Cole was standing in the hallway as Jessica entered, panting for breath. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, but Jessica didn’t know if he was referring to her breathlessness or if he somehow knew what else had been happening.

‘Is he really dead?’ she asked.

‘Definitely.’

‘You saw the body?’

‘He’s still there if you want to.’

Jessica wouldn’t usually go out of her way to see something so morbid but after everything she had heard recently, she felt an irresistible urge. The chief inspector stayed where he was as Jessica edged forward. At the far end of the corridor, there were people working in white paper suits and hair nets. One of them noticed Jessica but the look in her eyes must have told them that she was coming to look at the body regardless of what they thought.

The Scene of Crime officer nodded towards her and turned. Jessica stepped carefully along the hallway, being careful not to touch anything, as she was led to the entrance of a toilet at the end. From the doorway, she could see the unmistakeable shape of Nicholas Long’s body on the floor, a pistol lying next to his hand.

‘He was on his front when we arrived,’ the officer said.

‘Was he suffocated?’

‘Probably.’

Jessica treaded forward gently, glancing from side to side. She saw a chip had been taken out of the sink, a piece of the white ceramic on the floor next to Nicholas’s hand. Jessica crouched and leant forward to see the contorted look on his face as the officer said ‘steady’ over her shoulder. She looked down at a pool of liquid on the floor she had somehow missed. All of a sudden the smell hit her and she didn’t need to ask what it was. Jessica stood again, stepping backwards carefully, having seen everything she wanted to. She took no particular pleasure from viewing the corpse but couldn’t deny there was a definite feeling of satisfaction he couldn’t hurt anyone again. Facedown in a puddle of his own making seemed just about right too.

Rowlands was hovering uncomfortably next to Cole but Jessica ignored him as she spoke to the DCI. ‘It seems like it’s the same person who killed Oliver and Kayleigh.’

‘Yep.’

‘Can we have a quiet word?’ Jessica glanced sideways at Rowlands to indicate that meant without him. Cole nodded and pushed the door open to the main part of the club, walking across to the long sofa where Jessica had seen the girls lounging on her first visit to the place.

The red velvet material felt cheap and uncomfortable as Jessica slid in next to the chief constable, before telling him everything she had found out over the past few days from Eleanor, Leviticus and Ruby. If he was angry, he didn’t show it, instead replying with a simple: ‘So what you’re saying is that we have a few suspects?’

He smiled thinly at her.

‘I’m sorry for going around you.’

Cole scratched his head and laughed slightly. ‘I’m not as out of the loop as you might think.’

‘Oh.’

Jessica waited for him to elaborate but he said nothing, the knowing smile fixed on his face. Jessica broke the silence. ‘Who found him?’

‘The bar manager – Liam someone or other. He’s off being spoken to now. He says he came to open the place up and found his boss where we did, then called us straight away.’

‘Did you talk to him?’

‘No, we’ll get a statement today, then you can read it through and go back to him tomorrow to see if anything has changed.’

Jessica narrowed her eyes. ‘Are you suspicious of him?’

‘Maybe – he seemed a little too cooperative. Plus we’ve started going through the CCTV and it shows him arriving half an hour before he told us he did.’

‘Perhaps he got the times wrong?’

‘We’ll see. We’ve been talking to this other guy too, the bloke from the front desk.’

Jessica could still remember the way she had confused him by reading the name from his tag as if it were magic. ‘Scott?’

‘Yes, him. He was here when we arrived as well.’

‘Have you seen the CCTV yourself?’

‘I was about to have a look when you arrived.’

The chief inspector turned, beckoning Jessica towards the door that led to Nicholas’s office. Inside, a man was sat behind the large desk, pressing buttons on the computer as the images on the screen skipped forwards and backwards. Cole introduced Jessica to one of the members from their computer team and told her he was heading back to the station to deal with the media fall-out. He didn’t even blink when she suggested Rowlands would be better utilised back at the station. Jessica wondered if his comment about ‘not being out of the loop’ extended to more than what she had been up to in the course of the job.

Before he left, he nodded towards the filing cabinets lining the room. ‘These are all locked,’ he said firmly.

‘Okay . . .’

‘They have to stay that way.’

Jessica hadn’t thought about looking for a key to get into them and wondered why he was telling her before it dawned on her that the Serious Crime Division would be desperate to get to the contents. Finding a legal way to do that was by no means a certainty and simply helping themselves would likely create more problems than it solved if any of Nicholas’s associates were ever brought to court.

Jessica didn’t bother asking how he knew they were locked before nodding an acceptance. The other officer stood to offer her his seat and, although she wasn’t usually concerned if men opened doors and gave up their chairs for her, she didn’t complain.

‘Have you found anything?’ she asked when they were alone.

‘Not really. Obviously the body was found along the hallway but there are no cameras around there.’

‘Life’s not that easy.’

‘Exactly. Anyway, there are four cameras.’ He pointed towards a button on the keyboard which Jessica pressed to flick from one view to the next. Once she had the hang of it, he talked her through them, although she could see for herself. ‘There’s one outside of the front door pointing at the pavement outside, another in the lobby facing the sofas, a third above the bar directed at the row of stools, then a final one next door.’

‘In the changing rooms?’

‘Charming, hey?’

Jessica was only half-surprised. Nicholas Long didn’t seem the type to be that bothered about employment laws. She doubted ‘his’ women would report him considering everything she had heard about the type of person he was.

‘What have you found?’ Jessica asked.

The man directed her through a few screens until she reached a list of file names. ‘These are what I’ve already clipped up, although there isn’t a lot to look at.’

Jessica started the first one from the previous evening, which showed Liam and Scott leaving together, the bar manager securing and checking the door before they headed out towards Albert Square.

The next showed Nicholas staggering into the reception area, taking money from the till and then falling onto the nearby sofa. He seemed to be struggling for breath, before eventually composing himself and slowly making his way towards his office after leaning on the bar for support.

‘He doesn’t seem very well there,’ Jessica said, stating the obvious.

‘That was about an hour after the other two left. Watch this bit again.’

He reached across Jessica to scroll the footage back and she watched the door next to the bar snap firmly into place. She knew that you needed to know the code to get through from the bar side.

‘Did anyone else go through that door afterwards?’

‘No, I’ve checked through the whole night of footage, and the next person to come in was your guy who called it in earlier this afternoon.’

‘So whoever killed him was either hiding in this back area or came in through the fire exit?’

‘I guess so.’

‘They must have really wanted to kill him.’

‘Well, there is one other option . . .’ The officer turned and nodded towards an empty space on the floor. ‘There was a safe there. Your team have already been through it but the money had gone apparently. It could have been a robbery that went too far.’