The matter-of-fact way she spoke was horrifying and Jessica didn’t doubt for a second that what Ruby had told her was true.

Ruby must have seen the realisation on Jessica’s face because she smiled again. ‘Don’t worry, love, he’s like that with everyone. He didn’t even want Nicky – he sent him off to some boarding school to get rid of him – it was only ever about making sure I couldn’t have him.’

As if sensing what she was thinking, Ruby glanced from Jessica to Dave, then back again. ‘Up until about a year ago, I was living with this guy. We’d been together for eighteen months or so and things were going okay. We were talking about getting married – but then he didn’t come home one day. Then he wasn’t here the next day either, or the day after that. I called you lot but nothing ever came of it, he just disappeared.’

Jessica felt Rowlands glance towards her, which Ruby clearly saw. ‘It’s not what you think,’ she said, nodding towards him. ‘I got a call at three in the morning about a month later. You never know what it is when the phone rings at that time, do you? But it was that fat fuck, he was pissed as always, giggling. He asked how my relationship was going and kept laughing. I was going to hang up but then he said I shouldn’t worry. I asked what he meant and he said I should take heart that it took a six-figure sum to make him go away.’

‘Nicholas paid your fiancé to leave?’ Jessica couldn’t believe she was asking the question but Ruby finished off her cigarette before stubbing it out.

‘That’s what he does. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t want me any more, he doesn’t want anyone else to either. He thought it was hilarious that I’m living here on benefits while he paid someone else that amount to leave me. It’s the way he works.’

‘We’re looking into a few things,’ Jessica said, wanting to offer the woman some hope.

Ruby shook her head. ‘You’ll never get him for anything, you must know that? He’d rather go down shooting and take a couple of you lot with him. That’s the type of vindictive bastard he is.’

Jessica tried not to take the image literally. ‘What was it like living with him?’ she asked, although she could guess the answer.

Ruby reached forward and took another cigarette out of her bag, lighting it and sucking the smoke deep into her lungs before holding it in and eventually breathing out. ‘Everything you can imagine and worse.’ She twisted her body around and lifted her shirt, showing them an area at the bottom of her back around her kidneys. Even from the other side of the room, Jessica could see a patch of skin far whiter than the tanned brown of the rest of Ruby’s body.

‘That’s where he held an iron on me because I wasn’t ready to go out on time.’

She allowed her shirt to fall and then bent her ear forward, pulling her hair out of the way to reveal a zigzag-shaped mark. ‘I’d gone shopping one Saturday and missed the bus. I got home forty-five minutes later than I said I was going to. This was before the days of mobile phones, so I had no way of letting him know because the only money I had was for the bus, not for a payphone. He would only ever give me an exact amount for things. When I got home, he refused to open the front door at first.’ Anticipating Jessica’s question, she added: ‘He never let me have a front-door key.’

Ruby paused for another puff of the cigarette. ‘He eventually opened the door but when he was halfway through, he smashed it back into me. I fell backwards and this side of my face got caught in the door. At first, because I was in the way, he couldn’t shut it but, as I was lying there, he looked down at me and slammed it as hard as he could. My ear was caught in the door and was torn off.’

Jessica couldn’t prevent herself from wincing but Ruby seemed unperturbed, pointing to the inside of her thumb. ‘When I was pregnant with Nicky, we were hosting this dinner party for some people he knew. I wasn’t feeling very well and kept being sick but he barricaded me in the kitchen and told me to get on with it. I didn’t know what happened but I guess I fell asleep for a moment because I was woken up by the fire alarm going off. It was nothing serious but something under the grill had burned. He came storming in, saying I was trying to kill him by burning the house down. I was so tired, I didn’t even know what was going on – but he grabbed my hand and forced it onto this red-hot ring on top of the cooker. I was screaming and could smell my own hand burning but he was shouting in my face, telling me I’d regret trying to burn his house down.’

Ruby paused to have another smoke, although Jessica had the feeling she could have catalogued many more injuries.

‘Surely there were questions from the hospital?’ Jessica asked, knowing how naive she sounded. It was a human reaction, not a police officer’s.

Ruby exhaled and smiled thinly. ‘Let’s just say I fell down the stairs a lot. If you went to a different casualty unit each time, no one even noticed.’

It was far from the first story of domestic abuse Jessica had heard but, coupled with everything else she knew about Nicholas Long, a genuinely terrifying picture was emerging.

‘Aren’t things better now?’ Rowlands asked. Jessica heard his voice falter and realised he was taking it worse than she was.

Ruby smiled another toothy grin and held her arms into the air. ‘Look around, honey, this ain’t much fun either.’

Jessica had been wondering why Ruby was letting them into all of her secrets but realised the woman was past caring. As she finished stubbing out the cigarette, Jessica knew the saddest thing was that Ruby would run back to her former husband in a heartbeat if the option was there.

She wanted to comfort the woman, to tell her it couldn’t be that bad, but she knew anything she said would sound patronising.

‘There’s not much else I can tell you, sorry,’ Ruby added, straightening her clothes.

‘What was Nicky like as a child?’ Jessica asked, doubting the woman would be able to give her any information to back up what Leviticus had told her.

‘Nicholas found everything funny, as long as it didn’t affect him. Nicky would pinch and punch me and his dad would laugh along so he thought it was okay.’

‘But you still wanted custody?’

Ruby shrugged. ‘Boys will be boys. They’re always up to something. He was still my son.’ She quickly corrected herself: ‘Is my son.’

Jessica couldn’t think of anything else to ask. She had hoped for some insight into Nicky but instead ended up hearing one more awful chapter in the life of the boy’s father.

‘You can show yourselves out,’ Ruby concluded as Jessica and Rowlands stood.

As she waited in the hallway with the constable struggling to put his boots on, Jessica couldn’t help but swear under her breath.

‘Sounds like a lovely chap, doesn’t he?’ Rowlands said quietly.

‘You don’t know the half of it.’

‘I do have one idea you might be interested in.’

‘There’s a first time for everything.’

‘No, seriously. Your newspaper ad thing, it was something Ruby said.’

Jessica could tell from the way he was speaking to her normally that he thought he was onto something.

20

Jessica peered across the table at the two individuals and pointed to the newspaper in front of her. ‘If either or both of you were responsible for this, now would be a pretty good time to speak up.’

When neither of them answered, she looked sideways at Rowlands. He spoke with the exact tone she wanted him to, like a big brother to a younger sibling. ‘Look,’ he said chummily, ‘if it was you and you tell us now, we’re prepared to let things go. If you keep this going and we later find out it was either of you, then you will be in serious shite.’