‘Have you at least told them that we’re not . . .’

‘Not yet.’ Adam rolled his eyes. ‘It’s easier like this for now,’ Jessica added. ‘I’ll tell them when the time’s right.’

‘You can’t leave them thinking it for too much longer.’

Jessica picked up the laptop and walked back to the door. ‘I know. I’ll sort it.’ She walked through to the living room and plugged it in, waiting for the device to boot up, as she wandered back to the glass balcony door and stared into the darkness. She had long since regretted making the phone call from the airport to tell her parents and Izzy that she was flying out to get married. They had all understood at the time but Jessica didn’t have the heart to tell them what had happened.

As her mind began to drift, Jessica heard the computer beeping. Each time it did something she didn’t expect, her first instinct was to whack as many keys as she could to see if it helped. Her second instinct was to call Adam. The printer’s not working – ‘ADAM!’. The screen’s gone blue – ‘ADAM!’. Someone’s asking me to send my bank details to Nigeria – ‘ADAM!’. If all else failed, violence – or at least the threat of it – often did the trick.

Usually the laptop would have booted straight onto a screen from where she knew she could load the Internet browser. Instead, it had stopped at a password screen and was asking for a username.

‘ADAM!’

He came into the room holding two shirts. One was bright blue, the other grey. ‘Which one?’ he asked.

Jessica pointed to the grey one. ‘What’s going on with this?’

Adam hung both shirts over the doorframe and walked to the sofa. ‘I had to set us up separate logins. I’ve got all this stuff from the university which is confidential and sensitive. I couldn’t risk you accidentally deleting it or anything like that.’ He laughed as if it was a joke but Jessica could tell he was lying.

‘I don’t even look at all that stuff. I only ever use the Internet.’

‘It’s more of a just in case thing. It just means you’ll have access to your own files now.’

Adam typed in a username for her, adding: ‘You can pick your own password.’

‘I don’t want to pick my own password – I’ll never remember it. I just want it to login like it used to.’

Adam squirmed awkwardly, shuffling from one foot to the other. ‘Sorry.’

Jessica typed in a password and then watched the main screen appear. As Adam picked up his shirts and went into the bedroom, she checked the empty Internet browser history and wondered what he was up to.

9

Although Adam had been keen to act as if nothing was wrong, Jessica had made it clear she wasn’t happy. She was still in a mood the next morning as she made her way into DCI Cole’s glass-walled office for a senior briefing before the chief inspector talked to the rest of the team.

Cole was sitting behind his desk, with Jessica, DS Cornish and DC Diamond in a semicircle around him. Jessica had never known Izzy sit in on a senior team briefing in the past, so she knew her friend must have something important to share.

When she first started attending briefings, Jessica had felt herself itching to get away. She couldn’t see the point in sitting around talking when you could be out doing something instead. Recently, she had begun to realise it was more of a way to offer ideas and share opinions.

‘I do have something for you,’ Cole began, picking up a printout from his desk. ‘As we thought, Oliver Gordon was killed by asphyxiation. As far as we can tell, there was no strangulation – his neck wasn’t bruised and his hyoid bone is also intact.’

Jessica was waiting to hear whatever the news was about the casino Kayleigh and Eleanor had worked in but knew the chief inspector would get to it when he was ready. Although she didn’t have any great depth of knowledge of anatomy, she had only been in uniform for a few months when she found out the hyoid bone was at the top of the neck, almost directly under the chin. She had been working late shifts and been told to attend a 999 call at a local petrol station. A worker had been robbed but his attacker had also beaten him around the chest and body with an axe handle. The man could barely breathe but had somehow managed to call the police. When Jessica arrived, she could see the dark purple marks on his neck and the man croakily said at least two of the blows had caught him under the chin. When they were alone, the more experienced officer she had attended the scene with said he thought the man had broken his hyoid bone, adding that Jessica would recognise it herself if she ever had a case that involved strangulation.

‘Were there any major chest injuries?’ Jessica asked now.

The chief inspector shook his head. ‘He was likely killed by a plastic bag or something similar wrapped tightly around his face. He took at least one hard blow to the face, probably a punch, which may even have knocked him out before the bag was wrapped around him. There are a few minor marks on his back, which could have come from someone digging an elbow in, or pushing a knee into him if they were on the ground.’

‘Was there anything else at the scene?’

Jessica had not seen much when she’d been at the house but other members of the force would have been examining the Sextons’ property as well.

Cole shook his head again. ‘The homeowner found Oliver’s phone but we’ve not come up with anything untoward in the records. The hallway had various household things already in it – coats, shoes and the like – but they were apparently untouched.’

Cornish had been taking notes but stopped to interrupt. ‘Do we have any idea what happened then?’

Jessica had been wondering the same thing since first attending the scene. Cole took a large breath, shaking his head. ‘We still don’t know if Oliver was killed at the Sextons’ house or if he was taken off-site. It might have been that there was a knock on the door and he opened it, only to be punched in the face and then suffocated. We haven’t found anything in the house and can’t find anything that says he was in contact with anyone else, or that he left the property either voluntarily or not. His computer is clean too and none of the neighbours saw anything. Checking the traffic cameras nearby is needle in a haystack stuff so we just don’t know.’

Jessica knew DS Cornish had definitely gone for the inspector role and, assuming they hired internally, Jessica thought her office mate would get the job. She certainly had the drive and efficiency to do it, although Jessica didn’t know how she felt about the prospect of Louise potentially outranking her. Although they got on, they had little in common and rarely talked about anything other than work.

The sergeant said nothing but started writing.

‘I didn’t get anything from his parents or friends either,’ Jessica said. ‘We can maybe leave it a few days, then try talking to them again, but everything pretty much adds up to the fact that Oliver was a relatively normal kid.’

‘Normal’ was a word most members of CID hated. What they didn’t want was the situation they had – where no one had a bad word to say about the victim. ‘Yeah, sure, I saw him taking part in that drug-fuelled Wizard of Oz-themed orgy’ they could cope with. ‘All he did was sit in his bedroom watching movies’ was a struggle.

‘How are we going with the newspaper obit?’ Jessica asked. She had been slightly out of the loop since bringing back the details and handing them over.

‘Isobel,’ the DCI said.

Izzy glanced at her notes, then looked back up and spoke confidently. ‘We’ve been in contact with the phone company to try to trace whoever made the call to place the notice. Considering we had the paper’s full cooperation, we thought it would be easy, but it’s taken them this long to come back to us with a payphone in the city centre. It’s only a few hundred yards away from the newspaper office.’