She would happily have described herself as messy and disorganised but the one thing she had remembered to do in the past two months was keep a pad and pen next to her bed for a moment like this. Cole started to give her the details and she tried to write them down. At first she thought her eyes were still struggling with the early hour but then realised her confusion was down to the fact the pen wasn’t working.

‘Hang on, hang on,’ she said irritably, opening the drawer underneath her nightstand just in case there was a spare pen there.

There wasn’t.

It was typical that even when she had gone out of her way to be organised, things didn’t quite work out. She asked the inspector to send her a text message with the details instead and then hung up.

Cole was Jessica’s immediate superior and had been promoted at the same time she had. She had always got on fine with him when they had been in more junior roles. He was a decent guy but perhaps a bit too nice. He was about as normal a bloke as you could ever meet; one of those people whose descriptions you hated when taking statements from a witness. He was average height and weight, with sensible short brown hair and always wore regular unassuming clothes. He didn’t wear glasses or sport any distinguishing scars or facial hair. Even his voice was exactly as you would expect.

In fact, the only thing not really regulation about Jack was that he had what most officers didn’t seem to – a proper family life. He was in his mid-forties and married, seemingly happily, with two children. He had family days out with them, still took his wife out for meals and to the cinema, and booked his time off sensibly so they could all have weekends away together. Unlike pretty much every other officer, he didn’t drink and Jessica had never heard him swear. Perhaps that was normal to most people but it was anything but for the job they had.

Cole liked working from his desk and saw any real interaction with criminals, witnesses or anyone outside of the station as something he would rather not be involved with. To some it showed he didn’t like to get his hands dirty but Jessica understood he had strengths in different areas.

Sitting on the edge of her bed, Jessica ran her hands through her long dark-blonde hair thinking that it needed a wash, as it always seemed to. There was definitely not going to be time for that this morning. She pulled it back into a loose ponytail and hunted around her room for some suitable clothes.

She thought most of her colleagues took ‘plain clothes’ a bit too literally. Even the younger blokes seemed to take the title ‘detective’ as a chance to start clocking up department-store loyalty points with a wardrobe seemingly consisting of identikit dull suit jackets and pairs of chinos. The only difference between the younger guys and the veterans seemed to be the width of their ties. The new guys would start off with skinny monstrosities around their necks but their neckwear seemed to become wider the longer they spent turning up in those dreary suits.

Jessica knew she couldn’t take things too far and still wore a suit to work each day but at least it wasn’t the same one with an egg stain on the pocket, unlike a certain colleague or two she could think of. She also made sure she dressed something like her age – she was almost thirty-one after all. Hunting through her wardrobe, Jessica pulled out a light grey suit to put on and, just to be a hypocrite, a blouse straight from the floor.

Jessica lived in the Hulme district, just south of the main centre of Manchester. It wasn’t too bad, far enough away from the pubs and clubs and the full-on student areas to be able to sleep through the early hours – and only ten minutes’ drive to her team’s Longsight base. Far more important than all of that was the fact it was close enough to the curry mile to pick up a good Madras without too much hassle.

Cole had messaged Jessica an address in Gorton, in the east of the city. It took her just over fifteen minutes to drive, despite the roads being fairly quiet. There wasn’t too much in the way of traffic but, as ever, the traffic lights constantly seemed to be red. She also nearly ran over some student type who looked like she was making the dreaded Saturday morning walk of shame. There didn’t seem to be any other reason for a girl in a short purple dress to be walking bare-footed across a main road holding impossibly tall heels in her hand. Jessica wondered if the girl had actually had a good night as she crunched down through the car’s gears after swerving around her.

Jessica’s bright red K-reg Fiat Punto was her pride and sometimes-joy, even if it didn’t give her much pleasure on the cold winter mornings when it wouldn’t start no matter how much she kicked and swore at it. She had been given it as a present for passing her theory test from her mum and dad over ten years ago and had learned to drive in it. It was an attachment to easier, less serious days. How it was still on the road was a mystery far beyond Jessica’s detective skills. The exhaust was perhaps the only thing loud enough to wake up her flatmate and best friend Caroline, while the MOTs were expensive and the piss-taking from colleagues was relentless.

Even her dad gave her stick about it. ‘We only bought that as a first car,’ he would say to her. ‘You earn a decent salary now . . .’

Well she earned a salary now, that was for sure, and, as long as they could get her from A to B, or at least close to ‘B’, she wasn’t that bothered about cars. In an emergency, she had access to the patrol’s pool of vehicles and, rusting heap or not, it was at least her rusting heap.

Jessica pulled up behind two patrol cars outside the address. It wasn’t too far off the main road, fairly close to the speedway stadium. Luckily her supervisor had sent the basic directions too. She got out and walked towards the plain-clothes officer she recognised by the house’s gate.

Detective Constable David Rowlands had a grin on his face. ‘I didn’t know if they were calling you in but then I heard the exhaust on that heap you drive from half a mile away.’

‘It’s come to something when someone with hair like that takes the piss out of anything,’ Jessica fired back with a grin, flicking him the V just for good measure.

‘I was still asleep when I got called in,’ he protested as a way of explaining why his usually spiky and gelled hair was instead decidedly fluffy and floppy.

Rowlands was younger than she was, still not out of his twenties, and tall with spiky jet-black hair – plus the customary skinny tie. He certainly fancied himself with the opposite sex and had a sharp mouth with a cheeky, dimpled smile that meant it was hard to get angry with him. Even with his constant bragging about various conquests and his obvious cockiness, Jessica had taken an instant liking to him when he had joined the squad a few months after she had.

He had once tried it on with her late one evening a year or so ago. To be honest, given his reputation, she would have been bloody annoyed if he hadn’t at some point or another. She hadn’t been receptive but that wasn’t the point. They had both been drinking after a rare result; some woman who had been sent down for stealing from her own mother. Rowlands wasn’t the type to take her rejection too seriously and, if anything, they were better mates afterwards. He was certainly one of the few members of the Criminal Investigation Department she would go out for a drink with.

Jessica breezed past him, ducking under the police tape, to enter the small front garden of the semi-detached house, thinking it was quite a nice-looking place. Not all the houses in this area were as well kept. The red brickwork looked fairly clean, as did the upstairs and downstairs bay windows. The only thing spoiling the illusion of middle-class fulfilment was the bright white double-glazed front door just about hanging on to its bottom hinge.