Jessica was always amazed by her friend’s ability to sleep through anything. If there was an overnight alien invasion, she thought Caroline would just wake up after eight hours of uninterrupted slumber and wonder who the grey-headed extra-terrestrial with the probe was.

Caroline laughed. ‘If I had the choice of my superpower of being able to sleep through anything, or yours of being able to eat any old shite and not get fat, I’d rather have yours.’

Jessica knew her friend had a point. Saturday fry-ups and regular curries were just the start; she had never really put on weight, even as a child. Now approaching her dreaded thirty-somethings, she had been telling herself she had to start eating properly but hadn’t got around to it.

‘Anyway,’ Caroline added. ‘I don’t know why I’m up. I guess I just fancied doing something.’

‘You’re not turning into a morning person, are you?’

‘I hope not. I hate those people.’

Caroline Morrison was Jessica’s oldest and best friend. She was slim with naturally slightly olive skin plus long brown hair and wide brown eyes to match. If she was honest, Jessica had always been a tad jealous of her friend’s looks and especially those eyes. Caroline really was pretty whether she put any effort into her appearance or not. A few years ago, when they used to go out a lot more often than they ever managed now, Jessica always felt the need to wear more make-up and spend longer on her own hair in order to not be the ‘ugly friend’. She didn’t feel unattractive but, compared to Caroline, she was always likely to be second choice.

At that time Jessica was frustrated her skin was frequently pale, her hair wasn’t completely blonde, while her hazel eyes weren’t quite any colour. Some days they seemed green, others brown or grey. She wasn’t bothered by anything like that now; Harry’s stabbing and subsequent downward spiral had matured her in a way she couldn’t have expected.

Caroline nodded towards the toast in Jessica’s hand. ‘Any bread left?’

‘Yeah, you might have to cut the mouldy bits off though.’

‘Eew . . . oh is that . . . ?’

Caroline had noticed the main picture on the paper’s front page above the murder story. Jessica closed the pages and scowled at the photo. ‘Yes. Peter Hunt.’

‘Is that because the court case starts tomorrow?’

‘I tried not to read it but probably.’

When Tom Carpenter, the man who stabbed Harry, handed himself in, it wasn’t the police he had come to, instead it was someone altogether more sinister – Hunt. Lawyers weren’t that popular with police officers in any case but Hunt was truly the scourge of the Greater Manchester Police force.

He was a lawyer who delighted in taking on cases to defend anyone with a high-enough profile to get his photo into the papers and on the news bulletins. There may have been rifts between colleagues in her department but the one thing everyone Jessica worked with was united on was that Hunt was as low, if not lower, than the people he represented.

It didn’t help that he was from the south. Being a lawyer was Hunt’s first crime, while having coiffured blond bouffant hair was another. But being born in Cambridge and speaking with a southern accent was an altogether bigger one. The fact he represented all manner of hooligans and law-breakers was the final straw.

Public Enemy Number One for the force wasn’t anyone among the array of drug dealers, gang members and other ne’er-do-wells that blighted their life, it was Hunt. Even the DCI, disliked by most of the officers under his care because of his pomposity and adhesion to strict form-filling, had it in for the lawyer. It was rumoured he himself regularly checked the status of Hunt’s tax disc just in case he’d forgotten to renew it on the £250,000 Bentley he drove around in.

‘I saw him on TV last week,’ Caroline said. ‘He was on one of the news channels talking about some book he’s got out.’

‘He’s always somewhere giving his version of the truth. He was in the paper last week because he was launching some campaign with one of the local MPs. One of the younger lads set up a dartboard with the picture on. It was very popular.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought you had a good enough aim to get him in the face?’

‘Who said I was aiming for his head? It was a full-length photo.’

Caroline smiled. ‘You really don’t like him do you?’

‘He’s an arse.’ Jessica didn’t like bringing work home but had ranted to Caroline about Hunt a few times in the past.

When she and Harry had first met, he had been working on a case against Frank Worrall, a well-known local crook. Money-laundering is what they had tried to get him on but people-trafficking, prostitution, loan-sharking or the odd beating could have been options too. Worrall was involved in many things that caused misery for others but proving it was never going to be easy. As well as the year of on-off work Harry had already put into it, Jessica had helped with some of the final bits and pieces before the Crown Prosecution Service had been called in.

Worrall was no fool and had an army of people working under him. The dealers on the street were easy to pick up but they were always careful not to be caught with any significant amount of drugs on them. They were always out of court quickly, never turned anybody else in and, even if they had wanted to, they wouldn’t have known it was Worrall at the top of the tree. Eventually CID, along with the over-arching Serious Crime Division, had brought Worrall in and been given that go-ahead to charge by the CPS, who must have thought there was a case.

But they hadn’t counted on Peter Hunt.

A year ago in court, Hunt had painted Harry and the rest of the force as bitter, target-driven incompetents with a vendetta. Worrall’s wife had cried in the witness stand and told the jury what a good man her husband was. She sobbed as she spoke of him grafting every day to provide for her and their children, while Hunt had even handed her a box of tissues to emphasise the point. The kids were also present at the back with the grandparents towards the trial’s conclusion to ramp up the pressure and Worrall himself spoke about inheriting his father’s building business and how he had just wanted to do his dad proud. He insisted the police had it all wrong and he didn’t understand why they had it in for him.

Even Jessica had to admit it was a masterful performance.

Against the emotion of those performances, the paper trail the police had put together was always going to be a hard sell. The jury had the choice of either the crying wife and scared-looking children at the back – or a complicated series of circumstantial transactions that could be implicating. When it came down to picking between the sharp-speaking, good-looking lawyer or tired officers reading from a notebook, there had barely been a contest.

The eight men and four women acquitted Worrall on all counts with Hunt leading the now free man out onto the steps of the court house with their arms aloft. He told the live news broadcasts that proving Worrall’s innocence was the highlight of his career and that the police would have to rethink the way they ran investigations.

If that wasn’t enough to fully put himself in the force’s sights, when he had taken the Carpenter case, he had not only managed to get the man bail but had negotiated the CPS down from an attempted murder charge to one of wounding with intent – or section eighteen grievous bodily harm in legal terms.

Harry’s lack of cooperation hadn’t helped but Hunt had stood up in pre-trial court and vouched for the accused, saying he would be personally responsible for him between that date and the main trial. Carpenter had been free to walk the streets on bail for the past eight months.

Jessica wasn’t bothered by Hunt’s hair, his birthplace or his occupation but, even for him, trying to get this guy off was low.