Suspect number three was sitting at the back and had barely looked up since Jessica had started watching him. He was young, maybe mid-twenties, and had shoulder-length scruffy black hair which stood out against his pasty white skin. She stared closely at him and noticed he was wearing a brown tweed-like jacket with elbow patches.

Who the hell was this guy? Tweed? Elbow patches?

He had that kind of look some people seemed to think made them look like a quirky rock star, or tortured writer. It didn’t; it made them look like dicks.

As she compared all three ‘Garry Ashfords’, Jessica hoped this guy was the real one. She would actually enjoy bullying him.

Aylesbury opened the conference, introducing himself and the other two officers and welcoming everyone present. Without naming names, he criticised ‘uninformed reporting’ and said that any leaks should be properly checked with the station’s press office. After telling the assembled media off, he then effectively confirmed that every detail already reported by the Herald was true.

Each journalist had been given a pack with the photos and details the force was happy to release. It included the phone number members of the public should call if they had any information, as well as the sketch based on the person the neighbour had seen walking past the victim’s house a few times the previous weekend. That had only arrived moments before the briefing had begun but the assembled media had been assured they could download a better-quality version from the force’s website. Jessica had seen the sketch itself and didn’t expect any useful leads. It looked so plain it could really be anyone. Whoever was manning the phone lines the following day would have a lot of useless information to wade through, she thought.

The media were told that Yvonne Christensen’s husband and son had helped the inquiry but were not suspects and the point was reinforced that the public should feel safe. Aylesbury made a special instance of looking into the camera to emphasise his words and enforce that point as if he was making an Academy Award acceptance speech.

After that he opened the floor to questions. Most of what was asked was simply going over what was already known. The first question came from the obese man at the front, who immediately ruled himself out of Jessica’s list of suspects by saying, ‘Paul Davies, Bury Citizen,’ before asking something particularly bland.

One down, two to go.

After a few more questions, the DCI pointed at the hand from the back – suspect number three. The man ruffled his hand through his hair and said: ‘Garry Ashford, Manchester Morning Herald. I was just wondering why it took the force two days to respond to Stephanie Wilson’s concerns?’

Jessica narrowed her eyes and stared at him. ‘Got you,’ she thought.

9

The last couple of days had seen a complete turnaround for Garry. After the call from his source about Yvonne Christensen’s murder, he had phoned the number he had been given for that detective sergeant but not really got anywhere. She seemed like a right moody so-and-so.

When she asked how he had found out her number, he made up something about a friend from a phone company but didn’t think she’d bought it. They would struggle to find his source even if they got into his own phone records. The person that contacted him had at least two SIM cards and had called from the unregistered pre-pay one.

After getting a ‘no comment’ from her, he made the call he had been waiting eighteen months for – to tell his editor he actually had a story of note for him. It was both of their days off and he had never called his boss on his mobile before. He figured this was as good a time as any. Garry reckoned Tom Simpson would have been a good journalist at some point in the past but, being in the job for as long as he had while he worked his way up to editor, he had lost something along the way. Garry had taken a year and a half to become cynical about the industry but his boss had been in the job for over twenty years, so who knows what he thought of it all?

The editor was in charge of managing the paper’s content and staff but recently there increasingly seemed to be pressure to make savings. Everyone had seen the memos from management about cost-cutting and, along with the length of time he had been doing the job, Tom Simpson had appeared to lose any courtesy he might have once had.

As editor, his one concern was getting a paper out on time and not getting fired. He frequently swore and bawled out other reporters in the newsroom, warning them that costs had to be brought down and, if they didn’t get him better stories, perhaps they would be expendable. Some of the older production staff and journalists had told Garry it hadn’t always been like that. When Tom had first been promoted to editor eight or nine years ago, the atmosphere had been much better but declining sales, the rise of free content on the Internet, and rifts with management had taken their toll.

One of the older reporters, who was eagerly awaiting retirement in a year or two, had explained to Garry in the pub one evening just why he thought things had got so bad.

‘All those government departments and councils and police and fire and everyone else have these bloody press officers now,’ he said. ‘In the old days you could buy someone a pint and get the full story on everything. It was all cock-ups galore and you could really go to town on these idiots. Now you just get stuck rewriting these nonsense statements about “diversity” and “ethical funding”, whatever the hell that means.’

Garry didn’t know whether that was right but it was clear the only time the editor’s mood seemed to improve was when somebody brought in a story that raised sales.

The finance department and editor received daily figures for how many copies of the paper had been returned by newsagents and street sellers. This allowed them to work out how many copies of the paper had actually been sold. Garry thought his luck had finally turned with his ‘bin fury’ story. On the back of that, sales had gone up twenty per cent for three straight days. His editor was delighted. He had praised Garry’s work ethic in a group email and hovered around his desk for those days asking about follow-up stories. Eventually it had to end – there were only so many articles you could churn out about rubbish before people stopped buying and moved on to something else. Sales dropped to where they were before and Garry had been forgotten about again. In many ways, that had made things worse. Before, he was just some anonymous reporter in the newsroom but after that, he had shown he could get stories that spiked sales, just not consistently.

Garry’s editor answered his phone with a ‘who’s this?’ Not even a ‘hello’ and definitely not a ‘hi’.

‘This is Garry, Garry Ashford.’

‘You do know it’s my day off?’

‘Yes . . . but I think I have something big for you.’

‘You “think” you have something big? I’m on my way to the football.’

Garry stumbled his way through telling his editor about the phone call he had just received. He talked about the murder and how the body had been found locked in a house as the police took two days to find it. His editor asked for the source and Garry gave it.

‘You scruffy little genius! Why didn’t you use them before?’

It sounded good-natured but Garry wondered if the ‘genius’ part outweighed the ‘scruffy’ comment to actually make it a compliment. He told his boss that his source had never really come up with anything of note before.

His editor didn’t sound as if he was really listening anyway. ‘Right, right,’ he continued. ‘Look, get hold of this witness. Just turn up at her door and find out what she told the police, then get into the office tomorrow. No point in wasting something like this for tomorrow’s edition – the city’s empty on a Sunday. We’ll get everyone with a blinding front page on Monday. Blow the nationals out of the water.’