DS Jessica Daniel series: Think of the Children / Playing with Fire / Thicker Than Water – Books 4–6 Read Free Page B

you’ll need a team with you. Start sorting that and I’ll forward you the emails when they
arrive.’
    As Reynolds and Jessica exited the office and began to walk down the corridor, the DI put one hand on her shoulder. ‘Are you all right, Jess?’
    ‘Yeah, just wet.’
    ‘I mean the body you found. I know what you’re like, just breezing through everything. I found the body of a child once . . .’ He tailed off but Jessica didn’t give him
an opportunity to continue.
    ‘I’m okay. But I could do with a towel.’ She knew that wasn’t the question her colleague was asking but she didn’t want to stop working. Reynolds knew her well
enough not to push.
    ‘All right, you sort yourself out and I’ll get a few calls in.’
    Jessica was glad to get away from the inspector. It wasn’t that she didn’t like or respect him but she never enjoyed it when anyone asked questions that might make her think about
her own well-being too much. She went off to dry her clothes and hair as best she could before finding Dave in the large open-plan area which the constables shared on the station’s main
floor.
    She couldn’t help but smile as she followed a trail of water to find him towelling his own hair as he hunched over a desk.
    ‘You look as if you’ve been dragged from the bottom of a lake,’ she laughed.
    ‘You look as if you’ve been swimming with your clothes on.’
    Jessica grinned. ‘How was Laura when you left her?’
    ‘Shaken, but she’ll be okay. When she got wind that the other guy was dead, she kept saying it was her fault. I don’t know what she could have done about it.’
    ‘Do you want to come back out? We found a map in the car with the bodies. No idea what it leads to but we don’t know who the driver is yet and the body from the boot hasn’t
been identified formally so we don’t have anything else for now. There was a spade in the boot so it might be where he was going to bury the body but I don’t know why you’d need a
map for that. Something doesn’t add up.’
    Rowlands rubbed the top of his head with his hand. ‘Do you think there’s a point you reach where you can’t get any wetter?’
    Jessica was confused. ‘What?’
    ‘When you’re out in the rain, absolutely soaked, do you think there’s a point where you’re so wet, it doesn’t matter if you stay out in it because you’re
already as wet as you can possibly be?’
    Jessica screwed up her eyes, arching an eyebrow. ‘When most people settle down with a girlfriend or boyfriend, it does absolute wonders for their personality. With you, it’s just
bloody weird. I preferred it when you spent half the day looking at those shite lads’ mags, now you’re offering philosophical opinions about rain.’
    ‘I was just . . .’
    ‘Whatever. Are you coming?’
    Rowlands gave a small smile. ‘Yeah, but I’m getting one of those big coats from storage that uniform use before we head out.’
    Jessica shared a car with DI Reynolds and Dave Rowlands while two other vehicles carried teams of officers to the location marked on the map. The digital photographs were
decent quality and someone in the administration department had made copies for the team to take with them. As Reynolds drove, Jessica looked intently at the printouts in her lap. She had never
been great with directions but the images appeared to come from an Ordnance Survey map. A red cross marked an area just outside the M60 ring road not too far from the main road that would take them
to Altrincham.
    Jessica didn’t know the district too well but the map showed some woods and a few large fields which backed onto an area that one of the other officers told them was an industrial park.
The cross itself seemed to have been marked very deliberately, slightly into the woods in red pen. The photographs were a little out of focus but offered an accurate idea of what the original map
would look like.
    The entire team were now in heavy waterproof jackets and their