‘Nah, I’ve not heard anything.’ Lee was feeling beads of sweat on the palms of his hands.

‘What about McKenna though? I don’t really know anything about him but you must?’

‘Nah. He’s just some guy on the block, ain’t he? Like all the others. Always banging on about God-this and Jesus-that. It’s not done him much good though, has it?’

‘Oh right . . . It’s just one of the other guys reckoned you got on and that . . .’

Lee spun around quickly, spilling part of his drink over the top of the glass. ‘Who said that?’

The other man was clearly taken aback. ‘Oh, no one. I don’t remember. It was nothing bad or that . . .’

Lee looked at him and then downed the rest of his drink in one go. ‘Aye, well, there’s a few too many in that place who’ve got a lot to say.’ With the pint finished, Lee put the glass back on the bar, slightly more carefully than the previous one.

‘I’ve gotta go,’ the other man said. ‘I’m back on earlies tomorrow plus the missus will be wondering where I am.’

‘You’re not one of them, are ya?’

‘One of who?’

‘Y’know, one of them who goes running home when their wife flashes her knickers or gets a strop on.’

The man laughed nervously. ‘No, no. It’s just late and she’s had the wee kids all day.’

‘All right, I should probably be off anyway,’ Lee replied. ‘Mine will probably be snoring by the time I get in.’

The two men said their goodbyes and left the pub together. The other man walked around towards the car park at the back while Lee put his hands in his jacket pockets and started to walk along the thin pavement that ran next to the main road. Aside from the odd passing car, it was a nice quiet journey, exactly what he wanted after the day he’d had.

He was still fuming with the way that female detective had spoken to him. He could remember the day when coppers, prison officers and journalists would mingle together in the local he had just left. They’d drink most of the night, enjoy some cheap imported cigars and then go to work the next day as normal. Women like her wouldn’t have even been allowed in the pub back then, let alone the police force.

‘’kin joke,’ he said to no one in particular.

He pulled the collar up on his jacket and turned right to go along his usual cut-through. It wasn’t too cold but the season was definitely beginning to turn.

The main road had been well lit but there were no street lights down this particular path. It only stretched for around forty yards, linking the road to the estate where he lived. There were metal barriers at either end to stop cars using it, with three lines of cracked paving slabs separating two patches of grass on either side. Houses backed onto the grassy areas, the moon casting a shadow from the building on his right across the walkway.

Lee squinted as his eyes adjusted slowly to the gloomier area. He upped his pace ever so slightly. He had never really been a fan of this shortcut but it saved him ten minutes by not having to walk all the way around the front of the estate and then back through again.

His boots echoed as he walked, clipping the hard slabs as he moved. All of a sudden, he thought he saw movement from the right. He didn’t want to stop but his eyes flickered sideways and then he saw the shape coming at him. It was dark but he saw a face he recognised in the partial moonlight as the man crashed into him.

He went to shout but felt an enormous burst of pain in the middle of his neck. ‘You . . .’ was the last word he managed to gurgle as the man hammered the knife straight through his chest.

12

Jessica had been battling with her conscience the day after Lee Morgan had been discovered. As soon as she arrived at the station, she had been told the prison officer’s dead body had been found. Emotion flooded through her, as she wondered if the way she had wound up both Donald McKenna and the guard himself had directly led to it.

At first she thought the warden could have committed suicide if he did have something to hide but that was ruled out as soon as she was told his wounds were identical to Craig Millar and Ben Webb’s.

After that, her thoughts moved to the prisoner. Had McKenna done something to prove a point to her that no one was untouchable? She didn’t even know if the warden had been corrupt. The previous day she had been fishing for information and might have had suspicions but couldn’t have expected this. The only thing she felt relatively sure of was that McKenna had to be involved. There was no way it could be a coincidence that Lee Morgan had turned up dead a few hours after she had been to the prison and asked about the potential relationship between the two of them.

After being at the scene in the morning, the body had been taken away for testing and Jessica returned to the station in the afternoon. She went straight up to the first floor to see if Farraday was in his office, assuming he would want to see her anyway. He noticed her walking down the corridor through the windows of his office and waved her in before she had even knocked. He phoned downstairs for Cole and, a minute or so later, the three of them were sitting in his office as they had done a few days previously.

The DCI spoke first. ‘Okay, Daniel, while you’ve been out, the secondary results have come back from the labs for the other bodies. I spoke to the head person there half an hour ago and she told me the new swabs taken confirm Donald McKenna is linked to the three deaths.’

It was exactly what Jessica had been expecting but the confirmation was still a shock. She breathed out loudly. ‘What do we do now?’

‘Do I think we have a case? Not a chance. What we do now is keep trying to link McKenna to the victims. The DNA evidence is essentially worthless at the moment. I spoke to someone from the CPS briefly and he pretty much laughed down the phone. As we all thought, given our suspect is firmly behind bars, it’s unusable in court unless we have some other link between him and the victims. The fact they were all in prison together isn’t enough.’

He shuffled through a handful of Post-it notes stuck to his desk, continuing. ‘What about this prison guard guy, er, Morgan?’

He turned the Post-it note around that had the prison guard’s name written on it as if to remind Jessica who it was. She certainly didn’t need her memory refreshing. ‘I saw him yesterday. He is the warden responsible for the area where McKenna is housed . . .’

The chief inspector cut straight across her. ‘So, some bent warden’s turned up dead then. McKenna must be involved somehow.’

Jessica didn’t want to sound like she was correcting him but did have to make a point. She wasn’t sure why he had jumped to that conclusion. ‘We’re not sure he’s, er, corrupt, Sir.’

Farraday nodded. ‘Yeah, yeah, I know. It will be there somewhere, though. What did he say to you yesterday?’

‘Well, the governor told me individual head wardens are responsible for cell allocation. Lee Morgan was the warden responsible for McKenna, who was living in a cell on his own. Most prisoners are two to a cell and I just asked him why McKenna instead of one of the other prisoners? He didn’t really have an answer.’

Even Cole was nodding now. ‘It does sound a little off,’ he said.

The DCI spoke across them. ‘Off? I’ve seen paper clips less bent than this guy will turn out to be, you mark my words.’

Jessica was feeling increasingly frustrated. It wasn’t that she thought the guard was whiter than white, she just wasn’t convinced they should be condemning a dead man before they knew the truth. The increasing feeling of guilt that she had accused Lee Morgan of just that, albeit it not directly, was still playing on her mind too.