Eric didn’t want to enter the house and told them he hadn’t been in since the murder. He said he was in the process of organising a company to go in and clean the house up. When that was complete, he would look to put it on the market. Finding a set of cleaners keen enough was proving a problem when he explained the situation.

Jessica wasn’t surprised.

The house itself looked more or less the same as it had the last time she had been there. The bed upstairs had been stripped with the sheets taken by the Scene of Crime team. Blood had soaked through to the mattress and was clearly visible.

Jessica and Rowlands walked around the house looking for something that might have been missed. She checked the attic for the first time herself, having seen the report that said there was no connection to the neighbouring property but wanting to check herself for completeness. It was exactly as the account had said – there wasn’t much to see with no way in, obvious or not.

She tried to walk herself through what would have happened, the direction Yvonne must have been facing when the wire was wrapped around her neck. She thought about where the killer’s feet must have stood and the angle their body must have been at as they held the murder instrument. None of it really helped.

She visited Sandra Prince at her house. It seemed odd that the woman had gone back to living at the property where her husband’s murdered body had recently been found but Jessica knew some people did that because there was nowhere else for them to go. The woman wasn’t in the best frame of mind but did say she was bemused as to why Wayne Lapham had been released. Sandra hadn’t been angry exactly but kept saying that he had already got away with it once, meaning the burglaries. It was hard to argue with her. Jessica asked if she knew of any connection to the Christensen family but Sandra didn’t recognise the name or photos.

In terms of the case itself, neither of the visits had really helped but it had focused Jessica’s mind on the bodies again with the viciousness of it all. It made her appreciate even more that the person she was looking for was definitely no fool. Setting up this kind of scene took the attention away from themselves because the police were busy trying to find out how the murders were carried out, rather than who carried them out. As for the why, they had as much idea about that as they did about the other aspects. She didn’t believe Lapham could be their killer but the connection he gave to the victims surely couldn’t be a coincidence either.

After returning to the station, Jessica checked in with Cole but there was little to report. The victims of the other three burglaries for which Lapham had been convicted of handling stolen goods had been visited again but reported nothing untoward. Jessica went to her office to get rid of some paperwork. Reynolds wasn’t in and she had the space to herself but she couldn’t focus on the work, her thoughts turned towards her appearance in court the following day and round two with Peter Hunt. Not to mention the case she was working on.

She had just pushed back into her chair and shut her eyes when her phone rang. She picked it up from the desk, looking at Garry Ashford’s name on the screen. She had reprogrammed his name properly into her phone after meeting him, reluctantly admitting that perhaps he wasn’t that bad after all.

He still dressed like a prat and couldn’t spell his own name though.

‘Mr Ashford,’ she answered. ‘How’s life in the gutters?’

‘Oh . . . hi. Are you alone?’

‘Yes but this isn’t a sex line. Well, unless you’re paying . . .’

‘Can I run something by you?’

Jessica’s first thought was that another body had been found and somehow the journalist knew about it before she did. Her mind was racing. ‘What?’

‘At lunch today, I spoke to a lawyer named Peter Hunt.’

Jessica winced at the mention of that name. She was aware that, even if she was exonerated by Aylesbury and the superintendent, there wouldn’t be too much they could do if a story about her threatening a suspect got into the papers. The police couldn’t be seen to have someone in such a prominent position who was embroiled in a scandal like that. As someone who could work as part of a big investigation, she would be finished, hard evidence or not.

Her response aptly summed up her mood. ‘Shit.’

‘He was only confirming what I had already heard.’

That was the problem the station’s whispers had caused. The legend of what had actually happened in the interview room had grown out of all proportion. In the car on their way to the Christensens’ house earlier, Rowlands had asked her about the incident. She hadn’t told him much – or anyone for that matter – but he had told her the things he had heard. They ranged from something actually approaching the truth to her having Peter Hunt up against the interview room’s wall by the throat. Other versions included her turning the table over and bellowing a string of abuse at both Hunt and Lapham, while somebody else had apparently said she’d attacked the pair of them with a fork from the canteen. She had realised on the journey things had got out of hand. People had obviously been talking and word would have been around most of the Greater Manchester Police force by now. That wasn’t even counting the people Peter Hunt had spoken to. It hadn’t crossed her mind at the time but this was exactly the kind of thing that could have happened.

‘What have you heard?’ Jessica asked.

Garry’s version of events was almost exactly as Jessica remembered. He certainly had a very good source considering there had only been three people in the room and she knew he hadn’t got the information from herself or Wayne Lapham. Hunt may have confirmed details but she doubted he would have tipped someone like Garry Ashford off in the first place.

‘I can’t really talk about it, Garry,’ she said after he finished telling her his story.

‘I know but I have to ask.’

‘What are you going to write?’

‘I don’t know yet . . . something.’

‘You know this could ruin me?’ Jessica wasn’t sure what to say. It wasn’t as if she had been too nice to him before. That had just slipped out.

‘Would you like to tell me what happened?’

Jessica didn’t know what had come over her in the past few days with the anger in the interview room, plus the emotion in the station’s toilet and over the phone with Harry. She had even enjoyed a laugh with the DCI, a person she had never really got on too well with before. And now she told Garry Ashford, a journalist and relative stranger, everything. Once she started speaking, she couldn’t stop. He didn’t try to interrupt or ask anything, he simply let her talk. She told him how Lapham had got under her skin and that Hunt had let him. She spoke about the investigation itself: how the police had got nowhere and were struggling. They weren’t even sure how the murders had happened, let alone who did them. She even told him about her own feelings of inadequacy amid a complete lack of leads.

If Internal Investigations were listening in, they would have had a field day. When she had finished, there was a short silence.

Garry eventually broke it. ‘That was a bit . . . more . . . than I expected.’

Suddenly she was laughing again and so was he. ‘I don’t know why I told you all that,’ she added once things had calmed down. ‘I could be ruined if all of this got out. They wouldn’t trust me to go into an interview room again.’

‘What would you like me to do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I have an idea but would need your help?’

‘Go on . . .’

‘Do you think you can trust me?’

‘I’m not sure I have much choice.’

Jessica listened as Garry told her to leave it with him but to make sure she got hold of the next day’s paper. ‘I think I’ve got a way to keep you and my editor happy,’ he said.