‘It seems plausible. I don’t think she was faking it about not knowing McKenna.’

‘Me either. We can check all the national insurance number stuff anyway so there’d be no point in making it up. She seemed keen to meet him too.’

‘She must have had some life, with people at every corner asking her to prove who she is.’

‘Still, it gives us something huge to work on now.’

Jessica didn’t get his point. ‘How do you mean, the lab guys said her DNA couldn’t be a match to what was found at the scenes.’

‘True, but if McKenna’s got a long-lost sister who doesn’t have a birth certificate then who’s to say he doesn’t have a long-lost identical twin that was never registered?’

30

Jessica knew instantly he was right but tried not to look surprised or sound as if the idea hadn’t occurred to her. ‘We could get a photo out to the media and see if anyone recognises him,’ she said. ‘The papers don’t need to know it’s a picture of Donald McKenna they’re printing, just that we are after someone who looks like that.’

‘Exactly, good thinking. We’ll get plenty of people calling to say it’s Donald McKenna but maybe we’ll get a few other names suggested too? We’ll have to talk to the chief inspector in the morning.’

Jessica had almost forgotten about Farraday and was trying to figure out how he could be involved. He didn’t particularly look like McKenna, although they had a similar physique. She remembered her first meeting with Adam when he told them matching DNA could come only from an identical sibling. The DCI had to be involved somehow though, with the way he had held up the investigation and then the fact he had taken Carrie’s phone to cover his tracks. The idea of McKenna having a brother could still be a red herring too.

‘I think we should phone it in now,’ Jessica said. ‘If we can get McKenna’s photo on tonight’s news, in tomorrow’s papers and on the Internet, it gives us a bit of a head start.’

She checked the clock on her phone. They didn’t have much time and couldn’t do anything themselves from the train so Cole called the chief inspector. Jessica could hear only one side of the conversation but it didn’t sound good. When he had hung up, Jessica asked the obvious question. ‘What did he say?’

‘He said we should wait until tomorrow and that he wants to talk to us both first. I think he’s worried we’re going to make another mistake by putting the wrong photo out there.’

‘It wasn’t our mistake last time.’

‘I know but he’s probably right. If we make sure all the paperwork from the labs is correct first, we can hammer the media with it tomorrow. We’ll still hit all the TV broadcasts and get it on the Internet, we’ll just miss the papers.’

Jessica thought Farraday might well have a different reason for wanting to hold things up – he wanted to give himself a few more hours to cover whatever tracks he might have left.

‘We still don’t know what’s going on, do we?’ she said.

‘Not really. After all this, it could be McKenna is actually nothing to do with any of it. If there is a twin he could be acting alone safe in the knowledge any crime he commits will get blamed on his brother who’s already locked up. Maybe the phone was left in the cell by who ever was in there before McKenna? If there is a twin, perhaps he never realised he had a brother and the coverage could be news to him too? Then again, we could have been right the first time and it is somebody on the outside working with McKenna. There are so many permutations, even if we get the guy we might never know.’

He looked up to make sure he caught Jessica’s eye and winked at her. ‘There could still be a secret tunnel out of the prison too, remember.’

The thought hadn’t occurred to Jessica that McKenna could be completely innocent in it all. She had spent so long trying to think of ways to connect him to the crimes and then to Farraday that it hadn’t even crossed her mind the prisoner could now be exonerated.

‘If you’re right then I guess the phone isn’t necessarily relevant to the case either. You’re always hearing stories about people smuggling things into jails.’ A second thought then popped into her head. ‘Hang on though, if McKenna is nothing to do with it, that doesn’t explain what happened with the warden Lee Morgan. I know nothing has been proven against him but he must have been killed for a reason.’

‘True, but he was the one where no DNA was found so they could be separate cases.’

‘Same stab wounds but I guess it could be a copycat thing to puzzle us.’

Cole rubbed his head. ‘This is all getting confusing.’

‘You’re telling me. We have Craig Millar, Benjamin Webb, Desmond Hughes and Carrie who were all definitely killed by either Donald McKenna, someone who planted his DNA or his twin . . .’

‘. . . and if there is a twin, either, neither or both brothers may or may not know he has a relation.’

‘Er, right.’

‘Then there’s John Mills, who is still unconscious, and Lee Morgan – who may or may not be connected to all of this as well as McKenna separately.’

The two detectives looked at each other and broke out into grins at the same time. It wasn’t meant as anything disrespectful to the victims, more as a way of coping with the complex nature of everything. ‘I think we should write this down before trying to explain it to anyone else,’ Jessica said.

Cole laughed and said he would while Jessica leant back and closed her eyes. The inspector might think it was intricate but he didn’t know the half of it considering what she knew about Farraday as well. At first she pre tended to be asleep but, when she felt Cole tapping her forearm and telling her they were back, she realised she actually had dropped off.

It was early evening and beginning to get dark as they walked out of the train station and caught another taxi back to Longsight. Jessica knew the chief inspector would have left early in order to not have to make any decisions about what they were bringing back but wasn’t too bothered. With everything that had happened in the past couple of days, she felt as if something had lifted from her and knew she wouldn’t be sitting on the wall opposite Farraday’s house that night hoping for who knows what.

Jessica drove home and parked in one of the designated spaces at her flat. She switched off the engine and headlights and took her phone out without moving from the driver’s seat. It was gloomy outside and the street lamps were just beginning to come on. She thumbed through her contacts and stared at Adam’s name.

After a couple of days of proper sleep and the way she finally felt she was coming to terms with Carrie’s death, Jessica could see how badly she had treated him. She felt terrible watching him in the office the previous day knowing he had done some really good work but not having the guts to tell him so. Jessica was fully aware he had done nothing wrong and that she should tell him so – but the thought of calling him up and admitting it was all her fault wasn’t something she knew if she could do.

It almost felt as if she needed someone like Carrie or Caroline to give her a kick and tell her she was being stupid. She closed her eyes and could almost hear the Welsh officer’s accent in her head. ‘Stop mucking around and just call him. You obviously like him, y’daft sod.’

What would Jessica say to him though? ‘Hey, just calling to say sorry I was a bitch, fancy a pint?’ Would he understand she just hadn’t known how to react to Carrie’s death? Could she tell him about everything that had happened with Farraday? Or about the phone under her bed which belonged to the dead officer and where she’d found it? She didn’t know what to do and felt it would be hard to tell him why she had blanked him without explaining everything she knew about the chief inspector.