There was nothing.

Adam had texted her a few times during the day but she had deleted the messages without even reading them. She felt selfish but it was almost if she wanted to punish herself for not preventing what had happened the night before.

As Jessica sat staring at the computer screen, her thoughts drifted to cartoons from her youth for no apparent reason. She considered how simplistic it seemed when Bugs Bunny had a small devil on one shoulder whispering bad thoughts in one ear as a little angel sat on the other telling him the opposite. It sounded stupid but she could almost feel them there behind her, the devil telling her the chief inspector was the one and that she should shout it from the rooftops, the angel reminding her she was just struggling to deal with her friend’s death and seeing demons where there were none.

Jessica walked out to her car and got in, looking at the clock on the dashboard. She realised she had slept for barely four hours in the last day and a half. It felt as if someone else was driving as she pulled onto the road to travel home. Her feet and hands were moving over the pedals, gear stick and steering wheel but Jessica made no real conscious thought to control what she was doing.

Her mind snapped back as a car behind her beeped as she waited at a green traffic light. She wasn’t sure if she had fallen asleep for a few moments or simply if she hadn’t noticed the colour. She tried to pull forwards but the car lurched over the stop line and stalled. The car behind beeped again, swerving around her and speeding through a light which was now definitely red. Jessica started the engine again and felt that little devil in her ear, whispering mischievous ideas. The next time the light went green, she pulled away quickly and did a U-turn at the junction going back the way she had come.

She wasn’t going home.

Jessica couldn’t remember the exact directions but knew roughly which area she was going to. She found the estate fairly easily but drove through the maze of roads for fifteen minutes looking for the exact one she wanted. Eventually she parked on the side of the road and turned her headlights off. She had no plan or no real idea what she was going to do but in the darkness she sat and watched DCI Farraday’s house.

She had known the rough location because of the party he had thrown when he had first started the job. It was in a fairly affluent area and she knew her car would stand out. Jessica made sure she was stopped between street lights in the shadows and stared at the house. There was a light on downstairs but the rest of the property sat in darkness. Around the house was a mixture of fences and hedges around six feet high or so with an automated gate at the end of the driveway. It was the type where you pressed a button and waited to be buzzed through.

Jessica was thinking as clearly as she had done the whole day. She stepped out of the car and walked quietly up to the gate, making sure to avoid the glow of the street lights. She looked for a security camera but couldn’t see one. She first tried opening the gate but it wouldn’t budge, so instead she pushed it roughly to see if it was fixed sturdily enough in place to let her climb. It felt as if the bolts fixed into the ground were solid so she squinted into the distance towards the house to see if there were any obvious motion lights that would come on. She couldn’t see anything and, after looking both ways to check for approaching cars, Jessica quickly jumped up onto the middle bar of the gate and then flipped herself over the top.

She landed a little awkwardly on her ankle on the other side but gritted her teeth and refused to cry out. She followed the line of the hedge towards the house, stepping carefully in an effort to leave no footprints.

Jessica reached the garage attached to the house. The front door was only a few yards in front of her and a small alley on her right presumably led towards the back of the house.

She jumped as the downstairs light went out and held her breath, ready to duck into the alley if any of the doors opened. She wondered if it had gone out because someone had seen her but she started to breathe again as a light upstairs went on, figuring it was just the occupant going to bed. She gently rattled the garage door to see if it would open but it was locked from the inside.

Jessica realised she had no idea what she was doing. She had acted on impulse but ended up doing exactly what she had told the officers not to do at the briefing; she had let her anger cloud her judgement. She crept backwards but her heel clipped something hard, making it rattle noisily. Jessica quickly ducked, pressing herself towards the hedge. The sound might have seemed louder to her but she again held her breath, waiting for what seemed like an age. She could feel the wind starting to whip around the garden but nobody came.

When she was sure no one was going to discover her, Jessica looked to see what she had bumped into and noticed a black wheelie bin. Her head was telling her to turn and run, to get into her car and drive home to get some sleep but her eyes felt fixed on the plastic container that came up to her chest. She stepped towards it, flipping over the lid. A smell of rotting rubbish hit her but she looked inside anyway. She used the light of her phone’s screen to see in the dark but on top was an apple core and two banana skins, plus some sloppy leftover food.

Jessica knew it was time to go and could feel a voice in her head practically screaming at her but, without thinking, she was suddenly digging through the bin. It stank and she didn’t want to think about the slime she could feel on her hands but she pulled out small carrier bags full of rubbish, digging her nails in to rip them open and then dumping the contents back into the container as she fingered through whatever was in them.

She took out a supermarket carrier bag, which had been tied at the top, ripping the sides open. Some sort of liquid oozed down her arm as she dropped it back into the bin but, as she did so, something heavier fell out. She used her phone to light up the area and reached in to see what had dropped. In among a small pile of old filtered coffee and drained tea bags, Jessica used her thumb and forefinger to pull out a small plastic object. It was sticky and clearly damaged but Jessica had no doubt what it was and who it belonged to.

It was Carrie’s mobile phone.

26

It might have been the wind or the drying dampness stuck to her arms but Jessica felt a chill spiral down her back. She was fixed to the spot, sliding the top part of the phone upwards then downwards and staring into the pile of rubbish. The smell was no longer affecting her, the stinking aroma was nothing compared to the shock she felt at what she was holding. Jessica tried pressing the button to turn it on but then realised there was no back panel and no battery. She used her finger to scratch into the compartment where there should have been a SIM card but it was empty.

She quickly realised her mistake. Her fingerprints would be all over the phone now too. Even if she took it to a superior officer and said she found it in DCI Farraday’s bin, all he would have to do was deny it. If he had used gloves to lift it from the scene there would be only her marks on it and who would believe a mad woman who claimed to have found it rooting through other people’s rubbish?

Jessica had a connection from Farraday to Carrie’s death and John Mills’s stabbing. If the lab results came back the way they all expected them to, the latest attacks would also be linked to the killings of Craig Millar, Benjamin Webb, Desmond Hughes and Lee Morgan. That meant she had an indirect link from the DCI to everything that had happened but she couldn’t believe her own stupidity. She had blown it and was holding evidence she couldn’t use and a theory she would have to keep to herself. The only thing she could console herself with was that her paranoia hadn’t been misplaced. It wasn’t much of a relief though, given she knew she would have to act on her own.