Other officers hadn’t yet arrived but the area would be taped off when they did. Her vehicle was causing an obstruction as it blocked half a lane of a main road and cars beeped their horns as they waited, before swerving around her. She ignored the protests and started to walk slowly down the alley looking from side to side. It was littered with rubbish but, despite the ongoing good weather and brightness of the day, the narrow walkway was completely in the shade.

Jessica moved a few boxes with her hands, scanning the verges on each side as car horns blared behind her. In the distance were police sirens, which she hoped meant her colleagues were on their way as opposed to some other major incident happening.

As Jessica neared the area where the hotel’s large metal bins were, the smell of something rotting increased. There were scraps of food and a few takeaway wrappers on the floor but Jessica was struggling to breathe because of the stench. She took a few steps backwards and inhaled a large breath of clean air before moving quickly down the alley.

Her eyes darted from side to side before being drawn to an object just past a fire exit. She crouched and, although she didn’t want to touch it, she could see clearly it looked like a hand. It had been badly chewed, either by the dog or, given its proximity to the bins, possibly by rats. It reminded her of an undercooked piece of steak she had once spat out in a restaurant: a mixture of lumpy soft meat. The only thing that really identified it as a hand was the fact three of the fingers and a thumb still had nails attached.

Jessica stepped away and made her way further down the alley to take another breath. She didn’t know if the stink belonged to the hand or the bins and scattered takeaway leftovers. With a fresh lungful, Jessica returned to the hand. The digits themselves were largely mangled but she looked closely to see if she could pick out any further letters on the skin. According to what the lab worker had told Cole, the finger that had been sent to her had an ‘A’ tattooed on it, which would be the second letter in whatever was spelled across the knuckles. There was definitely a gap where the ring finger had been removed and on one of the other fingers she could make out what she first thought was a ‘W’, before realising she was looking at it from the wrong way and that it was actually an ‘M’.

She squinted to see if it was possibly an ‘H’, which would have backed up the love–hate theory, but it really did look like an ‘M’. The markings on the other two fingers were difficult to work out because of the scratches and teeth marks. They could have been ‘I’s, ‘L’s, ‘T’s or possibly ‘P’s, or any combination of those.

Jessica stood, walking back towards her car. There were still plenty of vehicles beeping their horns but she could also hear police sirens very close too. In her head, she tried to work out what the word could be if it wasn’t ‘hate’. Without anything to write on, she struggled slightly but none of ‘malt’, ‘halt’, ‘hail’ or ‘mail’ made much sense, unless the victim had been a postman and was particularly proud of it.

As Jessica was trying to think, she could hear vehicles braking loudly and saw the flash of white as police cars stopped either side of her car at the end of the alley. A few uniformed officers started to look at the Fiat Punto but Jessica emerged from the alley showing her identification. ‘It’s mine,’ she said. The officer nodded. ‘Are the Scene of Crime team coming?’ Jessica added. ‘It stinks down there.’

‘I’m surprised they’re not here now to be honest.’

Jessica interrupted the man. ‘Matt!’

‘Er, no, I’m Ian.’

‘No, sorry, I didn’t mean you. The tattoo: it could say Matt.’ The man looked at her, confused, but Jessica dismissed him. ‘Don’t worry. I’m going to head off. Don’t let anyone else down there until the lab team arrive. Tell them what they’re looking for is on the right past the bins and the fire exit. It’s in a proper state.’

Jessica got into her car and manoeuvred herself out of the small gap that was left now the police cars had parked either side of her. As she drove back to Longsight, she tried to remember if any of the players from the rugby photo were called either Matthew or Matt. Off the top of her head it didn’t ring a bell but the photo itself, as well as the bits of research they had on each person, was back at the station. If either Dave or Izzy had been back there, she would have called them but they were stranded at the CCTV offices.

After parking at Longsight, Jessica called Izzy to tell her the hand had been found. The constable said there were no camera angles that had caught their figure in black emerging from the alley. She made a crack about having to catch a bus back to the station and added that they had a good grab of the person sticking their thumb up to the camera. A digital version of the footage had also been sent off to the police’s own labs to be analysed officially.

Jessica thought about going to tell the DCI what had happened but was more interested in the name Matt. She went to her office and shuffled around the papers and files that were, as usual, cluttering her space. She finally found what she was looking for but couldn’t see a player whose name matched what she thought the tattoo could say.

Given the possible letter combinations, she was struggling to match anything before it occurred to her the letters could represent someone else, for instance the person’s son or daughter. It seemed an odd place to tattoo a different person’s name but then she had once arrested a woman who had a tattoo of a fully naked female on her breast, so anything was possible.

Temporarily giving up, Jessica walked through the main floor to find the officers who had been working on the updated list of missing persons. After asking a few people, she was directed to two officers sitting opposite each other in the far back corner of the room. Aside from when she was at either Izzy or Dave’s desks, Jessica didn’t spend too much time on the main floor but when she herself had been more junior, her own area had been exactly where the two people were sitting.

Jessica had always found the corner hot and stuffy in the summer, cold and draughty in the winter. As she made her way over, Jessica could almost feel herself sweating because of the temperature. She had stopped asking for updates about the state of the station’s air-conditioning. The part the refrigeration company were apparently waiting for had gone missing somewhere in Eastern Europe, its replacement impounded by customs officers. No one seemed to know what was going on beyond the fact it was far hotter inside than it was out. Jessica had persuaded the admin department to give her the number for the company supposed to be fixing things but the customer service department had almost left her wanting to cut off various body parts from the clowns who worked there. Twenty-five minutes of having to press ‘one’ to get through to another set of options where she needed to press ‘four’ followed by ten minutes on hold, five minutes of someone not helping her and then another ten minutes on hold hadn’t put her in a good mood and she’d given up.

One of the two officers was on the phone, the other was typing on a keyboard. Jessica knew their faces but not their names. She sat on the edge of their desk and both officers acknowledged her. The one who wasn’t on the phone was a new recruit, a young woman somewhere in her twenties. ‘Are you all right, Ma’am?’

‘Yeah, don’t call me that though. Seriously, “Jess” is fine or “DS” or “Sarge” if you really must.’ Some officers preferred the formality of using titles. Jessica did understand it in that it could make it easier to separate ‘real’ life from the job but, from her point of view, each time anyone called her by anything other than her actual name, it just made her feel old.