The second message was shorter, the tone more clipped.
OK, so I’m guessing you don’t want to talk to me. That’s fine, but I think it’s a bit rude to ignore me when I was only trying to make sure you were all right. I know it was your mum who got attacked ’cos Ju’s mum’s friend who’s married to the copper told her it was. I hope she gets better soon. Take care x
Feeling bad that she’d forgotten to ring Bex as she’d intended to after receiving her previous messages, Holly typed out a quick reply, even though she knew Bex would be sleeping and wouldn’t see it until morning.
Sorry couldn’t get back to you earlier, it’s been a weird couple of days, she wrote. That’s great about Leanne, bet you’re buzzing! My mum’s home from hozzy, but we had a massive bust-up this morn and now she’s
She paused and bit her lip, then deleted the last part, and wrote:
My mum’s OK, thanks for asking. See you when I come back to school xxx
PS miss you.
Pressing Send before she could change her mind, she checked to see if she’d had any missed calls from her mum. She hadn’t, and that upset her. She probably wouldn’t have answered if her mum had called, but the fact that she hadn’t bothered spoke volumes, and Holly swallowed the lump that was forming in her throat. All that stuff her mum had said about loving her and wanting to protect her – from God only knew what or who – was crap. She didn’t give a shit about anybody but herself, and Holly had never felt more alone in her entire life.
Downstairs, waiting for the kettle to boil, Suzie sat at the table and scrolled through the article she’d been reading on her laptop when she had heard Holly crying out in her sleep.
After coming home from Josie’s flat that morning to find Holly asleep, she had intended to spend some time in the basement, working on the website. But she’d been too preoccupied by everything that had happened with Josie and Rob to concentrate, and had found herself staring blankly at the screen, seeing not the photos that were actually on it, but a montage of images from earlier. The fury on Josie’s bruised face when she’d tried to force her way in . . . The anguish in Holly’s eyes as she had struggled to stand up for herself against the woman who had, until then, controlled every aspect of her life . . . The disappointment in Rob’s eyes when she had taken Holly’s side over his . . . Rob walking out . . . Josie’s empty underwear drawer . . .
With all that going round in her head, along with the fear that she wouldn’t be able to hear the doorbell down there and might miss Josie or Rob, she had brought the laptop up to the kitchen, thinking that she might be able to work better there. Holly had come down shortly after, so she’d been forced to abandon her plans, and the day had been pretty much wasted watching films.
Holly had started to fall asleep after dinner, so Suzie had told her to go back to bed. She had then come into the kitchen and turned her laptop back on, and she’d been sitting here ever since, chain-smoking and working her way through the wine Rob had left behind as she searched for Josie on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Frustratingly, none of the Josie Evanses that came up were the right one, and Suzie guessed that Holly’s mum must be one of those rare people who didn’t like social media. Suzie embraced it as a way of keeping up with the lives of friends from the past who she no longer saw in person, but she knew there were people out there who steered well clear of it, because Rob was one of them.
‘Why would anyone be stupid enough to put all their personal shit out there for the whole world to see?’ he’d asked her once when discussing what he classed as her ‘obsession’ with Facebook. ‘Don’t you think the government spies on us enough already without handing it to them on a fucking plate?’
Suzie was a little more cautious than Rob gave her credit for and rarely posted anything, and she truly doubted the government would be interested in the photos of peoples’ dinners, babies and funny pet videos that clogged up her timeline. But, just as in real life, it seemed that men were far less interested in that stuff than women, and only a handful of her male friends and colleagues had online accounts, whereas all of her female friends did. That was why she had expected to find Josie on at least one of those sites, but the woman was a virtual ghost.
Holly had said that her mum was secretive, but this level of secrecy seemed unusual to Suzie, and she wondered what the woman was hiding. Or was it, she mused, that Josie was trying to hide?
The more Suzie thought about it, the more likely that latter theory seemed. Holly had told her that she and her mum were always moving around and never settled anywhere long enough for her to make any lasting friendships. To Suzie’s mind, that was the classic behaviour of someone who had escaped from a violent relationship and desperately didn’t want the ex to find them. And that made her wonder if Holly’s father had abandoned her mum before she was born, as she’d been told. Maybe he’d been violent and Josie had fled after Holly was born, and the nightmares Holly claimed to have suffered from a young age were actually memories of traumatic things that she’d seen or heard.
That seemed like a pretty logical explanation to Suzie, but she wasn’t sure how it linked in with the murdered couple. And there clearly was a link, judging by Josie’s over-the-top reaction to Holly reading the article and questioning
