With the fact they lived close together, it really wasn’t a good recipe for success.

Jessica looked around the rest of the room and there was a mass of trinkets and the types of ornaments people brought with them back from holiday. There were small statues of buildings as well as plate sets, candles and all sorts of other tat Jessica absolutely hated. The only item she ever brought back from a trip abroad was as much alcohol as she could get away with.

When Vicky returned she was carrying a cup of tea and sat in an armchair opposite the sofa Jessica was on. ‘Are you sure you don’t want one?’ she asked, holding her mug up.

‘I’m fine, thanks.’

‘Do you like all my pictures of Lewis?’ Vicky pointed at a particular one above Jessica’s head. ‘In that one there he was in the school play. He was fourteen but they wouldn’t give him the lead role. He was the best one there though – no one could have denied that.’

‘Did you know much about his friends, Mrs Barnes?’

The woman took a gulp from her tea then answered. ‘Oh yes, he played a bit of rugby and so on. I used to let him have his friends stay over. I know I probably shouldn’t tell you this but I’d get them some beer or something on a Friday night. You know what lads are like, don’t you?’

‘Would you remember the names though? For instance did you know Jacob Chrisp and Edward Marks?’

The woman pursed her lips. ‘I wasn’t always sure about the rugby boys. Faces I’m fine with, it’s the names that don’t come so easily.’

‘You didn’t remember Matthew Cooper the other day,’ Jessica reminded her.

Vicky shrugged defensively. ‘If he knew Lewis, it must have been a friend of a friend-type thing.’

Jessica took the holiday photo out of an envelope she had been carrying around and walked over to the woman. She pointed at the two young men she didn’t know. ‘Do you know who these people are?’

The woman looked hard at the photo. ‘I know the faces, erm . . .’ She looked up to the ceiling as if it were written up there. ‘One of them’s “Steven” but I don’t know the last name. The other one is somebody Newcombe. They called him “Newey”. I’d know the first name if you said it.’

Jessica gave the woman time to think things over but Vicky couldn’t remember anything else. They made small talk and Jessica listened to another rant about January before she thanked the woman for her help, adding that if she remembered any of the names fully, she could call at any time. Vicky wanted to know the significance of the photo but Jessica didn’t reveal too much. She asked Lewis’s mother if she could look for any further photos taken around that time of her son with his friends and then said her goodbyes.

After finding the link from Matthew to the other three victims and having at least partial names for the other two, Jessica was going to drive back to the station, log the information on the system and then go home and drink an entire bottle of wine herself. It wasn’t something she did too regularly but there were now only a few hours until her birthday and she was hoping no one had remembered.

27

It wasn’t often the post turned up before Jessica had to leave for work but, as if Royal Mail somehow knew, a birthday card was waiting in the hallway of her communal block of flats as she was on her way out. She only needed to read the handwriting on the envelope to know it was from her mother. A few years ago, the postman responsible for the round where Jessica lived had been arrested for stealing from the mail. Over ten thousand undelivered items were found in his garage. Somehow, despite that and another year where there was a strike on, Jessica’s mother always managed to get a card to her on time.

Jessica had spent her nineteenth birthday in Thailand with Caroline. The two had gone travelling for the best part of a year after finishing college but, even then, the receptionist at the hostel where they were staying had hand-delivered her a card from her mum. She thought Caroline must have been involved somehow, at least in divulging where they were staying, but her friend denied everything.

Before she pulled her car away, Jessica opened the envelope and read the contents of the card. It both moved her and made her laugh at the same time.

‘A third of a century. We’re so proud of you. X.’

And then came her mother’s signature followed by the sign-off:

‘PS: Our phone number hasn’t changed. Use it!’

Jessica knew she wasn’t great at staying in contact with her parents but it wasn’t the easiest thing to do. Her dad always wanted to talk about her job but often it was the last thing she wanted to discuss. Her mum would want to know about boyfriends or Caroline or other things that hadn’t been going too well. She had never really told them that she and Caroline had been out of touch for a long while and had only just begun to be good friends again. After things turned out the way they had with Randall, Caroline had gone to stay with Jessica’s parents for a short while. They frequently said they saw her as their own, given Caroline’s parents had both died.

Jessica’s mother and father were both coming down for the wedding and apparently looking forward to it. She didn’t want to be asked the obvious questions about when it would be her turn to walk down the aisle. That was bad enough but if either of them started talking about grandchildren, it really would wind her up.

As she arrived at the station, no one said anything to indicate they knew it was her birthday, which suited Jessica just fine. She had already emailed Cole a few details about the two people in the holiday photo who were so far unidentified. The chief inspector gave her a couple of officers to help find out who they were. Someone was visiting the parents of Jacob Chrisp to see if there were any other photos from the same time and to ask if they knew who the other people in the picture were. A different officer had gone to see Matthew Cooper’s brother for the same reason.

While that was going on, Jessica was working from the station to find out what could be discovered using the names ‘Newcombe’ and ‘Steven’. It was obviously a common first name but they knew roughly what ages the two unidentified men should be, which gave them a start. On the college-leavers’ list there was no one with the last name, while the Stevens had all been ruled out, regardless of how they spelled their first names. That meant that, as with Matthew Cooper, they had to look further afield into people who lived in roughly the same area as the other victims, while trying to track down the types of clubs and societies the men might have been in.

It was enormously complicated as they didn’t know where to start because the chance of people being friends of friends meant the net had to spread so wide. That left them compiling a list of everyone with the names ‘Newcombe’ or ‘Steven’ and then working backwards to connect them to any of the victims. Or, as Rowlands so eloquently described it, ‘Trying to find out who’s taken a piss in the ocean’.

Jessica didn’t leave the station for the entire day but news filtered through that the officers who had gone to see the Chrisp and Cooper families had come back with nothing. Jessica had a long list of people who weren’t in the photo but nothing concrete to say who was. It was a long frustrating day all around, especially with the air-conditioning still not working. Things were so bad the staff had even stopped complaining about it. People were bringing their own desk fans from home to use, although the temperature had at least dipped a little outside in the past day.

Not a single person asked about her birthday which to Jessica was far more suspicious than people hinting at the subject. She’d had her suspicions but the reason eventually became clear as Rowlands tried to start a casual conversation with her towards the end of the day. ‘Do you fancy the pub after work?’