Lucy walked into the empty major incident room. It hadn’t been used for a while. There were still some photos of the previous crime scenes Blu-Tacked onto the whiteboards; she walked across and pulled them down. She picked up the whiteboard rubber and began to scrub out the lists that she’d written on there, annoyed that no one had bothered to come in here and clean up properly. She’d been off work for a couple of weeks and assumed it would have been done.

Peter Browning walked in with a mug of coffee for her and put it on the desk that she always used. ‘Useless bastards could have cleaned the stuff away properly.’

She nodded. ‘If you want something doing…’

He sat down on a chair. ‘So what’s up, boss? Is this going to turn into a major investigation?’

Lucy tried not to let it show that he’d just pissed her off with his flippant attitude. He should know better; any murder was a major investigation.

‘It looks that way. I want a briefing in an hour, can you let the others know?’ She didn’t bother turning back around to speak to him and he got the message. Nodding to himself, he stood up and left her to it.

She went and sat down, logging onto the computer. Amanda was good; she’d already uploaded the photographs so Lucy could have access to them. Lucy printed out a couple of the victim and stuck them on the whiteboard. She liked her staff to be able to see the faces of the victims – it made them keep it real. It was all too easy to forget you were dealing with actual people when you worked long hours trying to catch killers. But she never did. They stayed with her and she continued to think about them long after the cases were closed and the offenders had been locked away. Usually when she woke up in the early hours of the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep.

She sipped the coffee, wondering how the woman had ended up at Strawberry Fields. No one would have chosen to be out walking late at night in that weather and where were her shoes? She’d been driven there. Judging by the amount of blood that had soaked into the gravel and filled the puddles on the ground, that was where she’d been killed. It was the primary crime scene, so who had taken her there? Why did they want her dead?

They’d found a bankcard with the name M. Benson on it in her jeans pocket, along with a soggy ten-pound note. Colin Davey was searching the intelligence system to see if there were any matches for the name, as well as the usual social media sites. She grimaced as the cold from her feet reminded her they were still damp. She needed to change her shoes. Going down to the locker room, she took out her spare pair of shoes and put the pumps she’d been wearing on the boot rack in the drying room next to the biggest pair of standard-issue Magnum police boots she’d ever seen. She’d have to try to remember to fetch her shoes later. When she arrived back upstairs, the phone was ringing in her office and she dashed to answer it.

‘It’s Catherine.’

‘What’s up?’

‘This is going to sound strange, but it’s really bothering me – the fact that she’s been bludgeoned over the head and her shoes are missing.’

Lucy smiled, relieved that the pathologist was as puzzled as she was. ‘I know what you mean.’

‘Post-mortem is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon; it’s the quickest I can do it. At least it will give you time to identify her and hopefully find her family. That’s another thing that’s bothering me. I feel as if I know her. She looks familiar, only I don’t know her – why am I thinking this?’

Lucy shrugged. ‘I can’t help you there, Catherine. Maybe you did know her.’

‘I don’t think that I did, though. There’s something about how she was found and I can’t put my finger on it. Christ, maybe it’s my age. I’ll see you tomorrow, Lucy.’

The phone went dead and Lucy put the receiver down.

The briefing room wasn’t as full as Lucy had hoped. She looked at Mattie, who shrugged, and she wondered if Browning had bothered to pass on her message. As she took her place at the front of the room, Tom came in late, as usual, with a stack of papers tucked under his arm. He stood next to her and whispered, ‘Can’t stop, there’s a management meeting and I can’t get out of it. I’m supposed to be doing a presentation.’

Lucy had to bite her tongue. A murder investigation should take precedence over a bloody management meeting. But who was she to dictate to the powers that be? She was just a pawn in the whole bloody mess. He left her to it.

‘Right. Col, do we have a positive ID on the victim?’

Colin stood up and passed her a printout of an intelligence report. There was a large picture of the dead woman staring defiantly back at her from her custody record.

‘That’s Melanie Benson, forty-five years old. She has previous: drunk and disorderly, a couple of thefts from Debenhams, mainly small stuff. Nothing major and she hasn’t come to our attention in the last four years. She has a son, Andrew Benson, who was taken into care when he was six. According to her last Facebook update, she had been to visit him and take Christmas presents for her grandkids.’

‘Does he live locally?’

‘No, Manchester.’

‘At least we have a next of kin for her. Someone phone GMP and ask them to assign a family liaison officer once they’ve delivered the death message, and give them my contact details. Have you run background checks on him?’

Col nodded. ‘He’s as clean as a whistle. Works for some IT company. It seems he’s done well for himself, considering his childhood.’

Lucy smiled. ‘It’s nice to know that it happens, that sometimes there is a happy-ever-after. That gives us a starting point. If he comes to identify his mum’s body we can interview him then. Could he have been seeking revenge for her messing up his childhood?’

Mattie shrugged. ‘You never know, it’s always a possibility.’

Lucy secretly hoped it wasn’t. Would her son leave her lying naked? She didn’t think so but until he’d been interviewed and his alibi checked he couldn’t be ruled out.

‘Seeing as Melanie wasn’t dressed for the inclement weather, let’s start working our way through the most recent associates on the list. I want the nearest pubs to her home address checked. See if she was in there last night – she was out somewhere. Find me someone who spoke to her, saw her leave. Who was she with?’

She passed the sheet of paper around the room. Browning lifted his hand. ‘I remember her – it’s a few years since I dealt with her. She used to drink in The Ball and Chain. I remember going to arrest her there once for nicking.’

Lucy nodded. ‘Can you go there, take a copy of her picture and see if she was in last night? You know the score. Once we have a timeline of her last movements we can concentrate on some door-knocking. At the moment there’re no doors to knock on – there are no houses overlooking the part of Strawberry Fields where she was found. There’s no CCTV either, and the nearest shop that might have some is the Co-op on Harrel Lane, but we know that it will more than likely only cover the entrance of the shop, so that’s no good. I’ll get the PCSOs to check all the houses along the stretch of road before the Fields start, just in case any of them have their own CCTV. Is there anything I’ve missed?’

She looked around the room at the shaking heads – she wasn’t too proud to take advice or suggestions from anyone if it would help them to catch whoever had done this.