‘Do people only use payphones to make nuisance calls?’ Jessica asked, only half in jest.

Izzy continued: ‘Because of the length of time this has all taken, any CCTV we may have had of the area is gone. All we have to work with is the description of the caller.’ She looked towards Jessica and this time she smiled. ‘I think it’s fair to say that’s left us with quite a wide scope.’

‘A man who is eighteen to bloody fifty,’ Jessica exclaimed in disgust. ‘How many teenagers do you know that sound like a fifty-year-old? Or vice versa?’

‘What are we going to do about this?’ Cornish asked.

Cole caught Jessica’s eye and she guessed the answer before he spoke. It was the only thing they could realistically do. ‘For now, we’re going to put it to one side. Apart from the staff at the paper, no one else knows. If any readers saw the notice on the day, then they didn’t clock it and no one else has come forward to point it out.’

‘It can only have been done for attention,’ Jessica said, picking up the point. ‘Assuming it was our killer, they wanted us or whoever to see it. Obviously we have but there’s not much benefit at the moment to sharing it with the public. If the killer wants us to notice them, we’re better off keeping it quiet and hoping they try to get our attention again – hopefully without murdering anyone.’

Cole nodded a short acknowledgement. Jessica knew the danger was that whoever was responsible could try to get their attention by killing someone else – but that was a risk anyway. The body had been left for them to find, the newspaper notice deliberately placed. If the perpetrator was trying to show off by pre-announcing their crimes, it could likely happen again. If the team could spot it in time, they might be able to do something about it.

‘We’ve been in dialogue with the paper,’ Cole added. ‘They’ve agreed to keep everything quiet for now, although we may end up having to give them something at the end of all this. They’re now taking more details of callers and people who email in for any obituary notices but that doesn’t mean the same thing will happen again.’

‘How are we doing with Kayleigh?’ Jessica asked, trying to hide her impatience.

The chief inspector nodded towards Izzy, who answered. ‘Kayleigh’s been in the house for five years and there were only two other sets of owners in the previous twenty-five years. The ones from furthest back have both died while we can’t find any connection from the most recent ones to Oliver or his family, or to Cameron and Eleanor. I managed to speak to them last night but they have moved out of the area and don’t appear to have any link to anything.’

‘So was whoever left the body targeting Kayleigh, or was it random?’ DS Cornish asked.

Cole was scratching nervously at his head. His hair had been receding rapidly over the past year or so and Jessica wondered if he realised how much the job was ageing him. ‘It’s hard to know,’ he said, nodding to Jessica, who took up the conversation.

‘It could be random but it would be very random. Firstly, they could have left the body anywhere. Secondly, there must have been easier houses to get into if that’s what they wanted: places with windows left open and so on. It was only a single pane of glass to break at the back of Kayleigh’s house but the guys reckon it was smashed with one brute-force strike. They’d have had to protect their hand but it could even be something like a punch.’

‘How would they have known about the key being left in the back door?’ Izzy asked.

Jessica shrugged. ‘It could be someone Kayleigh knows, or that could have just been good or bad luck depending on which way you’re looking at it. If they went equipped to break in, they would have probably found a way in any case.’

The constable nodded in agreement. ‘We spoke to Eleanor Sexton yesterday. She was a bit surprised to hear Kayleigh’s name but pretty much confirmed everything we had already been told – they worked together at a casino in the city but left around twenty years ago. They stayed in intermittent contact but nothing in the past decade or so. Neither of them seem to have been in any sort of trouble in the past and we can’t see anything else that would connect them. If Kayleigh hadn’t told us she knew Eleanor, we wouldn’t have known.’

The constable glanced up at Jessica as if to say the information she had been waiting for was finally on its way. She then turned to the chief inspector, who picked up a grey file from his desk and opened the cardboard cover.

He looked at Jessica specifically as he spoke. ‘Have you heard of Nicholas Long?’

Some local criminals were notorious, their faces and names known to pretty much everyone in uniform, but this wasn’t a name that instantly rang any bells for Jessica. ‘He sounds familiar,’ she replied, not knowing if it was because he was some sort of crook she should recognise, or if he was someone else semi-famous.

Cole held up an enlarged photograph for them to see. It showed a man somewhere in his early fifties smoking a cigar, grinning broadly. His skin was rubbery, his cheeks red and sagging, and his forehead covered in wrinkles, with strands of hair combed across his scalp in a way that fooled nobody.

Jessica shook her head slowly. ‘I’ve definitely seen him before . . .’

‘He’s a little before your time,’ Cole said. ‘Nicholas Long is a businessman in the strictest sense of the word. He currently runs a club in the city centre but that’s a vast scaling back of his operations. Twenty years ago, he ran the casino that both Kayleigh Pritchard and Eleanor James, now Eleanor Sexton, worked at. In between times he has run various businesses, including employment agencies, pubs, and a snooker club.’

‘What type of club does he run now?’ Cornish asked.

‘It’s a gentlemen’s establishment,’ the chief inspector said, raising his eyebrows towards Jessica, who didn’t know why he simply didn’t call it a ‘strip club’.

Jessica was beginning to fill in the gaps but didn’t interrupt as Cole spelled it out. ‘Throughout all of this time, he’s been suspected of various criminal offences, drugs being the main one, but prostitution and people-trafficking as well. They’ve been trying to pin illegal weapon possession on him for some time but have never been able to find anything. Apart from GBH charges when he was a teenager, he’s somehow managed to keep a clean record. To all intents and purposes, he is a legitimate above-board businessman.’

He paused as if waiting for the question that didn’t come, then flicked through the file and took out another sheaf of papers. ‘What he may not know, although I suspect he does, is that the Serious Crime Division have been looking into him for the past two years. They’ve been checking his books and employment records.’ He fixed Jessica with a stare. ‘This means that we have to tread very carefully indeed.’

Jessica broke the gaze and looked towards Izzy. ‘Have we got anything else on him?’

The constable glanced sideways at their supervisor for assurance before referring to her own notes. ‘Nicholas Long is fifty-five years old and is married to Tia Long.’ She held up a photo of a young woman with tanned perfect skin and flowing dark hair. She couldn’t have been any older than thirty at the most.

‘I wonder what attracted her,’ Jessica said.

‘He has a teenage son, also called Nicholas, with a former wife called Ruby. He comes from Moss Side where our records are a little sketchy. What is clear is that he does still have some sort of high respect in the area.’

She passed across a photocopy of a newspaper article from a few years ago with Nicholas Long standing outside a building grinning at the camera. Jessica skimmed the first few paragraphs before handing the page to DS Cornish.

‘As well as the boxing club he paid for mentioned in that article,’ Izzy added, ‘he also owns one of the main pubs in the area plus paid for recent renovations to a community centre on the estate.’