‘We wanted to speak to Simon if that’s all right?’

‘He’s not here.’ Paula was beginning to sound annoyed.

‘Where is he?’ Jessica asked.

She was still looking down at the pad but almost dropped it as the woman replied. ‘I don’t know, I’ve not seen him in nearly a week.’

11

‘You’ve not seen him?’ It was a pretty pathetic response but Jessica blurted it out without thinking. If Simon Hill hadn’t been seen in around a week, that would correspond with the time it had been since their nameless driver had crashed.

‘Yeah. What’s it got to do with you?’ Paula, one hand on the front door, was now sounding defensive.

DI Reynolds spoke before Jessica could. ‘Your husband’s been missing for a week and you’re not concerned?’

The woman seemed bemused. ‘Who said he’s missing?’ The three people looked at each other wondering where the confusion had come from. Paula clocked that something had gone over her head, continuing: ‘Why do you think he’s missing?’

‘Where is he if you haven’t seen him in a week?’ Jessica asked with a little more aggression than she intended.

‘He works as a lorry driver . . . he’s often away for a week or two at a time, then he’s home. What’s going on?’

With a little persuading the two detectives managed to get invited in. Jessica insisted the woman had nothing to worry about, they were simply looking into new leads for old cases. Paula didn’t seem entirely convinced but answered all of their questions.

She and Simon had moved into a smaller house because, at the time, they were struggling to pay the mortgage on the property they owned. Paula then got a job working as a clerk for a legal firm and they moved to the place they were now in. Everything from that point of view seemed perfectly fine but Jessica still wondered about the woman’s husband. Paula reluctantly gave them the details of the haulage firm employing Simon and they left.

Before they got back to the station, Jessica tried calling the company but they were closed for the evening. They could have followed things through by trying to find the owner, then contacting him, but Simon Hill was still not a suspect in either case, and his wife’s explanation for his whereabouts seemed legitimate.

It was an annoying end to an equally frustrating day as Jessica dropped Reynolds at Longsight. He put a hand on her shoulder and told her to get some sleep as he said goodbye. She thought she must look bad if someone she considered a friend was saying she needed to rest, even though it was barely early evening.

As she opened the door to her flat, it took Jessica a few moments to remember Caroline was staying. A delicious smell was drifting from the kitchen, something which had barely happened the entire time Jessica had lived there. Her usual diet consisted of either microwaved food or takeaways and the only thing she trusted herself to cook was toast and occasionally either a fried egg or some baked beans. Her friend Hugo had cooked for her a few times but, aside from that, her kitchen was mostly unused.

It was probably because Jason had implied she looked exhausted but Jessica spent large parts of the evening yawning and telling Caroline she wasn’t tired. While she was doing that, she could clearly see her friend trying to act as if everything was normal. She told Jessica she had spoken to Thomas and told him she wanted to separate – and that she meant it. She didn’t want to elaborate and Jessica thought there was probably more to the situation, although she wasn’t going to push the point.

She made up her mind that evening to not bother calling Simon Hill’s employers the following day; instead she would go there unannounced. She checked the address on the Internet and realised it was less than five minutes away from Rowlands’s house. After clearing it with Reynolds, Jessica sent a text message to Rowlands to tell him she would pick him up in the morning because they had somewhere to go.

After another night’s sleep broken by a nagging feeling she had missed something, as well as not being used to sharing a bed with anyone – even if it was her best friend – Jessica was already in a bad mood by the time the morning came. It didn’t get any better when she left the flat only to find her car frozen under a thin coating of ice. She didn’t fancy another trip upstairs to boil a kettle, so spent ten minutes hacking at the ice to clear the windscreen.

The icy roads made what Jessica thought would be a routine half-hour journey across the city a frustrating series of start-stop manoeuvres punctuated by an increasingly irate string of swear words. She even turned off the radio because every station seemed to be playing festive music, something else she couldn’t stand. It wasn’t that Jessica disliked Christmas but she never decorated her house largely because she knew that it would still be up in the summer.

By the time she reached Rowlands’s house, she definitely wasn’t in the mood for his ‘What took you so long?’ greeting as he got into the car.

‘Sod off. Why are you so cheery anyway?

‘Am I?’ Rowlands put his seatbelt on as Jessica pulled away.

‘Were you out with Chloe last night?’ she asked.

‘I was actually.’

His upbeat tone of voice was infuriating. ‘Oh, for f . . . Can you please stop being so nice?’

‘What?’

‘Just take the piss out of my car or something. All these pleasantries are weird.’

Dave smiled. ‘Are you jealous?’

‘No, I just preferred it when you were unhappy.’ Jessica spoke with a laugh but realised there was a little truth in the statement too. Everyone seemed to be moving on, while she was stuck doing the same thing. In many ways she felt better about her own life when her close friends were stuck in the same rut as she was.

Before Rowlands could answer, Jessica tried to gloss over what she had said. ‘What did you get up to last night then? And spare me the graphic details.’

‘After I left the station, I picked Chloe up from judo . . .’

Jessica interrupted before Rowlands could finish his sentence. ‘She does judo?’

‘Yeah, she’s a blue belt.’

Wondering if she had misheard, Jessica queried: ‘A black belt?’

‘No, blue, it’s a few levels down.’

Jessica didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. ‘So she’s a bit shit then?’

‘Well, put it this way, she could kick my arse.’

‘I could kick your arse.’

Rowlands sounded outraged but Jessica suspected he agreed with her. ‘Whatever. Anyway, she could kick both of our arses, probably together.’

‘So why isn’t she a black belt?’

‘Because you work your way up. You start at white, then there’s yellow and a few others. Anyway, red’s the highest.’

Jessica had no idea what she was talking about but didn’t want to concede the point. ‘What about black?’

‘I don’t know, I just know red’s the highest.’

‘So, hang on, if she’s not even black – and that’s not the highest – how hard can she be?’

‘Why are we even talking about this? Do you want to fight her or something?’

‘I don’t know, maybe. Blue belt sounds a bit crap.’

Rowlands was laughing. ‘Okay, well, I’ll tell her that. Anyway, after I picked her up, we went to the Palace Theatre.’

Jessica indicated to pull around a stationary car and flashed her lights at a driver on the opposite side of the road who didn’t give way. ‘Oh, piss right off. You went to the theatre? This time last year you’d spend your evenings drinking cans of Carling and playing PlayStation games.’

‘This time last year you kept taking the piss because I spent my evenings drinking cans of Carling and playing PlayStation games.’

‘Exactly, that was way better. Right, what did you do after that?’