She stifled a shiver as a draught breezed through her. Hoping she hadn’t left the bedroom window open again, Kayleigh carried her bags into the kitchen, where the actual reason became obvious. As she entered, her eyes were drawn to the broken glass scattered across the floor. Kayleigh put her shopping down and tiptoed to the back door, careful to avoid the shards.
The bottom half of the back door was wooden but the top was made from translucent bobbled glass, which now had a jagged hole in the centre. Kayleigh stared at the keyhole and cursed herself for being so lazy. Because she struggled to find her keys, she always left the back-door key in the lock. Kayleigh tried the handle to see if it would open, wincing as she heard glass splintering under her shoes. The door required as much of a yank as the front one had, but the fact it was unlocked proved someone had smashed the glass and then used the key to open it. The key was still resting in the keyhole.
Kayleigh pushed the door closed and leant against the fridge, closing her eyes in frustration. She remembered the previous time she had been broken into a few years ago, when she had carelessly left a window open and gone out for the day. Back then, she had promised herself she would learn her lesson. Over time, she had simply become lazy, constantly misplacing keys, leaving curtains open and, as was now apparent, carelessly leaving keys in locks. Although Ordsall didn’t have the best of reputations, Kayleigh had rarely experienced problems in the area since the initial break-in.
Looking around the kitchen, apart from the glass, Kayleigh struggled to see anything that was out of place. She weaved around the glass and her shopping, making her way into the living room. She didn’t own much of value but what she did have was in the main room of the house. Fully expecting to see the television gone, Kayleigh was surprised to see it on top of the cabinet exactly where it had been that morning. Next to it was her stereo which, while not worth that much, would surely be worth taking if someone had broken in. As with the kitchen, Kayleigh could not see anything out of place, with an empty glass still on the armrest of the sofa exactly where she had left it the previous evening. She stepped across to the cabinet underneath the television and opened the drawer, taking out her laptop almost so she could believe it was still there.
She was full of relief, not just because the computer hadn’t been stolen – but more because she didn’t want to lose the photos she had on it.
Realising that someone who had broken in might assume she had something valuable upstairs, Kayleigh checked her bedroom. It was still untidy but that was nothing to do with the break-in and everything to do with her own messiness. The duvet cover was half on the floor, with shoes scattered across the carpet. Kayleigh checked the side table next to her bed where she kept the spare house keys, but everything was as it should be.
The landing and spare bedroom were equally clear, so Kayleigh walked back down the stairs into the hallway, feeling confused and wondering if it was just kids who had been playing around.
She returned to the kitchen, approaching the sink and staring out of the back window. A lane ran along the rear of the property and she had long known the rotting wooden fence inherited from the previous owner offered little privacy from whoever chose to walk past. There were local gangs but Kayleigh hadn’t had a run-in with any of them and pretty much kept herself to herself.
After putting the frozen items of food in the freezer, Kayleigh wondered if she should sweep up. If anything, calling the police could bring her more attention and, with the fact that apparently nothing had been taken, Kayleigh considered whether she would be better tidying up and then getting a glazier to come out. The excess on her insurance would surely be as much as it would cost to repair the door anyway, so the hassle of standing around while a police officer took photos and left a crime number didn’t seem worth it. Then there would be the forms to fill in and the endless things to sign. As if being broken into wasn’t bad enough, they then tried to kill you off with paperwork.
Kayleigh pulled the dustpan and brush out from underneath the mass of carrier bags in the cupboard below the sink and crouched, swishing the fragments of glass into the pan, while being careful not to kneel on any. The hole in the window wasn’t that big but Kayleigh found small slivers of glass in far-flung corners of the room. When she was finished, she emptied the pan into the large wheelie bin outside the back door and then found the phone book in the living room, before calling the first glazier on the list.
With everything sorted as best it could be, Kayleigh filled up the kettle with water and set it to boil, wondering why life couldn’t be easy. She went to sit in the living room, where she could watch through the living-room window for the work van to arrive, but instead felt the all too familiar pressure on her bladder, so headed upstairs.
As soon as she opened the bathroom door, she realised something wasn’t right. The hole in the back door had made the air fresh downstairs but the bathroom smelled of something that reminded her of a summer a few years ago when the bin men had gone on strike. Rubbish had been left to rot for three weeks and the lane at the back of her house where everyone put their bins reeked of rotting, decaying waste. Kayleigh flashed back to that summer as she stepped into the room, eyes drawn to the bath. She had taken a shower that morning and always left the curtain half-stretched along one side of the tub so it could drip dry.
It was then she knew someone had been in her house.
The curtain was pulled the entire way around the bath, shielding her from whatever was inside.
She crept forward until she had one hand on the shower curtain but the smell was finding a way to seep through her senses even though she was holding her breath. The stench almost made her gag. Feeling the need to breathe in, Kayleigh closed her eyes and quickly pulled at the thin sheet. She heard the plastic rings at the top clattering into each other and then slowly opened her eyes.
Kayleigh felt strangely calm. She had watched television shows and films where people would go running and screaming and, although her head was telling her to close the door and call the police, her first thought was that she wouldn’t be able to take a shower any time soon.
And then she finally breathed in, her senses taking control of her body.
Kayleigh closed her eyes to take away the scene but this offered no protection from what was now etched in her memory. Even in the semi-darkness, she could see everything clearly.
It wasn’t the young man’s body which had been dumped in her bath that terrified her as much as the way his eyelids were hanging open, exposing small red blotches in the whites of his eyes in a way she knew she would never forget.
6
In the days it had taken for Oliver Gordon’s disappearance to become an official case, Jessica had guessed it would only be a matter of time before his body turned up. They had decided not to publicise the fact the boy’s death had been predicted in the pages of the Herald and no one else had apparently noticed. As soon as the call came through that a woman had found a body in her bathtub following some sort of break-in, Jessica knew it would be Oliver.
With Reynolds still suspended and DCI Cole busy trying to manage more than his own workload, Jessica grabbed Izzy and headed out to the address in Ordsall. If she had been at home, it would have been a ten-minute walk at most from Salford Quays but, instead, Manchester was its usual static self. Jessica skipped through as many side streets as she could remember before finally emerging into the network of terraced redbrick houses where the flashing blue lights of an ambulance and two police cars were already waiting.