Page 15 of The Unforgiven

“Noted. But I imagine if you ever step foot in a church, you’ll burst into flame.” I nodded at Nick as he entered the office, carrying his laptop. He’d been trying to find out where the email I’d received had been sent from, specialising in techy stuff, which explained the limit of my interest.

There were teams now dedicated to cybercrime and security; during my degree the psychology behind internet crimes became a full-on strand, and I’d found that fascinating. How things actually worked technically was another matter.

“I’m more likely to burst into flame from Saira putting a curse on me,” Vinny muttered, watching the door like she was about to enter.

“Personally, I wouldn’t waste my energy.”

Wrigley called to order before Vinny could respond.

“Right, my twenty-four-hour party people, we have a name. No formal identification yet, but we’re seeking to resolve that in the next two or three hours. Our Jane Doe is Chelsea Bainbridge, twenty-eight years old, living on the Windfield Estate in Kirkdale, Liverpool, but she was brought up in Moston, Manchester. She was the mother to a nine-year-old girl, and seven-year-old boy who are currently with their father on holiday at some holiday park near the New Forest. There’s enough photographic evidence on his social media to make him an unlikely suspect, although I don’t think he’ll be too upset she’s dead. We don’t know why she was in Manchester, and no one has reported her missing. Today’s job, apart from hopefully catching her killer and then I don’t have to cancel the trip me and Pam have booked to London to see some play, is to find out as much about Chelsea Bainbridge as possible. I want to know what sort of toilet roll she bought, who she’d pissed off, who she was shagging – if she did something in the last two weeks, I want to know what it was.” He stopped for breath, his voice replaced with murmurings from the room.

“How did we identify her?” Lachy was sat on a desk looking slightly worse for wear.

“Mac, want to explain?” Wrigley said, looking at me.

I stepped forward, aware everyone’s attention was on me. “I picked up an email at four this morning from an anonymous, now deleted account. It contained two attachments; one was a screen shot of one of her social media profiles. The second was a still from a CCTV image caught from a camera near the Jolly Sailor. The sender said we wouldn’t be able to trace the camera, which has been true so far. The sender’s also messed with the metadata so we can’t identify anything from the screenshot, and the timestamp on the CCTV is exactly when the CCTV in the Jolly Sailor’s carpark was down.”

“Which is too much of a coincidence,” Nick clicked a button on the remote, switching on the screen. The email I’d received was there, but the subject had been removed. I doubted what it’d said had been seen by Nick. Wrigley was well aware of the players in my birth family, he had to be, and he had the skills, however well he hid them, to tweak the email before Nick saw it. “If you want the technical genius info, the sender scrubbed the camera model or device number, and the hash has been altered so it doesn’t match anything in our database. The sender wasAtlas7384,and it was sent from a protonmail address, a small, hard to get hold of server. The image metadata is completely clean – no EXIFs, no GPS, and the intel’s been edited with Redline Suite, which isn’t something your average hat knows about. I’d like to take credit for this, but this is down to Caroline.” He gestured towards a woman who looked like a seventeen-year-old who’d just wandered in from a ComiCon. She blushed and tried to hide behind a couple of the other analysts who supported the team.

I gave her a smile, making eye contact and she smiled back, then glanced at Vinny and went even redder.

For the love of god, please, no.

“How come you’ve got a special pen pal, Mac?” Vinny turned on me.

I shrugged, wondering the same thing myself. “Probably someone who knows I check my emails regularly.” Vinny was allergic to his.

“Something to consider,” Wrigley carried on. “While we start pulling Chelsea’s life apart.” He pointed over to the boards that’d been set up, displaying print outs of information we had so far, which hadn’t been much until now. A digital board was also made, which we could access on our phones, viewing new information as it came in, but most cops liked to stare at the physical board instead, usually standing far back from it. There was a reason behind it; the physical board activated spatial memory and motor planning; touching and moving the representation of the case turned abstract ideas into something felt and manipulated, making it easier to see patterns. It promoted visual synthesis, seeing the whole and not just the parts. Plus, it was easier to read and take in, given that we were all suffering from digital overload, and as Vinny had once said, when he gave his explanation, it was what cops did.

“We want to know about Chelsea’s digital life – Lachy, I don’t want you public facing while looking like you spent the night swimming in a vat of bitter. You, Nick and Verity start sleuthing online. Mac and Vinny, you’re off to Liverpool. Start with her neighbours and get a positive ID. The southern arses are on their way to speak to the ex-husband and asking a few questions on our behalf. He’s back in Manchester on Tuesday so we’ll get him then – it looks unlikely he’s involved unless he ordered a hit.” Wrigley carried on issuing directives.

I didn’t bother to listen to who else was doing what, elbowing Vinny in the ribs again instead.

“At least you won’t bump into Dr Miz while we’re in Liverpool.”

He managed to laugh. “Yeah. Wouldn’t surprise me if I turn around and she’s there. I’ll read you the texts while you drive.”

“You don’t want to drive?”

“You can have this one. Enjoy it. It won’t happen for another seven years.”

Chapter Eight

Just under an hour in a car with a Vinny, who was still regretting his life choices, was enough to have me questioning my life choices by the time we reached the Windfield Estate. Parts of both cities, Manchester and Liverpool, were in the process of being regenerated, millions of pounds being poured in to make the places less resemble the slums of the early nineteen hundreds and the soulless estates of the sixties and seventies, when no one wanted to live near the city centres and you only did because there was nowhere else.

Now the property developers had taken over the skylines, Angel Meadow in Manchester had become the very trendy Northern Quarter, a place once described by Engels as hell on earth, wretched, dangerous and degraded, and if he ever returned for a Friday night out, he probably wouldn’t think it’d changed.

It was just more expensive.

Liverpool was the same. Full of trendy bars and overpriced restaurants, people wandering around just after midday dressed as if they’d just fallen out of a nightclub, not that anyone bothered with those anymore. I couldn’t remember the lasttime I’d been in one, unless I’d been on a job and looking for someone, flashing my warrant card instead of paying the entry fee.

Chelsea had lived in a nineteen sixties three-storey walk up block, council flats that could’ve appeared as a photo for the dictionary definition. Flaking white paint on the upper levels added to a general sense of impending doom, the pebbledash and brick in need of some serious tender care or knocking down. Graffiti punctuated the weather worn exterior, tags and faded murals from a youth project maybe, carried out a decade or more ago. Communal balcony walkways ran along the front, perfect viewing spots for nosey neighbours to see and hear everything – arguments, deliveries, late-night visitors, although experience told me that the three wise monkeys would be in residence.

No, officer, I didn’t hear anything. No, I didn’t see nothing. Can’t tell you anything if I didn’t see owt, can I?

Metal security doors protected the main entrances, impotent guards given they were propped open with a bin or a pile of bricks, and rust decorated the railings; glitter that’d lost its shine.

I wondered if this had ever been a nice place to live, if it had ever been filled with the buds of excitement, of hope, or whether the despair I felt was mixed into the bricks and mortar.