Page 82 of Her Last Breath

‘Check your phone. The Burnley Reporter. Their website.’

Jane tapped the microphone icon on her phone and voice searched, the plastic gloves making it difficult to type.

‘Shit!’ she said, prompting a questioning look from Pawel. ‘How the hell did this happen?’

‘You tell me,’ Sameer bit back.

‘I didn’t authorise an official press release.’

‘Someone’s talking to them, DI Hacker.’

OK, he was pissed. But this was not her fault, though.

Jane turned her attention back to the article on the online newspaper’s front page. Police confirming link between the recent murders of Alice Rogers, Mark Burrows and Bill Hargreaves. The article went into detail about the cases being suspected suicides, mistakenly investigated as such by a police force coming across as inept, with a ‘breaking news’ headline. Jane clicked, her heart sinking further. She could feel the sweat pooling in her lower back, anger and shock mixing inside her.

Police are looking for a forty-three-year-old white male in connection with the three murders. The suspect is described as being six-foot-one, medium build, with a distinctive shaved head and goatee.

Colin Wilson. They had his description down. This was not fucking OK.

‘You need to find out who leaked this to the press and shut them down,’ Sameer ordered, his tone angrier than she had ever heard it before. ‘Understood?’

‘Yes,’ she said tightly.

Ending the call, she turned to Pawel.

‘You know this guy? Sol Brazani?’

‘Yes, “crime reporter”.’ Pawel used quotation marks in the air to gesture how much he thought of Brazani’s professional credentials. ‘Massive arsehole.’

‘Leaking stories?’

‘Yes. We have used him though, when we planted something before. I don’t know the details. DC Berry usually does press liaison for your section.’

DC Berry? What the hell?! Had he been leaking precious information to the press right under her nose?

‘The paper is funded by a tech millionaire, one of many which he has set up locally in towns like Burnley. They’re not so nice about people like me, or people who aren’t white.’

Misinformation peddling as a legitimate news site. Jane felt her temples humming now with rage. This was not over. She would pin down how Brazani was getting information and if it was bloody Steve Berry, she would nail him to the briefing whiteboard as a warning to the rest.

DS Johnson called her while she was still studying the article on her phone.

‘Ma’am, we have a major problem. Colin Wilson gave surveillance the slip at the foodbank. He’s disappeared.’

Chapter 55

‘How the hell did he get away?’

Jane was livid, surrounded by her team in Burnley HQ.

‘Two uniformed officers were outside the foodbank, they thought there was only one entrance,’ DC Berry explained.

Jane bit back her suspicion of him, following her conversation with Pawel Kowalczyk. What else had he leaked to Brazani?

‘Assumed? Why didn’t they check?’

‘They said staff were going in and out of that one door all day.’

‘The foodbank is connected to the church. Did they not twig?’