Dead Jealous

by Helen H. Durrant

  DEAD JEALOUS

  A gripping crime thriller full of twists

  (DI Calladine & DS Bayliss Book 7)

  Helen H. Durrant

  First published 2017

  Joffe Books, London

  www.joffebooks.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this.

  ©Helen H. Durrant

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  http://www.joffebooks.com/contact/

  THERE IS A GLOSSARY OF ENGLISH SLANG IN THE BACK OF THIS BOOK FOR US READERS.

  Please note deck is local usage for a floor of a tower block. A pushchair is a stroller.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  AVAILABLE NOW BY HELEN H. DURRANT

  Glossary of English Slang for US readers

  CHARACTER LIST

  FREE KINDLE BOOKS

  For my gorgeous grandchildren — Imogen, Jake, Layla, Holly and Evie.

  Prologue

  She looked him straight in the eyes. “C’mon then, hand it over.”

  In her high heels, the girl stood slightly taller than him. She had her hands on her skinny hips, daring him to default on their deal. “Ain’t got the balls, have yer? Knew it!” She tossed back her long hair. “You’re like all the rest, a bloody loser.”

  She could tell he was afraid. She saw it in his eyes, the way they kept darting back and forth between her and the black shadows cast by the tower blocks.

  “Scared someone’s watching us?” she taunted. “Afraid someone’s waiting out there ready to pounce, are yer?” She moved closer until her face was only centimetres from his. “I ask you to do one simple thing. You’re a waste of space, do you know that?” She’d had enough. Turning her back on him, she walked away towards the shadows.

  “No!” he shouted after her. “I’ve got the stuff. I just wanted to be sure.”

  She stopped and half turned. “Sure of what? That I won’t tell anyone?”

  “I’ve not done this before,” he said quietly.

  She shook her head. “I’m calling time. I was an idiot for asking you in the first place.”

  “But I need the money!”

  “Tough!” She spun round and watched him, a sly smile on her face. She pulled a roll of notes from her jeans pocket, held them aloft and waved them, taunting. “Pity. You could have had a lot of fun with this little lot.”

  “I’m not lying. I have got the stuff. But not here.”

  “Follow me.” She walked into the shadows, knowing that he would follow. “Some dealer you’re going to make.”

  “Here. This what you want?”

  She snatched the packet from him, a big grin on her face. “Good boy! I got it wrong, didn’t I? I might even use you again.” She stuffed the drugs into the pocket of her leather jacket, leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “Now, do one.”

  “What about my money?”

  “Get lost! Treat this as a lesson in customer satisfaction. If I’m satisfied,” she patted her pocket, “I might pay you. But if not . . .” She spun round and walked away.

  “You can’t do this! I got what you wanted. I took all the risks.”

  She could hear him trotting up behind her. He was like all the rest, an idiot, easily taken in. She’d never had the slightest intention of parting with hard cash.

  “Leave me alone or I’ll talk,” she threatened. “Want everyone to know what you’re really like?”

  He stopped in his tracks and shouted after her. “You’re a selfish bitch, Flora Appleton. You won’t get away with this!”

  “I already have,” she chuckled. “You’re so easy to con. Far too trusting, that’s your problem.”

  He was no better than all the rest. Which was a shame, because Flora quite liked him. If he had shaped up, they could have had fun together. She walked away. There was business to be taken care of. She had money in her pocket and drugs to sell. She heard the footsteps again. He was back. She turned to look, but there was no one.

  She shouted at the shadows. “Don’t play games with me!” Flora squinted into the darkness. There was a slight movement beside a row of bins several metres away. He was following her. Wants his money, she supposed. She smiled to herself. That wasn’t going to happen.

  “I know you’re there,” she called out. “You’ll have to try a lot harder if you want spook me.”

  Flora turned into an alley that ran between two of the tower blocks. It was within sight of the Pheasant pub, which was lit up like a beacon. He wouldn’t have the nerve to follow her here. Too scared of being seen. She strolled past the pub, hands in her pockets and began to whistle. Maybe she would finish the night off in the pub.

  Suddenly someone grabbed at her arms and pulled her off balance. Flora staggered, and teetered on her high heels. She tried to turn, to shove her assailant away, but a blow to the head put paid to that. She fell to the ground.

  Flora Appleton lay face down on the concrete. Greedy hands tore at her jacket, went through the pockets, and found the drugs and the roll of notes.

  Flora wriggled a few inches forward, trying to push herself up. He had more balls than she’d given him credit for. Then she cried out. Her assailant yanked her head up by the hair, and slammed her face hard into the concrete. Flora groaned, and spat out a mouthful of blood. As soon as she could, she caught her breath, and screamed for all she was worth.

  “No you don’t, bitch.” The jolt of another blow to the back of her head. But she’d wriggled onto her side and was able to lash out. Her fist made contact with flesh. She was howling and swearing. Then she felt the first sting of the blade.

  It slashed across her thigh.

  She heard, ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!’ screamed over and over. The knife struck again. And again, delivering searing pain to different parts of her body. Flora knew the only way she would survive this was by attracting serious attention.

  She gave another piercing scream and kicked out frantically. She was running out of time. She tried to turn, push the bastard off, and flipped onto her back. Wild eyes bored into hers, filled with anger and hate. Seconds later the blade entered deep inside her chest. Flora Appleton lay still.

  Chapter 1

  Nine days later — Monday

  It was three in the morning and Detective Tom Calladine was weary. He’d been fast asleep when the call came. The incident was serious, and he had no choice but to attend. The body of a teenage girl had been found stuffed in the boot of a car on the
Hobfield.

  “You’re not going to like it,” Natasha Barrington warned. “Stinks to high heaven.”

  A CSI lifted the boot lid and stood aside. Natasha hadn’t been joking. The smell and the sight were dreadful. What was left of the girl was curled up. The horror of it was that her body had been bent and twisted to fit into the small space.

  Natasha shook her head. “All that hot weather we’ve been having has muddied the waters, I’m afraid. Decomposition is well advanced. We’ll have to be careful just getting her out of there.”

  Calladine’s imagination ran riot, calling up images of limbs dropping off as they lifted her. He shook himself. It was the double whiskey he’d had before bed, and the tiredness. There was no point in asking if anyone recognised her. As she was now, she was barely recognisable as human.

  “Bus pass. No name, I’m afraid — too well worn. But it’s one of the sixteen to eighteen ones. So a college student, I’d say.” Natasha smiled.

  He turned to Roxy Atkins, one of the Duggan’s senior forensics people who’d also attended, and mumbled, “Let me have an ID as soon as. Nothing more I can do here.”

  He felt sick. The smell, the sight . . . he hadn’t been prepared. Tiredness notwithstanding, he had the wit to realise that this was a nasty one. Someone had killed that girl, then left her to rot. Whoever had done that needed catching.

  “The lads who found her are over there.” Natasha pointed to a group of shocked-looking youngsters huddled together by a wall.

  “I’ll have a quick word.” Calladine beckoned to a uniformed officer. “Come with me and take their statements.”

  * * *

  Calladine woke up later that morning feeling as if he’d spent half the night on the Hobfield estate. In actual fact, he’d been there less than an hour. His bones ached and he couldn’t stop yawning. Once he had been able to take a broken night’s sleep in his stride. That was fast becoming a thing of the past.

  He cleaned the incident board and made a neat list of the meagre details they had. Soon the photos would be on the police computer system. They’d be printed out and pinned up here too. That should focus the minds of his colleagues when they got to the office.

  Natasha Barrington from the Duggan Centre (where all the forensics and pathology were now outsourced to) had already phoned. She’d been at it since the early hours. With careful cleaning, the student bus pass had revealed the victim’s surname. That and the fact that the victim was a student had helped with tracing dental records. Fortunately the local dentist was able to find a match quickly. Dental records confirmed that the body was that of sixteen-year-old Flora Appleton. Now they knew for sure, Calladine had the unenviable task of telling Flora’s mother. He’d take Ruth with him. She was better at the morbid stuff than him. She always knew the right thing to say. Then he remembered — it was Ruth’s morning off.

  “There’s a woman downstairs asking to see you, guv.”

  Calladine looked up from his desk and gave DC Nigel Hallam a quizzical look. The young detective was first to arrive and smartly dressed, as always. He had that eager, ‘keen to do well’ expression on his face. It was starting to grate. “Do we know what she wants?”

  “No, but she asked specifically for you. Said it was important, she’d talk to no one else, and she’d wait.”

  Calladine was trying to sort out the witness statements gathered last night regarding the Flora Appleton case. The kids who’d found her in the boot of that car had been traumatised and he wasn’t surprised that their statements made little sense. But they all agreed that Flora hadn’t been seen around for a little over a week. After collecting their statements, Calladine had left it to the CSIs and the team from the Duggan to remove the body. He was relieved not to have to witness that little operation.

  Given how and where the girl had been found, the death was obviously suspicious. They’d know more once the post-mortem had been carried out and the CSIs had done their work. For a start, it would be helpful if they knew exactly where the girl had been killed. Flora had been missing for a full week, but her mother had not reported it. Calladine was having difficulty with this anomaly.

  “Did she say if it had anything to do with Flora Appleton?” The young DC shook his head. “Okay, I’ll pop down and have a word.”

  The main office was unusually empty. His sergeant, Ruth Bayliss, had the morning off. DC Simon Rockliffe — Rocco to his mates — was on an IT course in some far-flung corner of Wales. Calladine took the stairs, thinking about his depleted team. Rocco had been ‘Rocco’ for so long now they were in danger of forgetting his real name! DC Nigel Hallam was new. He’d been a uniformed PC, recently promoted to detective constable and assigned to Calladine’s team. Calladine hadn’t got the measure of him yet. Nigel had the makings of a good detective, but there was something about him that neither Calladine nor the rest of the team had taken to. The lad had a steep hill to climb. It was hard to have to fill the void left by the death of Imogen Goode. Perhaps that was it.

  The team were all painfully aware that Nigel wouldn’t be with them at all if Imogen hadn’t been killed. Calladine still got upset when he thought of the pretty DC. It had happened three months ago, but it was still very raw, particularly with Ruth. She’d not been herself since.

  The woman who’d asked to see him was pacing the floor in the small room next to the reception area. Calladine didn’t recognise her. He put her at roughly forty. She was small with short spiky hair, and dressed in jeans and a baggy sweater. She was holding something wrapped in a small blanket.

  He greeted her with a smile. “Can I help?”

  “Jill Hodge.” She smiled back. “I came to give you this. I think it might be important.” She handed him the item she’d been carrying. “I’ve moved into a house on Beardsell Terrace, number two. I’m about to have a wood burner installed, and I found this bricked up behind the old fireplace.”

  Wrapped in a child’s pink blanket was a small pottery urn, a ginger jar perhaps. It was about twelve inches high and glazed a rich, deep red.

  He looked at it, puzzled. “Is it valuable?”

  “Possibly,” she replied. “But it’s what’s inside that bothered me.”

  Calladine lifted the lid and peered inside. “It looks like ash.”

  “Exactly what I thought.” She gave a shudder. “At first I thought the thing must be an urn, and that I’d stumbled upon some poor soul’s remains. But now I’m not so sure. I still think they are someone’s ashes, but the blanket is a child’s.” She paused, and drew her lips into a thin line. “This was lying on top, just under the lid.” She handed him a second object. “I wrapped it in the tissue paper to keep it safe. I thought it best when I saw what it was.” She took a deep breath. “I know the story. I’ve been away for a while, but I used to live around here.”

  The wrapping was protecting a child’s hairslide. Calladine blinked in disbelief. It was a simple rectangle of pink plastic with a large gold butterfly at one end. Across the length of the topside was printed the name ‘Jessica.’ Calladine’s stomach did a somersault. For a second, he thought he was dreaming. How many times had he looked at an image of this item? For weeks, the hairslide and its owner had stared back at him from the front pages of both the local and national press.

  “It’s hers, isn’t it? And those,” Jill Hodge nodded at the ashes, “that’s what’s left of little Jessica Wilkins.”

  The colour drained from Calladine’s face. She might be right. And if she was . . . ? This would be huge. The press would be all over it — again. Not to mention what it would do to Jessica’s mother. But more important to Calladine was the question of what they had missed during the original investigation. If this was indeed Jessica, it meant she’d been kept and killed somewhere local.

  He looked at Jill Hodge as if through a fog. “We can’t be sure. There will have to be tests.”

  “How long is it since the child disappeared, about fifteen years?” she asked.

  Calladine was f
eeling queasy. “Seventeen years, five months and a couple of weeks.” He saw the quizzical look she gave him. “I still have a copy of the file in my desk drawer.” He was slightly embarrassed at this admission. It made it appear that he’d been counting off the days. “I read through the case notes regularly,” he added.

  “You were part of the investigation team at the time. I remembered your name from the papers. Are you alright? You’ve gone awfully pale.”

  Was it any wonder? It was one of the worst cases he’d ever worked on. A missing child, no leads, not even rumours. But worst of all was the fact that the body had never been found. Calladine hated failure, particularly when it involved children. Not finding Jessica, or what had happened to her, hadn’t been easy to live with. For weeks he had woken in the dead of night, thinking about the numerous things that could have befallen Jessica. He’d theorised, gone over the events in his head, and retraced the girl’s steps until he was worn out. Everything, including all the emotion surrounding that case, was seared onto his brain.

  Jessica Wilkins had been nearly two years old. Her mother, Josie, had taken her to Leesdon Park to play. It had been a hot afternoon. She’d left the child sleeping in a pushchair under a tree while she went for an ice cream from the van parked up near the swings. Josie reckoned she’d been away five minutes tops. When she got back, Jessica was gone. Someone had taken her, along with the small pink blanket from her pushchair. The child was never seen again. This was every parent’s nightmare, and her mother was beyond frantic. No one had seen anything, there’d been no CCTV. There was absolutely nothing to work with. The investigation lasted months. But inevitably the case was wound down. It remained unsolved.

  “We turned this town inside out.” Calladine was staring out of the window at the High Street. It was as if time had slipped backwards. He could recall every detail. “There was no time off for weeks. We searched everywhere. We sent divers into the canal, the river and the reservoir up in the hills. We went house to house, more than once. We went into every cellar in this town. But we got no leads. No one knew anything. All the work we put in was for nothing. It was if the little lass had simply evaporated into thin air.”