And then, when all four were gone and he could live with himself again, he could finally say goodbye to Nigel Collins and start his life over. It would be his tormenters who had to live with the wreckage they had caused, not him.

36

Jessica didn’t recognise the old man standing on the stall but then she instantly knew why not. The person who had worked there had got himself a new job. Emotions flooded through her and she kept repeating to herself over and over that she must be wrong. She had to be sure and approached the stall. She had been staring at it trying to take everything in and the holder must have been anxious as she reached the point where she was directly in front of him.

‘Are you all right, darling?’ he asked in a local accent.

Jessica couldn’t think straight. ‘Yes, sorry. I was just wondering about a man who worked here . . .’

The man half-smiled at her. ‘Heh, you’re not the first. I think a few of the girls around here have had their eye on m’boy over the past couple of years.’

‘Your boy?’

‘Oh not my son or anything but, yeah, he’s a good lad. He has a new job, so I’m sorry he won’t be around any longer.’ Jessica didn’t know what to say but the man clearly misunderstood the look on her face. ‘Oh don’t worry, it’s a good job. I’m pleased he’s sorted himself out. It just means I’ve had to come out of retirement until I can find someone else to take over.’

Jessica hadn’t been listening but said thanks anyway. Her mind was racing and she felt as if she were in a trance. It couldn’t be . . .

She felt she had to hear someone else say it before it would be true. She had taken a few steps away from the stall but turned around again and walked back towards the man. ‘Could you tell me what his name was?’

‘You didn’t even know? I didn’t think he was that shy. It was Randall. Randall Anderson. Maybe you’ll get lucky and come across him one day? I think he’s got a girlfriend so you might have to wait in line.’

The man laughed but Jessica didn’t. She moved quickly away from the stall, fumbling with her bag to pull her phone out. Once again, just as she needed to move quickly, her fingers betrayed her. She finally pulled it out of her bag but it caught on one of the handles and she dropped it.

Her heart froze as she saw it fall almost in slow motion. There was a small crash as it hit the ground. She bent down and snatched it up but the screen had a slight crack across it, although it seemed slightly responsive. Jessica pressed the button for her contacts list. The phone was being slow and the scroll was only half-working but she managed to get up a list of recent contacts then pressed the ‘call’ button next to Caroline’s name.

‘Answer, answer, answer,’ Jessica said quietly but out loud while the phone rang. She heard a click and for a moment thought her friend was about to speak. Instead, it was her voicemail message. While she listened to her friend’s voice, Jessica remembered that morning’s text saying her friend had been called into work. As the other end of the line beeped, Jessica spoke frantically.

‘Caz, it’s Jess. Look, wherever you are, go somewhere safe or somewhere public. If Randall is with you, make some excuse to get away and call me back? It’s urgent.’

She hung up and swore, much to the annoyance of a woman walking nearby with a young child. What did she do now? The obvious answer was to do what she always told everyone else to do – phone the police – but Jessica was thinking of her friend. What if there had been a mistake? She would be risking throwing away their friendship and perhaps her own career.

Ultimately, she wasn’t worried about treading on toes considering the case had been taken from her. It was better to be wrong and get a telling off than be right and do nothing. But if she ended up making allegations that turned out to be untrue, especially if it looked as if it were designed to coincide with Caroline moving out, their friendship would surely be irreparable. More practically too, if the police were looking for the killer and he got wind of it, he could go to ground and disappear. He had done it before and Jessica couldn’t risk that happening.

Jessica decided she should head back to the flat to see if Caroline had returned from work. If not she would at least be able to pick up her car and drive to her friend’s office and then the two of them could go to the police station while people senior to her decided what to do. From the market, the journey would only take ten minutes to get home and that might even give her a chance to see where she had gone wrong. There was a taxi rank next to the market and Jessica jogged towards it, before opening the door on the first one.

She gave the driver her address and then attempted using her half-working phone again. She called Caroline over and over with no luck but there wasn’t much point in leaving further messages.

As the taxi drove, she tried to think of things that might not fit but instead could only come up with things that justified her fears even more. Caroline had never met Randall’s parents. He said they lived abroad but it was an easy thing to say to get out of having your girlfriend meet them. And what about Ryan? He claimed he had found her files on the coffee table after she had left them under her bag but maybe he did find them where he said because Randall had already gone through them first? It was a horrible thought. It could have been her carrying those files around that led to Claire Hogan and Mary Keegan being killed quicker before the police could find the connection.

The taxi driver was good and Jessica gave him a ten-pound note before dashing out of the car towards her flat. She put the key in her front door, thinking about how a key had been turned by Nigel Collins or Randall Anderson to let himself into the victims’ homes.

She pushed the door open and went inside. ‘Caroline?’

There was no answer. Jessica put her bag on the floor next to the front door and took her phone out, putting it in her pocket and then went to pick up the car keys from her room. As she moved, she thought she could hear some sort of rustling sound coming from Caroline’s room. At first her heart leapt, with her instant thought being her friend was at home but then something far more sinister occurred to her.

Jessica crept along the carpeted hallway. She knew where the squeaky floorboards were and moved to avoid them. She passed her own bedroom door and carefully approached Caroline’s. It was mostly shut but there was a crack and she could definitely hear something moving inside. Jessica held her breath and tried to peer through the gap where the hinges met the wall but could see nothing. She looked through the already open part but could only see one side of Caroline’s bed. She slowly pushed the door open to reveal more of the bed through the widening crack, squeezing silently through the gap and looking behind the door.

Randall was standing there, his hands reaching into the built-in wardrobe but his face turned to look at her with a puzzled look on his face. ‘Jess? Sorry I didn’t hear you come in. Caroline was called into work but left me her key so I could start moving things for her. Didn’t she text you?’

Jessica felt frozen to the spot. What did she do? Randall was bigger and stronger than her. It wasn’t as if she could just go straight in and accuse him of being Nigel Collins and call the police. She already knew what he was capable of doing, having seen all four bodies. Not only that but, if he did kill her here, the police would just assume that Collins had come to deal with the officer assigned to his case. Even if Randall’s DNA was found at the scene, that would be expected as he was Caroline’s boyfriend.