The station was only a bus ride and five-minute walk away and she figured that she might as well put in a few hours if she was going anyway. When she arrived not long after nine in the morning, reception was busier than it usually was on a weekend. All the drunks and troublemakers from the night before would be in the cells under the station and things were usually fairly steady by this time.

She asked one of the uniform officers what was going on. ‘Nothing much,’ came the reply. ‘Probably a missing person. The call came in last night. We’re off to support the tactical entry team.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. You now know all I do.’

Jessica checked the details with the desk sergeant, who seemed to be the bearer of all knowledge. ‘That’s pretty much it,’ he said. ‘A call came in from a woman last night who said she’d not seen or heard from her mother in a few days. She wasn’t answering her front door and the daughter reckons she can hear her mum’s mobile phone going off inside.’

‘Why doesn’t she let herself in?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose she doesn’t have a key.’

‘Why didn’t you call me?’

‘It’s just a missing persons thing. They come in all the time.’

‘Maybe. I’m going with them.’

‘You’re not in today, are you?’

Jessica didn’t hear him and was already off to get the address from one of the men in uniform. Something seemed a bit too familiar. Missing persons reports did come in all the time but how many left their phones at home and locked the door before going missing? If you wanted to disappear, you just did it.

She got in her own car and headed towards the address. She knew roughly where it was but not exactly. It was generally in the same area as the first two victims but on a main road where you wouldn’t want to be out after dark. The street was notorious for street prostitutes and kerb-crawlers and there had been a couple of vicious assaults in the past year or so. Jessica found the address fairly easily, mainly because there was a police van parked outside.

It was a ground-floor flat at the end of a row of dingy-looking shops. The main door was next to another on the side of the building which backed onto some sort of delivery yard for the shops. Beyond that was a patch of grass and some wasteland. Jessica went to talk to the two members of the tactical entry team, introducing herself and showing her identification. It wasn’t usual policy but the tactical entry team said they were under instructions to wait for the uniformed officers to arrive. Jessica soon saw why; a girl who certainly looked as if she was still a teenager came storming up to her, pointing a finger. ‘Are you in charge?’

‘No.’

‘Well, who is?’ The girl looked back towards the tactical entry officer. ‘Why can’t you just hurry up and go through the bloody door? My mum could be hurt in there.’

Jessica quickly weighed the situation up. Tactical had arrived ready to go in but, given the daughter’s hostility, had called in for uniform to escort them just in case. There was another woman standing on her own not far from the flat’s front door smoking. She was quite a bit older, certainly in her fifties. Jessica first went to try the door handle but it was locked, so she walked across to the other woman.

‘Hi,’ she said.

The woman looked sideways at her without a smile, replying: ‘All right?’

‘What are you waiting for?’ Jessica asked, trying not to sound too aggressive.

‘I live upstairs,’ the woman said, pointing towards a second door next to the first. ‘Kim woke me up with all the shouting. She was round yesterday wanting to know if I’d seen her mum.’

‘Have you?’

‘Have I heck.’ There was a clear hostility to the answer.

‘You don’t get on?’

‘Would you get on with someone working as a whore in the flat underneath you? Door going at all hours of the night and all that noise? You lot don’t do anything.’

Jessica hadn’t introduced herself as a member of CID but the woman clearly knew. Jessica also had to admit the woman had a point. Kerb-crawling was illegal but prostitution in itself wasn’t. Her ‘lot’ almost certainly hadn’t done anything but there wasn’t a whole lot they could do. The daughter who Jessica assumed was ‘Kim’ came pounding back across the yard towards the two of them. ‘I bet you’re loving this, aren’t you?’ she shouted at the woman.

‘Leave me alone, Kim. I told you yesterday I haven’t seen Claire.’

‘Oh, piss off. You were always moaning, banging on the bloody ceiling. Calling the old bill.’

Jessica stepped in between the two of them, pointing towards a piece of grass between them and the tactical team. ‘Okay, Kim, I think you should go over there,’ she said. ‘It won’t be long.’

Kim glared at her. She was wearing jeans and a tight-fitting dark T-shirt. Her long blonde hair was tied into a loose ponytail. If it wasn’t for the snarl on her face, she would have been pretty.

She turned from Jessica to the other woman, hissing a reply – ‘You better not have anything to do with this’ – before walking towards the spot Jessica had indicated.

‘That’s what I get all the time,’ the woman said to Jessica. ‘You’d think I was the one causing trouble.’

‘How long have you lived here?’

‘A year or so. I want to move out but am stuck on the housing association waiting list. Because I’ve got a place to live I’m not a priority.’

‘Has the mother lived below you this whole time?’

‘Claire? Yes – it’s a convenient location for her, ain’t it?’ There wasn’t much else they could say to each other but moments later a marked police car pulled up next to Jessica’s Punto behind the van. Two officers clambered out and crossed to the two tactical officers who were taking some heavy-looking equipment out of their van. The flat’s door was double-glazed and very similar to the Christensens’ and Princes’. From everything the locksmith had told her a couple of weeks ago, they weren’t very easy to kick in.

As the other officers arrived, Kim again marched over to the tactical team before all four officers and the girl went towards the front door. Jessica joined them and everyone was asked to stand back while the team smashed their way through using a two-man battering ram.

The door took a fair amount of hammering before eventually succumbing to the brute force. Jessica wanted to be first through the door but Kim beat her to it, dashing inside and disappearing from view. Jessica started to lead the other officers in but, as she heard the ear-piercing scream, she knew exactly what they would find.

25

The woman might have been a prostitute and caused misery for her neighbours but she didn’t deserve to die in the brutal way indicated by how she had been found. Jessica followed the screams into a room on her left as she saw Kim standing over a double bed, hysterical. Jessica’s first thought was a selfish one; Kim had blood on her hands and had already contaminated the scene. The biggest uniformed officer physically picked up the shouting, kicking daughter and took her outside.

The woman sprawled across the bed was naked and face down. Aside from the unclothed limbs, there was a mass of bleached blonde hair spread out but discoloured in parts by the deep red blood. Jessica stopped any of the other officers from entering the room, waiting at its entrance. She told them to help calm down Kim, and ensure the woman who lived upstairs went nowhere either. Jessica took her phone out of her pocket and called the station to report what they had found and then called Cole. She would leave it to him to pass the news up the chain, while a Scene of Crime team would be requested.

Jessica took in the whole of the bedroom. The scene of this murder seemed much more vicious than the first two and Claire must have fought harder than the previous victims. The obvious first response was that whoever had killed her had been a client but Jessica knew full well that a locked door was no obstacle if the killer was the same as that of the first two victims.