DS Jessica Daniel series: Think of the Children / Playing with Fire / Thicker Than Water – Books 4–6 (77 page)

If Jessica could have summed him up in one word, it would be ‘floppy’. He had light brown hair with a blonde tint, which Jessica guessed was artificial, that was parted along the
centre and then drooped bouncily on either side. His face was slightly shiny, as if he had spent his lunch-break moisturising, and he wore a suit which was probably more expensive than any single
piece of equipment in the room.

Jessica rolled her eyes and accepted his handshake, refusing to grimace as he deliberately squeezed tightly and smiled. ‘You must be Ian,’ she said, sitting back in the chair.

The man perched on the edge of Garry’s desk, so that he was peering down at her. Garry said he would leave them to it, suppressing a smile as he left the room and closing the door behind
him.

‘I am, what’s your name?’

‘Detective Sergeant Daniel.’

‘Do you have a first name?’

Ian was smiling in what Jessica guessed he thought was an appealing way. In reality, it made his face seem crooked, his pointed nose angled to the side and his too-thin lips slanted into what
was closer to a sneer.

‘Do you want to take a seat?’ Jessica said, ignoring his request and indicating Garry’s chair.

Ian slid off the desk, walking around it before sitting down with his legs splayed wide.

Jessica could feel her patience being pushed. He had that smug look about him, like he’d eaten the last of the biscuits and didn’t care that anyone knew. ‘I understand it was
you who took the phone call for the death announcement relating to Oliver Gordon?’

‘Indeed.’

The fact he couldn’t even answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a yes or no question was infuriating. She asked him to elaborate on exactly what the job entailed although, from
the way he described it, working on the births, deaths and marriages page was somehow equivalent to an undercover journalistic operation that was exposing corruption at the heart of government.
Seemingly, without him, the paper would come crashing down.

Jessica eventually steered the conversation around to the information she needed. She wondered if Garry had told her not to shout at Ian specifically because he knew she would be desperate to
after spending five minutes alone with him.

‘Tell me about the caller,’ Jessica asked.

‘It was male,’ Ian said.

‘Older, younger?’

The man ran his hand through his hair. ‘I don’t remember completely but he definitely sounded like an adult.’

Jessica had taken one of the notepads from the top of the filing cabinet and was making notes. ‘So over thirty?’

‘Perhaps a bit younger.’

‘So are you saying it was a young adult, between eighteen and thirty?’

‘Maybe. He could have been older.’

Jessica realised she was pushing the pen into the pad with increasing pressure. ‘How much older?’

‘I’m not sure. Maybe between eighteen and fifty?’

Jessica bit into the skin on the inside of her mouth to stop herself swearing. ‘That’s a broad age range.’

Ian had leant back in the chair, resting his foot on the opposite knee. ‘I didn’t realise it would be relevant at the time. I only remembered the name because I had to ask the guy to
spell it out.’

‘You had to ask him how to spell Oliver?’

‘It might have had a double “L”.’

Jessica tried to suppress a sigh. ‘Fine, anyway, you asked the man how to spell it. And what did he sound like? Was he unhappy? Frustrated? In a hurry?’

Ian looked back blankly at her and Jessica realised she wasn’t going to get anything of use. Aside from the actual notice in the paper, the trip had been a waste of time. Although they
would be able to get the phone records through at some point, it didn’t necessarily mean it would give them any answers. Pre-pay mobile phones could be used without credit cards, so they
could be put in anyone’s name, while phone boxes, although rarer now, could still offer anonymity. Assuming whoever had called in the notice knew what they were doing, there wouldn’t be
an easy way to track it. Ian’s description had narrowed the person down to one gender but, given his lack of awareness of the age of the person involved, she wouldn’t be certain he had
got the sex right either.

Jessica tried again. ‘Do you remember anything other than the fact that it was a male who sounded somewhere between the ages of eighteen and fifty? Did you write the name down?’

Ian brushed his eyebrow with his finger, smoothing it. He clearly wasn’t interested in the rest of the conversation. ‘Sorry, I can’t recall.’

Jessica ripped the top page from the pad, although her notes consisted of little other than ‘18–50’, then ‘knob-head’ written in capital letters. She folded it over
and put it in her jacket pocket, then stood. She had been going to hand him a business card before thinking better of it. ‘If you remember anything else, ask Garry to give me a
call.’

Ian got out of the chair and put his hands in his pockets, standing with his hips thrust forward. ‘Are you not going to leave me your number?’

‘I’m not sure there’s anything more you can tell me.’

‘Maybe I could take it for non-professional reasons?’ Jessica couldn’t be sure but she thought Ian winked.

‘I’m all right, thanks.’

‘If you’re sure.’

Jessica opened the door and walked out before Ian could add anything else. Garry was standing a few desks away talking to one of the staff but she managed to catch his eye as she headed towards
the lift. He caught up with her as she pressed the button to go down. ‘You’ll need my pass to get out,’ he said.

‘How do you put up with that guy?’ Jessica replied.

The lift pinged into place and they both stepped inside. ‘I don’t really. I put him in a corner and let other people give him work. He’s only here because of his
dad.’

‘He’ll probably be running the place in eighteen months.’

‘Don’t even joke. Still, it was him who noticed the name match-up.’

‘At least he’s an observant idiot and not just an idiot.’

As the lift opened onto the ground floor, Jessica and Garry stepped outside. He used his card to swipe her through the security check and then waited by the door with her. ‘If he thinks of
anything else, I’ll drop you a line.’ After a short pause, he added: ‘What’s going on with this kid? Is he missing? Dead?’

‘Who are you asking as? Journalist or interested bystander?’

Garry grinned sheepishly. ‘A bit of both.’

‘I guess it doesn’t matter seeing as his parents have been on to you. Either way, he’s missing. We don’t know any more than that yet.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think that if someone was calling your paper predicting his death a few days ago, then we have a pretty serious problem.’

Kayleigh Pritchard picked up the carrier bags from the foot well on the passenger’s side of her car. The handles strained as she lifted, the thin plastic vulnerable
against the weight of the groceries inside. She wondered what the point was of having ‘bags for life’ if she never remembered to take them out of her car boot. Instead, she was building
up an ever-larger collection of plastic bags in the cupboard underneath her sink, and the ones in her car certainly would last for life, seeing as she never used them. She carried the shopping to
her front door and put it on the doorstep while fumbling with her keys thinking, not for the first time, that she really should clear it out.

Because it rarely seemed to stop raining, her wooden front door was permanently swollen and always needed a hard shove.

Kayleigh practically fell over the threshold as she shouldered the door inwards and, after retrieving her bags, fought the door back into place before pausing for breath. The daily battle with
the door had been going on for a few years and wasn’t getting any easier.

She stifled a shiver as a draught breezed through her. Hoping she hadn’t left the bedroom window open again, Kayleigh carried her bags into the kitchen, where the actual reason became
obvious. As she entered, her eyes were drawn to the broken glass scattered across the floor. Kayleigh put her shopping down and tiptoed to the back door, careful to avoid the shards.

The bottom half of the back door was wooden but the top was made from translucent bobbled glass, which now had a jagged hole in the centre. Kayleigh stared at the keyhole and cursed herself for
being so lazy. Because she struggled to find her keys, she always left the back-door key in the lock. Kayleigh tried the handle to see if it would open, wincing as she heard glass splintering under
her shoes. The door required as much of a yank as the front one had, but the fact it was unlocked proved someone had smashed the glass and then used the key to open it. The key was still resting in
the keyhole.

Kayleigh pushed the door closed and leant against the fridge, closing her eyes in frustration. She remembered the previous time she had been broken into a few years ago, when she had carelessly
left a window open and gone out for the day. Back then, she had promised herself she would learn her lesson. Over time, she had simply become lazy, constantly misplacing keys, leaving curtains open
and, as was now apparent, carelessly leaving keys in locks. Although Ordsall didn’t have the best of reputations, Kayleigh had rarely experienced problems in the area since the initial
break-in.

Looking around the kitchen, apart from the glass, Kayleigh struggled to see anything that was out of place. She weaved around the glass and her shopping, making her way into the living room. She
didn’t own much of value but what she did have was in the main room of the house. Fully expecting to see the television gone, Kayleigh was surprised to see it on top of the cabinet exactly
where it had been that morning. Next to it was her stereo which, while not worth that much, would surely be worth taking if someone had broken in. As with the kitchen, Kayleigh could not see
anything out of place, with an empty glass still on the armrest of the sofa exactly where she had left it the previous evening. She stepped across to the cabinet underneath the television and
opened the drawer, taking out her laptop almost so she could believe it was still there.

She was full of relief, not just because the computer hadn’t been stolen – but more because she didn’t want to lose the photos she had on it.

Realising that someone who had broken in might assume she had something valuable upstairs, Kayleigh checked her bedroom. It was still untidy but that was nothing to do with the break-in and
everything to do with her own messiness. The duvet cover was half on the floor, with shoes scattered across the carpet. Kayleigh checked the side table next to her bed where she kept the spare
house keys, but everything was as it should be.

The landing and spare bedroom were equally clear, so Kayleigh walked back down the stairs into the hallway, feeling confused and wondering if it was just kids who had been playing around.

She returned to the kitchen, approaching the sink and staring out of the back window. A lane ran along the rear of the property and she had long known the rotting wooden fence inherited from the
previous owner offered little privacy from whoever chose to walk past. There were local gangs but Kayleigh hadn’t had a run-in with any of them and pretty much kept herself to herself.

After putting the frozen items of food in the freezer, Kayleigh wondered if she should sweep up. If anything, calling the police could bring her more attention and, with the fact that apparently
nothing had been taken, Kayleigh considered whether she would be better tidying up and then getting a glazier to come out. The excess on her insurance would surely be as much as it would cost to
repair the door anyway, so the hassle of standing around while a police officer took photos and left a crime number didn’t seem worth it. Then there would be the forms to fill in and the
endless things to sign. As if being broken into wasn’t bad enough, they then tried to kill you off with paperwork.

Kayleigh pulled the dustpan and brush out from underneath the mass of carrier bags in the cupboard below the sink and crouched, swishing the fragments of glass into the pan, while being careful
not to kneel on any. The hole in the window wasn’t that big but Kayleigh found small slivers of glass in far-flung corners of the room. When she was finished, she emptied the pan into the
large wheelie bin outside the back door and then found the phone book in the living room, before calling the first glazier on the list.

With everything sorted as best it could be, Kayleigh filled up the kettle with water and set it to boil, wondering why life couldn’t be easy. She went to sit in the living room, where she
could watch through the living-room window for the work van to arrive, but instead felt the all too familiar pressure on her bladder, so headed upstairs.

As soon as she opened the bathroom door, she realised something wasn’t right. The hole in the back door had made the air fresh downstairs but the bathroom smelled of something that
reminded her of a summer a few years ago when the bin men had gone on strike. Rubbish had been left to rot for three weeks and the lane at the back of her house where everyone put their bins reeked
of rotting, decaying waste. Kayleigh flashed back to that summer as she stepped into the room, eyes drawn to the bath. She had taken a shower that morning and always left the curtain half-stretched
along one side of the tub so it could drip dry.

It was then she knew someone had been in her house.

The curtain was pulled the entire way around the bath, shielding her from whatever was inside.

She crept forward until she had one hand on the shower curtain but the smell was finding a way to seep through her senses even though she was holding her breath. The stench almost made her gag.
Feeling the need to breathe in, Kayleigh closed her eyes and quickly pulled at the thin sheet. She heard the plastic rings at the top clattering into each other and then slowly opened her eyes.

Kayleigh felt strangely calm. She had watched television shows and films where people would go running and screaming and, although her head was telling her to close the door and call the police,
her first thought was that she wouldn’t be able to take a shower any time soon.