Jessica didn’t know what to say. You heard all sorts of harrowing tales from people working for the police but this was right up there. No one came out well from this, Shaun or his mother. And what about the victims? Nigel Collins and poor Kim. Perhaps even Shaun himself and Claire were sufferers because of it all?

Shaun sniffed again. ‘I felt so bad. It was the last time I ever saw her. I came back to Leeds that night and just drank. I didn’t even know the guy I beat up. I’ve thought about it a lot since. I wondered if maybe I wanted to end up somewhere like here and punish myself? I don’t know.’

There wasn’t an awful lot they could say. They would pass on the confession to their superiors who might decide to reopen Nigel Collins’ case. If that happened, someone else would come to visit Shaun to ask him to repeat everything he had just said. Even if he refused, Jessica’s recollections and Cole’s notes could probably be enough.

Jessica’s mind was still working. ‘Who were the other boys, Shaun?’

‘I didn’t really know everyone’s name. It was all about nicknames and football usually, just having a laugh. It wasn’t always just the four of us. Big groups of us would go off kicking a footy around. It was just that day it was the four of us bunking off. I’m still not really sure how it all happened. We were smoking around the back of this shop and Nigel walked past. We all knew his name and face just through him being around. Everyone took the mick and called him names and so on. He kind of half-knew us and our mums because we were all from the same area. He never seemed to forget anyone. Scott said he was the guy who had been looking at his girlfriend some other evening and we went with it. It was only a chase at first.’

‘Do you remember Scott’s last name?’

Shaun thought about it but shook his head. ‘I’m not sure I ever knew it. It wasn’t the kind of thing I would have asked. He was younger than me so we weren’t even in the same class.’

‘What about “Jamo”?’

‘I don’t know. That was what Scott called him.’

‘Do you know if it was his first name, like “James”? Or last name like “Jameson”?’

‘No, he was always just “Jamo”. He was in Scott’s year, which is how they knew each other.’

‘What about Jon?’

‘He’s the only one I knew anything about. He was the year above me in school and had already finished. He lived quite close by but was waiting to do his A-levels or something like that. I don’t remember exactly. We didn’t really talk again.’

‘Do you know his full name?’

‘Yeah I think . . .’ Shaun looked up to the ceiling trying to remember. ‘Price? Something like that.’

Jessica glanced at Cole and then spun around to look back at Shaun. ‘Could it be “Prince”? Jonathan Prince?’

‘Yeah, maybe. That sounds about right.’

29

It didn’t take much working out for Jessica to figure out that ‘Jamo’ would be James Christensen, the son of Yvonne. That still left them Scott to discover but they knew three of the four gang members who had beaten Nigel Collins into a coma had now had a parent brutally murdered.

Jessica and Cole hurried out of the prison. One of the reception workers drove them back to the station and Jessica spent large parts of the car trip and train journey on her phone.

The first thing they had to do was find out who Scott was. What was his last name and where did he live? More importantly for now, where did his parents live? Someone had to find them to make sure they weren’t the next victims. All they had to go on was that Scott was a few years younger than Jonathan Prince and Shaun Hogan and in the same school year as James Christensen. It should be easy enough to find out what school they went to, check the intake for that particular year and look for anyone called Scott. Unless he had changed his name in the meantime, it would give them maybe one person to look at if they were lucky but certainly no more than five or six if not. Complications could arise if people had moved but it still shouldn’t take long. Jessica hoped the people at the station would have tracked down their man by the time the train pulled in. If any of that failed, they would bring in James Christensen to see if he could point them in the right direction to find Scott.

The next concern was to track down Nigel Collins. Surely he had to be their man? He was connected to all three murders and, depending on the way you viewed things, had the motive. She didn’t know why he would target the parents instead of those who had hurt him though.

Aylesbury told Jessica over the phone he would be setting one team up to find Scott and another to find Nigel.

The train journey took the same time to arrive back in Manchester at lunchtime as it had to get to Leeds that morning but Jessica was on edge. Every stop at a platform had her seething, checking her watch and wondering what was taking so long. Again, Cole’s coolness infuriated her. He didn’t need to say anything, his posture said it all: Just wait, getting stressed can’t help either of us. It was helping her, though. She watched people get on and off and had irrational thoughts about whether one of them was Scott or Nigel Collins.

Her phone rang as they pulled into the Oxford Road station. It was marginally closer to their Longsight base than the main Piccadilly station and Jessica thought they could get a taxi directly from there, saving them a few minutes. Cole shrugged and went with it as Jessica talked on her phone and bounded out of the station. The inspectors wanted to see her ticket but she wasn’t in the mood to be stopped, pulling out her identification card instead and telling them in not too polite terms to move out of her way.

The phone call hadn’t improved her mood. Far from finding ‘Scott’, it seemed as if the other officers had not got anywhere. Although he had returned to the area for a short while, James Christensen had gone back to Bournemouth University according to his father and no one seemed to be able to get in contact with him. They had his mobile number but he wasn’t answering and a couple of local officers had been despatched to find him. Perhaps the only thing they had managed to do was confirm which secondary school James had attended. That information had come from his father who wasn’t too keen to be giving out that kind of information according to the person Jessica spoke to. ‘He kept asking if his son was under suspicion, then was banging on about his rights,’ the officer told Jessica.

‘What is it with people and their bloody rights?’ Jessica said. ‘Everyone thinks they’re entitled to something.’

Officers had managed to go to the school and find an intake list from the year they needed, despite being told at first it was against the Data Protection Act. A call from the DCI had apparently straightened that out but the officers had been told the superintendent had also spoken to someone at the Local Education Authority before the papers had been handed over. The school had emailed a copy as well as handed over a photocopied version of the originals.

Even with that, the problem was that there were three people named ‘Scott’ in the same year as James Christensen. While Jessica had been on the train, the team had hit brick walls with all of their potential gang-leaders.

There was a Scott Hesketh, a Scott Harris and a Scott Barry. Those names were being cross-checked with birth certificates, the electoral roll and other easily accessible name archives. The school itself had a limited amount of information on past pupils. From what the officer told Jessica, it was basically just name, grades and home address. Given those addresses were six years old, that didn’t give them much. Officers had been sent out to each of the three addresses to see if they could come up with something, while the other information they had was being run against their own police databases.