He ordered a cappuccino and told the blonde server he was waiting for a friend. He had just worn a regular coat over his shirt after the fashion advice he had received the night before. DS Daniel was five minutes late so he checked his phone to see if she had called or sent him a message of explanation. She hadn’t but, as he looked back up, he saw her coming through the door with her best scowl on. She spotted him instantly and made her way over to sit opposite.

The waitress made a move as if to come over to their table but the officer gave her a look that quite clearly advised her not to.

‘Hello,’ Garry said as she sat down.

‘Right, I’m here. What do you want?’

DS Daniel looked a little windswept; her long hair had clearly been blown around and she fiddled with it, trying to move it out of her face. For the first time Garry actually noticed her eyes. They were kind of half green, half brown. He liked them but not the way they were looking at him.

‘I just wanted to check some things with you.’

‘Go on.’

He flicked through his notebook and read from it without looking up. ‘I’ve been told that the body you found last night was killed by the same person who killed Yvonne Christensen. Not only that but both bodies were found in houses that were locked and that you have no idea how the murderer either got in or back out again.’

DS Daniel looked down and took a deep breath then looked back at him. Her expression had changed. She no longer looked angry, just weary. ‘Look, I’m not going to ask you who your source is but you can’t print this stuff. We don’t know if everything you just said is true. People have died. What we want is help finding whoever did it, not sensational headlines that are going to make people panic.’

Garry knew where she was coming from. He agreed with her to some degree but he was a journalist after all. Just because he had been given some information unofficially, he didn’t see why it couldn’t be used as long as it was done responsibly. ‘I didn’t write those headlines, my editor did, but you can’t expect me just to sit on information when I get it. I have a job to do too.’

‘That might be true . . .’ DS Daniel tailed off. ‘Right, print what you have but if I see the words “serial killer” anywhere in the article . . .’ She tailed off again but the implication was clear.

‘I’ll do what I can but the editor writes the headlines and edits what I write. It’s up to him.’

‘Fine.’

‘So can I quote you?’

‘Don’t push your luck. I don’t trust anyone that can’t spell their own name properly.’

‘Huh?’

‘Garry has one “r”, you moron.’

Jessica was sitting on a bus that would take her almost the whole way back to the station. It would leave her with a five-minute walk but she didn’t mind that. She hadn’t fancied driving into the centre for her talk with the journalist. It was always a nightmare to park and she hadn’t planned on spending too long with him.

She was actually quite pleased with the way her meeting had gone. She believed Garry when he said it was his editor who had written the stories up to have a go at the force. When Harry used to take her out, he would speak about the value of journalists. ‘Just be careful which ones you trust,’ he told her. ‘Some of them would screw their own mothers over if it made the front page.’ She was a pretty decent judge of character and Garry seemed all right. He actually seemed to care, which was always a good start.

She thought having someone she could trust in the media could be key to finding the link between Yvonne Christensen and Martin Prince.

As she wondered about that, the time the journey was taking was reminding her why she didn’t use public transport very often. In terms of distance, it wasn’t too far back to the station but the time really added up when the bus waited at every single stop. There was some guy chatting far too loudly on his phone in the seat in front of her, with three teenagers listening to some dreadful dance music through the speaker of one of their phones at the back. Near the front there was a baby strapped into a pushchair crying its eyes out while its mother chatted to her friend in the seat next to her. It was just noise, noise, noise.

She closed her eyes for a moment but couldn’t blank any of it out. As she looked towards the rear of the bus, she saw one of the youngsters had just lit a cigarette. She sighed and wondered whether she could be bothered with it.

She took a deep breath. ‘Oi,’ she snapped at them, pointing at the no smoking sign on the window next to them. They were about three rows behind her.

‘What?’ the one with the cigarette said, taking his first drag.

‘Put it out.’ By now most of the other passengers were looking at her.

‘Why? What the fuck are you going to do about it?’

This was all she needed. Jessica reached into her inside pocket and pulled out her police identification card, getting up from her seat and walking towards them. She hoped the bus wouldn’t stop suddenly or she would stumble and look a right fool. She showed them her credentials, perching on the seat closest to them. ‘Just put it out and stop being dicks.’

‘You can’t talk to us like that,’ one of the non-smokers said.

‘And you can’t smoke on a bus, so put it out and we’ll forget it happened, right?’

The kid with the cigarette looked as if he was weighing up his options but eventually stubbed it out on the floor.

‘And watch your mouth in future,’ she finished, putting her identification away and walking back to her original seat. ‘Next time I’ll drive,’ she mumbled under her breath.

Jessica would not have been in such a hurry to get back to the station if she had known the news that was waiting for her. Firstly the desk sergeant pulled her to one side to update her about Harry’s court case. She didn’t know who the officer’s source was at the Crown Court but whoever it was must have had a front-row seat.

Harry had been called to give evidence that morning but things hadn’t gone well. Apparently, he had responded almost entirely with one-and two-word answers to the lawyer prosecuting and only shown any animation when Peter Hunt had begun cross-examination. Before the judge had stepped in, Harry had called Hunt ‘scum’ and a ‘parasite’. He had eventually responded to the questions but, with the jury present for everything, the damage had been done. If he couldn’t control himself in a courtroom, then why would they think he could control himself in a pub? Jessica felt so sorry for him. She so wanted to help in the way he had helped her but you couldn’t do that if the other person wasn’t willing to engage. She decided she would try to call him again that night. He probably wouldn’t answer but she didn’t want to abandon him.

As soon as she had finished at the front desk and before she could get back to her office, she ran into Rowlands. ‘What bad news has my spiky-haired harbinger of doom got for me today then?’ she asked.

‘Funny you should say that . . .’

‘Go on.’

‘Sandra Prince. Her doctor won’t let us speak to her for at least another twenty-four hours. He says she’s not ready for it yet.’

‘Great. Anything else?’

‘We spoke to Eric Christensen. He says he’s never heard of anyone called Prince. We showed him pictures of all three family members and he doesn’t know any of them.’

‘Has anyone come up with any other link?’

‘Nope and door-to-door haven’t got anything either.’

‘Phone lines?’

‘Got a few things to check out but probably not.’

‘Are forensics back yet?’

‘Just the basics. It looks like it’s some kind of steel rope again. It’s all on your desk but cause of death and the weapon seem to be the same as before. All the blood matches Martin Prince and, for the moment, they’ve not got anything else.’