Woman in Black (28 page)

Jessica nodded but didn’t really have any need to go to the half-built room. She didn’t know what she was doing but was more acting on a whim than with any great purpose. After finishing her drink, she asked Charlie if he minded her going upstairs on her own but he was fine. Jessica walked into the hard white-stoned floor of the entranceway then up the carpeted stairs to the wooden landing. The kitchen also had a wooden floor and Jessica wondered quite why it was all so mismatched.

She felt strange about being given such free rein to root through someone else’s possessions. It wasn’t as if it was the first time she’d done something like it but there was usually a warrant involved. It occurred to her that Charlie didn’t mind because so little of it was directly his.

She ignored the room she had identified as Ed’s bedroom the last time she had been in the house and instead looked in the ones she had only glanced at before.

The first was in keeping with the rest of the half-finished house. The ground had bare floorboards with boxes were stacked in one of the corners. She opened the flaps of the card but it contained only decorating items, with stiff old paintbrushes and tins of paint with logos that looked outdated.

In the second room was a single bed on a clean-looking carpet. It didn’t look new as such, more untouched, as if it had been set up for a guest who never arrived. Jessica looked out of the arched window over the back garden where Charlie was pacing, talking to someone on the phone. He saw her and gave a cheery wave which Jessica returned slightly less enthusiastically. She was finding him an odd man to read but there were a lot of strange things in his life. He had not long made up with his brother, only for Ed to disappear. That left him as the sole heir to the house, something he didn’t really seem to know what to do with. It seemed pretty obvious Ed was a little eccentric, given the state of the house he had been living in apparently alone since his father’s passing.

Jessica had never had money to spare, not that she had struggled financially for a long time either. She earned enough to pay her bills, tried to save a little, then have some left over for whatever she fancied during the course of a month. As she looked around at the vast expanse, she wondered how she would have reacted to inheriting something so large. Maybe it would have been in the same way Ed and apparently his father before him had – by only half-dealing with things. Some rooms, such as the kitchen and Ed’s own bedroom, were nicely maintained, others were a shambles. It seemed they had created as much comfortable space as they needed to live in and not much more.

Jessica had looked into the family dynamic as much as possible and couldn’t help but feel there was something not quite right. At the same time, everything Charlie said had been verified and it wasn’t as if there was anyone else to check the family issues with. She wondered why neither of the sons had any type of relationship. Charlie was apparently single while Ed, who had also been a decent-looking young man with artistic talent and plenty of money, was apparently unattached too.

Jessica knew she wasn’t exactly an authority on relationships but it wasn’t as if she had found any trace of former girlfriends, or boyfriends, connected to the brothers. When the media got hold of big cases, things such as murders or something akin to what Jessica was working on, people would often contact the police because they knew the victim. It might be a former girlfriend or boyfriend, sometimes distant relatives or old friends. They wouldn’t necessarily be able to add anything to the case itself but it might help them build up a picture of who the person was. With Ed, they’d had next to nothing, almost as if he lived in the giant house on his own and didn’t have anyone else in his life.

Jessica continued to look through the house. The bathroom was as impressively decked out as the kitchen – one large wet room with a tiled, slanted floor for the water to run into a drain in the centre. The taps and shower unit were made of stainless steel, the sink and toilet the same colour as the shiny black walls. Jessica had only seen a bathroom quite so well equipped once before. On that occasion, she’d had to visit Edinburgh for work purposes and the force had paid for a hotel room. Because the place was oversubscribed, the staff had put her in a suite at the top of the building. It had been so much classier than anything she’d experienced before, she ended up taking two showers and using a remote control to open and close curtains in the bedroom just because she could.

She finally found her way back into the room where Charlie had handed her the picture of the rugby team. She felt drawn to the window again, spending a few minutes watching birds flit into the back garden and chase each other before flying away. There was no sign of Charlie outside and the scene seemed incredibly peaceful. She could understand why Ed had spent his time painting in the room that looked out onto the back.

Jessica eventually turned away, peering towards the clutter of boxes around the room. She didn’t know what she was after but started to look through the one closest to her. Even the contents seemed to have no order to them. In the first one was a certificate for Ed from primary school because he had finished fourth in a maths quiz but underneath it was a tin of shoe polish, four wall brackets you would use to put up shelves, an empty glass milk bottle and a board game that had an old television presenter’s face on the box, despite the fact he’d been dead for over a decade.

After putting the items on the floor, Jessica did her best to repack them into the box they had come out of, although she wondered if they would ever be taken out again. The contents of second crate were just as mismatched as the first. It contained golf balls, some old curtains, a snow globe, some tacky old sunglasses, a few candles and three newspapers from over twenty years ago. Jessica looked through the papers in case they had been kept for a reason but, if they had, she couldn’t see it.

As she put all the items back into the box, Jessica was beginning to question her own judgement about what she was hoping to achieve. She opened a third box and took out some wire coat hangers plus four empty tobacco tins. Underneath those were a set of framed photographs.

The first one was of two boys around nine or ten years old building a sandcastle on the beach. One was blond, the other had dark hair. Both were grinning at the camera and Jessica could just about see the resemblance to Charlie. When they were younger, the two brothers looked fairly similar, although the brown-haired Ed was a little shorter. Jessica continued to look through the pictures. The next one was of Ed on stage in what looked like a school play. He was a little older, maybe thirteen, and appeared to be giving some sort of sincere soliloquy. Charlie was the subject of the next photo, riding a bike around what looked like a park but could possibly have been the garden. There was also a photo of Charlie fishing, another of him playing football and a final one where it looked as if he and Ed were doing their homework. The pair were sitting opposite each other at a table concentrating on separate work books.

Jessica thought the photo underneath those was hauntingly beautiful. It looked as if Ed hadn’t even known it was being taken. He was around sixteen years old and sat painting in the room underneath. Light streamed through the windows ahead of him with a misting of rain on the glass. She found the image incredibly compelling and wondered who had taken it. Perhaps confused by the way she had been drawn to that photo, Jessica almost failed to notice what the next picture was showing. She had gone to put it face-down on the other photos before realising its significance.

She turned it back over and stared at the contents. There were six young men, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, all toasting the camera with glasses of beer in their hands. They were all a mixture of tanned brown and burnt red and it seemed clear they were on a holiday of some sort. After looking at it the second time, Jessica could clearly see Ed Marks in the middle with a huge grin on his face. Next to him on one side was someone who looked like a younger Matthew Cooper. She had only just got hold of an up-to-date picture of him but felt sure the resemblance was there.

Next to Matthew was someone she couldn’t place but, on the other side of Ed, Jessica could see something she had been waiting for since the first hand was found. There was one more face she didn’t know but the final two tanned faces grinning out of the photo undoubtedly belonged to Lewis Barnes and Jacob Chrisp.

TWENTY-SIX

On almost every occasion where Jessica heard or saw something that excited her relating to a case, she would feel her heart racing, ready to leap into action. Instead, she simply stared at the photo of the men. She looked at the hints of blue sky above them, wondering where it had been taken and who had been behind the camera. Was it a barman or a passing stranger? Was it a seventh young person somehow related to whatever the picture was showing her?

Jessica walked back down the stairs still looking at the photo, also holding onto the image of the two brothers doing their homework. She found Charlie in the kitchen. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, adding: ‘What have you found?’

She handed over the holiday picture. ‘Do you know anything about this? When or where it was taken? Who might be in it?’

Charlie stared at the image and then looked back at her. ‘Are these…?’

‘Four of them, including your brother, are missing. I need to find out who the other two people are, then what happened with the six of them.’

‘I don’t really know,’ Charlie said, slightly stuttering his words. ‘I vaguely remember him going to Faliraki when he left college but we had different friends.’

‘At least one of these people didn’t go to college with him though,’ Jessica said, thinking of Matthew Cooper.

Charlie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. All I remember is that it was the first time he’d gone abroad and he had to sort out a passport. It was the summer after he finished his exams but I guess it didn’t necessarily mean they were all people he was at college with. He did this art class thing once a week too. I just don’t know.’

‘So he would have been eighteen or maybe nineteen?’

‘I guess so.’

Jessica took the photo back. ‘Can I take this for now?’

‘No worries.’

She showed him the other one of the two boys doing their homework. ‘I found this. I didn’t know if you might want it?’

Charlie took the photo from her and smiled slightly. ‘I remember this being taken. It’s nice. Dad used to make us do our homework when we got home from school before he’d let us out. I remember him taking this.’ He used the support at the back of the frame to prop it up on the kitchen counter.

Jessica indicated towards the photo she was holding. ‘Can you keep quiet about this for a bit?’

‘Sure, it’s not as if I know anyone anyway.’

‘I mean from the papers.’

‘Whatever you want.’

Jessica drove back to the station trying to think things over but there were no obvious answers. If something had happened on the holiday, the person leaving hands around the city could perhaps be one of the two faces from the photo she didn’t recognise – or it could still be someone else entirely. The first priority had to be finding out who the remaining two people were and hoping neither of them had gone missing and that they would be willing to talk. Whether the holiday itself was relevant would be something they would hope to find out in due course – but at least Jessica now knew there was a connection from Matthew Cooper to the other three victims.

After parking at Longsight, Jessica called Charlie to ask if he could look through the rest of the boxes at his house and let her know if there were any others of Ed at a similar age. Two of her leads had already come from him and it would be irresponsible to not finish looking through things. With his agreement, she could have asked officers to go over but the house was so big, it would be easy to miss items and there would be no guarantee they would know what they were looking for. At least Charlie was aware of the type of photos she was after and, regardless of his odd circumstances, he did seem keen to help.

Dave and Izzy had already left for the day, as had Cole. Jessica would usually run ideas past at least one of them but, after looking around the station, she returned to her own office. DS Cornish was sitting at her desk and it was the first time Jessica had seen her in their office for a while.

‘How’s things?’ Jessica asked.

Louise sounded tired. ‘Slow and painful. I’m seeing red vans in my sleep.’

‘No luck finding out where it came from then?’

‘We’re getting there but not easily. We thought that once we had the make and model it would be a fairly small list – but Royal Mail’s records aren’t great. Instead of having a small list of vehicles it could be, we’ve got a long list of vans it isn’t. The DVLA are their usual shambles too – they really are the most incompetent, useless bunch of idiots I have ever known. We’ve got a couple of leads.’

Jessica walked around her colleague’s desk and sat at her own, turning to face the other woman. ‘What about looking into George Johnson himself?’

‘I’ve been left out of that a little but it’s fine by me,’ Louise said. ‘The superintendent has been talking to a few people. We’ve gone over his bank records and there are a few cash withdrawals that don’t seem quite right but they could be innocent enough. At some point we’ll interview him about them but there’s so much more we want to look at first. We had to jump through hoops but we’ve got a warrant for certain emails now too. You know we wanted to do it without him knowing? That created all sorts of problems but we’ve got tech guys looking over things.’

‘Expecting much?’

The sergeant sighed, adjusting one of the photos on her desk to make sure it lined up with the others. It was the longest conversation Jessica had had with her since the other woman started working at the station. ‘Who knows? Some people think that if they delete emails, there’s no trace of them. Some are too stupid to delete them. Others don’t send emails at all and our lab teams could spend the next few days looking over the dullest memos imaginable. I think it will come down to the cash that’s now not in his account and whether we can prove he’s done anything untoward with it.’