‘Great,’ Carson said, rolling his eyes. ‘The security racket must be doing well. How do these people grow fortunes?’ He shook his head. ‘The back streets of Blackley will be crawling with amateur sleuths right now, none of them fit for fucking purpose. Can you imagine what it will be like when all the local smackheads think they’ve got a path to easy money. Don will get more names than fucking Lloyds.’

‘Maybe we can persuade the drug squad to muscle a bit of info out of someone,’ the same voice said. ‘You know how it is, they’ll do anything to stay out of a cell.’

‘Try everything,’ Carson said, and then turned his attention to two detectives sitting at a table near the front. ‘Anything from the phones?’ he asked.

The detectives shook their heads in sync with each other. ‘Nothing yet, except people telling us that it might be gangland, because Jane’s father is a crook,’ one said.

‘Has anyone else got anything that can take this investigation forward?’ Carson asked, his eyes scanning the room. No one answered.

Carson sighed. ‘So it looks like it’s forensic results or nothing for the moment. Anyone got an idea?’ The room stayed silent, and so Carson clapped his hands. ‘Come on, back to it. Phone your families and apologise that you’ll be out for most of the night. If they moan, just be glad that they’re alive.’

Carson grabbed his jacket and nodded at Joe. He raised his hand to the back of the room, towards Laura, gesturing at her to follow. As she excused herself past small muttering cliques, Rachel Mason flashed her a glance, but Laura turned away. She didn’t have time for squabbles about Rachel being left out.

As Laura got close, Carson said, ‘We’ll check whether anything was found at the scene, and then you go to Mike Corley’s house. We need to find out more about Deborah. People might remember more now, because the news is less fresh for her. Go over again where she went, who she slept with, who she knew. We might just find a link between the two women.’ He turned to Laura. ‘Try and speak to Corley’s wife alone, if you can. Talk to her as a mother, not as a copper. You might just get something from her that way.’

Carson walked out of the Incident Room, Laura and Joe following behind, and turned into a room that sometimes got commandeered for meetings with community leaders and criminal justice committees. It was the murder squad’s turn now. There were two officers in there, supervised by a young female Crime Scene Investigator, cataloguing everything that had been collected from the scene. The table was filled with exhibit bags, and notes were being made about which officers had yet to provide statements detailing their finds. This was part of the routine, the exhibit trail, some of the grunt work done by those away from the frontline. A CSI used to be called SOCO, Scenes of Crime Officer, but American TV had glammed them up.

‘Is there anything that looks promising?’ Carson asked.

One of the officers looked up and shrugged. ‘You’re the detective.’ When Carson scowled, he added, ‘Just the usual scrap metal collection. Ring pulls, bottle tops. There are some cigarette ends, but they are so mashed up that I can’t see them being much use.’

‘Get them analysed anyway,’ Carson said.

‘I’ll speak to forensic submissions, but I wouldn’t hold out much hope,’ the CSI said. ‘The budget doesn’t stretch to speculative stuff these days.’

Carson looked surprised. ‘Doesn’t it?’ he said, grimly. ‘Well, I don’t fucking care about pulling back, because when we have another death on our hands, the case will get even more expensive. Tell forensic submissions that if they refuse to send anything off that later proves to be crucial, I’ll give their number to the next victim’s parents so that they can explain why they couldn’t afford to save their daughter.’

The crime scene investigator looked at the floor, clearly not wanting to take Carson on.

‘We’re not looking at someone who hung around there, waiting for a victim,’ Joe said, his voice soft and quiet. ‘It’s a dumping ground. We’re looking for snags of cloth, that kind of thing.’

The two police officers shook their heads. ‘Nothing like that, but if the body had been there for a while, he hadn’t, and his traces might have gone.’

Carson turned away. ‘I guessed as much.’

‘So what now?’ Laura asked.

Carson sighed in frustration. ‘Unless Mike Corley can tell you anything new, we wait for the phone call that gives him up, or for the post-mortem to yield something. Apart from that, we just hope.’

Chapter Thirteen

Jack was sitting in his car, writing the story on his laptop, his phone plugged into the side, acting as a modem. This way he could send the story straight to Dolby when he had finished. He was by the Whitcroft estate again, feeling like he was spinning plates as he moved between court and assignments, looking again for quotes for the feature.

He sat back and stretched his fingers. The murder story was done. It was short, with just a description of the murder scene and the bare details from the press conference, padded with the ongoing grief of the Corley family. It told everyone what they needed to know, that a young woman from Blackley had been murdered. The police hadn’t released much else.

He read through it, saved it, attached it to an email, and then sent it to Dolby’s inbox, all from the front seat of his tired old Triumph Stag.

He looked at the estate through his windscreen. It was nearly six, and he saw people returning from work, some of the ones he had seen earlier in the day. There were some kids ahead, in their late teens, sitting on bikes and watching young girls walk past with their prams. The soft glow of a cigarette passed between them, although from the way their fingers snapped for their turn it seemed that the paper contained more than just tobacco. People who spotted them in time crossed over when they got near. The tallest of the group leaned to talk into a white van that had pulled up alongside them. It was the same security van Jack had seen earlier. He noticed letters on the side this time: DR Security.

Jack put his laptop away and strapped the bag over his shoulder as he climbed out of his car. There was no point in putting it into his car boot, because the group had seen it. He pulled out his voice recorder and hovered near the shops. Every time someone came near, Jack asked if he could speak to them about the problems on the estate, or whether the police were doing enough, but no one seemed keen. They just rushed into the shop or kept on walking. It looked like he was going to have to do the door-to-door stuff. He glanced over to the group again. They were still watching him.

Jack headed away from the shops and towards the first cul-de-sac. He was about to knock on the first door when he heard the sound of tyres scraping along the kerb behind him. As Jack looked around, he saw that it was the white security van.

‘Can we help you?’ the driver said through the open window, his hands fat around the steering wheel.

Jack bent down to his level, and said, ‘No, I’m fine.’

The driver and his companion were just as Jack expected, bulky and wide-necked and tattooed.

‘I’ll put it a different way,’ the driver said. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Just doing my thing,’ Jack said.

‘Which is what?’

‘It’s my thing, not yours, which sort of ends the conversation,’ Jack said, and then he turned to walk away.

Jack didn’t expect the conversation to end there, but he had to let them know that he wasn’t intimidated.

‘No, it doesn’t,’ said a different voice.

Jack turned around and saw that they were both out of the van now. They were dressed identically: black trousers and black silk jackets, with hair shaved to the scalp. The second man was much shorter than the driver, and one thing Jack had learned from seeing drunken pub fights is that the big man will hurt you the most, but the little man is more likely to start the fight.