‘I wish.’

They looked at each other and there was a short pause that Caroline broke. ‘Are we okay?’

‘Yeah, of course we are.’

‘I was only trying to help. I wanted to cheer you up.’

‘I know.’

‘What did he do?’

‘It doesn’t matter really.’

Jessica sat next to her friend on the sofa and hugged her. ‘Where’s Randy?’

They both giggled.

‘I told Randall I wanted to spend the evening in with you.’

‘That’s nice. Is he still looking after you?’

‘Yeah, he’s a great guy. He was really upset the other morning. Neither of us knew what had happened with you and Ryan. You had both left. We were there staring at each other in confusion. He felt bad his mate had upset you.’

‘It wasn’t his fault.’ Jessica moved slightly away from the embrace. ‘Wine?’

They both laughed again. ‘Of course.’

Jessica was feeling a lot better as she fetched a bottle from under the sink with some glasses. At some point, someone would call her with the results they were waiting on and they had Shaun Hogan to see on Monday. She was expecting a busy week and was pleased to have made up with her friend.

Back in the living room, she sat next to Caroline putting her feet up on the sofa and poured them each a glass of wine. ‘So is it getting serious with you two, then?’

‘Maybe,’ Caroline said with a smile. ‘He’s been talking about getting a new job. He’s had enough of working on the market now. He’s better than that anyway.’

Jessica weighed up what to say next. She knew what she wanted to ask. ‘Are you going to move in with him?’

It was something Jessica had been thinking about since she had first seen the two of them together, the way they looked at each other left the thought nestling in the back of her mind.

Caroline looked directly at her friend. ‘It was always going to happen to one of us sometime.’

‘I know. It’s a shame. We’ve had a good run.’

Jessica could see a tear in her friend’s eye but was determined not to cry herself after her recent sob fests. She put her arm around her friend. ‘What type of job is he looking for?’

‘I don’t know really. He’s only worked on that stall, fixing shoes and other bits and bobs. He’s skilled though. Good with his hands.’

Jessica burst out laughing.

‘Not like that,’ Caroline clarified, giggling herself through a thin stream of tears. ‘Dirty mind. He’s only young, he’ll find something.’

‘So now you’re admitting he’s young?’ Caroline smiled. ‘Cradle-snatcher,’ Jessica added with an even bigger grin.

‘Jealous.’

‘I’m pleased for you both.’

‘We had talked about looking for a place when he gets himself fixed up with a better job. It was his decision. I said I could afford it at first but he reckoned he couldn’t let me do that.’

‘You’re not going to move away away, are you?’

‘Of course not. You’re not going to get rid of me that easily.’

‘Shame, I could get some good rent for that room.’

27

Jessica had never been a big fan of travelling by train. For one, she hated facing backwards while the train moved forwards; there was something inherently unnatural about it. She wasn’t even too keen on the sideways-facing seats. Why was it so hard to have rows of seats that all faced the same way? They managed it on aeroplanes.

She was sitting next to Cole on their way to Leeds, facing backwards and feeling slightly sick. Travelling in a car across the Pennines was a nuisance at the best of times but during the morning rush hour on a Monday, traffic was at its peak. As much as she would never admit it to anyone, especially not Rowlands, Jessica rarely took her car on the motorway. She relied on it to get her a few miles to work and back and occasionally trusted it to complete a return journey to her parents’ house, although only on the minor roads. She definitely didn’t have faith for it to get her from one side of the country to the other. The force didn’t like paying out expenses on car journeys either so a trip on the train it was.

The scenery thundered past as they made small talk. Neither of them seemed keen to speak about the case but Cole told Jessica about his Sunday out with his wife and kids. It felt like another world to her but made her think of poor Kim Hogan and how she hadn’t had the opportunity of a proper upbringing.

Both she and Cole had seen the initial forensic test results. Claire’s neck wounds were almost identical to those of Yvonne Christensen and Martin Prince, while the instrument was again some type of steel wire or rope. With that and the way the flat was locked, they were as sure as they could be that the murders had all been carried out by the same person. Forensics had once again failed to find any trace of the killer. There were no fingerprints, no DNA, no blood and nothing under Claire Hogan’s nails. It also didn’t look as if she’d had sex the night she died.

Either the murderer was very careful indeed, or he knew how to cover his tracks.

The cash that had been left on the side had at least six different sets of fingerprints between the two notes and traces of cocaine. The labs were working on isolating anything that could be useable but Jessica wasn’t hopeful. Even if they did get something they could check, it would only rule people out unless they got a match on the National DNA Database.

At this point, Jessica would have been happy enough with someone to rule out.

She had seen Garry Ashford’s name on the front page of the Herald again that morning. The other media outlets had the story too but Jessica doubted they had spoken to the woman who lived above the victim. In a good way for him, Garry was showing himself to be a bit of a pest. He was certainly persistent but she wondered who his source was. There were plenty of possibilities. Someone on the Scene of Crime team, maybe? They were the only people who had actually been to every scene that she knew of but then somebody had told him about her interview-room incident too.

The train steadily pulled into their destination but they remained sitting until the other commuters were off, a wall of suits, smart shoes and briefcases hurrying away almost as one. When it was clear, the two stood and made their way through the station, showing their tickets to the inspectors on the gate. They got a taxi but it was only a few miles to their destination.

HMP Leeds was a massive old Victorian building for B-class prisoners. The categorisation meant the authorities thought Shaun Hogan didn’t need to be kept with the most violent offenders but he wasn’t trusted enough to be in an open prison either. Jessica had read his file and knew the GBH he had been sent down for was something that happened all too frequently. It reminded her of Tom Carpenter but without the knife; two men fighting outside of a bar after drinking too much on a Saturday night. Shaun Hogan had ended up head-butting the victim, before kicking him in the head on the ground.

He was lucky he hadn’t killed him.

Even with his guilty plea, he had been sentenced to five years in prison but he would be out in a few months because of time spent on remand and apparent good behaviour. He would have served just over half his sentence.

From the outside, the building looked like a castle with imposing cylindrical walls at the front. There was an enormous heavy set of wooden doors at the opening too, all of which added to the structure’s intimidating appearance.

The taxi dropped them off outside and they walked into the reception area. It was a smallish office off to the right of the entrance. They showed their credentials and were searched. The fact they were police officers meant they were given a lot more leeway than most but everyone was patted down and had to go through the metal detectors – regardless of who they were.