Children laughing.

Jessica rolled over and could see a handful of kids in school uniform standing nearby. A few of them looked concerned but some of the older ones were giggling. Jessica stood awkwardly, wincing as a jolt of pain shot from her hip. The palms of her hands felt raw but she wasn’t concerned as she looked frantically towards where the blue car had been.

It wasn’t there.

Jessica glanced quickly from side to side. Everything had happened in a matter of seconds, so it couldn’t have gone far. She stepped gingerly back off the kerb, still looking around before finally seeing a blue shape moving away from her in the opposite direction to which Reynolds’s car was facing. Jessica shook her head to try to clear it.

‘What happened to you?’ a man’s voice said.

Jessica hadn’t realised it but Reynolds was standing next to her with a hand on her upper arm.

‘It’s Hill, he’s in a blue car.’ Jessica pointed to where she thought he had headed. The inspector started to say something but instead helped her hobble across the road into the passenger seat. He did a three-point turn and began to drive in the direction Jessica had indicated.

‘Did you see him turn off anywhere?’ he asked. Jessica mumbled a ‘no’ while trying to pull her phone out of her pocket. She was relieved to see she hadn’t fallen on it and dialled DCI Dawson’s phone number before passing on what had happened.

The entire time from her falling to Reynolds turning his car around was likely less than a minute, so Simon Hill couldn’t have gone far. Jason reached the end of the road as Jessica was still talking and turned right, back towards the supermarket.

Now she was sitting, Jessica was beginning to feel the pain through her body. She tried to ignore it as she ended the call.

‘Linda says the message will go out to all officers to look for a blue hatchback,’ Jessica said. ‘More cars will be on their way. She reckons the estate is so much of a maze, there’s no way he’d be able to make the main road without being seen by one of the officers on duty.’

‘He forced a kid onto the back seat?’

Jessica hadn’t told the inspector that but he had overheard her half of the phone conversation.

‘It looked like it, I only saw the end. There was some sort of struggle and he just pushed the kid in and slammed the door.’

‘Did you see if it was a boy or girl?’

Jessica winced uncomfortably and wiped grit from her hands, letting it fall into the foot well. The skin on her hands had been scraped off and her palms were red and painful. ‘Boy, I think. Maybe nine or ten?’

Reynolds took his eyes from the road for a moment, looking sideways at Jessica. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yeah, I just slid on the frost and crashed over the kerb. If I wasn’t so concerned about that blue car I probably would have abducted one of those little shits who were laughing at me.’

Despite the seriousness of the moment, Jason laughed. ‘It was pretty funny. One minute you were standing there arguing, the next you’d taken off across the street. Then I saw you sprawling across the pavement. There’s bound to be a CCTV camera somewhere . . .’

Jessica chose to ignore him. ‘Are we heading back to the shops?’

‘Yes, these are about the only roads I know around here and that’s only because it’s where we came from.’

Jessica clung onto her mobile phone willing it to ring with news the car they were after had been stopped. She looked from side to side, hoping to see something. As the inspector turned back onto the road that circled around the supermarket and shops, Jessica banged the dashboard without thinking.

‘Stop.’

Reynolds screeched the car to a halt, much to the annoyance of the driver behind, who beeped his horn. Jessica opened the passenger door and dashed as quickly as she could given the pain in her knees and hip across someone’s front garden. This time, she was careful to keep an eye on where she was going, hopping across a flower bed and skirting around another patch of frost. Wind whipped around her, blowing her hair into her face, but Jessica kept moving, sliding around a bollard which separated the main through-road from a cul-de-sac.

As she neared her target, she felt her knee almost give way. Jessica gritted her teeth and kept moving before almost collapsing onto the boot of the blue hatchback she had seen at the school. It was parked on a driveway. Using the car to pull herself back into a standing position, Jessica peered through the rear window but there was no one there.

‘Oi, what do you think you’re doing?’ The voice was loud and angry, carrying on the wind in Jessica’s direction. She leant back onto the vehicle, letting it take her weight as she turned to see Simon Hill charging down the driveway towards her. He was still wearing the red jacket he’d had on when she had seen him outside the school but his face was full of annoyance. ‘Get off it,’ he added, pointing an angry finger towards Jessica.

She stood up straight, the man only a few feet from her. ‘Are you Simon Hill?’

He stopped, taking a half-step backwards, all of a sudden confused. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘I’m from Greater Manchester CID and you are under arrest.’

Jessica could tell Izzy was trying not to smile. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You can laugh, everyone else has.’

The constable’s lips crinkled upwards into a grin. ‘So all in all, you didn’t have the best of times in the north-east?’

Jessica was sitting in the Longsight canteen picking at a sausage. She rarely risked eating at work, having been warned off the food early into her career by Jason when he was a sergeant. He was very much in her bad books at that exact moment and Jessica’s dining choice was a fairly pitiful act of rebellion. ‘You could say that. At least we got something of a result from it all.’

‘Let’s hear it, then.’

‘Haven’t you already heard the story from everyone around the station?’

Jessica was still annoyed at how quickly Reynolds’s version of events had spread.

‘Yeah, but I want to hear yours.’ Izzy picked up her mug of tea and took a gulp before shuffling forward in her chair. Jessica thought it was as if the constable was settling herself down for story time. She finished off the sausage and pushed the plate away, wondering if she would regret eating the station’s food later in the day.

‘All right, fine. What do you want to hear first?’

‘Definitely the falling over.’

Jessica shook her head slightly. ‘It was basically just that. I saw Simon Hill, went running across the road, slid on some icy-frosty stuff and fell onto the pavement.’ She held her palms up for the other woman to see. Diamond did purse her lips into an ‘ooh’ shape but her eyes told a different story of hilarity.

‘It’s way funnier when Jason tells it,’ she said. ‘Is it true there were kids laughing?’

‘Yes, little bastards.’

‘Jason reckons he’s going to contact someone up there to see if there’s camera footage anywhere.’

‘There better not be.’

Izzy was clearly trying to hold it together, flicking her red hair over the back of her ears. ‘All right, so what happened when you did catch up with that Hill bloke?’

‘I was in the process of arresting him when this kid came out of the house and said, “Dad”. I knew then we were in the shite. The child I’d seen him bundling into the back seat of the car was his own. It took some getting out of him but when he realised there could be much more serious charges to face, he came clean about having two lives. Not only is he married to Paula down here, he’s got another wife with children up there.’

‘So the lorry-driver thing is all just an act?’

‘Sort of. He does it part-time which allowed him to tell both women he was off on business. He could get away with spending a couple of weeks at a time with one wife, then disappear back to the other.’