DS Jessica Daniel series: Think of the Children / Playing with Fire / Thicker Than Water – Books 4–6 (70 page)

Both officers stood up. ‘You can leave,’ Reynolds said, nodding towards the door.

Aidan slowly got to his feet, his solicitor packing the pad he had been writing on into his briefcase. ‘Did you really just bring us here to read all of that?’

Jessica watched Reynolds stare at Aidan. Because of the way he usually acted like a mixture of her father and older brother, she had forgotten how fearsome he could be.

‘No, we brought you in here to let you know that we know what you did,’ Jessica said. ‘Whether we can prove it – and whether it’s technically a criminal offence
– is another matter.’

The solicitor took his client by the wrist and led him out of the room. Jessica started to speak but Reynolds barely let her get a word out. ‘Not here.’ In silence, he led her along
the corridors until they were in his office.

‘What do you think he’s going to do?’ Jessica asked.

‘I couldn’t care less. We could go into abuse of trust or something like that but Sienna was over eighteen and the only proof we have of anything is the diary of a dead girl. We
already knew that. Neither of us really thought he’d confess, not with a solicitor there.’

‘It was worth a try though. He’ll be looking over his shoulder every time he sees a blue flashing light now.’

‘Oh, he’ll be doing more than that.’

Reynolds had spoken with a fearsome tone in his voice and Jessica felt intimidated by such a change in the man she thought she knew.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

‘I’m going to send photocopies of this diary to every newspaper and TV channel in a ten-mile radius. I don’t even care if it comes back to me – there’s no way
he’s getting away with this.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Jessica said.

‘No you won’t. If I end up getting it in the neck for this, I want you to get my job.’

‘Why would you do that?’

The inspector put an arm around Jessica. ‘Because you’ve already done enough.’

Jessica relaxed into the large reclining chair and put her feet up on the desk. ‘About time you got a new one,’ she said approvingly.

She watched Andrew relax into his own matching chair. ‘I didn’t think I could put up with you moaning about it any longer.’

‘How did Harley take the news about his daughter and her teacher?’ Jessica asked.

‘I don’t know. I called him the night before you told me it was going to drop in the papers. I thought he’d be angry, which he sort of was, but I think he’s been through
too much to really take it all in. He said he’d pay me. I kept telling him it was nothing to do with me but he wouldn’t listen.’

‘What are you going to do with the cash?’

‘I don’t know. Give it to charity probably. He still doesn’t know what happened with the fire and, even though I’m sure he’ll have the insurance, it doesn’t
feel right taking the bloke’s money.’ Andrew caught Jessica’s eye. ‘Sorry about mentioning the, er, fire.’

‘It’s fine.’

‘Do you know anything yet?’

‘No, we’re looking into things.’

Andrew stood and walked to the window. ‘You should quit and do this.’

Jessica spun around in her chair and snorted. ‘What, follow people around for a living? I’m all right.’

‘The money’s better and I’d bet it’s far less hassle.’

‘It’s not about the money.’

‘What’s it about? Putting yourself in danger?’

Jessica realised Andrew was being serious. She thought of the people she had come across over the years and the number of times she had been in trouble. ‘It’s about mates,’ she
said. ‘I get to go to work with my friends every day and, even when they’re being dicks, they’re still my mates.’

‘You could come to work with me? I’ll pay you well. We’ll set up our own joint agency.’

Jessica grinned at him. ‘It’s a really nice offer but I’m all right, thanks.’

‘You’ve got my number if you change your mind.’

‘I won’t.’

Andrew went back to his desk and hunted through the top drawer, before picking out a newspaper and placing it on the table between them. ‘What do you think is going to happen?’

Jessica picked it up and scanned the front page before turning to the inside and laying it flat. ‘I have no idea but I did hear that Aidan Barlow resigned last night.’

‘Do you think he’ll sue?’

Jessica shrugged. ‘Who cares? I spoke to the guy I know at the paper. He says that if the guy does try legal action, they would be able to produce all the diaries in court. Because
it’s a civil case, it’s on the balance of probabilities, not beyond reasonable doubt. He might still win but more and more details would be revealed each day. The papers only printed
that he had an affair with a student who later killed herself. If it got to court, everything else would be released about his threats to the second student.’

‘Sneaky.’

‘Yeah, it wasn’t entirely my idea. I would have leaked the whole lot.’

‘Are they going to know the information came from your station?’

Jessica shrugged again. ‘Probably. But again, if they complain, they risk the rest of the information coming out. I reckon Aidan will keep his head down and hope his wife forgives him.
He’s got off lightly.’

‘He’ll have to watch out for Harley too.’ Jessica didn’t want to comment, thinking that Aidan deserved everything he got but not wanting to condone anything else that
might happen. ‘I bet sales of the
Herald
are up today,’ Andrew said, flipping over to the next page of the paper. ‘They got five pages out of it and it’s been on
the news all morning.’

‘Yeah, my mate Garry will be happy.’

‘I didn’t think you were supposed to be friends with journalists?’

‘We’re not really but they can be helpful sometimes. I said I’d take him out for a beer but he’ll be buying after this.’

Andrew laughed but stopped himself when he realised Jessica wasn’t joining in. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

Jessica jumped up from the chair and took her phone out of her pocket. ‘Sorry, I’ve got to make a call. Are you going to be free later?’

‘I guess.’

‘Good, because I might have one final job for you.’

Jessica sat staring across the rippling water. The gentle waves were illuminated by rows of lamps along the water’s edge, the bright white moon reflecting from the
surface. The evening was cool but Jessica left the flat’s balcony door open, her feet resting on the handrail.

She knew something had changed. She didn’t know if it was down to her, perhaps a natural progression as she got older, or if her relationship with Adam had matured her. She wanted to feel
angry but instead she felt calm. The fact that she recognised her attitude had altered made her all the more certain that things weren’t quite right.

It didn’t matter how much she thought about the fires – and the fact someone had tried to kill her and Adam; she couldn’t raise the fury in her that she knew would have come so
easily barely months before.

Instead, she couldn’t forget Rowlands’s words. ‘Why is it always you?’ Over the course of her conversation with Ryan and the way she had uncomfortably begun to realise
that they were very similar people, she thought she had stumbled across the answer. It was always her because she couldn’t stop herself. Everything about her personality was act first and
think later. If she had thought first, she wouldn’t have lost Adam originally. If she had thought first, she would never have ended up alone in her flat with a mass murderer. If she had
listened to Izzy, her flat would never have burned down.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Caroline’s doorbell. Adam had been saying that perhaps they could think about buying the flat – but Jessica knew she could never stay
there long-term. The house they had been living in felt like Adam’s and this place felt like Caroline’s. She wanted somewhere of her own to call home.

Jessica closed the balcony door just as her phone begun to ring. She checked the caller and smiled, walking to the front door. The man standing there was cradling his phone to his ear with his
shoulder, holding onto a stack of newspapers under each arm.

‘You’re late,’ Jessica said.

He tried to enter but bounced off the doorframe, spilling one of the piles onto the floor. As he wobbled and tried to stop the first few falling, he accidentally released everything from under
his other arm, leaving a mound of papers covering the area in between the hallway and the flat. He crouched down, swearing under his breath and trying to pick everything up.

Although he had come to see her for a serious reason, Jessica couldn’t stop herself from laughing. ‘I thought the sign downstairs said no free papers?’

Garry Ashford looked up from the floor as he tried to re-stack what he’d dropped. ‘Ha ha, you’re very funny. Are you going to help?’

‘If by “help”, you mean take pictures and laugh, then yeah.’ Jessica stooped and began to pick up some of the papers herself before they eventually moved everything onto
the floor inside the flat.

‘Nice place,’ Garry said, wandering to the window and peering over the water.

‘It’s nicer when the sun’s out.’

‘How’s Adam? I heard he was out of hospital.’

‘He’s all right. I asked him to go out for the evening so we could work.’

Jessica sat on the floor next to the stacked papers and opened the lid of the laptop she had borrowed from Andrew.

Garry sat on the sofa. ‘Do you know what I had to go through to get those out of the office?’

‘I dunno. You left with them under your arm and managed not to drop them? How hard can it be?’

‘I had to sign them out because they’re part of our archive. It was only because I said I was working on a story that they let them go.’

Jessica shunted the laptop to one side and picked up the first paper. ‘Do you remember the last time we did this in my old flat?’

Garry clearly did. It had taken the combination of the two of them both to figure out who had been killing seemingly unconnected people in their own locked homes.

‘Is that why I’m here this time?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know who started those fires?’

‘Probably.’

‘Then why aren’t you out . . . I don’t know . . . getting them?’

Jessica shrugged and looked away, unable to admit that it was because she wasn’t sure if she trusted her own judgement any longer. ‘I want to know what you think first.’

‘Why me?’

Jessica beckoned the journalist over, so he was sitting next to her on the floor. She put the paper down and pointed to the page she had loaded from the
Herald
’s website.
‘What do you think?’

Garry leant forward and squinted at the screen, reading the headline and first few lines. ‘What am I looking at?’

Jessica flicked onto a second page and let him read again, then onto half-a-dozen more. Garry turned to her, obviously confused. ‘Stories about the fires, your fire, Martin Chadwick being
released . . . I don’t get it.’

‘How far back do these papers go?’ Jessica asked, pointing at the pile.

‘It’s what you asked for – about seven months or so. I’ve not got them all because there would have been way too many.’

‘Do all the stories you print go on the Internet?’

‘No, not the smaller ones.’

‘Okay, let’s start at the beginning.’ Jessica reached across Garry and started sorting through the papers.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Looking for the earliest one.’

Garry half-heartedly picked up the papers closest to him and began sorting them. ‘Are you going to tell me why?’

‘I want you to see it.’

Jessica needed Garry to work things out. If he could, it would offer some sort of justification for her actions and thought process. She flipped over the pile of papers and took the one from the
bottom, checking the date, and then skimming through the first two dozen pages. ‘Not this one,’ she said.

‘What am I looking for?’

‘Just wait.’

Jessica flicked through eight more newspapers before finally handing one to the journalist. ‘That one.’

She waited as Garry looked through the same sections. He looked up at her curiously. ‘Jess, I . . .’

Jessica continued working her way through the first pile, picking out three more and passing them to Garry and then choosing another five from the second. When she was finished, she tidily
stacked the ones she had used in date order and sat on the sofa, looking to where the journalist was going through the items she had given him.

After the final one, he stared up at her, holding his palms upwards. ‘I don’t get it.’

Jessica closed her eyes and leant back in the seat. ‘Just look. Read what I’ve given you and read what’s on the Internet.’

As Garry looked back at the stack of papers, she could tell he was thinking that everything had got to her. She could almost hear his mind working, wanting to ask her if she was all right.

‘Just read,’ she whispered quietly.

The man reached into his jacket pocket and fingered the ignition of the lighter. He felt a thrill of excitement surge through his chest as he rubbed the grooves of the circular
part with his thumb, gently rotating it slowly enough so that it didn’t produce a flame. He kept one hand on the object, holding his phone with his other as he walked briskly through the maze
of alleyways he had so carefully remembered.

He felt proud of the way he had evolved. In the early days, there had been no planning at all. He would drive to the site, do what he had to do and then get in his car and head home. It
hadn’t taken him long to figure out that he would find it hard to explain things if any witnesses reported his number plate close to more than one of his targets.

What he also started doing was buying fuel at a different petrol station each time, allowing him to refill his petrol can without arousing suspicion.

Not using his car at the scene solved one problem, but it left him with the issue of how to get the canister to the target without being seen. Public transport was obviously out and walking was
not only impractical because of the distances but also due to how heavy the petrol was. He had thought about using something else to get the fires started but he hadn’t come across anything
that was so quick to burn while, at the same time, being so easily available.