‘You’re getting on well, then?’ Caroline suggested with a twinkle in her eye. Jessica and Ryan looked at each other and giggled but neither answered.

‘We’re going to go to bed,’ Caroline said. ‘Thanks for the company this evening.’ She climbed off her boyfriend’s lap and helped haul him to his feet. ‘See you tomorrow, Jess. Have a fun night.’ As she went to leave the room, she leant over and kissed her friend on the forehead, before departing hand in hand with Randall.

Jessica fumbled for the remote and turned the television on. Her late-night talk-show rerun was just beginning.

‘Ha, you watch this too?’ Ryan said.

‘Not really.’

‘Me neither.’

They both laughed and Jessica edged closer to their guest on the sofa. ‘So do you reckon he’s the father?’ Ryan asked.

Jessica smiled. ‘Course he is.’

They joked and enjoyed the show together but Jessica spent more and more time watching Ryan. He had a little crinkle around the corner of his eye when he smiled and he seemed to smile a lot.

The show reached its final advert break and Ryan turned to look at her. ‘I’m going to have to go, the last bus goes soon. I could get a taxi I suppose . . .’

Jessica didn’t let him finish the sentence. She leant forwards and kissed him. It was gentle at first but he kissed her back strongly and she let him. It felt good. Before she knew what she was doing, she had her hand inside his shirt on his chest. He tried to push her back onto the sofa but she stopped him, pulling away from the embrace. He looked a little confused for a moment but, as Jessica got to her feet, she made it clear why she was stopping. She held out her hand and led him to her bedroom.

Jessica slept well, thoughts of faltering investigations and dead ends as far from her mind as they had been in weeks. She woke in the early hours but it was nice to have someone next to her. She didn’t make a habit of inviting strangers, or anyone for that matter, into her bed but she’d had a great evening. She closed her eyes and let herself drift back to sleep. It only seemed moments later but she awoke with a start. She opened her eyes as the light poured through the still too thin curtains.

She was alone on the bed.

‘Ryan?’

She didn’t say it very loudly but he clearly wasn’t in the room. She opened her eyes fully and figured she would find out if he was still in the flat. She picked up a large jumper from the floor and put it on over the nightie she didn’t remember putting on the previous night. It was a little chilly. She opened her bedroom door and walked out into the hallway before first checking the empty kitchen. She couldn’t hear any voices but headed for the living room anyway.

As she opened the door she saw Ryan sitting on the sofa in his boxer shorts reading Yvonne Christensen’s police file.

24

‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

Ryan’s head spun around and he dropped the file onto his lap, where the second file, Martin Prince’s, lay. ‘Jess. Sorry. I . . . they were on the table, I was curious.’

‘What gives you the right? Do you get your kicks from this kind of stuff? From seeing dead bodies?’

‘No, sorry, I just wondered what they were.’

Ryan stood and dropped the files onto the coffee table but Jessica’s raised voice had obviously stirred Randall and Caroline. Caroline might normally have slept through the noise but Randall must have heard it. The two of them came into the living room, Caroline wearing an unfastened dressing gown which looked as if she had hastily grabbed it. Randall was just behind, clearly half-asleep and wearing just a pair of boxer shorts.

‘What’s happening?’ Caroline started speaking but Jessica was still glaring at Ryan and cut her off.

‘Get out now. You’re lucky I don’t arrest you.’

Jessica didn’t know what she would have arrested him for but was annoyed at herself as much as anything. Taking the files out of the station could be a disciplinary matter, especially if you were as careless with them as she had been.

Ryan quickly moved past Jessica, Caroline and Randall. ‘Sorry . . . I’ll just get dressed.’

Jessica picked the files up from the table and started looking through them, making sure everything was still there. As well as the private information the police had on the victims and their families, there were photographs of the crime scenes and details of the interviews they had done. The link to Wayne Lapham was clear in both files. Most details were kept on the central computer system but, with the bigger cases, they still used hard copies.

‘What did he do?’ Caroline asked.

Jessica ignored the question, spitting a reply at her friend: ‘And what did you think you were trying to pull last night? I told you I wasn’t interested in meeting anyone.’

Caroline was clearly taken aback by the venom in Jessica’s tone. ‘Sorry, I just thought . . .’

‘Well, don’t.’ Jessica stormed past the two of them, files in her hand, back into her room where Ryan was only half-dressed, still looking for his shirt.

‘Get out.’

‘Sorry, I’m going, I’m going.’

Ryan finally found his shirt and snatched it from the floor before leaving the room with a final ‘sorry’. Jessica slammed the door behind him.

Her mood hadn’t cooled by the end of the day. She had deliberately stayed at the station after hours and gone to the pub with a few of the other officers. She knew she wasn’t great company and didn’t even have the willpower to take the mickey out of Rowlands. The talk of the station that day was that the new girl had dumped him. That news had cheered her up a small amount but she was still in a bad mood.

She was annoyed at herself more than anything, aggravated she had let her guard down and not sent Ryan packing in his taxi last night; she didn’t even know his last name. Jessica wondered if she had overreacted. At first, she thought it could be true he had just picked up the files out of curiosity but then she remembered she had left them underneath her bag on the floor, not on the coffee table. He had gone out of his way to look through them.

The only thing she did regret was the way she had spoken to her friend that morning; Caroline was only trying to cheer her up and hadn’t done anything wrong aside from some clumsy matchmaking. Jessica was an adult and made her own decisions. She had certainly made the choice to let Ryan stay the night. It wasn’t Caroline’s fault but the worst thing was Jessica knew she was too stubborn to say sorry. As usual, she would wait for Caroline to apologise and then make a big deal over accepting it.

When she got home that evening, the flat was empty with a note on the coffee table that just said:

‘Sorry. X’

Caroline was obviously staying at Randall’s that night. In contrast to the day before, Jessica had a terrible night’s sleep, waking up frequently before finally giving up in the early hours and going to watch the rolling news on television.

It was a Saturday the next day and, even though she could have had the day off, Jessica didn’t want to be in the flat if Caroline returned, wanting to make her friend suffer a little longer. Jessica had already been up for hours and got dressed to go into the station. She was going to have to go in at some stage, having left her car there the previous day because she had been to the pub after work. She knew some officers would have driven home after a couple of pints, safe in the knowledge they were unlikely to be turned in by their colleagues. Everyone knew the ones who did and, while most didn’t approve, they didn’t want to be the one who said something. Breaking the law in such a blatant way was a line Jessica hadn’t crossed and didn’t want to.