Jessica paused for breath. ‘Since Saturday, we have been able to pretty much rule out the husband Eric and son James. Confirming their respective alibis was complicated because of the period between the time of death and the body being found. James is at university in Bournemouth and, given the distance along with everything we’ve been able to verify, there aren’t any gaps long enough for him to have come up here and been able to return again.’

Jessica looked at Cole and raised her eyebrows. He took the hint and picked up the story. ‘James does at least have a set of keys which he showed to our colleagues down south but he insists they are kept with his other keys and are always on his person or somewhere nearby. Eric Christensen, on the other hand, says he gave his set back to his wife when he moved out. We don’t know if this is true but his alibis for the past few days certainly do check out.’

He looked back to Jessica, who turned again to face the floor and spoke. ‘Essentially, with the lab teams not coming up with anything and the only family members we know of unlikely to be involved, we don’t have an awful lot to go on. We’re not even sure how the killer got in and out, let alone who it was. We’ve examined all the usual things and know there is no basement, while the attic is full of junk. There was certainly no one hiding up there waiting for us to clear out.’

‘Can you cross over from the attached property?’ someone asked from the floor.

‘No, good thinking though. It is semi-detached but the brickwork goes all the way up to the top. It was one of the last things we checked.’

Jessica asked the assembled officers if anyone had any suggestions for how someone could have managed it. One constable got a laugh by putting forward the name of a popular TV magician, with a sensible suggestion to look at the previous owners. It had already been established the Christensens had lived in the place for just over five years but theoretically the previous owners might have kept a key. It seemed unlikely but it was something that should be formally ruled out.

‘Did the door-to-door inquiries come up with anything?’ one of the constables asked.

Jessica and Cole snorted at the same time. ‘Nope,’ Jessica said while Cole expanded. ‘The best we got was one neighbour at the other end of the street who thinks they saw the same person walk past their house three or four times in a short period. She was a little elderly and it could be the postman for all we know. Her description was fairly bland and didn’t really give us too much but they are going to work with the profilers today to get something onto the evening news. It does seem a long shot though.’

Someone made a crack that any picture without a gormless grin being on the front of tomorrow’s papers would be an improvement. Jessica made a mental note so she could give the joker something tedious to do when the jobs were given out. She had read the witness’s description and doubted there was anything in it but thought it perfectly summed up Cole himself, given the normality of it.

Cole continued. ‘We’ve set up a phone line for people to call in with information but we haven’t had anything yet, despite the media coverage.’

Neither the inspector nor Jessica had anything further to add, so Aylesbury told everyone there was going to be a press conference in the station at three in the afternoon and pressed the point they should all look busy. He sent them on their way with a slightly cheesy attempt at inspiring them into action. It was probably better than what Jessica could have managed, so she was grateful for it.

As the floor thinned out with various people being given their jobs for the week, Jessica waved Rowlands over and told him he was coming with her to the locksmith.

The two of them walked out to the car park at the back of the station. The morning had taken a lot longer than Jessica thought it would but at least things now seemed to be moving. She wished she had thought to bring a jacket to work, her trouser suit offering little resistance to the chilly spring breeze as they walked towards the car pool. Saturday’s warm weather seemed long gone and Rowlands must have taken one look at the morning’s grey skies and thought ahead as he was wearing a long trench coat to guard against the cold, while his hair was back to its full spikiness.

‘We’re not going in yours, are we?’ Rowlands said sarcastically as they reached the bank of vehicles.

Jessica grinned and shivered at the same time. ‘I’m not sure, we do need something to distract from your flasher’s mac.’

‘Careful with that smile, there might be a Herald photographer around.’

Jessica thought she might as well remind the locksmith who they were if he started looking at his watch too quickly so they took one of the marked police cars. She told Rowlands the address and said he could drive. Her mood was better than it had been in days but she still couldn’t be bothered with the other idiots on the road. Sometimes being in a marked car simply aggravated things. You could always tell the worst drivers; they were the ones who slammed on their brakes and pretended they were doing the speed limit the minute they saw you in their mirror.

The journey wouldn’t take very long but they had barely reached the bottom of the road when Jessica’s phone rang.

‘Will you change that bloody ringtone?’ Rowlands moaned as she fumbled in her bag for the device.

The caller was one of the other officers from the station. They had done some checking on the house’s previous owners. The couple that owned it before had emigrated to Canada when they moved out five years ago and were still living there.

‘Not a bad alibi,’ Jessica said to the caller. She hadn’t thought the previous occupiers would be a serious avenue to explore but also hadn’t reckoned another lead would fall through quite so quickly.

She hung up and turned to Rowlands. ‘Perhaps we should see if that TV magician has an alibi after all?’

8

The locksmith’s white van with company branding was parked on his drive, making the house Rowlands and Jessica were looking for easily identifiable. Just to fit the stereotype, he even had a red-top tabloid flopped across the dashboard as they walked around it to get to the front door. The man invited them in and offered to make some tea. Jessica never really drank hot drinks when she was younger but when you joined the force it became almost inescapable. Every time you went to a house to interview someone you were offered one and whenever you were on a training course you would have tea shoved down your throat at every opportunity.

One of Harry’s favourite places to get himself out of the station, aside from the pub, was a cafe which refused to serve coffee. On questioning this, the owner had told Jessica: ‘This is England, we drink tea. The French drink coffee.’ She didn’t really get that statement then or now. Even when you were at your desk in the station, whoever you were sitting next to seemed to ask at least once every hour or so if you fancied a tea from the machine. Whether what the machine spewed out could be classed as ‘tea’ was another issue, of course. She would love to get forensics involved in that particular investigation.

After their phone call, Jessica thought it would be a quick ten-minute trip where the locksmith would want them back out the door as soon as possible. But, far from keeping an eye on his watch, he actually seemed to enjoy showing off his knowledge. He talked about multipoint locks, five-lever dead locks, security hinges, double-locking handles and all types of other things that generally washed over the two of them. Rowlands wrote it all down but he might as well have written down ‘super special double-locking lock locks that can’t be opened, not even with special fairy dust’ for all the use it was to Jessica.