Authors: Kerry Wilkinson
‘
I
’m sorry
,’ Jessica said, without actually being sorry at all, ‘what did you say your name was?’
The man on the other end of the line was definitely going on her shitlist when she hung up. It was a fairly short list, currently consisting of the DCI, one of her former boyfriends and the pervy bloke who ran the chip shop at the bottom of her road.
‘My name is Garry Ashford,’ came the reply. ‘I work for the
Manchester Morning Herald
. I wanted to ask you about the body you found this morning.’
Jessica knew the media hadn’t been given any information yet. Later on, they would be fed a standard line about a body being found, tests being done, blah, blah, blah. If the son had been informed by then, they might even be given the name of the victim. Next week would be when the media were brought in on a larger scale. There would be some sort of press conference, a chance for a couple of the higher-ups to practise their sincere faces. There would be some sort of hotline set up.
Manning the hotline was definitely the worst job for a constable. Trying to pull out anything remotely useful from the mass of nonsense calls was a nightmare. Most of the people phoning up only wanted someone to talk to. Some poor sod would have to oversee the operation… It was a job that had Rowlands’ name all over it.
‘Which body are you talking about?’ Jessica asked, as if it was a crazy question.
‘Hang on, let me check,’ Garry’s voice replied. ‘Somebody Christ or something… Sorry, I can’t read my own writing. Er, Yvonne; Yvonne Christensen.’
Those words meant there would be two names finding their way onto Jessica’s shitlist. First, this journalist; second, whoever had leaked the victim’s name. Everything released to the media by the police had to go through the press office – and they got decidedly arsey when it didn’t. Not only that, the chief inspector would be annoyed if he didn’t get his chance to go on television.
‘How did you get that name?’ Jessica asked.
‘Sources.’
So he wasn’t just a know-it-all, he was a cocky sod too. ‘Look, I’m going to have to refer you to the press office. There’s no one in at the moment but I know there will be a statement going out later. If you call their main number, somebody will come back to you in a bit.’
‘I figured that,’ Garry replied. ‘But I thought they would probably only be giving out basic information later and so I thought I’d ask someone who might actually know something.’
‘Right… How did you get my number?’
Garry lowered his voice. ‘Stumbled across it in an address book around the office...’
That sounded distinctly made up. Jessica was pretty sure she hadn’t given her number to any reporters – but then again, there were the odd civic functions and community meetings she ended up at. ‘Punishments’, as they were better known. Someone might have bought her a drink at one of those at some point – and who knew where that might have led?
‘Do you want to make a comment then?’ Garry asked.
‘No.’
Jessica hung up when he was halfway through a reply. She wondered if she should tip off Cole, but thought that if the journalist was going to contact Cole, he would have done so before contacting her. Besides, he was probably full of it. One of those Scenes of Crime people, or someone in uniform, had blabbed, and so he was trying it on.
Still… His was a name to remember.
T
he biggest reason
Cole had told Jessica to go home was because working for the Criminal Investigation Department – CID – at weekends could often be a waste of time. It wasn’t necessarily
them
being lazy – but everyone else’s working patterns made things difficult. Courts, coroners, solicitors’ offices, forensics, their own press office and all kinds of other departments were either closed, trying to run with a cut-down weekend workforce, or generally having a skive. In contrast, uniformed officers spent Friday nights, Saturdays and Sundays dealing with the aftermath of the weekend stag and hen parties, plus the usual array of pissheads. Plain-clothed officers were often left catching up with paperwork.
Originally, Jessica had been planning on going home after her shift and possibly getting something to eat with her flatmate, Caroline, but now she didn’t think she’d be the best of company. Strangled bodies in bedrooms weren’t the best conversation-starter.
Instead, after her talk with the journalist, she went back to the station to catch up on some paperwork, figuring it would be one fewer thing to do the following week.
Her own office would offer a nice bit of peace – but Jessica fancied a bit of company, if only to annoy someone. Rowlands was on the main floor doing some paperwork of his own, so she went and sat opposite him. ‘Wotcha,’ she said.
‘You’re way too old to be talking like that.’
‘Oi! Did Eric Christensen get home okay?’
‘I assume so. Someone took him in a car to identify the body, then they were going to drop him back.’ Rowlands paused for a moment, looking up at her across the table. ‘How are
you
, anyway? Isn’t it this week that…?’ He tailed off.
‘Monday,’ Jessica replied.
‘How long has it been?’
‘Eight months.’
‘Do you still miss him?’
‘What do you think?’
Jessica thought back to when she had first met Harry. All plain-clothes CID newcomers started as a detective constable after around two years of training and a period before that in uniform. A new DC was usually the first point of call when the teas needed to be made, or an urgent biscuit run was required on a quiet day. It was important, career-defining stuff. Woe betide a fresh-faced constable who brought back a packet of custard creams from a mid-morning dash to the local supermarket. Even hardened criminals didn’t get as much abuse as a new recruit returning with something that didn’t have chocolate on it.
On top of that really important work, detective constables also got the jobs no one else wanted. The vast array of forms to fill in; the paperwork to file; the mountains of papers or computer files to fulfil the freedom-of-information requests; the nutters to talk to. Always the nutters…
A detective constable might have to work with the press office if he or she had really annoyed someone, or perhaps liaise with other police forces around the country, making the endless hours of phone calls necessary to rule people out from inquiries. The really unlucky ones could get the task of hunting through hours of CCTV, phone logs, or anything else in an attempt to find a breakthrough.
If a new recruit got a ‘well done’ or an inspector got a round in, then it had been a really good day.
Those months were the initiation ritual where a person found out whether the job was for them. It wasn’t for everyone.
After her own introduction to the department, around two years before, Jessica had been assigned to help out Detective Inspector Harry Thomas. Despite his position, he was still eager to get out into the thick of the action. Desks were not for him, and neither was brown-nosing, which was why he hadn’t tried for anything like a promotion.
It had most likely been the DCI’s little joke at first – pair the new girl with the grumpy old guy who has sat at the same desk for a decade and see how much she wanted to be a detective then. Jessica was in her late twenties, emerging from five years of working in uniform and taking exams. Harry was two ranks above her and twenty years older: an old-fashioned detective with not much hair, a paunch belly and a north-east accent – even though he hadn’t lived north of Manchester since he was a child. He also had a supposed attitude problem, certainly when it came to anyone in authority.
However, despite their partnership having been set up for a laugh, it had in fact turned into a firm friendship and mutual respect. Jessica liked how Harry could show her things that weren’t in the manuals, that the trainers didn’t bring up, while still being committed to getting bad guys off the streets. She was never quite sure whether he actually liked her – but he put up with her and, for Harry, tolerance was as good as it ever got.
Harry was old-school. The absolute last of a dying breed. Some would say for the better – and perhaps they were right. Most nights, he’d gone for a drink after his shift. In general, he wouldn’t go near the police pubs; he preferred the ones that were far more dimly lit, where the landlord was happy to let his clientele hang around after closing for a cheeky final drink.
After they had been working together for six months, Jessica had persuaded him to go to the same pub as the rest of the crew. He had let her buy him a drink – ‘Not that Scotch shite: a proper drink, bourbon.’
Bourbon was what he had been drinking when some boozed-up thug had knifed him in a dingy pub eight months ago, at the end of a bright September day.
Tom Carpenter, the guy who’d knifed Harry, was someone who couldn’t handle his drink and happened to have been carrying a knife in his back pocket. His fingerprints had been all over the knife left sticking out of Harry’s guts. A string of low-level thefts meant the police had had no problems identifying him.
At the time, Carpenter might not have realised he had stabbed a police officer, but when the papers and news programmes got hold of the story and started flashing his photo around, there weren’t too many places to hide and he’d handed himself in.
Jessica hadn’t known how to take the news when she’d found out. She had done plenty of hard graft working with Harry and he had always been fair with her. The years of exams to get onto CID had taught her the things she needed to be a detective, but Harry had helped her to
become
one. He had introduced her to his sources and had shown her how to find her own. He had opened her eyes to the city itself. He had taught her to see it not simply as a collection of buildings, a network of canals, a crawling line of traffic – but as all sorts of different people, and as defined, distinct estates and areas. It was like one of those magic eye pictures: suddenly, she had been able to see the hidden image.
Harry had survived the stabbing, but he’d spent weeks in hospital and had never returned to the force. Jessica had visited, but she had found he wasn’t the same person any more.
Faced with mandatory counselling sessions before being allowed to return fully, Harry had instead taken early retirement. He hadn’t even seemed that interested in helping the police investigation into the incident. Whether it was the shame of having drunk himself into a vulnerable position, or simply of not having been able to defend himself, Jessica didn’t know.
Cole had been promoted when it had become clear Harry wasn’t coming back, and it was a sad fact that Jessica had almost certainly been promoted to Detective Sergeant to fill a gap that had been left by Harry walking away. It had seemed like a quick promotion, but a lack of recruitment in the local area meant sergeants were getting younger all the time.
People like Harry were being pensioned off all over.
‘
I
know
you and Harry were close but I didn’t really know the guy,’ Rowlands said, now. ‘He always seemed a bit grumpy and people went on about leaving him be. I don’t think they really knew what to make of it when he took you under his wing.’
Jessica nodded. ‘He was like a boiling kettle, but that was him. When he stopped complaining, he had a really dry sense of humour.’
‘Is that where you get your dirty jokes from?’
‘Only the good ones,’ Jessica grinned. ‘I wish I had his contacts. The killing this morning… I don’t know where to start. I’m sitting here hoping forensics strike lucky, or that the autopsy throws up something good. Harry would have been out there, talking to people he knew. I’d always ask him how he knew so many people, and he’d shrug and say he’d had a pint with them fifteen years ago.’
‘I was still at school fifteen years ago.’
‘Exactly. This one time, I was out with him and there was a homeless bloke he bought cans of lager for. He’d put them down next to him and give the guy a wink. I didn’t know why he’d done it but he said, “You’ll see.” Then, two weeks later, we went back to the same guy, in the same window, wearing the same clothes and Harry sat on the ground next to him.’
‘What, in his suit?’
‘Yeah, it was mad. I hung around on the other side of the path, not knowing where to look. Harry gave the guy this brown envelope or something, had a quick word and then walked off again. I asked him what was going on and it turned out this homeless guy had witnessed some incident a few nights before. People don’t notice him because they think he’s asleep or passed out or whatever. He ended up giving us a description of some bag-snatcher we’d been after for ages.’
Rowlands’ nose wrinkled. ‘You’re making that up...’
‘Things like that happened all the time with Harry, but most people didn’t see him work. It’s like he had access to this secret network of people around the city.’
‘Has he told you what actually happened that night?’
‘I’ve not spoken to him in five months. He doesn’t answer his phone and, assuming he hasn’t moved, he doesn’t open his front door either.’
Rowlands nodded and pressed in, lowering his voice. ‘People are saying he’s not cooperating with the investigation.’
‘Who knows? I think he’s embarrassed by it all.’
‘Surely it wasn’t his fault he got stabbed?’
Jessica sighed. ‘The thing is, Dave, I don’t know. He was his own bloke then and he still is now.’
‘Don’t we have the guy’s fingerprints, and the knife?’ Rowlands said.
‘All that and more. I’m in court next week as a character witness. I don’t know why people are saying Harry hasn’t cooperated. I met up with the prosecution last week and they were more bothered about the pub.’
‘But if they’ve got the knife and everything, what else do they need?’
Jessica shrugged. ‘From what the lawyer said, the CCTV from the pub is more or less unusable. There were plenty of people in there at the time, but mysteriously, they all seemed to be in the toilets at the same time.’
‘Oh right, like that then?’