sure if she was killed in the woods, or elsewhere. Either way, the killer couldn’t have gone far with her. We’ve been looking at tyre tracks around the car parks close to the golf course but we’ve not helped by parking there ourselves. Because it’s in a fiddly spot close to the motorway and there are a few smaller roads underneath, we’ve had no luck tracking number plates either.’

Another sip of tea: ‘Our search teams spent an unproductive weekend trawling through the woods, ending up doing little more than litter-picking. We’ve got a mass of discarded crisp packets and old carrier bags but not much else. Cassie was strangled and we’re still trying to see if we can get anything from the indentations in her neck, although I was told not to hold my breath – an unfortunate choice of words.’

Jessica continued to tell the officers about the few things they did have, namely a vague description of what the killer was like based upon the injuries inflicted – male, taller than the victim, wide fingers, right-handed, the usual kind of thing. Then she moved on to the profile that had been commissioned, which was more of the same. The cuts on the body apparently showed that the male had a deepseated hatred of women, possibly his own mother or partner. The beating indicated the killer had an anger problem, as if murdering someone in the first place wasn’t enough of a clue. Blah, blah, blah.

Drawing on a mixture of the profile and the forensic work, an unfortunate group of officers had spent their Sunday cross-checking the details against everyone with a history of violence in the north-west of England. An initial ‘short’ list of five hundred potential names had been narrowed to a mere seventy who required further investigation. It was the standard type of thing they’d do for any major case that didn’t have a natural suspect, but it didn’t feel right to Jessica. The people listed had beaten up their wives or had a fight in the street. It was a big step up from that to strangling and beating someone to death and then cutting parts from their body.

Photos of the victim had gone out to the media over the weekend but it had already been eclipsed in a tale of two blondes.

One: a pretty young
Coronation Street
actress had announced she was pregnant via her Premier League footballer boyfriend.

Two: a pretty young receptionist had disappeared and turned up dead in the woods a day later.

They were almost the same age, had gone to school a mile apart and had similar looks, except that Cassie’s nose was slightly crooked and her teeth weren’t as straight. One of them was splashed over seven pages of the local newspaper, and between three and five of the national tabloids; the other was worth a few paragraphs at the bottom of a page.

In the battle of blonde versus blonde, there was only one winner. If you were on telly, you were a someone; if not, you were a no one. Even in death, nobody would know who Cassie Edmonds was.

DC Archie Davey answered his phone with an agitated: ‘All right, I’m doing it!’

‘Good morning to you too,’ Jessica replied. ‘Here I was giving you a friendly Monday call to find out if you’d had a nice weekend at the football and I don’t even get a hello.’

‘Yeah, my arse were you. Anyway, I’m still trying to find the right former rowing club member to talk to. I’ve spoken to a couple but don’t have anything yet. How’s it going there?’

‘As you’d expect – we’ve interviewed the people who were at the rowing club party the other night and everyone says the same as Holden. Damon left midway through the evening. No one actually saw him go, of course, let alone saw him leave with anyone. They’ve all got the same story.’

‘There’s a surprise.’

‘Exactly. There are no cameras in the park and his flatmate says he didn’t go home afterwards.’

‘So he drank himself to death and put himself in the bin?’

‘Apparently so. We’re doing what we can – all we need is someone to say there were drugs at the party, or they saw him drinking to excess. Everyone there either didn’t see him, didn’t know who he was, or only saw him briefly. We’ve not even got confirmation that anyone saw him drinking. We didn’t find anything at the scene either. For now it’s a stand-off. Someone knows more than they’re letting on.’

‘We should nick the lot of them and sling ’em downstairs until someone talks.’

Jessica sighed. ‘Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. I’ll call you later, okay?’

‘Am I allowed to say “no”?’

‘Yes, I’ll still call but . . .’ Jessica paused, wondering how best to phrase it. In the end, she settled for the simplest way. ‘. . . thanks for working on your days off.’

Archie didn’t reply for a moment but when he did, he was laughing. ‘Stop being so soft or I’ll have to tell everyone you’re not such a cow after all.’

12

Now they had CCTV footage of Cassie from Thursday night, Jessica, Izzy and DC Dave Rowlands headed into the centre of the city for a poke-around. After a period where the three of them seemed to work together on everything, it was rare that happened nowadays. Part of that was down to Jessica’s promotion, but because of a scandal over policing standards that had been brewing through the summer, and a report that was due early the next year, anything that looked like it could be a clique suddenly seemed a dangerous thing. For once, Jessica thought ‘sod it’ and decided she wanted to surround herself with people she trusted.

Following the usual bickering over who was driving, Dave’s protestations that everyone was calling him Bin Boy, and Izzy’s explanation of how she hadn’t had time to look into non-permanent tattoos, they parked and walked the route Cassie and her friends had taken. After heading along Tib Street, they crossed to the cocktail bar and then made their way onto Great Ancoats Street, where Jade and Cassie had argued close to the taxis. The last image of the murdered girl had been crossing the road next to the comedy club and heading onto Oldham Road. The theory was that, with her Failsworth flat three miles down the road, Cassie had decided to walk.