Dom grinned and passed the spliff over. Austin took a tiny toke on it before passing it back. He avoided coming to Manchester as a rule, and he felt jumpy enough already without clouding his mind with Skunk. He also wasn’t happy that there were only two of them here, because if something went wrong and they got separated, he’d be fucked for getting home.
‘Not long now,’ Dom said when he spotted another light going out along the row of houses he’d been watching.
Austin rolled his head on his shoulders, trying to ease the tension that had gripped him when Harry Cox’s call had come through. His bird was due any day, and he’d promised to be at the birth, so he hoped this was going to be fast and easy.
39
Rob leaned forward in his seat and stared at the image on the laptop screen. It wasn’t the clearest of shots, because it had obviously been taken on a phone from a distance, and the woman in it had her face turned sideways on to the camera. But he was certain it was Josie.
Suzie had told him that she’d searched for Josie on all the social media sites she could think of, but if she’d searched for Josie on Google as well, instead of focusing all her attention on the dead couple, she might have made the same discovery as Rob – and her mind would have been blown, just like his currently was.
It had taken a while, because there were loads of women called Josie Evans on the Net, and Rob had waded through hundreds, if not thousands, of links to beauticians, florists, hairdressers and other businesses using the name. There were also numerous links to various social media profiles, but he ignored those, figuring that Suzie must already have checked them out.
Bored and on the verge of giving up at 3 a.m., he had decided to try one last search, this time entering Holly’s name along with Josie’s. Annoyed with himself for not thinking to do that at the start when a stream of articles had appeared on the screen, he’d quickly read through them. They all confirmed what Harry had told him in the pub: that a two-year-old child called Holly Evans, daughter of former heroin addict Josie Evans, had died of an overdose after drinking the bottle of methadone her mother had left open on the table while taking a nap.
The coroner had classed it as a tragic accident and Josie hadn’t been charged. Luckily for her, that story had been buried by news of the murder of Anna Hughes and Devon Prince five weeks later, and the subsequent search for Anna’s missing daughter, Charlotte – whose clothes had been recovered from the Rochdale canal, but whose body had never been found.
The last article about Holly, the one that contained the photograph, was a short piece about her council-funded funeral. The date and venue had been kept strictly under wraps for Josie’s protection, but somebody had obviously found out about it and had managed to capture this image of Josie coming out of the crematorium escorted by a police officer and a woman who looked too official to be a family member.
Rob was 99 per cent certain that the Josie he knew was the same one Harry had mentioned, and he was also sure that she had been connected to the murdered couple, as Suzie had theorized. A cross-reference of the two stories had revealed that Josie and Anna had actually been next-door neighbours, but Josie was believed to have gone into hiding before the murder after receiving death threats, so she wasn’t named as a person of interest.
That all made sense to Rob, but one thing still didn’t quite fit: if Josie’s Holly was dead, how could she be here right now?
The answer came to him in a flash. Of course! Josie must have given birth to this Holly after the death of the original one, and she’d given her the same name to keep the other one’s memory alive. It wasn’t something Rob would do, because he thought it a bit ghoulish. But women were a different species when it came to stuff like that.
Tired by then, Rob decided to call it a night. He couldn’t wait to tell Suzie what he’d found out, but he would keep Harry well out of it. If she found out he’d lied about the interview and had actually gone looking for information that could have potentially put her little friend in danger, she would boot his arse out for good this time.
After closing the laptop down, he got up and stretched. Tensing when he heard a scuffling noise outside the back door, he slowly lowered his arms and looked behind him. The blinds were drawn at the window, so if someone was out there they wouldn’t be able to see him. A block of carving knives stood on the counter to his left, and he slid the largest one out of its slot and gripped it firmly in his hand before creeping towards the back door.
Before he reached it, there was a dull thud and the glass from the panel next to the door handle fell onto the tiled floor. A gloved hand snaked through the gap before he had time to react, and he watched in horror as the key was turned – the key he was forever warning Suzie to take out before she went to bed at night.
The door opened and two hooded figures stepped inside; one white and holding a metal baseball bat, the other black and pointing a handgun at his face.
‘You must be Robert?’ the black man said, his deep voice sending a shiver down Rob’s spine.
‘Wh-what do you want?’ Rob stuttered, taking a step back, trying to put the table between them. ‘There’s no drugs or money in the house.’
‘Put the knife down,’ the man said, walking further into the room as his friend re-locked
