It sounded unlikely considering the man had been killed in a similar way to Oliver and Kayleigh, but they could never discount anything.

‘Are there any cameras out back?’ she asked.

‘Not that are linked up to here – you’ll have to get your teams on it. There’ll be some around the square and probably the other streets nearby but whether you’ll get anything is a different matter.’

Jessica already knew that was true. Many of the cameras struggled to catch anything that wasn’t directly underneath a streetlight, making it easy enough to make your way around undetected if you really wanted to.

‘Will you feed all of these back to us?’ Jessica asked.

‘Of course but we’ll take everything back to the labs first. Who knows what else we might find?’

Jessica realised that this was exactly the type of opportunity the Serious Crime Division had been waiting for. Now that Nicholas was dead, they would finally be able to poke through a few things they would not previously have had access to. If they got really lucky, they might be able to implicate one or two other local ‘businessmen’.

As she exited into the hallway, Jessica stopped to watch the officers carefully removing Nicholas’s body through the fire exit. She followed them into the alleyway that ran along the back, looking up towards the tops of the buildings around to see if there were any CCTV cameras. There weren’t, leaving them with the question of how the killer got in. The obvious answer was that someone who worked there had left the fire door open, ready to either return themselves later, or for someone else to do the deed.

Jessica peered at the door, concluding it was pretty much like any other fire exit she had ever seen. It had a metal bar that ran horizontally across the centre, with another connecting vertically.

‘I’ve not touched it,’ Jessica said defensively as she saw one of the officers returning.

The man grinned an acceptance. ‘I never said you had but you’re thinking it must have been left open, aren’t you?’

Jessica stared quizzically at him. ‘Yes . . .’

‘That’s not strictly true, look.’ The officer pulled on a pair of blue latex gloves and pushed the door shut. ‘You think we’re locked out now, don’t you?’

Jessica accepted a pair of gloves from the man and put them on, stepping closer to the door. There was no handle on the outside; instead she ran her hands around the grooves between the door and the frame, wondering if they were wide enough to push her fingers into. She checked the hinges but the screws were on the inside, then stepped back, shaking her head. ‘Go on.’

The man began moving along the alley away from her, before stopping to pick up something from the floor. He walked back towards Jessica and showed her the object. ‘This is some sort of roof slate. I promise you I didn’t plant this. Hopefully it works now.’

He crouched and pushed the slate in between the bottom of the door and floor. He wiggled it gently at first then, after seemingly finding a spot he was happy with, stepped back and kicked it hard. To Jessica’s amazement, the door popped open. The man bent back down and picked up the slate, tossing it behind him.

‘How did you do that?’ Jessica asked.

‘It only works on old-fashioned fire exits. It would never work nowadays.’ He pointed at the vertical metal pole connected to the door. ‘What happens usually is that when you press down on the horizontal bar, it lifts this vertical one out of the ground so the door springs open. If you know what you’re doing, you can make the same thing happen by popping something hard but flat into the groove at the bottom of this pole.’

Jessica stared at him, open-mouthed. ‘All this time and I never knew that.’

‘No reason you should.’ The man shrugged. ‘I guess it depends where you grew up. Some kid at school showed me it years ago. We used to go into the locked classroom at lunchtimes and move our teacher’s things around. She could never figure out what was going on.’ The man suddenly seemed embarrassed. ‘I was only a kid.’

Jessica grinned. ‘Fair enough, who would have thought you’d now be putting that knowledge to good use?’

As she walked towards Albert Square, she thought that what she had just been shown put a new slant on things. Previously she had assumed someone who worked there must have been responsible, directly or not. This meant it really could be anyone.

As she left the alley to head for her car, Jessica could hear a commotion. To her right, towards the front entrance to the club, there were half-a-dozen police officers standing side by side in front of a line of police tape, their arms stretched out wide. Next to them was someone holding a video camera but it was the group of young men standing on the other side of the road who were the obvious concern.

A riot van skidded to a halt not far from where she was standing, officers pouring out of the back and dashing towards the scene. The young men were all wearing black, some with bandanas tied across their faces. Jessica came as close as she dared and could feel the tension in the air, with threats and abuse being shouted across the street.

As the riot squad lined up with their shields and helmets, the person with the video camera started running towards her, their gear making it clear they were from a television news channel. Jessica started edging towards her car as the stand-off continued: the police on one side of the road, the youths on the other.

As the cameraman slowed close to Jessica, a woman she recognised as a local news presenter came from somewhere behind her and stopped next to the man.

‘Did you get it?’ Jessica heard her ask.

Before the cameraman could reply, Jessica interrupted. ‘What’s going on?’

The presenter replied, ‘You police?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Have you been inside?’

‘What’s it to you?’

The woman smiled and nudged her colleague, who was looking into the viewfinder with the camera pointed at the floor. ‘How about we tell you what we’ve got and you tell us what you saw.’

‘I’m not talking on camera.’

The presenter exchanged a look with her colleague. ‘Fine, as long as we can still quote an unnamed source.’

The two women stared at each other, waiting for the other to go first. Jessica could hear the noise of the confrontation growing louder. ‘All right, fine,’ she replied, giving the briefest of details about what she had seen inside the club, omitting everything about suffocation, guns, stolen money, or fire exits that weren’t as secure as they first seemed.

The presenter seemed happy to have confirmation of the death. ‘So Nicholas Long is definitely dead?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

She looked at the cameraman. ‘All right, fine, show her.’ As the man turned the camera around so Jessica could see the digital screen, the woman continued, ‘There’s been all sorts of stuff on the Internet this morning that he was dead. One of our producers grew up on Moss Side and he said he’d heard chatter this morning.’

‘What about?’

‘You know Nicholas Long was idolised there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Watch.’

The footage had been taken around the corner where the police were now lining up. The person being interviewed on camera appeared to be a teenager, although the hood and bandana covered all but his young eyes.

‘Why are you here?’ a man’s voice asked off camera.

The youth’s eyes darted nervously away from the camera before staring defiantly into it. ‘It’s the feds, innit? They’ve gone and fucking killed him and now we’re gonna smash the place up.’

23

Jessica sat alone thinking the timing of Nicholas’s death and Dave’s revelation could not have been worse. She had already planned how her evening was going to go from the moment Adam told her he was going to be working late at the university. Usually, Jessica would have taken him at face value but something hadn’t sounded right, not to mention the way he had been behaving recently.