Woman in Black (30 page)

Her fears were confirmed as Dave and Izzy casually walked her to the station’s local, each pretending they were simply after a quiet drink. A smaller team had been left to work on the leads they had and, while Jessica would have preferred to stay herself, she went with her friends. She couldn’t even pretend to be surprised as she walked into the pub to find a select group of her colleagues, Caroline and a few other people she knew waiting for her. There was a token cheer of ‘surprise’ but a general acceptance she would have been one of the worst detectives going if she hadn’t figured out what the two constables had planned.

Jessica had never been keen on being the centre of attention, much preferring to sit in the corner and make sarcastic comments, but she thanked everyone and then cheered up even more when the landlord said her drinks were free for the night. She walked around the pub a couple of times, making small talk with the people that had come to say hello and then, almost inevitably, ended up in a booth towards the back with Caroline, Dave and Izzy.

‘So which one of you organised this then?’ she asked.

‘You can thank Dave,’ Izzy said. ‘Although I did tell him there was no way he’d keep it a secret.’

Jessica turned to Rowlands. ‘I’ll give you one thing; you can definitely organise a piss-up in a brewery. If you can sort out a shag in a brothel, you’ll be up for promotion.’

The constable smiled. ‘You really don’t do gratitude, do you?’

Jessica put on a sarcastic voice. ‘Thank you very much for reminding everyone I’m getting old.’

‘No problem.’

Although it was early evening, Caroline said she’d left work an hour prematurely. She was certainly dressed up for the occasion, wearing a short purple dress the type of which wasn’t seen very regularly in a police pub like they were in. The older male officers had certainly noticed but her friend seemed oblivious. She told Jessica that Dave had invited her. They had met on a couple of occasions in the past, although not as embarrassing as this one, and he’d kept her phone number just in case something like this came up. Jessica suspected he had taken her number just in case the woman became single at any point but didn’t want to point it out.

‘So, presents,’ Caroline said, sounding excited. She pulled a large glossy paper bag out from under her seat. Jessica tried to look cool but, even though public parties weren’t her thing, presents always went down well and she struggled to hide at least a degree of excitement. There were three items in the bag. She unwrapped the first to find a cook book that boasted it could teach simple culinary methods anyone could use. ‘I thought it was about time you learned some basics,’ Caroline said. ‘It’s got all sorts in there just to get you going.’

Jessica had been thinking the same thing for years but had never had the inclination. She wasn’t convinced the book would give her that but smiled and thanked her friend nonetheless. She also poked a smirking Rowlands in the leg.

The second gift was some vouchers for a department store in the city but Jessica really felt touched by the final one. It was a framed picture of her and Caroline from the week before they left to tour south-east Asia. They were both teenagers and it was a photo Jessica recognised and remembered being taken but hadn’t seen in years. They were cheesily grinning at the camera, wearing each other’s clothes. Jessica smiled and gave her friend a small hug. ‘This is really nice, thanks.’

Rowlands picked the picture up from the table. ‘Christ, you look young here.’

‘It was taken before I had to endure the stress of working with you every day.’

The constable ignored her. ‘Girls get such boring presents. Us lads get computer games, toy cars, robots and all sorts of cool stuff. You get bloody pictures and all kinds of shite.’

Jessica put on a serious face. ‘It’s called growing up, Dave. Most people stop wasting their life with games, comics and robots when they hit their teens. If you’re still doing that by the time you get to thirty, it might be time to get a proper hobby.’

‘All right, all right, enough of this “turning thirty” talk. You know how to kick a man when he’s down, don’t you?’ Dave protested.

‘Actually, there’s no better time to kick a man than when he’s down. I pride myself on being good at it.’

Izzy stepped in to change the subject. ‘So, when’s the wedding then?’ she asked Caroline.

‘Just a few weeks now.’

‘Are you excited?’

‘Yeah, can’t wait.’

‘It’s my wedding anniversary in a few weeks. It only seems like yesterday in some ways.’

‘Have you got kids?’ Caroline asked.

Jessica winced, realising her friend had asked exactly the thing she shouldn’t. Caroline realised it too because of the look on Izzy’s face. ‘Sorry…I didn’t mean…’

‘No, it’s fine. I haven’t got any children, no.’ The constable stayed calm but the atmosphere was edgy and it was clear it was a touchy subject.

‘Who are you taking then?’ Dave asked Jessica, obviously trying to lighten the mood.

‘What, to the wedding?’

‘Yes, who
are
you taking?’ Caroline added. ‘We’ve left a place for them at the table but haven’t got a name to go on the plan yet.’

Jessica shuffled nervously. ‘Just someone. It’s all sorted, don’t worry about it.’

‘A secret boyfriend?’

‘No, just a friend.’

‘A friend who’s a boy?’ Caroline pushed.

‘Sod off, just a friend. Don’t worry about it.’

‘Is it someone from the station?’ Izzy asked.

‘Can we change the subject?’

The other three people looked towards each other and almost collectively made an ‘oooh’ sound. ‘Right, what’s the plan for later?’ Jessica said, still trying to change the subject. ‘Are we staying here or what?’

‘It’s up to you,’ Izzy replied. ‘It’s your birthday.’

‘Right, well, considering I’m on free drinks all night, I vote stay here, then pizza on the way home.’

Dave laughed quietly. ‘You’re not going to invite us all round and cook fried eggs now you’ve got your new book?’

‘If you fancy a pot noodle, you’re welcome. Well, you’re not but these two are.’

‘I don’t really do pizzas,’ Izzy said. ‘I’m more of a kebab kind of girl.’

Jessica pulled a face. ‘I used to be like that but the problem is the morning after. With a pizza you can have the leftovers for breakfast. With a kebab, it looks as if someone’s hurled it up.’

The other three people around the table were united in their reply. ‘Eew.’

‘Are you telling me I’m wrong?’

Izzy answered. ‘No, but there are some things you don’t have to say out loud.’ Jessica laughed and had to admit that was true. The constable grinned herself. ‘If we’d organised this properly we could have gone around town doing the birthday scam.’

‘The what?’ Jessica asked.

‘Way back before I was an officer, me and my friends used to do it when we were teenagers. We’d go to one of the restaurants in town and someone would drop the hint it was someone else’s birthday. All the servers would come over and clap and sing this stupid song but you’d get a free cake out of it. Then we’d move on to the next place and do the same thing. There were about five places in town who had that policy so every few weeks we’d be out claiming it was someone’s birthday.’

‘I’m not convinced we’d get away with that any longer given our oath to uphold the law,’ Jessica said.

‘Maybe not but you’d get free cake.’

Despite her reservations about any sort of acknowledgement of her birthday, Jessica ended up having a good time. She liked that the two constables kept her grounded.

Jessica found herself getting tipsier as the evening went on. She didn’t know if the free wine was courtesy of the landlord himself or because her colleagues had put money behind the bar. By the time she’d got close to finishing her sixth glass of wine, along with the various shots that had been placed in front of her, Jessica knew she was beginning to slur her words. She had always found it ironic how much she and other officers drank, considering most of the crime they investigated, especially officers in uniform, ultimately came down to alcohol. She had always been a good drinker and was more inclined to laugh the night away than get herself in trouble. If anything, Jessica had always thought she was far more likely to say something stupid when she was sober as opposed to after she’d had a bit to drink. Despite that, she decided she had finished drinking for the night, especially as she would have to be back at work the next day.

There were a few mini protests from the constables as Jessica said she wanted to go but Caroline didn’t look too bothered as she had gone quiet and seemed to be fighting to stay awake.

Jessica caught a taxi from the nearby rank but it was only after she arrived home, via a pizza shop, that she noticed she had missed calls. Her head felt fuzzy but the takeaway took the edge off ever so slightly. Jessica pressed the buttons on the phone to listen to her voicemail but it took a few attempts to get it to do what she wanted.

She listened through the message once but Jessica’s brain wasn’t thinking clearly enough to take it all in. It was only on the third listen where she finally realised why she had been called so late. The team working at the station had identified both of the remaining people in the photograph – and one of them was already dead.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Jessica felt a little silly as she finally got her head around the message. Firstly, she had somehow managed to miss three separate phone calls from the station. It would have only been one or two people working their way through the list of names who had found the breakthrough and the person wouldn’t have been calling because they expected her to go back, simply because they wanted to update her. If Jessica had noticed her phone going off in the pub, even with what she had drunk, she would at least have been only around the corner from the station.

Back at home, there was no realistic way she could get herself back to Longsight and, given how drunk she was feeling, it wasn’t as if she could do much good anyway. Jessica thought about calling Cole to see if he knew any more but had enough self-awareness through her drunken haze to know she should probably leave it for the rest of the night.

She lay on her bed still wearing the clothes she’d had on all day and, as she watched the ceiling spin, Jessica thought the pizza wasn’t the best of ideas after all. She wanted to think about the two people that had now apparently been identified but it wasn’t long before her mind gave up and she drifted off to sleep.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

After the amount she had drunk, Jessica would have expected to sleep through to the moment the alarm on her phone went off the next morning but surprised herself by instead being awake over an hour before she had to be and feeling just about as alert as she could be, given the circumstances.

Apart from an aching bladder, Jessica felt ready for the day. She listened to her voicemail one more time. The officer who had left the message sounded nervous but excited, a nuance which Jessica had definitely not noticed the night before. They said they knew the final two people were called ‘Steven Povey’ and ‘Barry Newcombe’ but that Barry was already dead.

From just that, it was difficult to know exactly what was meant. Had the man already died or had he recently been killed in a way that related to the case? None of the other victims they’d found hands from were confirmed as deceased so something certainly sounded different. Jessica checked the times of the calls she had missed. They were all at a point where she would have been sitting in the booth in the pub and it was only then she realised she had somehow muted the device. It wasn’t the first time she had managed to do something similar but it was the only time she had missed something important through doing so. Her one crumb of comfort was that, given the time the calls had come in, she wouldn’t have been able to do much anyway.

Jessica again thought about calling Cole but, because it was early, didn’t want to disturb him while he might be with his family. Instead she caught the bus to the station, having left her car there the night before. She read her emails and, from what she could tell, the officer responsible for the breakthrough had simply been a little lucky in that they had stumbled across the right combination of names. After they had found the correct ‘Newcombe’ that had led them to work out who the other person was. It was always likely to be a matter of time before somebody found the right people but Jessica would still make sure the person responsible got the credit they deserved.

It only took a few moments for Jessica to realise the message she had been left the night before was slightly misleading. Barry Newcombe was dead but, if it was down to foul play, then the person involved had been very clever. He had been involved in a head-on collision in a car eight years previously in which he, his girlfriend in the passenger seat and the driver of the other car had all been killed. The reports showed Barry had been almost three times over the drink-drive limit and, given the car’s positioning on the road, the only suspicions of anything being untoward related to the man’s own decision to drink and drive.

If he had somehow survived the smash, he would have almost certainly been charged with causing death by dangerous driving and the witness reports were pretty damning. He had apparently been drinking at a party with some of his friends and had not even pretended to hide the fact he was going to drive home. A few of his mates said they had tried to stop him but none had called the police. Quite why his girlfriend had joined him nobody really knew but the poor guy he had crashed into left behind a wife and four children.

It wasn’t the first story of its type Jessica had read but it was one of the worst. A whole family had been destroyed because of the selfishness of one person.

She found it hard to concentrate on the other name that had been left for her, Steven Povey, but realised he was now the one person in the holiday photograph that was still unharmed. He was the youngest of the six men pictured at twenty-nine, which meant he would have only just turned eighteen at the time they figured the photo was taken. Barry Newcombe was the eldest and would have been twenty. The other four men would have been either nineteen or just about to have their birthdays.