‘I’m not convinced we’d get away with that any longer given our oath to uphold the law,’ Jessica said.

‘Maybe not but you’d get free cake.’

Despite her reservations about any sort of acknowledgement of her birthday, Jessica ended up having a good time. She liked that the two constables kept her grounded.

Jessica found herself getting tipsier as the evening went on. She didn’t know if the free wine was courtesy of the landlord himself or because her colleagues had put money behind the bar. By the time she’d got close to finishing her sixth glass of wine, along with the various shots that had been placed in front of her, Jessica knew she was beginning to slur her words. She had always found it ironic how much she and other officers drank, considering most of the crime they investigated, especially officers in uniform, ultimately came down to alcohol. She had always been a good drinker and was more inclined to laugh the night away than get herself in trouble. If anything, Jessica had always thought she was far more likely to say something stupid when she was sober as opposed to after she’d had a bit to drink. Despite that, she decided she had finished drinking for the night, especially as she would have to be back at work the next day.

There were a few mini protests from the constables as Jessica said she wanted to go but Caroline didn’t look too bothered as she had gone quiet and seemed to be fighting to stay awake.

Jessica caught a taxi from the nearby rank but it was only after she arrived home, via a pizza shop, that she noticed she had missed calls. Her head felt fuzzy but the takeaway took the edge off ever so slightly. Jessica pressed the buttons on the phone to listen to her voicemail but it took a few attempts to get it to do what she wanted.

She listened through the message once but Jessica’s brain wasn’t thinking clearly enough to take it all in. It was only on the third listen that she finally realised why she had been called so late. The team working at the station had identified both of the remaining people in the photograph – and one of them was already dead.

28

Jessica felt a little silly as she finally got her head around the message. Firstly, she had somehow managed to miss three separate phone calls from the station. It would have only been one or two people working their way through the list of names who had found the breakthrough and the person wouldn’t have been calling because they expected her to go back, simply because they wanted to update her. If Jessica had noticed her phone going off in the pub, even with what she had drunk, she would at least have been only around the corner from the station.

Back at home, there was no realistic way she could get herself back to Longsight and, given how drunk she was feeling, it wasn’t as if she could do much good anyway. Jessica thought about calling Cole to see if he knew any more but had enough self-awareness through her drunken haze to know she should probably leave it for the rest of the night.

She lay on her bed still wearing the clothes she’d had on all day and, as she watched the ceiling spin, Jessica thought the pizza wasn’t the best of ideas after all. She wanted to think about the two people that had now apparently been identified but it wasn’t long before her mind gave up and she drifted off to sleep.

After the amount she had drunk, Jessica would have expected to sleep through to the moment the alarm on her phone went off the next morning but surprised herself by instead being awake over an hour before she had to be and feeling just about as alert as she could be, given the circumstances.

Apart from an aching bladder, Jessica felt ready for the day. She listened to her voicemail one more time. The officer who had left the message sounded nervous but excited, a nuance which Jessica had definitely not noticed the night before. They said they knew the final two people were called ‘Steven Povey’ and ‘Barry Newcombe’ but that Barry was already dead.

From just that, it was difficult to know exactly what was meant. Had the man already died or had he recently been killed in a way that related to the case? None of the other victims they’d found hands from were confirmed as deceased so something certainly sounded different. Jessica checked the times of the calls she had missed. They were all at a point where she would have been sitting in the booth in the pub and it was only then she realised she had somehow muted the device. It wasn’t the first time she had managed to do something similar but it was the only time she had missed something important through doing so. Her one crumb of comfort was that, given the time the calls had come in, she wouldn’t have been able to do much anyway.

Jessica again thought about calling Cole but, because it was early, didn’t want to disturb him while he might be with his family. Instead she caught the bus to the station, having left her car there the night before. She read her emails and, from what she could tell, the officer responsible for the breakthrough had simply been a little lucky in that they had stumbled across the right combination of names. After they had found the correct ‘Newcombe’, that had led them to work out who the other person was. It was always likely to be a matter of time before somebody found the right people but Jessica would still make sure the person responsible got the credit they deserved.

It only took a few moments for Jessica to realise the message she had been left the night before was slightly misleading. Barry Newcombe was dead but, if it was down to foul play, then the person involved had been very clever. He had been involved in a head-on collision in a car eight years previously in which he, his girlfriend in the passenger seat and the driver of the other car had all been killed. The reports showed Barry had been almost three times over the drink-drive limit and, given the car’s positioning on the road, the only suspicions of anything being untoward related to the man’s own decision to drink and drive.

If he had somehow survived the smash, he would have almost certainly been charged with causing death by dangerous driving and the witness reports were pretty damning. He had apparently been drinking at a party with some of his friends and had not even pretended to hide the fact he was going to drive home. A few of his mates said they had tried to stop him but none had called the police. Quite why his girlfriend had joined him nobody really knew but the poor guy he had crashed into left behind a wife and four children.

It wasn’t the first story of its type Jessica had read but it was one of the worst. A whole family had been destroyed because of the selfishness of one person.

She found it hard to concentrate on the other name that had been left for her, Steven Povey, but realised he was now the one person in the holiday photograph that was still unharmed. He was the youngest of the six men pictured at twenty-nine, which meant he would have only just turned eighteen at the time they figured the photo was taken. Barry Newcombe was the eldest and would have been twenty. The other four men would have been either nineteen or just about to have their birthdays.

Jessica had already checked with a few well-known travel operators but none of them had records going back eleven years. That meant Steven Povey was her one final link to finding out what the reason could possibly be for what was happening. Although it wasn’t quite eight in the morning, Jessica couldn’t be bothered to wait and phoned the number the officer had left for him. The man had moved out of the city a few years before and now lived in a village further north in Lancashire. He reluctantly agreed to meet Jessica later that day. Initially he wanted to put her off but she insisted it was urgent and that it had to be as soon as possible. Jessica didn’t tell Steven about the holiday photograph or talk about possible links to the other men at first but stressed it was important she was able to speak to him.