10

Jessica wasn’t sure whether she liked Caroline’s new boyfriend. Perhaps she felt that way because the investigation was going nowhere and nobody would have impressed her given her mood – or maybe it was because she had arrived home from another unproductive day and found him already in their flat?

Their flat was on the ground floor with another one above them which had been empty for a little while. Unlike some in the area, it was an actual apartment and not just a converted house. They had a small garden at the front but it had been paved over before they moved in and they never did anything in it. As you entered the front door, Jessica’s room was immediately on the left, while the entrance to the living room was opposite it. Next to her bedroom was Caroline’s, while at the end of the hallway directly opposite the front door was their bathroom. The kitchen was a separate room, with its door opposite Caroline’s bedroom. The living room was the biggest in the flat but the two bedrooms were fairly equal in size.

It was a week and a half since Yvonne Christensen’s body had been found and Jessica had got precisely nowhere. They had already reached the point where constables from other districts had been returned to their force while officers at Longsight were being moved on to other cases. It really was a disaster, with the finger of blame pointing squarely at her.

Nothing much had happened in the initial investigation with lead after lead finishing in a dead end. The hotline had come up with nothing, except for members of the public wanting a chat or thinking their uncle looked a bit like the e-fit. Someone had even phoned up to say the sketch looked like the officer who had been on the news the night before. They were referring to Cole, which brought plenty of quiet laughs around the station when he wasn’t present. All potential leads had been checked but there was nothing of any substance.

The day after the press conference, the Herald had gone to town on the force because of the two-day delay in finding the body. There was a big picture of the victim smiling out from the front page, with an editorial inside asking why the body had been ‘left to rot’.

‘Nice and tactful for the family,’ Jessica said to Cole when they had seen the paper.

A few days after that, the force had been blasted again, this time for a lack of progress. The byline on both articles had been ‘Garry Ashford’. With the investigation not going anywhere, Jessica would spend parts of her free time thinking up creative ways to make life miserable for the long-haired, tweed-jacket-wearing pain-in-her-arse.

With murders, in a huge majority of cases the killer was someone who knew the victim. In most of them it was either a family member or someone romantically involved. But anyone they knew of who apparently fitted that description with Yvonne Christensen had been ruled out. They had looked into everyone from the husband, to his new girlfriend, to the son, to the neighbours and even Stephanie and Ray Wilson, just in case. They checked her bank accounts and phone records, all of which seemed normal. No one seemed to have a motive for murdering Yvonne and, even if they had stumbled across a reason, no one – least of all Jessica – had much of an idea how the murder had been pulled off.

With all of that running through her mind, she had driven home in the rain with a clear plan for the evening: take her shoes off and relax in the living room with a bottle of wine.

Jessica really liked her and Caroline’s living room. She found it incredibly cosy and relaxing, perfect after a bad day. There was a deep dark brown fabric sofa that allowed her to sink into it. She had fallen asleep on it a fair few times in the past. They had a separate reclining seat made of the same coloured fabric but Jessica much preferred the sofa. There was a glass coffee table in the middle of the seats too, which usually had some selection of celebrity magazines Caroline had bought on it. Jessica pretended she never read them but would often have a flick through when she was alone.

Between the two of them, they didn’t really watch too much television and hadn’t bothered paying for anything like satellite or cable. Given their jobs, both of them lived pretty busy lives but Jessica had never been much of a television-watcher in any case.

Caroline had plenty of DVD box sets but Jessica only really watched the news and late-night reruns of trashy morning talk shows. Not that she would have admitted the talk-show watching to her colleagues, of course. You would lose plenty of credibility if you confessed that one of your hidden pleasures was staying up at night to see what the results of the previous show’s DNA tests would throw up.

But, after arriving back in her flat, there was a man she didn’t know sitting on their sofa drinking from a can of lager.

‘Er, hello?’ Jessica said as his presence caught her by surprise while she had half-kicked off one of her shoes.

‘Oh, hi . . . is it Jessica? I’m Randall, Caroline’s boyfriend.’

Caroline had re-entered the main room at the sound of the voices. She said she had been changing in her room and added that she hoped Jessica didn’t mind Randall coming over. ‘It was just that I wanted you both to meet but everyone is always so busy so, in the end, I just invited him over. I hope you don’t mind.’ Caroline explained.

Jessica didn’t mind, well not really, but it would have been nice to have been asked.

As it was they weren’t having a bad evening. Randall was decent-looking – just under six feet tall, with a shaven head and blue eyes. He clearly had a decent physique judging by the tight fit of his T-shirt and must work out, though his muscles weren’t bulging in a grotesque way. There was some kind of spiky-lettering tattoo visible on the lower half of his right arm but Jessica couldn’t figure out what it was. He wasn’t really her type; she didn’t go for guys who spent so much time working out and tattoos and piercings had never been too appealing. He did seem nice and Caroline could barely take her eyes off him.

Although she preferred the sofa for comfort, Jessica had left it to Randall and Caroline to share while she took the recliner. They half-watched some nonsense game show, laughing at the contestants’ lack of knowledge while Caroline tried to get her best friend and boyfriend to interact with each other. The bottle of wine the two women had shared was certainly helping in that regard.

‘So, you met over shoes then?’ Jessica said after an hour or so of small talk.

Caroline and Randall looked at each other and giggled then had a mini argument over who should tell the story in full. If it had been anyone other than her best mate – and if they didn’t look so happy – Jessica would have felt sickened by their show of affection. There was nothing more annoying to her than happy couples.

It was Caroline who spoke. ‘He did such a good job fixing them and they are my favourite going-out heels.’

She smiled and squeezed her boyfriend’s hand.

‘Isn’t it just a bit of glue?’ Jessica asked, not meaning the question to sound quite as blunt as it did. She was moderately interested but probably could have phrased the question better.

Randall laughed. ‘Well, yeah. You just take the names, addresses and phone number if they’re cute, wait until they’re gone, get the old superglue out then charge ’em for the privilege.’

Jessica assumed it was a bit more complicated than that but laughed along.

‘Wait, you only get the phone numbers if they’re “cute”?’ Caroline asked with mock indignation.

‘I got yours, didn’t I?’

‘Oh yeah, that’s all right then.’

‘At least you’ve got a story for the grandkids anyway,’ Jessica said. ‘Grandma fell over and broke her shoes, while Grandpa fixed them for her.’

‘Whoa. Who said anything about grandkids?’ Caroline laughed.