Silent Suspect: A completely gripping crime thriller with edge-of-your-seat suspense (Detective Jessica Daniel thriller series Book 13)

by Kerry Wilkinson

  After picking up the receiver a second time and listening to the steady tone, Jessica replaced it again and stood staring beyond the sea wall.

  The dark waves of the Irish Sea lapped in the distance, washing silt, seaweed, used condoms and the odd shopping trolley onto shore. She remembered coming here as a kid with her parents, being told by her dad that – on a clear day – she’d be able to see Ireland. It sounded fishy and distinctly made up at the time – and she sure as hell couldn’t see it now. It was so cloudy, she could barely see the moon.

  Despite the fading light, a couple were on the beach below, apparently oblivious to the onset of night and the freezing temperature. A twenty-something man was striding in white trainers, tracksuit bottoms and an England football polo shirt, dragging his protesting other half behind him. She was swigging from a can of foreign lager, calling him a string of garbled, barely literate obscenities. He continued stomping across the sodden dark sand until she yanked her hand away and started to stumble in the direction from which they’d come. The man yelled at her, finger jabbing wildly at her retreating back, until he gave up and disappeared after her, still pointing and gesticulating.

  Young love. It wasn’t quite the picture painted by the holiday brochures.

  Jessica turned away from the beach, peering along the street towards the centre of the town. One long road stretched from Lytham St Annes at the south of the resort, hugging the coastline for fifteen miles until it hit Fleetwood to the north. Jessica was on Blackpool’s southern promenade, close to the Pleasure Beach and within walking distance of the attractions. In the distance, Blackpool Tower was lit up, a golden beacon beaming into the dimming sky. Underneath, the long road was lined with rows of blinking neon lights, the illuminations carving themselves into the approaching night. They were another thing Jessica remembered from her childhood visit: tens of thousands of winking, shimmering bulbs lining the entire seafront from the end of summer until the first or second week of November. She’d been told that visitors would come from miles around to see Blackpool Illuminations. Thirty or so years ago, they probably did. Now, people were a YouTube clip away from seeing it for free.

  The first row of illuminations was a few hundred metres away, a dancing set of cowboys that ran up a set of lamp-posts on either side of the road and then jinked across a tightrope of wires high above. On the cowboys’ hats were the unmistakable golden arches advertising McDonald’s, with glimmering arrows close to the road pointing drivers in the right direction.

  It was all a bit… tacky.

  Were there competing Burger King cowboy illuminations on the north shore? A boogieing cavalcade of lights in the shape of a sandwich somewhere close to the tower underneath a Subway logo?

  Jessica doubted she’d missed much by not returning since she was a child.

  She turned in a circle, taking in the dilapidated hotels across the road, before spotting the CCTV camera high on a pole close to the phone kiosk. She stared up at the monitoring device as it peered down at her and wondered if someone was watching. If the cameras in Manchester were anything to go by, the answer was no. Hundreds were plonked around the city in a display of Orwellian power but very few actually worked. Of the ones that did, the picture quality generally left it hard to tell if the subject being filmed was human, let alone male or female.

  Across the road, the lights in the café built into one of the hotels flickered off. Aside from a silhouette shuffling out of the door and locking it behind him, there was no one anywhere near her. Jessica couldn’t even hear the beach couple arguing their way into the distance any longer.

  What should she do?

  Jessica had never seriously expected to find Bex next to the phone booth, but she’d expected… something. A clue to her whereabouts, a note, an explanation. In so many ways, that was the one thing Jessica had craved since the moment she’d arrived home three months previously to find Bex gone. She desperately wanted an answer to the question of ‘why?’. If Bex had left because of something Jessica had done or said, then perhaps she could begin to move on. It was the not knowing that was eating at her.

  She was about to return to her car when Jessica noticed the poster glued to the side of the metal shelter that surrounded the phone. It was an A4 sheet of paper covered with splurges of grainy black and grey ink, as if someone had used a cheap photocopier with a dodgy toner cartridge. The top corners had started to rub away with the dew or frost from the previous night, leaving a gloopy residue on the metal.

  MISSING

  The capitalised word spewed from the poster, atop a speckled monochrome photograph of a young woman. When it came to pictures of missing people, so many of the images showed individuals striking similar expressions: passive, almost dispassionate smiles as they stared somewhere close to whomever was snapping the photo. Jessica’s mouth started to open – it was an image of Bex.

  … Except that it wasn’t. She was seeing what she wanted to.

  The girl was in her late-teens or early twenties, with long dark hair and large hooped earrings. The rest of her features were difficult to make out through the fog of the poor print quality. Underneath her picture were the words: ‘THIS IS KATY. CALL IF SEEN’, followed by a phone number.

  Jessica stared at Katy’s image for a few moments, taking her in. People went missing all over the country: young, old, male, female, single, married. Many were found, some weren’t, but each left behind a story of confusion over where they had gone and why.

  Even though she had her mobile, Jessica delved into her pockets and emerged with a pound coin. It felt apt, somehow. She pushed it into the payphone socket and dialled the number from the poster. There was a clicking, silence, and then it started to ring.

  Jessica held her breath. One ring. Two.

  A man’s voice: ‘Hello.’

  ‘Oh, um… hi. My name’s Jessica and I saw a poster with a missing girl.’

  ‘Have you seen her?’

  He sounded excited as Jessica realised she was offering false hope. ‘Sorry, that’s not why I’m calling. It’s a bit, er, complicated…’

  ‘Complicated how?’

  ‘Can I ask who Katy is?’

  There was a pregnant pause, the awkwardness booming through the silence. Eventually, the voice stammered a reply: ‘She’s my sister. She’s been missing for three months. Are you saying you’ve seen her?’

  ‘I wish I had,’ Jessica replied. ‘It’s just that I’ve lost someone, too. They look similar and my friend has been gone for three months. I saw your poster and… I’m not really sure what came over me. I shouldn’t have called.’

  There was another pause, longer than the previous one. Jessica could picture the man on the other end of the phone, shrugging his shoulders, wondering why some nutjob had bothered to call. Perhaps he got this all the time: lunatics calling the number on the poster and then gabbling on about something or other.

  ‘Sorry,’ Jessica added.

  ‘No, it’s okay. Where are you? I put up posters all over.’

  ‘I’m in Blackpool on the South Shore, calling from a phone box overlooking the ocean.’

  ‘Near the Pleasure Beach?’

  ‘Sort of.’ Jessica spun around, looking for a closer point of reference. ‘There’s a hotel opposite – the Prince, plus a row of others and a café.’

  ‘Do you want to talk?’

  It was Jessica’s turn to sigh and pause. She’d driven up the motorway hoping for… something. She could go door to door on the hotels opposite with a photo of Bex, asking if anyone had seen her, but that was a long shot to say the least. There was the CCTV camera next to the phone, but she’d have to find out who operated it and then get onto them about whether they stored footage. That would take time, however. Beyond that, she wasn’t sure what to do. There was her empty home awaiting her back in Manchester, or…

  ‘Where are you?’ she asked.

  ‘I can be with you in twenty minutes or so if you stay put.’

  Jessica gazed thr
ough the blur of the early evening towards the dancing cowboys and then peered back to her car. ‘Okay,’ she replied. ‘I’ll be here.’ She was about to return the phone to its cradle when a thought fell into her mind. ‘Oh, sorry, I should have asked. What’s your name?’

  For a moment, she thought he’d gone, but the man’s voice was cool and clear. ‘I’m Peter,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you soon.’

  Three

  Jessica and Peter passed underneath the wibbling lit-up cowboys on their way towards the town centre. The long line of illuminations continued as far as she could see, stretching over the road in a variety of different shapes. After the cowboys, there was a rainbow of crabs batting their claws towards the passing drivers. Beyond that were fluorescent amphibians playing frogger across the top of the street. Like Vegas but a bit rubbish. A bit British.

  At first they walked in silence, but as the hum of traffic and visitors increased, they started to talk. Peter was a few years younger than Jessica, stubbly with short dark hair, but otherwise sporting nothing too identifiable, especially as he too was bundled up under a large jacket. He sounded local, northern at the very least. To the untrained eye, they were a couple having an evening stroll along the prom.

  Jessica glanced sideways towards him and then back the way she was heading. ‘You said Katy was your sister…?’

  ‘Right – she’s only nineteen.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  Peter waved an arm ahead, in the vague direction of the centre. ‘We live a mile or two away on the other side of town. She left the house one morning saying she was going out with her friends and that was the last I saw of her. The police said they’d been trying to find her but… y’know, this place is notorious for people going missing. Couples get pissed up and argue with each other; groups of lads end up getting lost when they’re on the lash. There’s something in the paper every week. Most of them turn up somewhere or another, so you can’t really blame the police.’

  At least he wasn’t one of those people who blamed the police for everything that had ever gone wrong. Jessica wasn’t sure if she should let on that she was an inspector. Some people reacted badly, clamming up and forgetting a police officer was still a normal person. Well, comparatively. Jessica knew a few officers whom she’d struggle to class as ‘normal’.

  ‘Have they told you anything officially?’ she asked.

  They continued for a few paces before he replied: ‘Not really, only that there’s no sign of her. They went around her friends and checked through her stuff at our house. There’s no sign of anything weird. No note, no dodgy emails or texts. Nobody has a clue. One morning, she was there; the next, she was gone.’

  He spoke matter-of-factly, relating a series of events as opposed to cracking with emotion. Jessica wondered if that’s how she sounded when talking about Bex. Sometimes the only way to push away the grief was to pretend it wasn’t there.

  ‘What about you?’ Peter asked, his pace slowing ever so slightly.

  Jessica took a gulp of the crisp air. Now she was out of the car and walking around, it didn’t feel so cold. ‘Similar. She was my housemate… my friend. One morning she was there, the next she’d gone.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Rebecca. Everyone called her Bex.’

  Jessica slowed to a stop and delved into the pockets of the coat, taking out her phone and flipping through the images until she found one of the teenager. She held up the device for Peter to see. In the first picture, Bex was smiling and giving a thumbs-up and a weary smile for the camera. Her skin was pale, appearing even more ethereal because of the blackness of her hair and swish of thick eyeliner. A small silver ring piercing her nose glinted in the light. In the next photo, Bex was in a sleeveless top and sunglasses, enjoying the sunshine in Jessica’s back yard. It was the day of her eighteenth birthday and she’d had friends over for a celebration. After the upbringing she’d had, it had been her first-ever birthday party. There had been that usual blend of bad – well, modern – music, finger food, laughs and fun. Undeniable fun – something that Jessica had rarely had in recent times. In the image, Bex’s skin had a slight tan, the spider’s web tattoo on her inner arm angled towards the picture-taker, with a doffed bottled beer in her other hand.

  Peter eyed the two photographs, nodding slowly as they set off walking again. ‘She’s pretty,’ he said.

  Jessica opened her mouth to reply, but the only thing that came out was a spiralling wisp of breath. Bex was pretty… yet it sounded weird coming from a stranger. Jessica shivered slightly, unsure if it was from the chill of the evening or the edge of creepiness that had laced Peter’s remark. She wondered why he’d said it. Perhaps he was one of those social misfits who didn’t realise that praising someone’s appearance wasn’t automatically a compliment. It was about context – and talking about a missing girl’s looks as a first point of reference was unnerving.

  They continued walking in silence for a little while, passing the Central Pier along with its assortment of dinging arcade machines. Jessica turned to see a woman in a mobility scooter rhythmically feeding two-pence pieces into one of the penny pushers. She delved into a large plastic cup without looking and hovered over the drop slot, pausing, waiting for the in-and-out mechanism to draw back before letting the coin go. Without waiting for it to land, she was already back in her cup, hunting for another coin: pausing, pushing, pausing, pushing.

  Nearby, two young girls, only ten or eleven, were leaping around one of the dance machines in perfect unison, matching ponytails bouncing behind them, the moves imprinted onto their brains. Next to them, a teenage couple had plastic rifles pressed into their shoulders and were blasting away at a screen filled with zombies. Or vampires. Or possibly werewolves. Jessica wasn’t entirely sure. Either way, they were doing a lot of shooting.

  They were well and truly on The Golden Mile.

  ‘What happened to her?’

  It took Jessica a moment to realise that Peter was talking to her. His voice had almost been lost among the tinkling assortment of sound seeping from the arcade.

  ‘Bex?’

  ‘Right – your friend.’

  ‘I pretty much told you. I went to work one morning, leaving her at home. When I got back in the evening, she was gone. She’d left all of her stuff, including her phone and shoes. The front door was unlocked and the stove was on. As far as I could tell, the only thing gone was her and the clothes she was wearing.’

  ‘No note or anything?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Jessica continued walking but could sense Peter peering sideways at her. He’d slowed, forcing her to move at his pace, and he kept edging closer to her, brushing his arm against hers and forcing her to move further towards the inside of the pavement to get away. Before long, she’d be against the rail separating the promenade from the beach.

  ‘Did the police talk to all her friends?’ he asked.

  ‘I… they spoke to everyone.’

  ‘With Katy, I think the police thought she’d gone to stay with one of her mates, that she’d had an argument with me or Dad and would turn up eventually.’

  ‘Did she live with your dad?’

  ‘We both do,’ he gulped. ‘Well, did. I still do.’

  Peter took another half-sidestep, the thick padding of his jacket grazing against the material of Jessica’s, while the back of his hand nudged her skin as if he was trying to persuade her to hold hands. Jessica didn’t break stride and tried not to show her discomfort, instead taking a forcible step towards him until their shoulders collided. She had the momentum of movement, but Peter hadn’t expected it and stumbled, taking a moment to regain his balance.

  ‘Oops, sorry,’ Jessica said.

  Peter appeared to take the hint, moving slightly further away. She could still feel him watching her and he continued speaking as if nothing had happened. ‘The police kept asking if she’d run away before. Was it like that with Rebecca?’

  ‘Sort of.’
<
br />   ‘Had she run away before?’

  ‘It’s complicated.’ Jessica didn’t want to say that Bex had been homeless precisely because she’d run away from her mother. Suddenly, the conversation felt wrong.

  ‘Katy hadn’t,’ Peter added. ‘This was a first. They kept asking about familiar places she might have gone to stay. Clubs she was a member of, whether she had a favourite pub, that sort of thing. Did they go through all of that with you about Rebecca?’

  ‘They asked all of that.’

  ‘But there was no sign of her anywhere…?’

  Jessica stopped, turning to face Peter and then gazing past him and upwards, realising they were level with Blackpool Tower. It soared high above on the other side of the road, a sparkling arrangement of golden bulbs winking on and off in time to a silent song. Considering the time of year and the temperature, there were a lot of people out. Hundreds of tourists and locals streamed back and forth along the prom on one side, with more bustling past the shops and attractions on the other.

  She could feel Peter staring at her but Jessica kept her gaze on the tower, a little over his shoulder. There was something about him that gave her the creeps. She bit her lip and then nodded in the direction from which they’d come.

  ‘I should be getting back,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, right…’

  Jessica took a business card from her pocket – one of the blank ones that didn’t identify her as a police officer – and handed it over. She knew she probably shouldn’t, but then thoughts of Bex got the better of her. ‘Just in case you ever stumble across Bex while you’re looking for Katy,’ she said.

  Peter eyed the card and then pocketed it. He stood with his arms open slightly, as if inviting a hug. Jessica wasn’t sure. She might have read him wrong and definitely wasn’t feeling herself. So she put her head down, offered a ‘see ya then’, and set off back towards South Shore.

  She kept walking until she felt sure Peter wouldn’t still be watching and then crossed the road, finding a spot on a wall outside a pub and turning back to watch the Central Pier. On the area at the front, a woman had hitched her skirt up and mounted a low-rent bucking bronco machine. As the plastic-looking bull threw itself upwards, the woman grasped its horns, her neck jolting backwards in a whiplash claim waiting to happen. Her friends were nearby, whooping and cheering for the entire six seconds until she was thrown clear, landing with a padded thump on the matting.