DS Jessica Daniel series: Think of the Children / Playing with Fire / Thicker Than Water – Books 4–6 (76 page)

‘Why did you come back to work then?’

The constable pulled a face and, for a moment, Jessica thought her friend had taken offence. ‘Because I don’t want to be defined by it.’

It wasn’t the first time Jessica felt as if someone else was the adult in the room as she somehow struggled to keep up.

‘I love being a mum but I don’t want to just be “Izzy, the mother”. I want to be “Detective Constable Isobel Diamond, the police officer”, “Mrs Diamond,
the wife” – all those things and more. I love Amber and I love being with her but I didn’t want to become someone who spends so long being at home that I’m incapable of
doing anything else.’

It was clear to Jessica her friend had been bottling up her speech for a while. ‘You’ll always be “Izzy the wind-up merchant” to me,’ she assured her.

‘Isn’t that why you’re not taking Adam’s name? Because you don’t just want to be “Jessica Compton, the wife”? You want to do your own thing?’

Jessica stared at her friend. ‘There is another reason . . .’

Before she could say anything else, her mobile phone began to ring. She took it out of her jacket pocket, sighing for Izzy’s benefit as she saw the caller’s identity.

‘Well, well, well,’ she answered. ‘Look who it is.’

She was slightly dismayed to hear that Garry Ashford’s voice did not waver as he replied. He was a journalist that she knew she could intimidate and certainly annoy. In the past they had
helped each other with various things and, although she’d never tell him, he was one of the few people she trusted.

‘How’s married life?’ he shot back.

‘Is that a tiny hint of jealousy?’

‘Jealous I didn’t get to see you squirming in a dress. I heard you went to Vegas to avoid everyone?’

‘Well, if you will listen to Dave Rowlands as a source, then you will be fed misinformation. Anyway, if you’ve been caught flashing in a park again, then no, I’m not going to
ask about having the charges dropped.’

She heard the man suppressing what she assumed for the benefit of her own ego was a snigger. ‘Have you got a few minutes to come to the office?’ he asked.

Jessica swirled her hand in the air to apologise to Izzy for taking so long on the call. ‘Can’t you just tell me on the phone?’

‘It’s serious.’

‘You’ve not locked yourself in a toilet cubicle again, have you?’

‘Jess . . .’

Jessica changed her tone. ‘All right, we’ll come over but we’re supposed to be on the way back to the station, so you’ll have to give me something.’

Garry took a deep breath as if wondering how to phrase things. ‘We took a call this morning from someone who said her son is missing.’

Jessica involuntarily let out a gasp, somehow knowing the woman sat in the living room below was the person who had made the call. She wondered why Oliver’s mother hadn’t told them
she had phoned the media. Garry didn’t seem to notice as he continued. ‘You know what missing persons cases are like – you won’t do anything for a day or so and we
don’t run anything unless we’ve heard from you, otherwise we’d be printing a new story every time someone had an argument and stormed out for the night.’

For a reason she wasn’t sure of, Jessica didn’t want to let on that she knew anything about Oliver Gordon, let alone that she was standing in his parents’ house. She gave a
non-committal ‘uh-huh’.

‘Anyway, we have this new guy who started two weeks ago. He’s straight out of uni and you know the type. They’re keen but don’t really have a clue what they’re
doing. We’ve been giving him the shit jobs to see what he’s like . . .’

‘Wow, what a boss you are.’

‘Honestly, Jess, if I wind you up, just wait until you meet him, he . . .’ Garry sounded as if he was about to go off on a rant before he stopped himself mid-sentence. ‘Either
way, we put this call onto him just to shut him up for half an hour. It’s not that we’re unsympathetic but you don’t know if there’s actually a story, or just some
over-protective mum who’s had a shouting match with her lad.’

‘What happened?’

‘We put this guy on the births, deaths and marriages page a few days ago. It’s a lot of work for not much reward and everyone here is always dodging it. He did a decent job but
noticed one thing after taking all the details down about the missing lad. Can I run a name past you?’

‘Who?’

‘Have you heard anything about an “Oliver Gordon”?’

Jessica felt a tingle run along her back, her suspicions confirmed. ‘What about him?’

‘We had his mum phoning in this morning to say he went missing last night – but we already ran an obituary for him two days ago.’

Jessica dropped Izzy back at Longsight Police Station where they worked, asking her if she could start double-checking Oliver Gordon’s background and also look into his
friends. She then left her car and took a marked police vehicle. The
Manchester Morning Herald
’s offices were in the centre of the city and she had no intention of driving around
looking for a parking space. Instead, she left the car half on the pavement, half on the road on a side street just off Deansgate and then walked the short distance to the cafe where Garry Ashford
had suggested meeting.

The small coffee shop was in an area surrounded by swanky new glass-fronted buildings, looking as if it had been dropped into the wrong century. A bell tinkled over the door as Jessica walked
in. The smell of exotic teas was both pleasant but strange as she immediately spotted Garry sitting in the corner drinking from an espresso cup, one leg crossed over the other. The walls were
brown, almost as if stained by the fumes, and Garry’s outfit blended perfectly as he was wearing a pair of brown corduroy trousers, with a matching jacket over the top of a white shirt. His
hair had grown since she had last seen him, scraggily hanging below his ears.

He was jabbing at his phone screen but looked up when Jessica scraped back the chair opposite him and sat.

‘Still not got a mirror in your house then,’ she said.

They had met in this exact cafe a few years ago. Back then, Garry would have squirmed awkwardly but instead he grinned. ‘It’s good to see you, Jess.’

‘You too but your girlfriend can’t seriously be happy about going out in public with you wearing stuff like that? And what’s going on with the tiny cup? Can’t you drink a
proper mug of coffee?’

Garry finished the espresso and put the cup on the table. ‘Ever the good mood.’

Jessica ignored him. ‘Let’s hear it then.’

Garry pocketed his phone and leant forward, reaching into a bag on the floor and taking out a copy of the
Morning Herald
. He flicked through the pages then laid it flat on the table,
which wobbled as he put pressure on it. ‘This is from two days back,’ he explained, pointing to a square box towards the bottom of the page. Jessica leant in to read.

The notice concluded with a date and ‘taken too young’.

‘How often do you run these?’ Jessica asked.

‘Twice a week.’

‘How does it work?’

‘It used to be something you would pay for but that stopped a few years ago because there were so many places people would put notices for free on the Internet. The bosses figured they
would rather have people buying the paper to read the notices and make some money than make more or less nothing because people weren’t paying for the spots and the pages were relatively
empty.’

‘How popular are the pages? I’ve never looked at one.’

There was an awkward smile on Garry’s face. ‘It’s not really for people like you. You’ve not got kids. For people who have children, this is something they’ll keep
plus, because they’re often involved in other activities with other new parents, they all look out for each other’s too. You’re only going to put a marriage notice in if you want
it to be seen by others, which doesn’t sound like you at all, and then you have the death notices. Although you do get the odd younger person, it’s the page that is most read by the
older folk because they aren’t generally looking for these things on the Internet. They check for names of people they might know who have passed away.’

It sounded pretty morbid to Jessica. ‘These are the most popular pages?’

Garry shook his head. ‘Actually, that’s the crossword.’

‘Seriously?’

‘God forbid you ever get a clue wrong. Once we printed the wrong grid and we were taking calls for three days about it. People were going crazy, phoning up and saying, “I’m
never buying your rag again” and so on. We got this letter handwritten in green ink saying they were going to fire-bomb the building.’

‘Over a crossword?’

Garry laughed, seeing the senselessness in his description. ‘I know.’

‘So if people only ever buy the paper for the crossword and the births, deaths and marriages bit, why even bother with all the news?’

Jessica was trying to wind him up but he answered seriously. ‘Half our managers think the same thing. I wouldn’t mind but, if we get a detail in a story wrong, no one bothers
us.’

Trying to bring him back around to the subject, Jessica pointed to the death notice. ‘Do people email these in?’

‘They can but this was phoned in.’

‘Have you got any way of checking who calls you?’

‘Not directly. You’d have to check with the phone company. I can get you the details.’

‘Do you usually take the name of the person who has placed the notice?’

‘Initially but the paper doesn’t keep the information long-term because we don’t take any payments and have no real need. We used to have vast filing cabinets full of it all
but it was getting ridiculous, then some management guy had this big thing about data protection and so on, so we shred it. I had a look for a name before I called you but there’s nothing on
the spike. We have these recycling people that come around, so I guess it went out with that.’

Jessica nodded in reluctant acceptance. ‘So you’ve just got this new guy who took the call?’

‘Yes, Ian. I’ll take you up to meet him.’

Garry shuffled nervously in his seat, so Jessica spoke the words for him. ‘He’s Sebastian’s replacement.’

‘Yes.’

Sebastian was a journalist who had become too involved with his stories, creating incidents to report on and then getting carried away.

Jessica thought Garry was going to apologise so she stood before he had the opportunity, reaching into her pocket and dropping a few pound coins onto the saucer next to the espresso cup.
‘I’ll get this but I’m taking that paper. Let’s go.’

The offices of the
Morning Herald
were only a few hundred metres away from the cafe. Garry used a security pass to swipe them through the front door and they headed
for the lifts. They were in one of the tallest buildings in the city and, while Jessica knew that was where the paper was based, she had never visited before.

‘Impressive,’ she said, examining the various company names on the walls before the lift doors opened with a hum.

‘We’re only on one of the floors. It used to be two but they crammed us all into one to save on rent. You won’t think it’s that impressive when we get up
there.’

Garry wasn’t wrong about that. As modern as the building seemed, the floor he worked on looked as if a paper-bomb had gone off on it. Entire rainforests had been sacrificed, simply so the
office could be covered by an apparently endless onslaught of rubbish. As soon as she stepped out of the door, her eyes were assaulted by the clutter. Boxes of white printer paper were stacked
immediately on her right, next to a whirring photocopier. On her left, there was a wall filled with framed newspapers. At one point they would have been neat and lavish, but the frames were hanging
at awkward angles and two of them were cracked. Ahead of her was a mass of desks, each with a computer and seemingly another stack or two of paper. Jessica wasn’t tidy herself but this was
taking things to a new level.

They walked side by side, Jessica following Garry’s lead as he weaved through a bank of desks towards the far side of the room. ‘Why is it so messy?’ she asked.

‘No idea. It’s always been like this.’

Although it wasn’t overwhelming, there was a hum of noise; a mixture of fingers tapping at keyboards and journalists chatting either to each other or on the phone.

They soon reached a glass-walled office with ‘Garry Ashford, News Editor’ written on the door. In other circumstances, that might have been impressive but the impact was dampened by
the fact it had been printed on a sheet of A4 paper and Blu-Tacked to the glass. Garry held the door open for her and then closed it once they were both inside.

‘It’s not that funny,’ he said as Jessica made no attempt to stifle her giggles.

‘That is the shittiest sign I have ever seen.’

‘Someone’s coming to do it properly,’ Garry insisted.

‘Still can’t spell your own name, either.’

Garry walked around the desk and sat as Jessica took the chair across from him. From what she could tell, Garry’s office was one of the few clutter-free spaces on the floor. The walls were
a faded yellow and clearly hadn’t been decorated in a while but his desk was clear except for a computer. The only other piece of furniture was a filing cabinet in the corner.

‘I don’t even use that,’ Garry said, indicating the cabinet as he noticed Jessica looking at it.

‘How come you get your own office?’

‘Dunno really. The news editor has always had one, so I ended up inheriting it when I got the job. I spend most of my time on the floor anyway.’

‘Where’s this Ian guy?’

‘I’ll get him but, if you’re going to shout, just remember these glass walls aren’t that thick.’

‘Why would I be shouting at him?’

‘You’ve not met him yet . . .’

‘Why are you so convinced I won’t like him?’

Garry grinned knowingly. ‘Let’s just say I don’t think he’s your type. His dad is on the board of directors, which is why we had to hire him. He’s not as bad as I
thought he might be but . . . well, you’ll see.’ He stood and walked back towards the door.

Jessica might not have met him but she knew exactly what Garry was warning her about when he returned a few minutes later with a man who looked as if he had somehow been created solely to annoy
her. Ian walked with a swagger that he had neither the looks nor natural charisma to pull off. As he offered his hand for Jessica to shake, he eyed her up and down, before offering a posh-sounding:
‘I didn’t realise police officers could be so attractive.’