The two officers exited the house after a final ‘Thank you’ from Martin, Reynolds leading them back to the car. A few years before, they had shared an office when they had both been sergeants. After his promotion to inspector, very little had changed initially but recently Jessica had begun to feel less comfortable around the man. It was something that was hard to pinpoint. A few months previously, while investigating the case of a missing child, she’d had what was a minor disagreement with the chief inspector. Largely because of her stubbornness, things hadn’t been addressed. Anyone who wasn’t familiar with the internal dynamics between Jessica and her colleagues might not notice anything different and she sometimes thought it was all in her head. Regardless of the truth, Jessica was feeling a little ostracised by her workmates.

It didn’t help that she was struggling to deal with the guilt of how she had broken the law trying to solve that case. Apart from Detective Constable David Rowlands, whom she had involved in her plan, no one knew what she had done.

Jessica slid into the passenger seat, slamming the door harder than she meant to. Reynolds sat in the driver’s seat and put the keys in the ignition without starting it.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

In the same way that ‘calm down’ could infuriate drunk or angry people, Jessica knew that someone asking how she was feeling was her trigger. ‘I’m fine,’ she replied, forcing an upbeat tone.

The inspector laughed gently. ‘How was the back of the van?’

‘Bumpy.’

‘Did Martin say much?’

‘No.’

Jessica’s reply was instant. She didn’t know why but she wanted to keep the man’s breakdown to herself – at least for now. Very little about her morning’s work had turned out how she’d expected but she was feeling a sense of responsibility for Martin she wasn’t sure she should have.

Jessica lay awake staring through the darkness at the ceiling. She stretched a hand across to rest on Adam’s hip as he slept facing away from her. She listened to his breathing. It wasn’t quite at snoring levels but he was certainly exhaling loudly through his nostrils. She wanted to blame him for waking her up but knew it was entirely down to her restlessness. She traced the outline of the man’s side with her fingers. His skin was smooth and tight, his hip bone jagged.

Rolling away, Jessica squinted to look at the alarm clock on her side of the bed. The red LED letters glowed 03.33 through the gloom. It was utterly irrational but Jessica had always found something satisfying about the numbers matching on a clock. It was small comfort in a house that still felt unfamiliar, even though she had been living there for a few months.

It was the home Adam had lived in with his grandmother before her death and Jessica was still coming to terms with being somewhere that didn’t feel like ‘hers’.

After leaving home, she had either shared a flat with her best friend Caroline Morrison, or lived by herself. The last few months had been a learning curve as she had never lived with a man before. Despite Adam’s insistence that the things in the house were ‘theirs’, she didn’t see them like that. Everything felt like it was his and that she was somehow trespassing. She even felt guilty about eating food from the fridge if she hadn’t bought it. At first she had confided in Adam about her discomfort but she wasn’t sure he understood her feelings. She didn’t think he was being insensitive, simply that, because the house was his, he couldn’t grasp why she didn’t feel it was home.

Jessica’s daze was broken by a buzzing sound from the small table next to the bed. The light on her mobile phone’s screen was flashing and the ringtone sounded after a second or two. She could feel Adam beginning to stir, his legs stretching as he rolled over. Jessica wondered if she was awake or asleep, blinking rapidly at the ceiling as she reached out and pulled the phone towards her. The grey haze around her vision prevented her from reading the name on the screen, so she simply stabbed the front to answer it.

‘Hello,’ she said groggily. Her throat felt dry and she squinted towards the table to see if the glass she left there had water in it.

‘Sergeant Daniel?’

It was a man’s voice. He spoke quickly and frantically.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s Martin Chadwick. Sorry, something’s happening. Please come quickly.’

4

Despite having lived at Adam’s house for months, Jessica still wasn’t sure of the best way to get from where they were in Salford to where she worked in Longsight. After the first night, she got lost trying to drive off the estate in the dark the following morning. She had stayed at his house before moving in but each time had left during daylight. It was only when she found herself turning back onto his road that she realised she had somehow gone the wrong way. After a few months, Jessica had a better grasp of the general area but still hadn’t mastered the shortcuts that avoided the queues.

As she pressed down on the accelerator and neared the turn onto Mancunian Way, Jessica figured driving to work at four in the morning was definitely the future given the complete lack of traffic holding her up. Getting up at four in the morning was definitely not the future, however. Well, unless it was a future where people enjoyed seeing her very tired and annoyed by mid-afternoon.

Reluctantly, she had to admit it was nice to have a car that started first time on a cold dark morning. Six weeks previously, she had finally given up on her beloved Punto and gone with Adam’s advice about a new vehicle. It was roughly the same size as her old car but had none of the character. Yes, it might start first time every time, yes, it might be fuel-efficient, yes, it might be quiet – but it didn’t have a cigarette lighter that fell out and rolled under the pedals, making braking something of a lottery. It didn’t make a growling noise of annoyance each time she hit exactly forty-two miles per hour. It didn’t even have that little dent in the passenger door from when she reversed into a concrete post in a multi-storey car park.

After she had pointed that out at the showroom, Adam told her there were many more concrete posts out there just waiting for her to collide with them. Jessica smiled as she remembered his cheeky grin, then her phone rang, snapping her back to the present.

Reaching forward, Jessica pressed a button next to the dashboard. The Bluetooth answering function was another benefit of the new vehicle. ‘Yep,’ she said.

‘Jess, it’s Dave. Are you on your way to Martin Chadwick’s?’

Detective Constable David Rowlands didn’t sound anywhere near as tired as she might have expected him to, given the hour. He had been her first call as she headed out of the house.

‘I’m ten minutes away,’ Jessica replied. ‘Are you there yet?’

‘Yes.’

‘I woke Jason up. He’s on his way too.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘It’s probably best if you see for yourself.’

She drove through a red light and turned right towards Stockport Road. ‘Are Martin and Ryan okay?’ she asked.

‘Sort of. They’re not hurt.’ Jessica heard a muffled noise, as if the constable had broken away from the conversation to talk to someone. He quickly returned. ‘I’ve got to go, sorry, Jess. I’ll see you in a minute.’

Jessica focused back on the road, adding extra pressure to the accelerator as she headed past the turn for the station and kept driving, passing Crowcroft Park before turning left into the estate where Martin lived. A police van was blocking the entrance to the road, so Jessica parked on the adjacent street and walked briskly past the van. A female uniformed officer was standing next to the vehicle and nodded as she neared. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.