‘He’s not going to be going at high speed because he has a child in the car. We don’t have that problem.’
‘Debatable but continue.’
‘They’ve likely been on the road for a couple of hours and they’re going to need to stop soon.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘She’s seven. She’s gonna want a loo break.’
‘To be fair, guv, they might already have stopped.’
‘Maybe not, my friend. Daniel would have wanted to put some miles between them and social services.’
‘All sounds good, but there’s over five hundred miles between us and the tip of Scotland. How will we know we haven’t gone too far?’
‘This is when we pray that our colleagues’ powers of deduction are as good as ours.’
Seventy-Eight
‘I think I’ve got her,’ Stacey said, scrolling through Ashley Reynolds’s friend list. ‘That’s the good news. The bad news is that she states only Scotland as her location.’
The boss had left them with instructions to try and make contact with Daniel’s sister and find a link between Lucinda and the witches’ descendants. She’d decided to focus on Daniel first as that information could save lives. Knowing how Lucinda fitted into this picture was not going to keep Ava safe.
‘Gimme her name,’ Penn said. ‘I’ll load up Insta.’
‘Janine Birch,’ Stacey said, opening the Facebook tab on her phone. ‘Damn it, she’s locked down so tight even Zuckerberg couldn’t get in. I can’t message her.’
‘Same on Insta,’ Penn said.
Stacey returned to Ashley’s account and scrolled down, hoping to find a post with Janine Birch tagged.
‘Got something,’ Stacey said, locking on to a photo of the two women, red-faced and windswept. The caption told her where they were.
‘Dunvegan,’ Stacey said, reaching for her phone.
‘Hang on, Stace,’ Penn said. ‘What’s the date?’
‘July ninth two years ago.’
‘School break. They might have been there on holiday,’ he said before returning to his desk. He typed in the name. ‘Nah, Stace, that’s in the Hebrides, miles away from anywhere. We can’t send them there unless we’re absolutely sure. We gotta contact her via Messenger, and we’ve only got one way of doing it.’
‘Jesus,’ Stacey sighed, picturing how this woman was going to feel when a message popped up from a dead woman. But they had no choice. They had to find out exactly where she lived and whether Daniel had told her he was coming. She had no choice but to message her from Ashley’s account.
Stacey thought for a minute before typing the message.
This is the police. We need your help urgently.
She watched as the dots appeared.
PISS OFF, SICKO.
‘Yeah, that would have been my response too,’ she said as she typed another message.
It’s urgent. It’s about your brother.
Three dots reappeared.
Fuck off, freak. You are disgusting. I’m going to call the police.
