The Killer Inside: A gripping serial killer thriller (Detective Jessica Daniel thriller series Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

her things that weren’t in the manuals, that the trainers didn’t bring up, while still being committed to getting bad guys off the streets. She was never quite sure whether he actually liked her – but he put up with her and, for Harry, tolerance was as good as it ever got.
    Harry was old-school. The absolute last of a dying breed. Some would say for the better – and perhaps they were right. Most nights, he’d gone for a drink after his shift. In general, he wouldn’t go near the police pubs; he preferred the ones that were far more dimly lit, where the landlord was happy to let his clientele hang around after closing for a cheeky final drink.
    After they had been working together for six months, Jessica had persuaded him to go to the same pub as the rest of the crew. He had let her buy him a drink – ‘Not that Scotch shite: a proper drink, bourbon.’
    Bourbon was what he had been drinking when some boozed-up thug had knifed him in a dingy pub eight months ago, at the end of a bright September day.
    Tom Carpenter, the guy who’d knifed Harry, was someone who couldn’t handle his drink and happened to have been carrying a knife in his back pocket. His fingerprints had been all over the knife left sticking out of Harry’s guts. A string of low-level thefts meant the police had had no problems identifying him.
    At the time, Carpenter might not have realised he had stabbed a police officer, but when the papers and news programmes got hold of the story and started flashing his photo around, there weren’t too many places to hide and he’d handed himself in.
    Jessica hadn’t known how to take the news when she’d found out. She had done plenty of hard graft working with Harry and he had always been fair with her. The years of exams to get onto CID had taught her the things she needed to be a detective, but Harry had helped her to become one. He had introduced her to his sources and had shown her how to find her own. He had opened her eyes to the city itself. He had taught her to see it not simply as a collection of buildings, a network of canals, a crawling line of traffic – but as all sorts of different people, and as defined, distinct estates and areas. It was like one of those magic eye pictures: suddenly, she had been able to see the hidden image.
    Harry had survived the stabbing, but he’d spent weeks in hospital and had never returned to the force. Jessica had visited, but she had found he wasn’t the same person any more.
    Faced with mandatory counselling sessions before being allowed to return fully, Harry had instead taken early retirement. He hadn’t even seemed that interested in helping the police investigation into the incident. Whether it was the shame of having drunk himself into a vulnerable position, or simply of not having been able to defend himself, Jessica didn’t know.
    Cole had been promoted when it had become clear Harry wasn’t coming back, and it was a sad fact that Jessica had almost certainly been promoted to Detective Sergeant to fill a gap that had been left by Harry walking away. It had seemed like a quick promotion, but a lack of recruitment in the local area meant sergeants were getting younger all the time.
    People like Harry were being pensioned off all over.

    ‘ I know you and Harry were close but I didn’t really know the guy,’ Rowlands said, now. ‘He always seemed a bit grumpy and people went on about leaving him be. I don’t think they really knew what to make of it when he took you under his wing.’
    Jessica nodded. ‘He was like a boiling kettle, but that was him. When he stopped complaining, he had a really dry sense of humour.’
    ‘Is that where you get your dirty jokes from?’
    ‘Only the good ones,’ Jessica grinned. ‘I wish I had his contacts. The killing this morning… I don’t know where to start. I’m sitting here hoping forensics strike lucky, or that the autopsy throws up something good. Harry would have been out there, talking to