Vanished

Chapter 8

Although the two outbuildings and their contents were hugely significant, Jack was still looking for a safe which was, he assumed, where Avril Jenkins kept all of her personal information, because it sure as hell wasn’t anywhere in her house or in the wine cellar. He decided to do one final sweep of the entire property, looking behind every picture frame and tapping on every wall, looking for a false panel. But there was nothing.

He was feeling despondent when Laura called.

She’d been to visit Jessica Chi again, as Ridley had instructed. She wasn’t home, but her live-in landlady, Mrs Ashton, had told her that Jessica had only recently moved in and always paid the rent in cash. Mrs Ashton rarely saw Jessica, who seemed to be a very quiet, private girl who didn’t have many friends. Mrs Ashton had gone on to describe the only person who had visited Jessica in the past week: ‘A shortish man. Fit-looking, quite young, with black hair and black eyes with thick eyebrows.’ She said he looked like a ‘wrong’un’.

Jack was indignant. ‘What does she mean, “shortish”?’

‘Oh, that’s the bit that upsets you!’ Laura giggled down the phone. ‘Not the fact that she called you a wrong’un?’

‘Listen, Laura, could you or Anik try to find something — anything — on Avril Jenkins? There’s nothing here. No passport, no birth certificate, nothing. She was a married woman who ran a business and a house. There has to be paperwork.’

Laura said that she’d task Anik with the job, because she’d been told to get back to tracking Adam Border. ‘Ridley’s got a meeting with Steve Lewis, Mal’s boss, seeing as this is a joint op now. Who’s this Josh guy, by the way?’

‘Josh Logan. He was working with the Manchester Drug Squad, but now we’ve found fentanyl he’s going to work with us for a while. It’s already rife in the States, so he’s helping us to get ahead of it in the UK.’ As he spoke, Jack made his way out into the back garden. Laura asked if Josh was fit. Jack hung up on her.

As he watched Mal lead the methodical search inside the greenhouse, Jack felt frustrated. Every case had moments where the pace slowed right down, whilst another team picked up the baton and ran with it for a while. But this murder case had only just started, and Jack felt like he was treading water whilst watching the Drug Squad have first-dibs. He decided to go to the Drug Squad van to make himself a hot drink.

Jack was sipping an extra-strong cup of coffee when Josh asked if he could join him. ‘So, Jack, how do you think our cases connect?’

‘In all honesty, I feel like I know less now than I did when I first met Avril Jenkins,’ Jack said wearily.

Josh’s deep laugh resonated around the inside of the van.

‘She’s the piece that doesn’t fit, right enough. It’s common for gangs to target houses like this for their secluded, private grounds. And they normally target vulnerable people on their own. Maybe she truly had no idea what was going on in her own backyard. I’ve seen it happen. And you can’t see any outbuildings from the house. Maybe she discovered what was going on and became a problem they had to get rid of?’

‘Dismemberment’s overkill, don’t you think?’

‘And slow. Maybe they’re not connected at all. Maybe your killer has nothing to do with our drugs.’ Josh got up and filled the kettle to make himself a cup of tea. ‘You want a refill?’ Jack drained his mug and handed it to Josh. ‘You know what confuses me, Jack? No professional security. I mean, yes, there’s an old guy in a hut at the end of the main street only letting residents through. And the grounds are secluded. But, once you’re in, there’s nothing. Close to three million in drugs, street value, stashed beneath a lawn... and not even a security light or camera. I don’t know, Jack; some of this says professional, some of it says amateur.’ Josh beamed a huge smile. ‘Intriguing, right!’

As Jack headed back inside the house, his attention was drawn to the keypad used for opening the gate — the gate that he knew wasn’t locked on his first visit and wasn’t even closed on his second visit. This keypad had numerous, unmarked buttons on its display, and Jack noted down the maker’s name before continuing through into the kitchen.

From there, he looked out of the window and watched Josh walk beyond the trees, back towards the greenhouse. Jack followed. As he walked through the extensive garden, taking the same route as he’d done on his first visit, his mind floated back to following Avril with the wheelbarrow.

The hole she’d made when she was manically dead-heading was now filled in, but nothing had yet been planted in the space. Jack snatched a pair of gardening gloves from a wall and knelt down.

Mal was feeling his age as he continually bent down and stood upright throughout the process of meticulously sifting through the contents of the greenhouse. Now he stood, pushed his fists into the small of his back and clenched his shoulder blades together to cope with the sharp pain in his lower spine. Once the pain had passed, he relaxed his entire upper body in relief, looked out across the garden, and saw Jack kneeling in the soil, digging a hole with his hands.

Josh’s heavy tan work boots stepped into Jack’s eyeline, together with a second set of black boots which Jack instinctively knew must belong to Mal. Mal knew Jack well enough to simply wait for the explanation to present itself, and Josh followed Mal’s lead.

Sure enough, Jack’s hands soon hit something harder than soil. He found the edges of the object and lifted out a plastic bag. Jack had no inkling of what to expect inside the bag, but he certainly didn’t expect to find items of jewellery. Jack stared at the gold and diamond treasures in his muddy gloves. Josh spoke first: ‘Do you still know less than you did in the beginning, Jack? Or does that hoard shine any light on anything?’

‘I think this is the jewellery that Avril Jenkins claimed was stolen by Jessica Chi.’ Jack sat on his heels, confused and frustrated. Mal asked why she would pretend to be the victim of theft and stalking. ‘The only thing she gained was police attention,’ Jack said. ‘I think she was scared. But right now I have no idea what else is true and what’s a lie.’

Ridley, Steve Lewis and Superintendent Maxine Raeburn sat in Ridley’s office going over everything that each of their teams could bring to the table at this early stage of the investigation — and Steve was doing all of the talking. The Drug Squad had so much evidence to work with that they’d drafted in extra officers in order to work round the clock. Ridley was not best pleased. He had to beg for extra officers and even then rarely got them.

Steve Lewis was the same rank as Ridley but whenever he worked in tandem with a second team, he invariably took the lead. The problem with that was that Steve had tunnel vision: he didn’t care about Ridley’s case or whether Ridley got a result. The last time their paths had crossed, Ridley had taken Steve to one side and asked him to be more of a team player, and in response, Steve had had Ridley removed from the investigation, resulting in the only complaint against him in his otherwise blemish-free file.

Right now, Ridley’s day was about as bad as it could get. He hated to admit just how little his team knew. They knew Avril Jenkins’ name but nothing much else; they knew where Adam Border had come from, but not where he’d gone; they’d managed to lose track of a key witness, Jessica Chi; and, worst of all, the only two things they had found, a drugs farm and a missing silver Porsche, had both been sitting right under the nose of Ridley’s ‘best man’ for nearly a week.

As Raeburn silently listened, she too was visibly frustrated. At some stage, she’d have to justify why Kingston had to all intents and purposes ignored a woman who was now in four pieces in her mortuary. And why Ridley’s team couldn’t get a foothold in the subsequent murder investigation.

Ridley stood up from behind his desk and moved to his office window, where he looked out across the city. ‘Arnold Hutchinson shared with me that Terence Jenkins, the brother-in-law in California, is the main beneficiary of Avril Jenkins’ will. He’s coming over as soon as he can get a flight. We’ll see what his input brings.’

Raeburn was watching Ridley carefully as he talked, noticing how his shoulders hung down and his back was bent. She brought the meeting to an end, thanked Steve for attending and said that she wanted daily updates.

Once Steve had gone, Raeburn’s expression turned stern. ‘Good God, Simon, snap out of it. You’ve not gone yet.’ Ridley turned and perched on his windowsill. ‘You don’t have to tell your team, of course, but perhaps you should. Put them out of their misery and stop all of the speculation.’

Ridley shook his head. ‘I’ll tell them when this case is closed. They don’t need to know yet.’

By early evening, Mal and Josh were packing up, ready to leave. They’d retrieved everything they needed from the greenhouse and from the two outbuildings in the back garden. The extensive supply of pure fentanyl had been removed from the second outbuilding, and both were now secure as they still needed to be fully processed by SOCO. An excavator puttered its way towards the greenhouse, to take down the remaining structure before it fell down.

Josh shook Jack’s hand. ‘Great to meet you, Jack. And by the way, I’m baking tomorrow! Any requests?’ Jack laughed at the thought of Josh baking, but said he’d eat anything in the cake line and was happy to be surprised. Josh then handed Jack a bin bag full of rubbish from the Drug Squad van and asked if he wouldn’t mind throwing it away as he passed the bins next to the house.

To the side of the house was a brick structure about four feet tall, split into four sections, each with its own wooden door. Inside each section was a different coloured wheelie bin and on top of each section was a lid through which you could access the bins without having to take them out. Unfortunately for Jack, the lids were all padlocked shut so when he found the black bin, he had to pull it out of its pen in order to discard the impressive amount of junk accrued by the Drug Squad in just one day.

The bin stank. Remnants of food clung to soggy cardboard that had become wedged in the bottom. As Jack pulled the bin out far enough to fully open the lid, he could see discarded cigarette butts on the ground behind it. Being fairly certain that Avril wasn’t a smoker, he got a latex glove from his pocket and crouched to pick them up. He then turned the glove inside out, trapping the butts inside. He’d transfer them to an evidence bag once he got back to the station. He jotted down a note, giving his name and time he had used the bin, as it was more than likely the bins would be searched for evidence. From this new position near the ground, Jack could now see that this bin store had been built over air bricks that led into the cellar.

The cellar had been gone over with a fine-tooth comb, just like the rest of the house. Jack knew this for a fact because he was one of the people who’d explored it; but now, as he looked in through the air bricks, he could see that the internal back wall of the cellar stopped short of the external back wall of the house. This discrepancy was something he hadn’t noticed when he’d been inside but, from the outside, the size difference was obvious. Jack jumped to his feet, pocketing the latex glove containing the cigarette butts. He paced the outside wall of the building from front to back, heel to toe, then raced indoors, through the kitchen and down into the cellar. Jack measured the internal wall in the same way. It was six feet narrower than the depth of the house.

Through the air bricks, Jack could hear people running towards the back garden, and he could hear Mal shouting for everyone to stay back. Next to the greenhouse, a Wacker Neuson mini excavator had been stood down. Mal and Josh stood in front of it, looking at the pile of charred wood, collapsed metal shelving and general fire debris that used to form the back half of Avril Jenkins’ greenhouse. Hearing their shouts, Jack now ran to their side and followed their gaze into the centre of the debris where he saw a tangled mass of singed, jet-black hair entwined around slender fingers.