DS Jessica Daniel series: Think of the Children / Playing with Fire / Thicker Than Water – Books 4–6 (55 page)

Jessica started to walk towards the door but the inspector had another question. ‘Why aren’t you thinking about Martin Chadwick?’

It was a question she had been wondering herself. There was an insurance policy on his house which would likely pay out – although, according to him, it was now in Ryan’s name.

‘I don’t think it’s him,’ Jessica said. ‘I don’t think he would burn his own house down and I don’t think he torched Harley’s either.’

Reynolds spoke precisely. ‘I checked with the hotel Martin is staying in to see if he was in his room on the night Harley Todd’s house was burned down.’ Jessica felt a chill go
through her, knowing what he was about to say. ‘The person who was working on reception told me he left the hotel early evening and didn’t return until after midnight.’

Jessica walked back across the room and leant on the back of the chair she had been sitting on. ‘You can’t think he burned his own house down? Why would he do that?’

‘Not a bad cover, is it? If your place has been destroyed, everyone sees you as the victim.’ Jessica knew he was speculating, trying to get her opinion on something he’d had in
his own mind. She had been the only person to witness the emotional side of Martin as they sat in the rear of the van and couldn’t see how he could go from that to burning down buildings.

‘I’m getting someone to look into his background,’ Reynolds added. ‘We know what he went to prison for but maybe there were arson attacks before that?’

‘Will you let me know if you find anything?’ Jessica asked.

Reynolds tilted his head to one side, fixing her with the protective stare she used to see a lot more often when they shared an office. ‘Don’t get involved, Jess,’ he said
firmly.

Jessica met his eyes and gave a small nod, before turning and leaving his office. She didn’t know why she cared so much that whatever was happening was not down to Martin. It wasn’t
often that she allowed herself to become attached to the people she was supposed to be investigating but there was something about the moment she shared with him in the back of the van that she
wanted to believe was real.

With all the people she dealt with and the horrific things she saw, it gave her some comfort that there was genuine remorse out there.

She chewed on her lip, hurrying along the corridors to the main floor where she could see Rowlands at his desk frantically clicking the mouse next to his keyboard. Jessica slid herself in front
of him, blocking his view of the monitor.

‘How are you getting on?’ she asked.

Rowlands scowled at her. ‘This computer system is absolute shite. I’ve crashed twice today already.’

‘Yeah, yeah, a bad workman blames his tools and all that. What have you got?’

Rowlands shook his head but Jessica could see he was suppressing a smile. ‘You’re all heart, Jess.’ He pointed to a lever-arch folder on his desk. ‘These are the records
of everyone in the area with priors for arson or anything similar. There aren’t as many as I thought. I’ve been trying to do it through the computer but it’s not having it, so
it’s back to paper. I’ve had two others going through the lists with me but we can’t connect any of them to either of the Chadwicks, the Todds or Anthony Thompson. The best
I’ve got is that one of them was in the same prison at the same time as Martin Chadwick. I checked their records and they were on different wings. It’s tenuous at best.’

Jessica knew it was always going to be a long shot but it was something that had to be done. She stood, feeling another jolt of pain shoot through her back, but stopped herself from touching it
to avoid any further age jokes.

‘All right, good work,’ she said.

Rowlands raised one of his eyebrows and grinned. ‘Is that praise?’

‘Let’s call it an anti-bollocking.’

Jessica couldn’t figure out if the man who was boring her was wearing a suit or a uniform. It was a little of each, with a red handkerchief sticking out from his pocket
and matching sash around his waist that was the same colour as the hotel’s logo. Jessica realised she hadn’t listened to anything he had told her for at least the past five minutes, if
not longer. She felt Adam’s arm snake around her waist and heard him say, ‘Can you give us a few minutes?’, before leading her back towards the main doors of the hotel.

‘What do you think?’ he asked.

‘As a wedding venue?’

‘What else?’

Jessica struggled to hide her lack of enthusiasm, biting her bottom lip and shrugging. ‘I don’t know.’

Adam’s face broke into a knowing smile and she was aware he had dealt with her apathy many times in the past. ‘What don’t you like?’ he asked, smoothing the hair down on
the side of her face, before sitting on the stone steps.

Jessica sat next to him, resting her head on his shoulder. ‘I dunno. I think it’s that bloke to be honest.’

Adam put his arm fully around her and laughed. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘He’s just so bloody happy and enthusiastic. Everything’s “wonderful”, “great” or “brilliant”. Either that or “fab”. Honestly,
anyone that uses the word “fab” without being ironic deserves shooting.’

Jessica felt Adam pull her tighter towards him. ‘There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your job.’

‘Not that much. I don’t trust anyone who isn’t thoroughly miserable when they’re at work.’

She felt Adam’s chest bobbing as he laughed. ‘You’re so weird.’

Jessica snorted. ‘You’re marrying me.’

She felt Adam’s chest calm. ‘Yes, I am.’ He kissed the top of her hair. ‘Not here though?’

‘Nah, he’d drive me bloody crazy. What’s that sash thing around his waist?’

‘It’s a cummerbund.’

‘But why would you wear it to work? The guy’s a lunatic. It wouldn’t surprise me to find loads of people have gone missing from this hotel and their body parts are in his
freezer. No one can be that cheery on a Sunday afternoon.’

Adam started laughing again, standing and holding his hand to help Jessica up. ‘Now I know you’re working too hard,’ he said.

Jessica allowed him to pull her into a brief hug, before he released her. ‘I should go and tell him it’s not for us,’ he said.

‘I’ll meet you at the car.’

Jessica began to walk across the car park, taking her phone out of her pocket to find no one had bothered to contact her in the time they had spent looking at – and rejecting – three
potential wedding venues. After days with nothing other than confirmation the blaze at Harley Todd’s house had been started deliberately, she thought it could be a distraction from an arson
case that seemed to be going nowhere. Reynolds was still having Martin Chadwick’s past looked into but nothing had come up so far.

Jessica sat in the driver’s seat before Adam clambered into the passenger’s side a few minutes later. ‘Was he all right?’ she asked.

‘He didn’t try to kidnap me and shove me into a freezer if that’s what you’re asking.’

Jessica laughed. ‘That’s exactly what I was asking.’

Adam reached across and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. ‘Are you all right? It’s fine that you’ve not liked any of the places we’ve been to today but I
wanted to make sure you still want to go through with it.’

In the instant he finished speaking, Jessica felt a lump in her throat and blinked furiously to stop herself from crying. She didn’t know how to tell him what she was feeling. She wanted
to marry him but, at the same time, something didn’t feel right. Jessica wondered if it was butterflies that anyone might have, or something unique to her that was making her feel that way.
She knew Adam loved her more than anyone had or probably would. The problem was that, increasingly, Sebastian was drifting into her mind. A man she had only met properly once. She knew it could be
only a physical thing. Did it make you a bad person if you were seeing somebody but were attracted to someone else? It was the type of thing she might have spoken to Caroline about a few years ago,
or maybe Izzy if she wasn’t on maternity leave. It felt like the kind of knowledge she should have, given she was a grown adult, but she didn’t remember the ‘How do you stop
yourself messing up a relationship’ class when she was at school.

‘I’m just waiting to see the right place,’ Jessica croaked before turning the engine on. She pulled out of the car park and headed onto the main road. Adam hadn’t seemed
to pick up on her moment of insecurity and chatted about his week as Jessica made sure to say ‘yes’ and ‘uh-huh’ at the correct moments.

Within moments of joining the M60, Jessica felt her pocket begin to vibrate. ‘Can you get that,’ she said, lifting her hip up from the seat and angling it towards Adam. ‘I
forgot to turn the Bluetooth on.’

She felt Adam reach into her trousers and pull her mobile phone out before putting it to his ear. After explaining who he was to whoever was calling, Jessica heard him say, ‘oh’,
‘right’ and finally, ‘all right, I’ll tell her’.

‘Who was that?’ Jessica asked as she heard the beep to signal the call was over.

‘It was Jason. He, um, had some bad news. He said it was all right for me to tell you.’

Jessica felt a rush of adrenaline in her chest, thinking it must be something to do with one of the Chadwicks. She certainly didn’t expect the news he actually had.

Adam gulped, speaking gently and deliberately. ‘Someone called Molly North is dead.’

It was only when Jessica saw scenes like the one in front of her that she struggled to conceive how Britain only stopped hanging people in the 1960s. It wasn’t that she
had any especially strong feelings for or against capital punishment – she understood the arguments from both sides – simply that being hanged in particular seemed so brutal. If
state-sponsored killing was ever brought back, there surely had to be a more humane way to do it.

Molly North’s bedroom reminded Jessica of her own from when she had been a similar age. While Caroline adorned her walls with posters of pop stars and one footballer whom she had a crush
on, Jessica left hers plain. Instead, she had rows of books and a mixture of compact discs and cassette tapes shoved onto two shelves next to her bed. Unsurprisingly, she couldn’t see any
cassettes in Molly’s room but there were rows of books lining the otherwise clear walls.

The lampshade was upside down on the carpet, with small flecks of blood next to it and a leather belt that had a neat cut mark through it. Although the body had been removed, it was the way the
belt had been snipped which had Jessica thinking about her own childhood.

‘What happened?’ Jessica asked Reynolds, who was standing next to her.

‘Her mum and dad went out for Sunday lunch, came home and shouted up to say hello. When there was no reply, her mum came up and found her hanging from a beam in her room. Her dad cut
through the belt but it was too late.’

Jessica didn’t know what to say, other than a pitiful-sounding, ‘That’s horrible.’

Neither of the officers moved, silently taking in the surroundings before the Scene of Crime team came in to catalogue everything and take photographs.

‘What are you thinking?’ Reynolds asked.

‘I don’t know. Two suicides, two fires, we don’t even know if they’re connected.’ A thought occurred to her. ‘Was there a note?’

‘Not that anyone has found. The Scene of Crime boys will have a proper look around but you would have thought it would be left out in the open if there was.’

Jessica peered around the room from the doorway but, aside from the lampshade, blood and belt, the only thing that didn’t seem quite right was how tidy it was. She wondered if it was
always like that, or if Molly had cleaned her own room before hanging herself.

Reynolds walked across to the window and peered outside, before turning to face Jessica. ‘Do you think she killed herself because of her feelings for Sienna?’

Jessica shook her head. ‘I don’t know. She seemed more savvy than that. Obviously she was upset but it’s a large jump from that to . . . this.’

‘Why else would she do it?’

Reynolds’s question sounded more rhetorical than something for her to answer. Jessica spotted two framed photographs next to the bed. She stepped carefully across the room and sat on the
bed before picking one up.

It seemed as if it had been taken relatively recently, perhaps in the last year or so. Both young women were wearing shorts and small T-shirts and appeared to be in a garden or a park. Molly
looked exactly as she had on the day Jessica interviewed her. The woman’s short dark hair was tucked behind her ears and she had an arm draped around Sienna’s shoulders. Jessica had
only seen pictures of Sienna after her death but had to admit she was truly stunning. In the photo, her T-shirt was tied to expose her stomach with her shorts only just long enough to cover the
area where Jessica knew she cut herself. Her long blonde hair fell seductively, framing her face. She had one arm around Molly’s waist and was giving a thumbs-up to the camera with the other.
Jessica struggled not to smile at the image. It reminded her of touring south-east Asia with Caroline when they left college. There were all sorts of photographs in an album or a box somewhere that
were exactly like the one she was looking at: two young women hugging and grinning with their lives ahead of them.

She put the picture down and shuffled uncomfortably on the mattress, trying to get comfortable. There was a section close to the edge that felt softer than the rest and she had partially sunk
into it. Jessica picked up the second photo in which Molly and Sienna were still children, perhaps eleven or twelve years old. They were on a beach but the framing was a lot tighter and Jessica
couldn’t see much more than their smiling youthful faces.

As she put down the second picture, for a reason she didn’t want to think about, Sebastian popped into Jessica’s mind again.

‘You know what the news is going to say, don’t you?’ she said.

Reynolds caught her eye from across the room, telling her he knew. ‘We don’t have anything to say there’s any sort of suicide ring going on around here.’

‘I know that but it’s not going to stop them writing it – or hinting and letting people put two and two together. Before we know it we’ll have every parent with a
teenager keeping them inside because they think they’re part of some cult.’