Jessica sighed. ‘Right. Do you actually have any good news?’

Rowlands beamed at her. ‘Tomorrow night I’m off out with that new girl uniform have hired.’

Jessica rolled her eyes. ‘You’re a dick.’

13

As Jessica looked through the paper the next morning, she thought the coverage could have been worse. Admittedly not that much worse but definitely worse. Once again, all the other papers and TV broadcasts had stuck to the information given out by the press department. She knew the Herald was going to print the information Garry Ashford had – she had even told him to write it. In fairness, the phrase ‘serial killer’ wasn’t present at all in that morning’s front-page story. The problem was the headline: ‘HOUDINI STRANGLER’ in giant capital letters. If that didn’t get members of the public panicking, then the article explaining how ‘Houdini’ was breaking into people’s locked houses, murdering apparent strangers and getting back out again completely undetected certainly would.

The officer manning the front desk that morning told her they had already had two dozen phone calls from worried members of the public and he didn’t even need to say where her first stop of the morning would be. She headed straight up the stairs towards Aylesbury’s office. As she walked past the window, she could see Cole already there with Reynolds and a man and woman she didn’t recognise dressed in suits. She could make a good guess at who they were.

When you became a police officer you were fully aware there would be plenty of people who didn’t like you. In uniform if all you got was the ‘oink’ noises and the odd swear word then you had got off quite lightly. Over the course of a career most officers would be spat at or assaulted in some way or another. Being disliked by certain sections of the public was a given – but if you wanted to be really hated then you joined the Internal Investigations department. Not only were you disliked by the public for being a police officer, you were also hated by other officers for investigating your own.

Each police force in the country had a set number of officers who had moved from regular duty into the Internal division. The reasons, of course, were to work against corrupt officers. Everyone had heard the stories of the ‘old days’ where certain members of the force would be paid by various criminals to turn a blind eye to the very acts they were supposed to be preventing. Jessica was sure some of those tales were exaggerated or possibly even based on television shows and movies, rather than fact. Certainly she had never come across any type of double-dealing in her time. Some officers even got a bit edgy if they were offered a free cup of coffee just in case.

Almost everyone in the force would be against those types of practices but changing sides and investigating your own was not a popular way of showing it. In the same way a grass would be ostracised in the criminal world, the Internal Investigators were shunned by a lot of officers.

Leaking information to the media was not as serious as taking money to turn a blind eye of course but, when it affected investigations, it was still treated accordingly. If that information caused a public panic that just made things worse.

Jessica entered Aylesbury’s already pretty full office. The room wasn’t massive, with a large desk that had a computer and some photographs on top. On the walls were various commendation certificates and the like. The DCI was sitting on his side of the desk with Cole and the two strangers on the other side. Reynolds was standing and, as there were no seats left, Jessica stood near the door.

The two officers she didn’t know looked up at her then back down before she could make eye contact with either of them. They were both fairly young, the male maybe early forties with side-parted brown hair and a suit clearly a size too big for him. The female was around the same age with long brown hair tied back into a ponytail.

Aylesbury greeted her presence with a ‘DS Daniel’. He paused to let her settle and then continued, acknowledging the two people sitting next to his desk.

‘As some of you already know, these are officers Finch and McNiven. They work for Internal Investigations and will be speaking to everyone today about the information leaked to the media. I’m sure you are all aware of what has been in the papers.’

He held up a copy of that morning’s Herald just to emphasise his point. He was speaking fairly calmly but Jessica could see anger bubbling below the surface. He was probably holding back because of the presence of the Internal officers. She wondered whether the anger was aimed at the leaker or at the people brought in to investigate his officers. She had never quite seen eye-to-eye with the DCI but, when it came to your fellow colleagues, most people would back them over the Internal team.

‘We all know the value of using the media but whoever has leaked this information has not only made the force look incredibly stupid but put the investigation at risk. We have not been able to speak to Sandra Prince yet and headlines like this are hardly going to help her condition if she were to see them. People need to feel safe in their homes and to trust us. Recklessly giving information like this out helps no one.’

He made a special point of emphasising the last two words. ‘During the day officers Finch and McNiven have been given one of the offices down the hallway from here. They will be talking to pretty much everyone in the station but you three will be spoken to first. At least then it will allow you to get on with the rest of your jobs. You know how these things work.’

No one said anything, not that there was much they could add. Jessica didn’t know which officer was Finch and which McNiven but, as the DCI finished speaking, the female of the two looked up from a sheet of paper in front of her and said: ‘We wanted to start with DS Daniel if that’s okay?’

It was exactly what Jessica had suspected.

Cole and Reynolds filed out of the room back towards the stairs, while she went down the hallway with the two other officers. The male officer led the way, the female walking in between him and Jessica. They went down the passageway, turned left and kept walking until they reached the final room at the back of the building. It was an area Jessica had never really been to. As far as she knew there were only storage rooms back there. The male turned the lights on and Jessica could see it almost certainly was just storage. Boxes with files sticking out of the top had been shoved to the back wall and someone had brought up a table from what looked like the canteen. There was a dusty smell as the male offered her the seat across from them.

The woman started talking first. ‘Okay, DS Daniel, I’m Officer McNiven, this is Officer Finch. We’re from the GMP’s Internal division as you already know. Can I start by asking if you know why you’re here today?’

‘To be bollocked by you lot,’ was what Jessica thought. What she said was: ‘So we can all work together to stop information getting into the papers that could harm the case I am working on.’

She made a special point to stress the word ‘together’.

Officer McNiven smiled. ‘Something like that.’ She paused and shuffled through her papers, before continuing. ‘Okay, tell us about your relationship with Garry Ashford.’

Jessica told the investigators that she had spoken to him three times on the phone, once on the Saturday after the first victim had been found when he phoned her, once the day after to ‘clarify’ the article she had seen on the Herald’s website and then he had called her again after the second body had been discovered. She left out the part where the middle conversation had been largely an exercise in creative swearing. She then said they’d had a very brief talk in a cafe the previous day.