She finally found her way back into the room where Charlie had handed her the picture of the rugby team. She felt drawn to the window again, spending a few minutes watching birds flit into the back garden and chase each other before flying away. There was no sign of Charlie outside and the scene seemed incredibly peaceful. She could understand why Ed had spent his time painting in the room that looked out onto the back.

Jessica eventually turned away, peering towards the clutter of boxes around the room. She didn’t know what she was after but started to look through the one closest to her. Even the contents seemed to have no order to them. In the first one was a certificate for Ed from primary school because he had finished fourth in a maths quiz but underneath it was a tin of shoe polish, four wall brackets you would use to put up shelves, an empty glass milk bottle and a board game that had an old television presenter’s face on the box, despite the fact he’d been dead for over a decade.

After putting the items on the floor, Jessica did her best to repack them into the box they had come out of, although she wondered if they would ever be taken out again. The contents of the second crate were just as mismatched as the first. It contained golf balls, some old curtains, a snow globe, some tacky old sunglasses, a few candles and three newspapers from over twenty years ago. Jessica looked through the papers in case they had been kept for a reason but, if they had, she couldn’t see it.

As she put all the items back into the box, Jessica was beginning to question her own judgement about what she was hoping to achieve. She opened a third box and took out some wire coat hangers plus four empty tobacco tins. Underneath those were a set of framed photographs.

The first one was of two boys around nine or ten years old building a sandcastle on the beach. One was blond, the other had dark hair. Both were grinning at the camera and Jessica could just about see the resemblance to Charlie. When they were younger, the two brothers were fairly similar, although the brown-haired Ed was a little shorter. Jessica continued to look through the pictures. The next one was of Ed on stage in what looked like a school play. He was a little older, maybe thirteen, and appeared to be giving some sort of sincere soliloquy. Charlie was the subject of the next photo, riding a bike around a park though it could possibly have been the garden. There was also a photo of Charlie fishing, another of him playing football and a final one where he and Ed seemed to be doing their homework. The pair were sitting opposite each other at a table concentrating on separate work books.

Jessica thought the photo underneath those was hauntingly beautiful. It looked as if Ed hadn’t even known it was being taken. He was around sixteen years old and sat painting in the room underneath. Light streamed through the windows ahead of him with a misting of rain on the glass. She found the image incredibly compelling and wondered who had taken it. Perhaps confused by the way she had been drawn to that photo, Jessica almost failed to notice what the next picture was showing. She had gone to put it face-down on the other photos before realising its significance.

She turned it back over and stared at the contents. There were six young men, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, all toasting the camera with glasses of beer in their hands. They were all a mixture of tanned brown and burnt red and it seemed clear they were on a holiday of some sort. After studying it the second time, Jessica could clearly see Ed Marks in the middle with a huge grin on his face. Next to him on one side was someone who looked like a younger Matthew Cooper. She had only just got hold of an up-to-date picture of him but felt sure the resemblance was there.

Next to Matthew was someone she couldn’t place but, on the other side of Ed, Jessica could see something she had been waiting for since the first hand was found. There was one more face she didn’t know but the final two tanned faces grinning out of the photo undoubtedly belonged to Lewis Barnes and Jacob Chrisp.

26

On almost every occasion where Jessica heard or saw something that excited her relating to a case, she would feel her heart racing, ready to leap into action. Instead, she simply stared at the photo of the men. She looked at the hints of blue sky above them, wondering where it had been taken and who had been behind the camera. Was it a barman or a passing stranger? Was it a seventh young person somehow related to whatever the picture was showing her?

Jessica walked back down the stairs still looking at the photo, also holding onto the image of the two brothers doing their homework. She found Charlie in the kitchen. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, adding: ‘What have you found?’

She handed over the holiday picture. ‘Do you know anything about this? When or where it was taken? Who might be in it?’

Charlie stared at the image and then looked back at her. ‘Are these . . . ?’

‘Four of them, including your brother, are missing. I need to find out who the other two people are, then what happened with the six of them.’

‘I don’t really know,’ Charlie said, slightly stuttering his words. ‘I vaguely remember him going to Faliraki when he left college but we had different friends.’

‘At least one of these people didn’t go to college with him though,’ Jessica said, thinking of Matthew Cooper.

Charlie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. All I remember is that it was the first time he’d gone abroad and he had to sort out a passport. It was the summer after he finished his exams but I guess it didn’t necessarily mean they were all people he was at college with. He did this art class thing once a week too. I just don’t know.’

‘So he would have been eighteen or maybe nineteen?’

‘I guess so.’

Jessica took the photo back. ‘Can I take this for now?’

‘No worries.’

She showed him the other one of the two boys doing their homework. ‘I found this. I didn’t know if you might want it?’

Charlie took the photo from her and smiled slightly. ‘I remember this being taken. It’s nice. Dad used to make us do our homework when we got home from school before he’d let us out. I remember him taking this.’ He used the support at the back of the frame to prop it up on the kitchen counter.

Jessica indicated towards the photo she was holding. ‘Can you keep quiet about this for a bit?’

‘Sure, it’s not as if I know anyone anyway.’

‘I mean from the papers.’

‘Whatever you want.’

Jessica drove back to the station trying to think things over but there were no obvious answers. If something had happened on the holiday, the person leaving hands around the city could perhaps be one of the two faces from the photo she didn’t recognise – or it could still be someone else entirely. The first priority had to be finding out who the remaining two people were and hoping neither of them had gone missing and that they would be willing to talk. Whether the holiday itself was relevant would be something they would hope to find out in due course – but at least Jessica now knew there was a connection from Matthew Cooper to the other three victims.

After parking at Longsight, Jessica called Charlie to ask if he could look through the rest of the boxes at his house and let her know if there were any others of Ed at a similar age. Two of her leads had already come from him and it would be irresponsible to not finish looking through things. With his agreement, she could have asked officers to go over but the house was so big, it would be easy to miss items and there would be no guarantee they would know what they were looking for. At least Charlie was aware of the type of photos she was after and, regardless of his odd circumstances, he did seem keen to help.