‘Mr Roberts, please, let us do our job.’

Don slammed his hands on the arm of his chair and rose quickly to his feet. ‘Why should I?’ he bellowed, his face contorted by rage, tears in his eyes. ‘Would you, if you were where I am, because even if you do find the killer, which I fucking doubt, it will all be for nothing, because how long will he go away for? Ten years? Fifteen? And then he’s out. That’s if you even put him in jail. And you want me to spend those years waiting for him to come back onto the streets, back into my community?’ He stood over Carson, his hands balled tightly into fists. ‘I’ll find the murdering bastard, and I’ll make sure it won’t happen again, you can trust me on that.’ He jabbed his fist towards the door. ‘You need to go, now.’

‘Mr Roberts,’ Laura said, to deflect Don’s attention away from Carson. ‘We need to find out what we can about Jane.’

‘So do I,’ Don said, and then he stood up to leave the room.

Laura exchanged quick glances with Carson, but then she was taken by surprise when Roberts gripped her arm and hauled her to her feet.

‘I said out!’ Don said, and pushed Laura towards the door.

Laura looked at Carson, unsure what to do, but Carson pushed past her, pausing only to put his business card on the mantelpiece.

‘If you want to tell us anything, Mr Roberts, give me a call,’ Carson said, his voice measured. ‘I investigate murders, nothing else. This will be about Jane, not about how you make your money.’

Don Roberts didn’t say anything as they left the house, and when they were back on the path outside the front door, the door slammed behind them. There was silence for a few seconds, but then it was broken by the sound of sobbing from Mrs Roberts, audible even outside.

Laura blew out. Murder was just as much about the living as it was about the dead. She looked at Carson, who shook his head and then walked towards his car. He didn’t need to say anything, Laura knew that. Don Roberts was blinded by his dislike of the police, and if he found the killer before they did, there would be another death to deal with.

Chapter Nine

Laura was in Carson’s slipstream as he rushed into the police station, past a television crew that was still unpacking its gear and through the large wooden entrance door, banging it hard against the wall behind. One more hole for the maintenance team to fill.

The station was busy, just as Laura had expected. The day was rushing on, nearly one o’clock already, and it seemed like all rest days had been cancelled. There was going to be a high police presence in Blackley today, to provide reassurance to the community. Everyone was hanging around and waiting to be despatched, talking in small groups in the canteen, which was situated in the centre of the station in a bright and airy atrium, lit by the sun streaming through the high glass roof. Two police drivers pushed their way through, pulling trolleys behind them, one containing bags of files to be taken to the prosecution office, and the other filled with large brown exhibit bags, heading towards the forensic laboratory a few miles away.

Carson had commandeered a room on the ground floor, a large glass-fronted space with views over one of the car parks. The squad was based at the constabulary headquarters on the other side of the county, and so they had to set up base camps in other stations whenever a murder took them further afield. Desks lined the room. It was used mostly for training, the new boom industry, with computer terminals around the edges, the white board at the front filled with the enquiry routes from Deborah Corley’s murder. Laura saw Joe at a computer screen, and as she walked in, he looked up and waved tiredly.

‘What are you looking for?’ Laura asked.

He sat back and ran his hands through his hair. Laura noticed a few grey streaks.

‘I’m trying to find similarities,’ he said. ‘He must have done something like this before.’

Laura heard Carson grunt behind her. ‘He did,’ he growled, and he pointed at the photographs on the wall. ‘Three weeks ago.’

Joe didn’t answer, just flashed Laura a half-smile, and she guessed that he had learned to let Carson’s moods blow themselves out. Carson was bad-tempered and aggressive, and he didn’t have the bedside manner of some, but if Laura ever wanted a copper on her side, it would be him.

Carson sat down and sighed. ‘Go on then, hotshot,’ he said to Joe. ‘What have you got?’

Joe twirled his pen in his fingers. ‘So far, nothing. At least not in Lancashire.’

‘What, you think he might be from out of the county?’ Carson said.

‘Maybe,’ Joe said, nodding, ‘but not too far. He had to have known the locations well enough. And I just don’t believe that a fantasy is this well-developed without there being something else before it.’

‘Fantasy?’ Carson said.

‘The strangulation. The leaves. The dirt,’ Joe said, before standing up and going to the wall at the front, which was covered in photographs and maps. He tapped at the first picture: naked legs, flaccid and pale, sticking out of a large overflow pipe that took water from a reservoir into a nearby river. ‘Deborah Corley,’ Joe said. ‘Just the same. Leaves and dirt and grit jammed into her mouth, her vagina, her anus, dumped so that she could be found easily. I thought at first that the dirt might have been for some forensic reason, to make it harder to pick up DNA, but now I’m not so sure.’

‘Just because it is repeated doesn’t mean that it wasn’t done for the same reason,’ Carson said.

Joe shook his head. ‘When it’s repeated, it’s more than that. It’s the fantasy, part of the act. Remember what we said from the scene, that she was alive when he jammed the stuff in there. They both died from strangulation, so if we go with the forensic clean-up, then he must have attacked her and then jammed her full of debris, but that doesn’t fit in with a violent sexual offender. Sex attackers get off on the violence, so it doesn’t seem right that the violence would come after the sex. That’s when they are normally trying to get away. Some even stay to apologise, to try and comfort the victim.’

‘Maybe he couldn’t finish the job and acted out of frustration?’ Laura said.

‘What, twice?’ Joe said, his eyebrows raised. ‘Frustration suggests lack of control, because it wasn’t planned, but if you are out of control, you don’t act identically twice.’

‘So what do you think?’ Carson said.

Joe chewed on his lip for a few seconds, and then said, ‘The best I can come up with is that the removal of the clothes from the scene is part of the forensic clean-up. I think the debris and the strangulation is part of the act, and the motivation will have been sexual. If he didn’t have sex with her, he must have got his kicks in some other way. My guess is that he masturbated at the scene, maybe even onto her when she was still wearing clothes. That might be why she was naked and there were no clothes at the scene, because when her clothes went, his DNA went with them.’

‘Perhaps they were trophies?’ Carson said.

‘Possibly,’ Joe said. ‘Do you remember the small cuts on her body and legs?’

Laura and Carson exchanged glances and then nodded that they remembered.

‘I think that happened when he cut off her clothes,’ Joe said.

‘So what scenario do we have?’ Carson asked.

Joe looked at the photographs again, and then he went back to his chair. ‘He attacks the victim and fills her mouth with dirt and debris, perhaps to keep her quiet. He jams her with dirt wherever he can, for some sexual motive, and then strangles her. As she dies, he masturbates over her, and then cleans up.’

‘So it’s a pure sex attacker?’ Carson said.

‘That would be my guess,’ Joe replied.

‘What about a diversion?’ Laura said.