DS Jessica Daniel series: Think of the Children / Playing with Fire / Thicker Than Water – Books 4–6 (92 page)

She was hoping for a laugh which didn’t come. Instead he opened the door and got out, waiting for Jessica as she rounded the vehicle and checked the address on her phone. ‘I bet this
isn’t what she expected when she married one of the richest businessmen in Manchester,’ she said, looking each way before crossing the road.

Ruby Long lived in the middle of a row of terraced houses in the Wythenshawe area. The house next to hers had a skip outside and there was a smell of burning as Jessica noticed a bonfire in the
field at the end of the road. The houses were all red-bricked with sloping brown-tiled roofs and small front yards barely wider than the adjoining pavement. Ruby’s property was filthy on the
outside, with black soot-like dust splattered across one of the downstairs windows. Jessica could hear a cross between a giant bumble bee and a jumbo jet zipping along the road parallel to where
they were. Before approaching Ruby’s door, she waited as a boy who couldn’t be older than eleven or twelve turned the corner at the end of the road, dropping one leg to the ground and
spinning a moped around before speeding towards them.

Against her better judgement, Jessica stepped off the pavement, standing in the centre of the road and holding an arm out to make it clear she wanted the biker to stop. The groaning of the
engine was almost deafening as the youngster skidded to a halt next to her.

‘Where’s your helmet?’ Jessica asked him, wondering which of the various offences being committed in front of her eyes she should mention first.

Up close, the boy looked even younger, although his voice had broken and he had an angry inflection in his voice. ‘Who the fook are you?’

Jessica pulled the keys out of the bike’s ignition and told him she was from the police, rolling her eyes as the expected mouthful of abuse arrived. After establishing that he was
apparently ‘eighteen’ and that his licence was ‘at home’ – although he couldn’t remember where he lived well enough to tell her – Jessica spent fifteen
minutes waiting for a local patrol car to come.

When the uniformed officers arrived, it was clear they were already very familiar with the boy who had spent the time in between calling Jessica a lot of words she was pretty sure she
hadn’t known when she was his age – even if he did turn out to be eighteen.

As one officer placed the boy in the back of the patrol vehicle to return him home, the other tried to figure out what they were going to do with the bike. He offered Jessica a
‘thanks’ that didn’t seem overly genuine, pointing out the biker was ‘twelve, maybe thirteen’. Jessica’s joke about the lad having two kids by two different
mothers was met by a stony-faced agreement that she probably wasn’t far wrong.

‘Welcome to Wythenshawe,’ Rowlands said as Jessica finally got around to knocking on Ruby’s front door.

The inside of Ruby’s house wasn’t as dirty as the outside but there was something unerringly familiar about it. The carpet was the same shade of red as that in
Nicholas’s club and the decor of bright, glittery tat felt similarly forced and fake. Rowlands noticed it straight away, pointing out the wooden border that ran along the walls.

Ruby herself wasn’t exactly happy to see them. Although Jessica had called to arrange a time when they could talk, she opened the door with a ‘I wondered where you lot were’
and then turned, walking through the house, shouting ‘and take yer fooking shoes off’ over her shoulder. Nice to see you too.

Jessica slipped hers off easily but Rowlands hopped from one foot to the other, nearly overbalancing as he tried to untie the laces on his boots. Six months previously, she would have playfully
nudged him with her shoulder but she wasn’t sure if they had the same relationship nowadays.

‘Over, under, in and out, that’s what tying shoes is all about,’ she said. ‘Just do that backwards.’ After what seemed like an inordinately long time, the constable
finally dropped his boots to the floor, revealing socks with cartoon characters on.

‘You’re worse than Adam,’ Jessica said, walking in the direction Ruby had headed in.

She found the woman sitting in an armchair in a living room that was as garish as the hallway. The walls were painted red up to the border and then a slightly off-white above it. There were at
least half-a-dozen mirrors and a haze of smoke hanging around the ceiling. Jessica remembered the way Eleanor had described the casino and couldn’t help but wonder if Ruby was somehow
creating her own low-rent version.

Ruby scowled at the officers, cradling a cigarette in her hand. Her expression only told part of the story as her face was brown bordering on orange, her skin wrinkled and leathery, making her
look far older than the mid-thirties that she was. Jessica could only assume that was what a lifetime of cigarettes left you with.

She took another drag, before stubbing it out on an ashtray balancing on the windowsill. Jessica sat on the sofa, with Rowlands next to her. ‘I was hoping for a bit of background on your
former husband,’ Jessica said.

Ruby shrugged, reaching into a handbag by her feet, pulling out a packet of cigarettes and taking one out. She offered the pack towards them in a gesture Jessica hadn’t expected, although
she did seem pleased when they both turned her down.

‘I’ve not seen him in years,’ Ruby said, hunting around the floor before realising she had left the lighter on the windowsill next to the ashtray.

‘What about your son?’

Ruby didn’t look up as she lit the cigarette. ‘Him either.’

‘How long ago did you split up?’

She breathed in deeply, holding the smoke in her mouth before finally exhaling as her eyes closed in pleasure. ‘Ten years ago when he hooked up with that tart he’s married
to.’

Nicholas certainly liked his women young. Jessica knew that Ruby had been eighteen when she’d had Nicky – and they were already married by then. Meanwhile, if Tia was now in her late
twenties, that meant she was also a teenager when she had got together with Ruby’s then-husband.

Jessica was roughly the same age as Ruby and it seemed creepy that the woman in front of her had a son who had just turned eighteen. She barely felt old enough to have a child now, let alone
having one who was already an adult.

‘How often have you seen Nicholas since?’ Jessica asked.

Ruby shook her head dismissively. ‘Not much, maybe once a year?’

‘Do you have any contact with your son at all?’

The woman held the cigarette close to her mouth but didn’t touch it to her lips. ‘What’s it to you?’

‘We’re looking into a few things surrounding your former husband.’

Ruby smiled, exposing yellow teeth that somehow fitted with her skin tone, like a womble with a crack habit. ‘Anything that could get him sent down?’

Neither officer replied but Ruby got the message that it would be a good time to tell them anything she knew.

‘How did Nicholas get custody of your son?’ Jessica asked, being careful to use the word ‘your’ instead of ‘his’.

The smile disappeared from Ruby’s face as she puffed heavily on the cigarette. ‘You’ve not got a clue, have you, love? Have you ever met him?’

Jessica nodded.

‘Well then, you’d know that if he wants something, he gets it. The minute he said he wanted custody, he was always going to get it. If I’d gone up against him in court, he
would have found a way to get to the judge. If he couldn’t do that, he’d go through Nicky, promising him all sorts to tell people I’d done things I hadn’t. If all of that
failed, he would simply make me disappear. There was no point me even opposing him – at best I’d lose, at worst, I wouldn’t be here now.’

The matter-of-fact way she spoke was horrifying and Jessica didn’t doubt for a second that what Ruby had told her was true.

Ruby must have seen the realisation on Jessica’s face because she smiled again. ‘Don’t worry, love, he’s like that with everyone. He didn’t even want Nicky –
he sent him off to some boarding school to get rid of him – it was only ever about making sure I couldn’t have him.’

As if sensing what she was thinking, Ruby glanced from Jessica to Dave, then back again. ‘Up until about a year ago, I was living with this guy. We’d been together for eighteen
months or so and things were going okay. We were talking about getting married – but then he didn’t come home one day. Then he wasn’t here the next day either, or the day after
that. I called you lot but nothing ever came of it, he just disappeared.’

Jessica felt Rowlands glance towards her, which Ruby clearly saw. ‘It’s not what you think,’ she said, nodding towards him. ‘I got a call at three in the morning about a
month later. You never know what it is when the phone rings at that time, do you? But it was that fat fuck, he was pissed as always, giggling. He asked how my relationship was going and kept
laughing. I was going to hang up but then he said I shouldn’t worry. I asked what he meant and he said I should take heart that it took a six-figure sum to make him go away.’

‘Nicholas paid your fiancé to leave?’ Jessica couldn’t believe she was asking the question but Ruby finished off her cigarette before stubbing it out.

‘That’s what he does. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t want me any more, he doesn’t want anyone else to either. He thought it was hilarious that I’m living
here on benefits while he paid someone else that amount to leave me. It’s the way he works.’

‘We’re looking into a few things,’ Jessica said, wanting to offer the woman some hope.

Ruby shook her head. ‘You’ll never get him for anything, you must know that? He’d rather go down shooting and take a couple of you lot with him. That’s the type of
vindictive bastard he is.’

Jessica tried not to take the image literally. ‘What was it like living with him?’ she asked, although she could guess the answer.

Ruby reached forward and took another cigarette out of her bag, lighting it and sucking the smoke deep into her lungs before holding it in and eventually breathing out. ‘Everything you can
imagine and worse.’ She twisted her body around and lifted her shirt, showing them an area at the bottom of her back around her kidneys. Even from the other side of the room, Jessica could
see a patch of skin far whiter than the tanned brown of the rest of Ruby’s body.

‘That’s where he held an iron on me because I wasn’t ready to go out on time.’

She allowed her shirt to fall and then bent her ear forward, pulling her hair out of the way to reveal a zigzag-shaped mark. ‘I’d gone shopping one Saturday and missed the bus. I got
home forty-five minutes later than I said I was going to. This was before the days of mobile phones, so I had no way of letting him know because the only money I had was for the bus, not for a
payphone. He would only ever give me an exact amount for things. When I got home, he refused to open the front door at first.’ Anticipating Jessica’s question, she added: ‘He
never let me have a front-door key.’

Ruby paused for another puff of the cigarette. ‘He eventually opened the door but when he was halfway through, he smashed it back into me. I fell backwards and this side of my face got
caught in the door. At first, because I was in the way, he couldn’t shut it but, as I was lying there, he looked down at me and slammed it as hard as he could. My ear was caught in the door
and was torn off.’

Jessica couldn’t prevent herself from wincing but Ruby seemed unperturbed, pointing to the inside of her thumb. ‘When I was pregnant with Nicky, we were hosting this dinner party for
some people he knew. I wasn’t feeling very well and kept being sick but he barricaded me in the kitchen and told me to get on with it. I didn’t know what happened but I guess I fell
asleep for a moment because I was woken up by the fire alarm going off. It was nothing serious but something under the grill had burned. He came storming in, saying I was trying to kill him by
burning the house down. I was so tired, I didn’t even know what was going on – but he grabbed my hand and forced it onto this red-hot ring on top of the cooker. I was screaming and
could smell my own hand burning but he was shouting in my face, telling me I’d regret trying to burn his house down.’

Ruby paused to have another smoke, although Jessica had the feeling she could have catalogued many more injuries.

‘Surely there were questions from the hospital?’ Jessica asked, knowing how naive she sounded. It was a human reaction, not a police officer’s.

Ruby exhaled and smiled thinly. ‘Let’s just say I fell down the stairs a lot. If you went to a different casualty unit each time, no one even noticed.’

It was far from the first story of domestic abuse Jessica had heard but, coupled with everything else she knew about Nicholas Long, a genuinely terrifying picture was emerging.

‘Aren’t things better now?’ Rowlands asked. Jessica heard his voice falter and realised he was taking it worse than she was.

Ruby smiled another toothy grin and held her arms into the air. ‘Look around, honey, this ain’t much fun either.’

Jessica had been wondering why Ruby was letting them into all of her secrets but realised the woman was past caring. As she finished stubbing out the cigarette, Jessica knew the saddest thing
was that Ruby would run back to her former husband in a heartbeat if the option was there.

She wanted to comfort the woman, to tell her it couldn’t be that bad, but she knew anything she said would sound patronising.

‘There’s not much else I can tell you, sorry,’ Ruby added, straightening her clothes.

‘What was Nicky like as a child?’ Jessica asked, doubting the woman would be able to give her any information to back up what Leviticus had told her.

‘Nicholas found everything funny, as long as it didn’t affect him. Nicky would pinch and punch me and his dad would laugh along so he thought it was okay.’

‘But you still wanted custody?’

Ruby shrugged. ‘Boys will be boys. They’re always up to something. He was still my son.’ She quickly corrected herself: ‘Is my son.’

Jessica couldn’t think of anything else to ask. She had hoped for some insight into Nicky but instead ended up hearing one more awful chapter in the life of the boy’s father.

‘You can show yourselves out,’ Ruby concluded as Jessica and Rowlands stood.