Cornish looked to emphasise the point. ‘He’s all about making eye contact and trying to look and sound as sincere as possible and he keeps his body language open. Obviously if you were talking to someone in the interview room, that’s the kind of thing you’d look for but, with him, he’s so used to doing it now, it’s second nature.’

‘Were you watching him when the maid told us about the camera?’ Jessica asked, looking at Reynolds.

The inspector shook his head. ‘No, I think I was looking at her.’

‘There was something in his face, just a moment before he corrected himself. At the time I thought it was surprise but maybe there was a little more there.’

‘Like panic?’

‘Maybe? I don’t know. It was only a fraction of a second he let his guard down. It could have been hope, I suppose. I think I’m just naturally suspicious of everyone.’

Jessica looked back at Reynolds, waiting for him to speak. ‘There’s not much else we’ve got at the moment,’ he said. ‘I’m hoping someone can give us a manufacturer for the van by lunchtime or so. If they do I can get onto the press office and we can get the photo out. Some of it has already leaked because we’ve had a few inquiries.’

‘Can someone really give you a car make and model just from the shape of the roof and windscreen?’ Jessica asked.

Reynolds nodded. ‘Apparently. Who knows what these people spend the rest of their time doing but if it can help us identify the vehicle I’m really not bothered.’

Cole looked to Jessica, raising his eyebrows, indicating it was her turn.

Jessica took a breath, then began. ‘I’m sure you know by now. There was a bit on the news about the robbery but I only received the enhanced images back this morning.’ She took some photos out of an envelope and passed them around. ‘On Saturday at about three, there was a knife robbery at an off-licence on Stockport Road. They got away with a few hundred quid but, as you can see, our thief was wearing something very familiar.’

Jessica went on to explain the facts about the case, including that the laboratories hadn’t found anything at the scene apart from a scuffed footprint in the dust showing the woman had size five feet. She talked about the female voice and similarity in the CCTV footage from the shop to the images they had from whoever was leaving the hands.

‘Are you thinking copycat?’ Reynolds said.

‘I was, maybe still am. I don’t know.’ She indicated the pictures he was holding. ‘If you look at the still frames you’ve got from the shop, they’re a pretty high quality. The ones from the city centre are zoomed in from a distance and not as good so you can’t compare like with like. All you can say is that they look . . . similar. They’re around the same height and build and wearing the same type of shoes and cloak.’

Reynolds was nodding. ‘It seems strange to go from cutting off hands to robbing shops.’

Jessica nodded. ‘Exactly but then we don’t really know what’s going on with the hands in the first place. Are the victims dead? Is the person leaving them working alone or with someone else and so on? We don’t know the motive, so maybe robbery is a part of it? It would definitely be odd but then so is leaving hands in the centre of a major city.’

‘What are you going to do with it?’ Cornish asked.

‘I’m off to Bradford Park to go through the camera footage with one of the team there,’ Jessica said. ‘I watched it at the shop the other day but we’re going to skim through a week of footage. The woman moves so quickly, it must be because she knew the shop layout. There’s no hesitation about where the counter is, or where the cameras are, because they already know. We’ll look to see if there’s anyone in the past week or so who has been in that seems to be paying particular attention to the layout. If they really know what they’re doing it will be hard to spot but I’m wary of getting all these photos into the media in case it is all unconnected and the robbery stills end up diluting people’s memories for the other case.’

Jessica was well aware the previous chief inspector, DCI Farraday, had made a disastrous call some months before that had ended up linking one suspect’s description to a much wider case the person wasn’t involved with. It had ended up denting both cases and Jessica didn’t want to repeat the same mistake.

‘The press office have already put out a standard statement about the date, time and place of the robbery,’ she added. ‘We’ll see if anyone comes forward for that while I go back over the videos. If we’re struggling in a few days, it could be a time to release the new still-shots.’

With little else to talk about, everyone went their separate ways but Jessica did at least feel the tension between her and Cornish had thawed slightly, even if it had taken jibes about her driving to do it. After the meeting, Jessica updated Rowlands and Diamond and set them to work finding out which traffic cameras and other CCTV fixtures were close to the shop. The robber must have gone somewhere and, although there wasn’t a monitoring device directly outside, there would be city-operated ones somewhere nearby.

Jessica drove to the Bradford Park station, which was close to Manchester City’s football ground. The place operated not only as a local community hub but also provided a base for almost all of Greater Manchester Police’s forensics team and other non-frontline staff, such as payroll and Human Resources. The shop’s hard drive had been taken for analysis and image enhancement, which wasn’t something they could do from the Longsight station.

She was led through the building to an area full of computers and introduced to a staff member who would be working with her. Together they began to watch the footage, starting with the Saturday itself and working backwards.

It was largely a tedious job but it did become easy to eliminate people. A lot of visitors to the shop clearly knew the layout already as they would simply walk in, pick up the newspaper or other item they wanted, pay for it and leave. Jessica realised that if the robber used the shop frequently, they would be hard to isolate. The process could still be useful if someone paid particular attention to the cameras.

Victor Burnham had been right about the Saturday-morning rush. As he opened the shop, there was a steady stream of customers who almost all picked up a paper, paid for it with near enough the right change, then quickly left. After the first couple of hours, the foot traffic dropped considerably and, after lunch, there were very few people who entered.

At the point the time code had moved on to half past two, Jessica knew that was where she had picked the footage up when she had viewed it the first time. A man entered the shop, as she knew he would, but this time she was watching properly. The scientist working with her saw exactly what she had and they exchanged a look before he rewound it to watch again. When the man walked into the shop, he glanced immediately upwards at the camera, holding the look for a fraction of a second longer than would have been normal. Switching from one angle to the other, they saw him do the exact same thing to the second camera before walking around the store. He picked up a magazine then put it back where it was and left the shop without buying anything.

They watched it back again and the man turned to Jessica. ‘What do you reckon?’

‘I believe the term is “casing the joint”,’ she said.

Jessica was annoyed at herself for being in a rush the first time and not spotting it. She had noticed the man not buying anything but completely missed his mannerisms. It could be a coincidence but, as it had happened just half an hour before the woman entered the store, it appeared unlikely. If the woman had an accomplice, it seemed all the more probable they had some sort of car, which made the work the other two constables were doing crucial.