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atmosphere was always awkward between them. They had gone from being able to chat about everything and anything night after night to having nothing to say.
    Rent prices in Manchester very much related to the quality of the area you wanted to live in. There were plenty of cheap apartments if you were happy to reside somewhere like Craig Millar did. The road they lived on in Hulme hadn’t been too bad but Jessica had opted for a newer one-bedroom flat in the Didsbury district when she moved. She could have afforded to stay in the old one if she’d wanted but, having nearly been choked to death on her own bed, that was never going to be something she was happy with.
    The new flat was in quite a respectable area but there was distinct lack of decent takeaways. There were a few but they weren’t as downmarket and full of grease as the ones Jessica preferred back near her old flat. Perhaps the best part was that her neighbours were nothing like Carrie’s. If anything, Jessica herself was the blight on the area, given the age and state of the car she owned. Her flat was part of a block of six newly built three-storey townhouses that were all converted into apartments. Jessica lived on the middle floor of one and didn’t really know her immediate neighbours, other than faces to say ‘hi’ to. Everyone pretty much kept themselves to themselves.
    Jessica liked the flat itself but it was mornings like this that made her wish she had stayed closer to the station. Technically it was a fifteen-minute drive from where she lived to Longsight. Given the traffic lights and sheer amount of vehicles piling into the city centre, it rarely took her less than half an hour on a weekday.
    In the time since Craig Millar’s body had been found they still only had some very basic information back from the forensics team. Essentially, there was confirmation of the victim’s identity and that he had been killed by either the second or third of the three stab wounds.
    Jessica stomped into the station through the front entrance in a mood because of the traffic. She started to head down a corridor towards her office but the desk sergeant caught her eye and called her over. ‘I’ve got a phone number for you,’ he said, offering her a Post-it note.
    ‘Whose?’
    ‘Someone at Bradford Park.’
    The location referred to one of the force’s main bases, where GMP’s forensics team was located.
    ‘What did they want?’
    ‘Dunno. To talk to either you or Jack – whoever got in first.’
    Jessica took the paper, on which was written a number and the name ‘Adam Compton’. She went through a set of double doors down a hallway the short distance to the office she shared with Reynolds. He wasn’t in and she walked over to her half of the room, sitting down after navigating a few piles of paper she had left on the floor the night before.
    She dialled the number and a male voice answered on the third ring. ‘Is that Adam?’
    ‘Yes, who’s speaking please?’
    His accent definitely wasn’t local. It sounded southern but she couldn’t place it. ‘It’s Detective Sergeant Jessica Daniel from Longsight. You left me a note to call you.’
    ‘Yeah, yeah,’ came the voice from the other end of the line. From the undercurrent of noise, it sounded as if he were doing something in the background. ‘Did someone tell you we found some blood scrapings under the fingernail of Craig Millar?’
    ‘I heard yesterday. Did you get a match?’
    ‘Well, sort of…’
    ‘How do you mean, “sort of”?’
    ‘According to the National Database, the blood belongs to someone called “Donald McKenna”.’
    ‘Isn’t that a good thing?’
    ‘Perhaps. Our records could be out of date but, according to the system, Donald McKenna is currently serving life in Manchester Prison.’

FOUR

    Adam Compton told Jessica his boss would be re-checking all samples and everything would be compared for a second time to the main National DNA Database. He did say that they