The first hour was spent driving in the dark. Jessica had always got on with Jason Reynolds but they had little in common. While she could have got through a journey and probably had a degree of enjoyment with Dave, Izzy or even Esther, whom she had only just met, Jessica simply had nothing to talk about with the inspector. By the time they hit Leeds, rush-hour traffic was beginning to peak and conditions had become more hazardous. There had been overnight snow which had turned to slush. Cars weaved dangerously across lanes around them as Jason drove steadily.

Jessica didn’t know what to do with herself. With conversation at a minimum and the radio firmly set to a station she didn’t think she would start listening to regularly for at least thirty years, Jessica tried to content herself with fiddling around on her phone. The presenter was in the middle of some spiel in which he was dedicating a string of songs from husbands to wives and vice versa. If Jessica was married, or had a boyfriend, she would have been very suspicious if her other half went through the whole procedure of contacting a radio station to ask for a special song. She wondered if it was that natural mistrust which stopped her from getting too involved with anyone.

As it was approaching the point where she didn’t think she could take any more, they finally passed the sign indicating they were within Sunderland’s city limits. Reynolds pulled over to the side of the road and made a phone call to whoever his local contact was. Jessica often thought Manchester was bleak but the grey overcast skies and string of run-down houses on their route in meant she took an instant dislike to the city. She knew it was irrational and more than likely based on how tired she was but she was already desperate to get in, find their man, then get out again.

Reynolds drove to a police station which had clearly been recently renovated. The red-bricked outside was clean with the glass on the door leading into reception completely transparent. To anyone else, it would have seemed normal but, at Longsight, although it had been tidied up a few years ago, the constant battering by the elements meant the exterior always looked dirty. The doors leading into the station were translucent at best with a film of brown and grey dirt coating the surface. Jessica had visited plenty of other stations both in and out of her district over the years and whenever something else was better kept than theirs, she instinctively wondered why other areas had money to spend while theirs seemingly didn’t.

Inside, they were quickly ushered through to a ground-floor office occupied by a woman who introduced herself as DCI Linda Dawson. She was somewhere in her early fifties, with long hair dyed brown, with grey roots coming through. Smartly dressed in a grey suit, she welcomed both officers, offering them a seat. Jessica took an odd pleasure from seeing the woman’s office wasn’t as nice as Cole’s. It was as irrational as her dislike of the city based on the weather but Jessica was feeling strangely parochial.

When they were settled, Dawson began to skim through the notes on a pad in front of her. ‘Obviously you know Mr Hill’s SIM card was traced to a mobile phone mast,’ she said. ‘We’ve been in contact with the network operator but there haven’t been any further hits so far. Has either of you ever been up here before?’

Jessica and Reynolds shook their heads.

‘Okay, his signal was traced to somewhere in the Pennywell area, which is a mile or so away. I know your DCI spoke to someone at the phone company. I’ve been in contact with him all morning. By all accounts, they can trace the call to within a few hundred yards. There is a row of shops not far from there which seems like a good place to start. We’ve had officers going door-to-door with the man’s photo. So far, nothing’s come back but I figured I can take you out there and we can have a look around for ourselves.’

With little else they could do, it seemed as good a plan as any. Jessica and Reynolds followed DCI Dawson and a constable, who went in a separate vehicle. They stopped at the back of a supermarket car park where frost still sat on the ground in an area in shade. The sun had begun to appear through the clouds but that was making the day even colder. Jessica was glad she had remembered a coat that morning and picked it up from the back seat of the car. The two local officers removed heavy coats from the boot of their vehicle and put them on before the four of them walked towards the supermarket. Across the road, Jessica could see a row of red-brick semi-detached houses with black slate roofs. The supermarket was close to a row of shops and all of the local buildings were similar in appearance.

DCI Dawson stopped when they were a few feet away from the shops. As the other officers moved towards her, she spoke quietly to ensure it was just them who heard. ‘It’s a very densely populated area around here,’ she said. ‘There are literally thousands of houses all within a small radius and a few flats too. That means your man, assuming he wasn’t just passing through, would find it very easy to hide – if that’s what he’s trying to do.’

Jessica took three copies of the same photo of Simon Hill out of her pocket. They had been printed on standard paper from the station and were grainy to start with. The quality looked even worse because of the creases from how she had folded them but Jessica flattened them against her stomach, handing a copy to each of the other officers. She had emailed the photo to her phone and was happy to use that herself.

From the headshot, Simon Hill had a shaven head and, judging by his double chin, was quite overweight. Jessica looked around at the handful of people walking past the shops and realised an instant problem that everyone was wrapped up in a mixture of jackets, hats, scarves and gloves. Everyone looked overweight when you took into account the large padded coats being worn, plus anyone who had a shaven head would most likely be wearing a hat, or a hood.

It was always going to be a long shot to go looking for the man based on the location of a phone call but the odds of finding him were now even lower.

Dawson walked them past the shops until they reached the supermarket’s entrance. ‘Has anyone been in the shops showing that photo around?’ Jessica asked.

The chief inspector was clearly trying to hide how cold she felt but Jessica saw the other woman’s face twitch as she suppressed a shiver. ‘Yes,’ Dawson answered. ‘This was the first place we started. Without getting a bus into the centre, this is where most people who live around here would see each other.’ She pointed towards the supermarket. ‘There are CCTV cameras inside and out, which we’ve requested images from but we haven’t been given the okay yet. We could go for a warrant but everything’s happened really quickly and, to be honest, we don’t know if your man’s been in. The mobile signal was just from somewhere around here.’

Jessica caught Reynolds’s eye and gave him her best ‘We’re wasting our time’ look. It wasn’t quite as good as her ‘Stop being such a dick’ face, or her ‘Sit down and shut up’ expression, both of which she had perfected through working with Rowlands, but it did appear to be successful.

‘I think we might go for a drive around the area,’ the inspector said to Linda. ‘While your team are out and about, I’m not sure there’s much we can do. At least this way we’ll get a feel for the place.’ Jessica thought he could have added, ‘And it’s bloody freezing out here’, but he didn’t.

Dawson nodded, clearly thinking something similar. She assured them she would call if anything came up.

Back in the car, Reynolds rang Cole and told him there was little going on. It was a similar story in Manchester, with frozen ground again impeding the dig in the woods where Toby Whittaker’s clothes had been found and no sign of Lloyd Corless. Jessica sent a text message to Esther asking how Rachel Corless was faring but the reply simply told her the boy’s mother was still quiet and borderline uncooperative. It was becoming clear everything further south had stalled.