After a second or two, which seemed a lot longer, he spoke again. ‘I have it here.’

‘Do a search to find out if their house was ever burgled.’

‘Okay, hang on.’ Jessica could hear him tapping away in the background. The police’s system was notoriously slow. She was now back at the car but standing next to it, leaning on the roof above the passenger door. Cole was opposite her.

‘Right, I’ve got it,’ Rowlands said. ‘Hang on . . .’ She could hear him typing on the keyboard. ‘Yep, it was burgled around a year ago.’

15

The drive back to the station seemed to take an awfully long time and Cole’s coolness was really beginning to wind Jessica up. She was still buzzing, the excitement of finally finding the link they had been waiting for almost too much to take – both victims had been burgled. Jessica was trying to stay calm but every red traffic light, every queue at a roundabout and every time Cole stopped to bloody well give way made her clench her teeth and bite her tongue. If she had been driving, she would have had the sirens blaring and the lights flashing as she tore down the Stockport Road to get back to the station as quickly as possible.

She had already told Rowlands to get all of the information they had relating to the burglaries either on her desk if they had a hard copy or on her computer screen if they didn’t. As they finally arrived back at the station, Jessica barely waited for Cole to park before she had the passenger’s door open and was striding towards the main building. She bounded through reception, past the desk sergeant and down the hallway into her empty office.

As she began to scan through the information that had been left on her screen, Jessica could see the burglaries of the Christensens’ house and the Princes’ had been linked to three others that happened in the same area within a week of each other this time last year. The problem was that, in theory, the crimes were unsolved. Having looked through each of the five incidents and cross-checked with the relevant notes, it was pretty clear the police had found their man though.

Wayne Lapham was a name Greater Manchester Police were very familiar with according to his file. As a fifteen-year-old, he had been sent to a young offenders’ institution for setting fire to an empty office building. He had spent the past twenty-five years in and out of prison and on probation schemes for various offences including drug possession, thefts, assaults, drunk and disorderly and threatening behaviour. Every eighteen months or so he would be picked up for a new offence and either sent back to prison or handed over to probation for another spell of supervision.

The offence that most interested Jessica was his most recent one. Just over a year ago, police had been called to a pub in the Levenshulme area of the city, just south of Gorton, where the five burglaries had taken place. A man had been attacked with a pint glass but, in the course of investigating that attack, they had ended up searching Lapham who just happened to be in the same pub. Having seen his record Jessica knew full well there was a very good chance the officers had recognised him and were searching him because of who he was. He would have been given a vague reason so he couldn’t press charges of harassment but everyone knew how it worked.

While searching him, they found a laptop and two mobile phones in his rucksack. He had first claimed they were his but, after police had been given a warrant to search his house and found the rest of the items taken in the five burglaries, Lapham’s story had changed. Then he claimed he had bought everything in a pub for £300 a few nights previously from a man he had never seen before or since.

Jessica smiled as she read that bit, shaking her head. Because most people would happily hand over £300 to a stranger in a pub. Obviously the police had delighted in picking holes in his story and the fact he had already changed it once. They charged him with burglary and handed the case over to the CPS for it to go to court. Given his record, he had been denied bail and was left sitting in a jail cell for three months as he waited for the full Crown Court trial.

That was where things got complicated. Although he had been caught with every item that had been stolen, there was no forensic evidence linking him to any of the scenes. Each burglary had been committed in the same way. Given the unseasonably warm weather last year, Lapham – or whoever had prised open an unlocked and slightly ajar window – then made off with anything they could get their hands on.

With evidence linking him to the stolen goods but not the scenes and the CPS nervous over whether they would get a conviction, they offered Lapham’s lawyer a concession on the morning of the trial. If his client pleaded guilty to handling stolen goods, they would drop the burglary charges. It was exactly the kind of thing that infuriated officers who worked hard on cases, not to mention victims who wanted to see justice. The one thing it did do was keep conviction rates up, meaning the CPS hit their own targets. Lapham, of course, couldn’t believe his luck. He pleaded guilty and walked free that afternoon after the judge ruled the time he had spent in prison on remand was sufficient punishment.

It couldn’t be a coincidence that two of the houses that had been burgled had now seen murders happen inside them. Regardless of whether he had been found guilty, Lapham was the man they needed to bring in. Jessica checked the address they had, printed off a copy of his mug shot, went to tell Aylesbury what was going on, and then set off to pick up their only suspect.

This time she would drive.

Uniformed officers had been sent out to check on the three other burglary victims from last year. There was no obvious motive for why a burglar would return to the scene of their crimes and kill the person who lived there but it’s not as if they had anything else to go on. Seemingly it was the only link between the two murder victims too.

Cole had thought it best they didn’t take marked vehicles, given Lapham’s likely attitude towards the police. That meant Jessica taking her own car, along with Rowlands and a uniformed officer. Cole was also driving his vehicle – a spotlessly clean silver 4x4 – along with two other regular constables. Six officers might have seemed a bit over the top but no one knew how Lapham would react to the police turning up at his door, especially given his history with the force. A marked car would also be sent behind them so they could transport their suspect back to the station when they had him. They would radio for the driver to move in when they were ready.

Despite Rowlands’s complaints about the sound of her exhaust tipping the suspect off while they were still a mile away, Jessica roared down Alan Turing Way towards Oldham Road on their way out to Moston. It was late afternoon and the Friday traffic had reached its peak with everyone heading off towards the motorway and home. They had barely got out of the station when Jessica left Cole far behind. He had given way at the junction next to the station’s exit as she put her foot down, probably cut up the guy behind – who beeped his horn – and then accelerated away through a traffic light that was definitely still on amber. Well, probably.

If the roads had been clear, the journey would have taken around twenty minutes but Jessica did it in less than that regardless of the traffic. As she pulled up outside the grubby block of housing-association flats Lapham was supposed to live in, Rowlands admitted he had been impressed, if mildly terrified, by her driving. The uniformed officer in the back didn’t say anything but his pale face and relief to get the seatbelt off when she put the handbrake on told the story well enough.