‘No. Jacob Chrisp’s mother gave us a sample but it is being tested. Someone said the hand wasn’t in a great state either.’

‘Yeah, I saw it. It looked like it had been out in the sun for a while. I’ll call you when I’m coming back.’

Jessica hung up and started the footage again. Her eyes felt a little rested after a few minutes away from it. The man next to her was clearly bored and jumped in his seat when she made an involuntary squeal. ‘Look.’

The footage was almost back to sunrise but a little later than the times the other hands had been left. The angle she was watching came from a camera pointing at the corner of the pathway leading along the side of the cathedral. The device was across the road so the images weren’t entirely clear because the shot was so wide.

Jessica rewound the footage and played it again as the man watched more intently second time around. A figure in a black cape emerged from out of shot and was walking across the road away from the camera. She paused and zoomed in as best she could. As with the previous footage they had found, there wasn’t anything clear enough to get a precise shot of the person’s face and the hood was pulled forward. She could see the same heels from before and, given the person’s stature, it certainly looked like a woman.

‘Is that who you’re looking for?’ the man asked.

Jessica zoomed out slightly and set the video to play again. ‘I think so.’ They both watched as the figure reached the other side of the road and then gasped at the same time.

‘Did she just do what I think she did?’ the man said. Jessica looked at him and his eyes were wide in disbelief.

Jessica scrolled the images backwards and zoomed in again before pressing play. As it got to the crucial part, the man next to her started laughing gently. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said.

She paused the stream and pressed a button to store the screen grab. A printer at the back of the room hummed into action and she walked over to it, returning to her seat with a sheet of paper.

‘They’re waving at the bloody camera,’ she said, barely believing it herself.

The rest of the footage hadn’t been much use. After waving, the figure had walked out of shot towards the spot where the hand had been left, then returned the exact same way. There was a second camera which showed the person walking into an alley but the exit of that had no CCTV pointed at it. Other local cameras had shown Jessica nothing while the quality of the images and the way the person kept their hood forward, angling their face away from the recording devices, ensured there was no clear shot.

The hand had been out in the sun for the best part of twelve hours with no one noticing. It wasn’t necessarily a surprise because it had been left slightly away from the main path on a grassy area and Jessica again thought the person who had left it must have known the district incredibly well. Their audacity was unbelievable.

It also proved beyond any doubt that whoever was leaving the appendages wanted them to be found. The blind spot in the cameras around the cathedral could have given them an opportunity to walk through in a crowd of people during daylight, break off to leave the hand and then walk back out again in another group of pedestrians. They hadn’t done that though, going out of their way to show off. With the fact the person had sent her Lewis Barnes’s finger directly too, she felt as if they were leaving her a trail, wanting her to find out why the men had been targeted. They obviously didn’t want to give her too much information, presumably in case it implicated themselves.

The day after Jessica had gone through the video footage saw the local newspapers and television news bulletins lead off with the still-shot of the figure waving at the camera. Phone calls had started to come in from the public but there wasn’t much to go on as the person’s face wasn’t visible. Jessica left a rather grumpy Rowlands to deal with those as she journeyed around the country with Izzy speaking to the other members of the rugby team.

Cole seemed convinced the rugby connection was key but the more she spoke to the players, the more Jessica began to think there was some other link they hadn’t yet found. It became clear the team had got up to various misdeeds but, through the stories people told, Jessica didn’t believe it amounted to much more than drunken stupidity and immaturity. A few players acted a little evasively as others seemingly spilled everything they knew. Some were married and wanted to meet away from their partners, others had no problems talking in front of them. Most of the players told her what had happened to Michael Wright and almost all of them seemed genuinely sorry for it. The two detectives told all of them that three of their teammates had been harmed and they should be extra careful and report anything suspicious immediately to the police. Putting all ten into protective custody was impractical, especially given the distance between them all.

Jessica and Izzy were sitting on a train back to Manchester after visiting the final player. It had been two and a half days of travelling, talking and then travelling again. Their carriage was fairly quiet and both women had tried to sleep without success.

‘What do you reckon?’ Izzy asked sleepily.

Jessica was in the seat opposite and couldn’t stop herself yawning. ‘I think we’ve done too much moving around this week.’

‘Not got us anywhere though, has it?’

‘No, most of the players were just a bit embarrassed. I always knew young men had dirty minds but I could have done without hearing about those strippers.’

‘Yeah, some of the practical jokes were a bit extreme but none of it was too serious, was it? Nothing worse than what you’d see in some town centres on a Friday night.’

‘Exactly. One or two might have been holding back but, between this lot, Jacob and the two Dave spoke to, I think we probably heard more or less everything. It’s not as if there were any clear motives for someone external to be coming after them and I don’t reckon any of the ones we spoke to were involved.’

‘Did you speak to Dave?’

‘Yeah. He was pretty pissed off at spending three days talking to members of the public but he’d also been out to talk to the friends Jacob had been with the evening he was last seen.’

‘Did they say much?’

‘Just that they’d been to the pub after work and that was the last they’d seen of him. The samples from his mother matched the hand too so we know for sure it’s his. It would just be nice to get some closure for all these people. We’ve got his parents, Lewis Barnes’s mum and Charlie Marks not knowing if their relatives are alive or dead.’

As she spoke, Jessica heard the text message alert tone on her phone and took the device out of her jacket pocket. They must have been in between good reception areas because she had two missed calls from the station even though it hadn’t rung. There was a text message too. Izzy noticed Jessica’s surprise at the content.

‘What?’ the constable asked.

Jessica gulped with surprise. ‘January Forrester has handed herself in.’

15

Any tiredness Jessica had been feeling evaporated instantly. The rest of the train journey seemed to take twice as long as it actually did while she fumed each time it stopped. Jessica tried not to act too angrily when Izzy pointed out it was in fact running on time. When they finally arrived back in Manchester, a taxi took them to Longsight and Jessica almost forgot how hot it was as she hurried through the entrance. The humidity hit her as the desk sergeant said, ‘Suspect’s downstairs,’ and she walked past him.