Jessica felt Adam pull her tighter towards him. ‘There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your job.’

‘Not that much. I don’t trust anyone who isn’t thoroughly miserable when they’re at work.’

She felt Adam’s chest bobbing as he laughed. ‘You’re so weird.’

Jessica snorted. ‘You’re marrying me.’

She felt Adam’s chest calm. ‘Yes, I am.’ He kissed the top of her hair. ‘Not here though?’

‘Nah, he’d drive me bloody crazy. What’s that sash thing around his waist?’

‘It’s a cummerbund.’

‘But why would you wear it to work? The guy’s a lunatic. It wouldn’t surprise me to find loads of people have gone missing from this hotel and their body parts are in his freezer. No one can be that cheery on a Sunday afternoon.’

Adam started laughing again, standing and holding his hand to help Jessica up. ‘Now I know you’re working too hard,’ he said.

Jessica allowed him to pull her into a brief hug, before he released her. ‘I should go and tell him it’s not for us,’ he said.

‘I’ll meet you at the car.’

Jessica began to walk across the car park, taking her phone out of her pocket to find no one had bothered to contact her in the time they had spent looking at – and rejecting – three potential wedding venues. After days with nothing other than confirmation the blaze at Harley Todd’s house had been started deliberately, she thought it could be a distraction from an arson case that seemed to be going nowhere. Reynolds was still having Martin Chadwick’s past looked into but nothing had come up so far.

Jessica sat in the driver’s seat before Adam clambered into the passenger’s side a few minutes later. ‘Was he all right?’ she asked.

‘He didn’t try to kidnap me and shove me into a freezer if that’s what you’re asking.’

Jessica laughed. ‘That’s exactly what I was asking.’

Adam reached across and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. ‘Are you all right? It’s fine that you’ve not liked any of the places we’ve been to today but I wanted to make sure you still want to go through with it.’

In the instant he finished speaking, Jessica felt a lump in her throat and blinked furiously to stop herself from crying. She didn’t know how to tell him what she was feeling. She wanted to marry him but, at the same time, something didn’t feel right. Jessica wondered if it was butterflies that anyone might have, or something unique to her that was making her feel that way. She knew Adam loved her more than anyone had or probably would. The problem was that, increasingly, Sebastian was drifting into her mind. A man she had only met properly once. She knew it could be only a physical thing. Did it make you a bad person if you were seeing somebody but were attracted to someone else? It was the type of thing she might have spoken to Caroline about a few years ago, or maybe Izzy if she wasn’t on maternity leave. It felt like the kind of knowledge she should have, given she was a grown adult, but she didn’t remember the ‘How do you stop yourself messing up a relationship’ class when she was at school.

‘I’m just waiting to see the right place,’ Jessica croaked before turning the engine on. She pulled out of the car park and headed onto the main road. Adam hadn’t seemed to pick up on her moment of insecurity and chatted about his week as Jessica made sure to say ‘yes’ and ‘uh-huh’ at the correct moments.

Within moments of joining the M60, Jessica felt her pocket begin to vibrate. ‘Can you get that,’ she said, lifting her hip up from the seat and angling it towards Adam. ‘I forgot to turn the Bluetooth on.’

She felt Adam reach into her trousers and pull her mobile phone out before putting it to his ear. After explaining who he was to whoever was calling, Jessica heard him say, ‘oh’, ‘right’ and finally, ‘all right, I’ll tell her’.

‘Who was that?’ Jessica asked as she heard the beep to signal the call was over.

‘It was Jason. He, um, had some bad news. He said it was all right for me to tell you.’

Jessica felt a rush of adrenaline in her chest, thinking it must be something to do with one of the Chadwicks. She certainly didn’t expect the news he actually had.

Adam gulped, speaking gently and deliberately. ‘Someone called Molly North is dead.’

17

It was only when Jessica saw scenes like the one in front of her that she struggled to conceive how Britain only stopped hanging people in the 1960s. It wasn’t that she had any especially strong feelings for or against capital punishment – she understood the arguments from both sides – simply that being hanged in particular seemed so brutal. If state-sponsored killing was ever brought back, there surely had to be a more humane way to do it.

Molly North’s bedroom reminded Jessica of her own from when she had been a similar age. While Caroline adorned her walls with posters of pop stars and one footballer whom she had a crush on, Jessica left hers plain. Instead, she had rows of books and a mixture of compact discs and cassette tapes shoved onto two shelves next to her bed. Unsurprisingly, she couldn’t see any cassettes in Molly’s room but there were rows of books lining the otherwise clear walls.

The lampshade was upside down on the carpet, with small flecks of blood next to it and a leather belt that had a neat cut mark through it. Although the body had been removed, it was the way the belt had been snipped which had Jessica thinking about her own childhood.

‘What happened?’ Jessica asked Reynolds, who was standing next to her.

‘Her mum and dad went out for Sunday lunch, came home and shouted up to say hello. When there was no reply, her mum came up and found her hanging from a beam in her room. Her dad cut through the belt but it was too late.’

Jessica didn’t know what to say, other than a pitiful-sounding, ‘That’s horrible.’

Neither of the officers moved, silently taking in the surroundings before the Scene of Crime team came in to catalogue everything and take photographs.

‘What are you thinking?’ Reynolds asked.

‘I don’t know. Two suicides, two fires, we don’t even know if they’re connected.’ A thought occurred to her. ‘Was there a note?’

‘Not that anyone has found. The Scene of Crime boys will have a proper look around but you would have thought it would be left out in the open if there was.’

Jessica peered around the room from the doorway but, aside from the lampshade, blood and belt, the only thing that didn’t seem quite right was how tidy it was. She wondered if it was always like that, or if Molly had cleaned her own room before hanging herself.

Reynolds walked across to the window and peered outside, before turning to face Jessica. ‘Do you think she killed herself because of her feelings for Sienna?’

Jessica shook her head. ‘I don’t know. She seemed more savvy than that. Obviously she was upset but it’s a large jump from that to . . . this.’

‘Why else would she do it?’

Reynolds’s question sounded more rhetorical than something for her to answer. Jessica spotted two framed photographs next to the bed. She stepped carefully across the room and sat on the bed before picking one up.

It seemed as if it had been taken relatively recently, perhaps in the last year or so. Both young women were wearing shorts and small T-shirts and appeared to be in a garden or a park. Molly looked exactly as she had on the day Jessica interviewed her. The woman’s short dark hair was tucked behind her ears and she had an arm draped around Sienna’s shoulders. Jessica had only seen pictures of Sienna after her death but had to admit she was truly stunning. In the photo, her T-shirt was tied to expose her stomach with her shorts only just long enough to cover the area where Jessica knew she cut herself. Her long blonde hair fell seductively, framing her face. She had one arm around Molly’s waist and was giving a thumbs-up to the camera with the other. Jessica struggled not to smile at the image. It reminded her of touring south-east Asia with Caroline when they left college. There were all sorts of photographs in an album or a box somewhere that were exactly like the one she was looking at: two young women hugging and grinning with their lives ahead of them.