Jessica waited for Jade to blow her nose again.

When she continued, she couldn’t face Jessica. ‘I had my shoe in my hand and felt this rage, like I wanted to kill her. I don’t even remember it properly – Vee and Zoe were holding me back and I was shouting and going crazy. It was like I was watching myself.’

‘Did you hit her?’

‘I don’t think so, I just threatened to.’

‘What did she do?’

‘Nothing. She looked at me and said she was sorry for whatever it was she’d done. I knew she hadn’t done anything but I was still furious. I was screaming, “Go on, fuck off” – and she did.’

‘She started walking?’

‘Our taxi turned up a minute or two later and she was already out of sight. When I woke up the next morning I didn’t even remember at first, then I was having flashbacks. I texted her about ten times. When I didn’t get a reply, I assumed she was still annoyed – which was fair enough. I was going to go round later today to say sorry in person but then Carl called me this morning, asking if I’d seen her. I phoned the other girls and none of them had – then I realised that no one had seen her since the argument . . .’

At that, Jade finally lost it, doubling over and sobbing into her hands. Jessica rested a hand gently on her back but there wasn’t a lot she could say. It wasn’t likely you’d forget the day you argued with your best mate and never saw her again.

11

After spending Sunday at home, taking and making calls, replying to emails and generally working in a not-working kind of way, Jessica found herself standing in front of the chattering, biscuit-eating, tea-drinking masses in the incident room of Longsight Police Station the following morning, trying to stifle a yawn. Even DCI Cole had come down from his high horse, or upstairs office as it was better known, to see the proceedings.

‘All right, all right,’ Jessica said loudly. ‘It’s too early, I’ve got a headache and if you can’t all shut up then I’m going to confiscate the biscuits.’

An outraged hush descended as Jessica turned to the pair of whiteboards behind her. On one, there was a large photo of Damon Potter, with Cassie Edmonds on the other.

‘Damon died on Wednesday, Cassie on Thursday evening – one murdered, the other we’re not sure,’ Jessica said. ‘There’s no obvious connection from one to the other but the fact we’ve got them both to investigate means numbers are tight, so it’s all hands on deck, to the pump, or however the saying goes.’

Jessica paused to have a sip of her tea: ‘At around half eleven on Thursday night, Cassie had an argument with her friend as they were waiting for a taxi. We have CCTV of her walking along Great Ancoats Street and then turning onto Oldham Road but that was the last anyone saw of her until a dog-walker discovered her body in the woods close to Ellesmere Golf Course on Saturday morning. Forensics say she was likely dumped in the early hours of Friday morning, meaning she was killed relatively quickly after disappearing. Her boyfriend has an airtight alibi and we don’t have any obvious suspects.’

A hand: ‘Was she assaulted?’

‘Not sexually, which means we don’t have a motive either. But she was beaten very badly.’

Izzy was operating the laptop connected to the projector and Jessica asked her to flash through the photographs of the body. Any murmurings around the room quickly stopped as the horror dawned.

‘Our crime scene was a bit of a mess,’ Jessica continued. ‘For one, the weather was at its usual welcoming best and then our dog-walker had a bit of an accident. Forensics did what they could but they’re mainly relying on what they can get from the body, not what was at the scene. Because Cassie was dumped on the night she disappeared, they’re not sure if she was killed in the woods, or elsewhere. Either way, the killer couldn’t have gone far with her. We’ve been looking at tyre tracks around the car parks close to the golf course but we’ve not helped by parking there ourselves. Because it’s in a fiddly spot close to the motorway and there are a few smaller roads underneath, we’ve had no luck tracking number plates either.’

Another sip of tea: ‘Our search teams spent an unproductive weekend trawling through the woods, ending up doing little more than litter-picking. We’ve got a mass of discarded crisp packets and old carrier bags but not much else. Cassie was strangled and we’re still trying to see if we can get anything from the indentations in her neck, although I was told not to hold my breath – an unfortunate choice of words.’

Jessica continued to tell the officers about the few things they did have, namely a vague description of what the killer was like based upon the injuries inflicted – male, taller than the victim, wide fingers, right-handed, the usual kind of thing. Then she moved on to the profile that had been commissioned, which was more of the same. The cuts on the body apparently showed that the male had a deepseated hatred of women, possibly his own mother or partner. The beating indicated the killer had an anger problem, as if murdering someone in the first place wasn’t enough of a clue. Blah, blah, blah.

Drawing on a mixture of the profile and the forensic work, an unfortunate group of officers had spent their Sunday cross-checking the details against everyone with a history of violence in the north-west of England. An initial ‘short’ list of five hundred potential names had been narrowed to a mere seventy who required further investigation. It was the standard type of thing they’d do for any major case that didn’t have a natural suspect, but it didn’t feel right to Jessica. The people listed had beaten up their wives or had a fight in the street. It was a big step up from that to strangling and beating someone to death and then cutting parts from their body.

Photos of the victim had gone out to the media over the weekend but it had already been eclipsed in a tale of two blondes.

One: a pretty young Coronation Street actress had announced she was pregnant via her Premier League footballer boyfriend.

Two: a pretty young receptionist had disappeared and turned up dead in the woods a day later.

They were almost the same age, had gone to school a mile apart and had similar looks, except that Cassie’s nose was slightly crooked and her teeth weren’t as straight. One of them was splashed over seven pages of the local newspaper, and between three and five of the national tabloids; the other was worth a few paragraphs at the bottom of a page.

In the battle of blonde versus blonde, there was only one winner. If you were on telly, you were a someone; if not, you were a no one. Even in death, nobody would know who Cassie Edmonds was.

DC Archie Davey answered his phone with an agitated: ‘All right, I’m doing it!’

‘Good morning to you too,’ Jessica replied. ‘Here I was giving you a friendly Monday call to find out if you’d had a nice weekend at the football and I don’t even get a hello.’

‘Yeah, my arse were you. Anyway, I’m still trying to find the right former rowing club member to talk to. I’ve spoken to a couple but don’t have anything yet. How’s it going there?’

‘As you’d expect – we’ve interviewed the people who were at the rowing club party the other night and everyone says the same as Holden. Damon left midway through the evening. No one actually saw him go, of course, let alone saw him leave with anyone. They’ve all got the same story.’

‘There’s a surprise.’

‘Exactly. There are no cameras in the park and his flatmate says he didn’t go home afterwards.’

‘So he drank himself to death and put himself in the bin?’

‘Apparently so. We’re doing what we can – all we need is someone to say there were drugs at the party, or they saw him drinking to excess. Everyone there either didn’t see him, didn’t know who he was, or only saw him briefly. We’ve not even got confirmation that anyone saw him drinking. We didn’t find anything at the scene either. For now it’s a stand-off. Someone knows more than they’re letting on.’