So far, nothing else had been found.

It didn’t really matter to Jessica if the results came back with another link to Donald McKenna, her priority was to try to connect the prisoner to Farraday. Given everything she had found, there had to be something. On the surface she was working with the rest of the team in the same way she should be but, when she had time alone, she was hunting for that link.

The obvious theory was that the DCI was somehow planting blood or hair from the inmate at the scenes although, apart from to cover his own tracks, she had no idea why it was McKenna in particular he was using. She knew from Adam how hard that would be but the chief inspector must have seen enough crime scenes over the years to have a pretty good idea how things should look.

She checked to see if McKenna had committed any offences out of the county that the DCI could have been involved with but there was nothing. Without going to the personnel department, she wouldn’t be able to find out things like the chief inspector’s exact age or place of birth so couldn’t tell for sure if there was anything in the past that connected them. She knew they must be roughly the same age and tried using the Internet to see if it threw up any links but there was nothing.

The thought occurred to her that perhaps the warden, Lee Morgan, had helped get the blood and hair samples for Farraday and maybe he had been killed to stop him revealing anything? There was so little she had to go on though. The prison officer had no criminal record and all she had were his basic details. With her boss’s personnel file beyond her reach and the Internet offering up nothing to pair him with McKenna, she had nowhere to go.

She thought about approaching Superintendent Aylesbury. The two of them had bonded before he had been promoted but it seemed like such a long time ago and he was always keen on using the correct authority structure. Jessica knew she had no evidence anyway. She couldn’t hand over Carrie’s phone and the constable’s personnel file might well have been returned by now. Even if it was still in the DCI’s drawer upstairs it didn’t show anything conclusive. The chief inspector being first at the scene could be easily explained by him being called by the desk sergeant as well. It was all circumstantial and proved nothing.

Jessica sat at her desk and leant back in her chair with her eyes shut allowing the exhaustion to grip her. As she drifted off to sleep, she realised she had absolutely no idea what to do next.

27

Jessica spent the next nine days trying to act normally but her nightlife was catching up with her. Each evening she would drive to the estate Farraday lived on, park two streets away and then sit on a low wall opposite his house simply watching. Sometimes she would do it for half an hour but on one occasion she waited until half past five in the morning then went home, had a shower, got changed and drove to the station.

Jessica had no idea what she was hoping to see but justified the way she was acting by the fact no one had been killed since. She knew the chief inspector hadn’t left his house overnight and, in her mind, that meant she had prevented anyone else being murdered.

Sitting in on the daily briefings made her feel sick. She had to watch Farraday talk each morning and endure the cold way he said the word ‘Jones’. Jessica had hidden the mobile phone she found under her bed but would take it out each morning, sliding the top part up and down over and over.

Her obsession with sleep was consuming her. Each morning she would add to the numbers written on the pad on her desk. Sometimes she felt as if she were deliberately keeping herself awake just to have a little less sleep than the night before.

She felt an arm shaking her gently. ‘Jess?’

Jessica jolted awake and could hear the rat-a-tat-tat noise of the train she was sitting on speeding along its tracks. ‘Are you okay?’ the voice asked.

Jessica shook her head and opened her eyes. The flashes of green outside the window were disorientating as she tried to clear her head.

Rat-a-tat-tat.

‘Yeah, I just dropped off for a moment.’ She blinked a few times and looked across the table to see Rowlands’s concerned face. He had that sideways tilt to his head she so hated. ‘Where are we?’ Jessica asked, pushing herself back into the seat and trying to get comfortable.

‘Not sure. Somewhere Welshy.’ Rowlands was smiling but Jessica could tell it didn’t have the same feeling behind it as it might have done a few weeks ago.

‘How long was I asleep?’

‘Dunno but you’d started dribbling so I thought I’d wake you.’

Jessica reached up to wipe her chin but it was dry.

Her colleague winked at her. ‘Gotcha.’

She forced a smile but there was no sincerity. ‘Have you ever been before?’

‘Aberystwyth? Nope.’

After over a week of tests, Carrie’s body had been released back to her family for the funeral. Jessica was always going to be one of the officers representing the force but Rowlands insisted he wanted to go too. DCI Farraday said he had too much work to do and Jessica knew Cole had a lot on.

‘Did you see this?’ Rowlands said, holding up a newspaper.

Jessica shook her head but reached out to take it. She read through the front page and then turned inside, skimming through the article. ‘Changed their tune, haven’t they?’

‘Not surprising though, is it?’

‘Why did it have to take one of us dying before they finally decided killing people was wrong?’

A few days previously the labs had isolated the various samples taken from Carrie’s body and found a single hair that had a DNA match to Donald McKenna. There was a mixture of excitement and disappointment around the station with people not knowing if it was a good thing. Cole had been consistently talking to the CPS about the possibility of a prosecution but there was no way they felt a jury would convict.

The prisoner’s DNA was directly connected to four killings and one attempted murder and he was the prime suspect in Lee Morgan’s death too but they could do nothing. She and Cole visited the inmate again but hadn’t found out anything more than they had managed before. For the first time since they started working together, Jessica told her boss she wanted him to lead the questioning but the prisoner had nothing new to say.

Her own investigations into Farraday weren’t going anywhere either. She had even tried staying late on a couple of evenings in case the personnel department left their office unlocked but they were more professional than that. She knew she was clutching at straws but couldn’t think of anything better to do.

‘Nice piece about Carrie in the Herald, wasn’t it?’ Jessica added as the train continued to thunder along.

‘Terrific.’

‘Did you tell Garry you liked it?’

Rowlands said nothing, still refusing to acknowledge he knew the journalist. ‘Did you see the bit about Daniel Wilkin?’ he said instead.

Jessica skimmed through the pages until she saw what he was talking about. Everything that had happened in the past few weeks was blending together for Jessica and had been utterly overshadowed by her growing obsession with Farraday. She remembered the e-fit of the student and read the piece. He had pleaded guilty to a charge of manslaughter and been given bail with very strict conditions to reside at his parents’ house with a tagged curfew. From experience, Jessica knew people accused of murder or manslaughter very rarely got bail but Daniel Wilkin really was no threat to anyone.

She looked up to Rowlands. ‘I’m glad they gave him bail.’

‘He’s still going to end up going down.’