Thicker Than Water (9 page)

He dug Jessica playfully in the ribs and she squealed. ‘Get off.’

‘Why are you asking?’

At first, Jessica wasn’t going to say but she figured Adam could only help. ‘There’s this kid we’re looking into. Everyone says he’s just normal. He likes
astronomy, he plays games, hangs around with his mates and watches television. Everything normal that you’d expect. But then he went missing, before turning up dead. No one seems to have a
clue why him.’

Adam rested a hand on her back. ‘Could it just be he was in the wrong place at the wrong time?’

‘It probably is. I guess I just want to think there’s something more to it than that.’

Adam kissed the top of her head and then stood. ‘I’m going to go dry off and then sort some clothes out for tomorrow.’

Jessica watched him walk into the bedroom, wondering what she should do with the evening. Izzy had refused to give her any further details on the casino owner, saying they had to check a few
additional things and that there was going to be a team briefing in the morning. Whatever it was, it didn’t bode well.

She reached under the sofa but couldn’t find what she was looking for, so checked the cabinet underneath the television. At a loss, Jessica walked through to the bedroom, where Adam was
leaning into their joint wardrobe. ‘Where’s the laptop?’ she asked.

Adam poked his head around the door and nodded towards the dresser at the bottom of the bed. ‘I was using it in here earlier.’

‘I’m going to email my mum while I’ve got nothing else on. She keeps going on about how I never call her – but then when I do I can’t get off the phone because
she’s busy telling me about how Gladys in the village is finally having her hip fixed or how she saw someone making a quiche on TV, or something like that. She’ll try to talk me through
it and then it’s onto whether or not I’m eating properly, how you are, how I am, how Dad’s doing. By the time I get off, it’s a week later. Emailing’s
easier.’

‘Have you at least told them that we’re not . . .’

‘Not yet.’ Adam rolled his eyes. ‘It’s easier like this for now,’ Jessica added. ‘I’ll tell them when the time’s right.’

‘You can’t leave them thinking it for too much longer.’

Jessica picked up the laptop and walked back to the door. ‘I know. I’ll sort it.’ She walked through to the living room and plugged it in, waiting for the device to boot up, as
she wandered back to the glass balcony door and stared into the darkness. She had long since regretted making the phone call from the airport to tell her parents and Izzy that she was flying out to
get married. They had all understood at the time but Jessica didn’t have the heart to tell them what had happened.

As her mind began to drift, Jessica heard the computer beeping. Each time it did something she didn’t expect, her first instinct was to whack as many keys as she could to see if it helped.
Her second instinct was to call Adam. The printer’s not working – ‘ADAM!’. The screen’s gone blue – ‘ADAM!’. Someone’s asking me to send my
bank details to Nigeria – ‘ADAM!’. If all else failed, violence – or at least the threat of it – often did the trick.

Usually the laptop would have booted straight onto a screen from where she knew she could load the Internet browser. Instead, it had stopped at a password screen and was asking for a
username.

‘ADAM!’

He came into the room holding two shirts. One was bright blue, the other grey. ‘Which one?’ he asked.

Jessica pointed to the grey one. ‘What’s going on with this?’

Adam hung both shirts over the doorframe and walked to the sofa. ‘I had to set us up separate logins. I’ve got all this stuff from the university which is confidential and sensitive.
I couldn’t risk you accidentally deleting it or anything like that.’ He laughed as if it was a joke but Jessica could tell he was lying.

‘I don’t even look at all that stuff. I only ever use the Internet.’

‘It’s more of a just in case thing. It just means you’ll have access to your own files now.’

Adam typed in a username for her, adding: ‘You can pick your own password.’

‘I don’t want to pick my own password – I’ll never remember it. I just want it to login like it used to.’

Adam squirmed awkwardly, shuffling from one foot to the other. ‘Sorry.’

Jessica typed in a password and then watched the main screen appear. As Adam picked up his shirts and went into the bedroom, she checked the empty Internet browser history and wondered what he
was up to.

Although Adam had been keen to act as if nothing was wrong, Jessica had made it clear she wasn’t happy. She was still in a mood the next morning as she made her way into
DCI Cole’s glass-walled office for a senior briefing before the chief inspector talked to the rest of the team.

Cole was sitting behind his desk, with Jessica, DS Cornish and DC Diamond in a semicircle around him. Jessica had never known Izzy sit in on a senior team briefing in the past, so she knew her
friend must have something important to share.

When she first started attending briefings, Jessica had felt herself itching to get away. She couldn’t see the point in sitting around talking when you could be out doing something
instead. Recently, she had begun to realise it was more of a way to offer ideas and share opinions.

‘I do have something for you,’ Cole began, picking up a printout from his desk. ‘As we thought, Oliver Gordon was killed by asphyxiation. As far as we can tell, there was no
strangulation – his neck wasn’t bruised and his hyoid bone is also intact.’

Jessica was waiting to hear whatever the news was about the casino Kayleigh and Eleanor had worked in but knew the chief inspector would get to it when he was ready. Although she didn’t
have any great depth of knowledge of anatomy, she had only been in uniform for a few months when she found out the hyoid bone was at the top of the neck, almost directly under the chin. She had
been working late shifts and been told to attend a 999 call at a local petrol station. A worker had been robbed but his attacker had also beaten him around the chest and body with an axe handle.
The man could barely breathe but had somehow managed to call the police. When Jessica arrived, she could see the dark purple marks on his neck and the man croakily said at least two of the blows
had caught him under the chin. When they were alone, the more experienced officer she had attended the scene with said he thought the man had broken his hyoid bone, adding that Jessica would
recognise it herself if she ever had a case that involved strangulation.

‘Were there any major chest injuries?’ Jessica asked now.

The chief inspector shook his head. ‘He was likely killed by a plastic bag or something similar wrapped tightly around his face. He took at least one hard blow to the face, probably a
punch, which may even have knocked him out before the bag was wrapped around him. There are a few minor marks on his back, which could have come from someone digging an elbow in, or pushing a knee
into him if they were on the ground.’

‘Was there anything else at the scene?’

Jessica had not seen much when she’d been at the house but other members of the force would have been examining the Sextons’ property as well.

Cole shook his head again. ‘The homeowner found Oliver’s phone but we’ve not come up with anything untoward in the records. The hallway had various household things already in
it – coats, shoes and the like – but they were apparently untouched.’

Cornish had been taking notes but stopped to interrupt. ‘Do we have any idea what happened then?’

Jessica had been wondering the same thing since first attending the scene. Cole took a large breath, shaking his head. ‘We still don’t know if Oliver was killed at the Sextons’
house or if he was taken off-site. It might have been that there was a knock on the door and he opened it, only to be punched in the face and then suffocated. We haven’t found anything in the
house and can’t find anything that says he was in contact with anyone else, or that he left the property either voluntarily or not. His computer is clean too and none of the neighbours saw
anything. Checking the traffic cameras nearby is needle in a haystack stuff so we just don’t know.’

Jessica knew DS Cornish had definitely gone for the inspector role and, assuming they hired internally, Jessica thought her office mate would get the job. She certainly had the drive and
efficiency to do it, although Jessica didn’t know how she felt about the prospect of Louise potentially outranking her. Although they got on, they had little in common and rarely talked about
anything other than work.

The sergeant said nothing but started writing.

‘I didn’t get anything from his parents or friends either,’ Jessica said. ‘We can maybe leave it a few days, then try talking to them again, but everything pretty much
adds up to the fact that Oliver was a relatively normal kid.’

‘Normal’ was a word most members of CID hated. What they didn’t want was the situation they had – where no one had a bad word to say about the victim. ‘Yeah, sure,
I saw him taking part in that drug-fuelled Wizard of Oz-themed orgy’ they could cope with. ‘All he did was sit in his bedroom watching movies’ was a struggle.

‘How are we going with the newspaper obit?’ Jessica asked. She had been slightly out of the loop since bringing back the details and handing them over.

‘Isobel,’ the DCI said.

Izzy glanced at her notes, then looked back up and spoke confidently. ‘We’ve been in contact with the phone company to try to trace whoever made the call to place the notice.
Considering we had the paper’s full cooperation, we thought it would be easy, but it’s taken them this long to come back to us with a payphone in the city centre. It’s only a few
hundred yards away from the newspaper office.’

‘Do people only use payphones to make nuisance calls?’ Jessica asked, only half in jest.

Izzy continued: ‘Because of the length of time this has all taken, any CCTV we may have had of the area is gone. All we have to work with is the description of the caller.’ She
looked towards Jessica and this time she smiled. ‘I think it’s fair to say that’s left us with quite a wide scope.’

‘A man who is eighteen to bloody fifty,’ Jessica exclaimed in disgust. ‘How many teenagers do you know that sound like a fifty-year-old? Or vice versa?’

‘What are we going to do about this?’ Cornish asked.

Cole caught Jessica’s eye and she guessed the answer before he spoke. It was the only thing they could realistically do. ‘For now, we’re going to put it to one side. Apart from
the staff at the paper, no one else knows. If any readers saw the notice on the day, then they didn’t clock it and no one else has come forward to point it out.’

‘It can only have been done for attention,’ Jessica said, picking up the point. ‘Assuming it was our killer, they wanted us or whoever to see it. Obviously we have but
there’s not much benefit at the moment to sharing it with the public. If the killer wants us to notice them, we’re better off keeping it quiet and hoping they try to get our attention
again – hopefully without murdering anyone.’

Cole nodded a short acknowledgement. Jessica knew the danger was that whoever was responsible could try to get their attention by killing someone else – but that was a risk anyway. The
body had been left for them to find, the newspaper notice deliberately placed. If the perpetrator was trying to show off by pre-announcing their crimes, it could likely happen again. If the team
could spot it in time, they might be able to do something about it.

‘We’ve been in dialogue with the paper,’ Cole added. ‘They’ve agreed to keep everything quiet for now, although we may end up having to give them something at the
end of all this. They’re now taking more details of callers and people who email in for any obituary notices but that doesn’t mean the same thing will happen again.’

‘How are we doing with Kayleigh?’ Jessica asked, trying to hide her impatience.

The chief inspector nodded towards Izzy, who answered. ‘Kayleigh’s been in the house for five years and there were only two other sets of owners in the previous twenty-five years.
The ones from furthest back have both died while we can’t find any connection from the most recent ones to Oliver or his family, or to Cameron and Eleanor. I managed to speak to them last
night but they have moved out of the area and don’t appear to have any link to anything.’

‘So was whoever left the body targeting Kayleigh, or was it random?’ DS Cornish asked.

Cole was scratching nervously at his head. His hair had been receding rapidly over the past year or so and Jessica wondered if he realised how much the job was ageing him. ‘It’s hard
to know,’ he said, nodding to Jessica, who took up the conversation.

‘It could be random but it would be
very
random. Firstly, they could have left the body anywhere. Secondly, there must have been easier houses to get into if that’s what
they wanted: places with windows left open and so on. It was only a single pane of glass to break at the back of Kayleigh’s house but the guys reckon it was smashed with one brute-force
strike. They’d have had to protect their hand but it could even be something like a punch.’

‘How would they have known about the key being left in the back door?’ Izzy asked.

Jessica shrugged. ‘It could be someone Kayleigh knows, or that could have just been good or bad luck depending on which way you’re looking at it. If they went equipped to break in,
they would have probably found a way in any case.’

The constable nodded in agreement. ‘We spoke to Eleanor Sexton yesterday. She was a bit surprised to hear Kayleigh’s name but pretty much confirmed everything we had already been
told – they worked together at a casino in the city but left around twenty years ago. They stayed in intermittent contact but nothing in the past decade or so. Neither of them seem to have
been in any sort of trouble in the past and we can’t see anything else that would connect them. If Kayleigh hadn’t told us she knew Eleanor, we wouldn’t have known.’

The constable glanced up at Jessica as if to say the information she had been waiting for was finally on its way. She then turned to the chief inspector, who picked up a grey file from his desk
and opened the cardboard cover.