‘It’s not just that . . .’ Jessica replied.

When she failed to add anything further, Reynolds shook his head again. ‘I’ll see you in the car. Whatever you do, I don’t want to hear about it.’

With that, he strode past Jessica out of the room.

As the door swished closed in front of her, Jessica rested her head on the doorframe. She wondered if her supervisor was right. Was she really allowing her judgement to be clouded? The truth was, she didn’t know if Ryan was involved in the things that were going on. He just always seemed to be there. A few years ago she had become obsessed with her then-DCI – John Farraday. That had not ended well and, although no one except the former chief inspector knew what had happened, it was still something she thought about on nights she lay awake.

Jessica took a deep breath and then opened the classroom door. The corridor was deserted, although she could hear a low hum of voices coming from the various rooms. Jessica followed her way back through the passageways until she found Aidan’s office, knocking loudly on the frame and instantly hearing a ‘come in’ from the inside.

Aidan was sitting in the same spot he had been in a little over an hour beforehand. On the desk in front of him was a cardboard folder. Jessica motioned to sit but the teacher simply held out the wallet for her to take.

‘Can I trust you with these?’ he asked before releasing his grip.

‘Absolutely,’ Jessica replied, taking the documents. For a moment she thought Aidan was going to add something but he stayed silent as she lifted the flap and pulled out five sheets of paper.

She skimmed through the contents, her eyes widening with each turn of the page, before Aidan cleared his throat. ‘As well as being their form tutor, we run a formal social education module over the two years,’ he said. ‘They have to hand in three essays a year on various subjects but, for this subject only, we require them to write their work by hand as opposed to type. It’s our way of ensuring they have a degree of literacy.’

‘And this is Ryan’s?’ Jessica asked.

‘Yes.’

‘How long ago did he write it?’

‘Maybe two months ago? Not long.’

Jessica flicked back to the first page. The sheet was covered in untidy blue ink but it wasn’t the words she was interested in. Through the margins of all five sheets, Ryan had apparently been unable to stop himself doodling. Footballs and three-dimensional cubes were on the first two pages but it was the final three which concerned Jessica. Crudely drawn daggers and knives littered the third, with the fourth and fifth littered with a mass of spiky horizontal lines that was undoubtedly meant to be a wall of flames.

12

Jessica waited at the station after her shift had finished, not wanting to sit in yet more queuing traffic for her journey home. She hadn’t mentioned the drawings to Reynolds but couldn’t resist flicking through them as she sat in her office by herself. Jessica tried to see a way that the final sheets could be anything but flames but there was no mistaking them.

The memory of how she used to constantly draw along the bottom margins of her exercise books when she was younger was at the front of Jessica’s mind. She would doodle hearts and elephants. She couldn’t draw anything else with any amount of accuracy but the hearts were easy and, for whatever reason, she had a vague talent for sketching an elephant which actually looked like one.

As for Ryan’s art, she might be able to accept the knives because of their simplicity in the same way that she used to draw hearts. The fire seemed too close to home considering what his father had done, not to mention his own house had burned down. The thought had crossed her mind that maybe he had set the fire, although the reasoning made little sense.

Jessica put the papers back into the cardboard folder, wedging them underneath a stack of files on the edge of her desk, not knowing what to do with them. Reynolds didn’t want to know about what she had and, given where they had come from and the grey area – at best – surrounding data protection and confidentiality issues, Jessica wasn’t sure she should take them to Cole, especially since he knew about her trespassing. On their own, the sketches proved very little.

After making sure the document folder wasn’t exposed, Jessica made her way out to her car. From what she had been told, very little else had happened while she had been at the college. Anthony hadn’t been found and initial tests on the paint tin and petrol can revealed nothing except for fingerprints they could test against Anthony’s when they finally found him. Not that it would matter if they couldn’t connect the objects to the scene. The team going door-to-door on the Chadwicks’ street had failed to come up with any suspicious sightings or information about who could be responsible for the arson. Depending on how the Crown Prosecution Service saw things, it could even be attempted murder.

Jessica had timed her journey well and cruised home so easily that the lack of red traffic lights was almost unnerving. The stop-start nature of commuting across the city was incredibly frustrating but was always there in the same way that grey skies were.

As she walked through the front door, Jessica could smell something intoxicating drifting from the kitchen. She walked through the door ahead, where Adam was standing with his back to her facing the cooker. Even from behind, she could tell exactly which T-shirt he was wearing. It was the crimson one with an enlarged head of a comic-book character printed on the front. She’d known he was a bit of a nerd for cartoons before she moved in but only realised what she was letting herself in for when it was too late. At least a third of all his tops featured some sort of character she either didn’t recognise or hadn’t seen since she was a child.

‘You’re late,’ he said, without turning around.

Jessica strolled across the kitchen and put her arms around his waist, snaking them up around his chest until she was hugging into the back of him. His straggly shoulder-length black hair tickled the side of her face as she replied playfully, ‘Whatcha cooking?’

‘Nothing for you.’

Jessica hugged him tighter as he stirred a pot of what looked like dark red sauce. ‘That’s a lot for just one person to eat.’

‘It’s for on-time people.’

She kissed the back of Adam’s neck in the spot she knew would make him giggle. Jessica felt his body crease from his hips upwards until he turned to face her with a large smile on his face.

‘That’s cheating.’

Jessica grinned back. ‘What can I say? I’m a cheater.’ She pulled him into her and hugged him tightly. It was her way of telling him she had not been having a good day at the station. Jessica always felt cagey sharing her work thoughts with anyone and she could see Adam had learned over the short while they had been living together that she would tell him things if she wanted to. Other than that, he never asked about how everything was going.

‘What’s it like working a four-day week?’ she asked as he released her and turned back to the stove.

‘Good. What’s it like working a seven-day week?’

Jessica laughed. ‘I don’t work seven days.’

‘It seems like it.’

It didn’t take any of Jessica’s skills for her to know there was a lot of truth in Adam’s words.

‘How is the job?’ she asked, trying not to dwell on what he had said.

When they had met, Adam worked in the laboratories which served the police force. Almost a year ago, when they weren’t seeing each other, he had applied for a job working for the science department at Manchester Metropolitan University. After hearing nothing, he had forgotten about it until they called him unexpectedly a few months previously asking if he was still interested and, if so, whether he could start in the new year. It was a research-based job with a small amount of support teaching but Jessica was convinced he had it easy because he worked four ten-hour days and always had weekends off.