Josh shrugged. ‘We can’t be spending all our time in hotel rooms or at your place at the club. I could rent us a really nice place. Bigger. Better. In your name, not mine, I don’t want you worrying that I’m going to fucking well abandon you or some crap like that. I’ll set up a standing order paying the rent into it every month. So come on. Let’s go shopping for what this lot call real estate. What do you say?’

‘I don’t believe this.’

‘Believe it. It’s true.’

Claire let out a squeal and threw her arms around him. ‘I love you!’ she shouted.

‘I know,’ he said, laughing.

105

105

Shauna nearly threw a fit when two uniformed police came knocking at the door. Her first thought was Josh. Something’s happened to Josh. Her second was that somehow they’d found out about her killing the two Cleaver brothers all those years ago. Or the other things. There were other things, bad things, and the police on the doorstep brought them all crashing to the front of her mind.

‘What the hell?’ she asked them.

She was alone in the house except for Aysha, who came lumbering, large with the baby, into the hall and stared at the two coppers on the doorstep.

‘Is Mr Minghella in? Mr Joey Minghella?’ asked one of them.

Aysha went white as a sheet. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘What’s going on?’

Shauna put a comforting arm around her daughter’s shoulders. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ she said, giving them her most penetrating stare. ‘Why do you want him?’ she asked.

‘We want to talk to Mr Minghella in connection with a serious incident. Is he in?’

‘No, he’s not. He’s gone over to see his father,’ said Aysha. ‘He’s my husband.’

‘Can we have his father’s address please?’

Aysha reeled it off. ‘What’s all this about?’ she asked.

‘Nothing to concern yourself with, Mrs Minghella. We need his help with our inquiries.’

It was only later, when they’d pulled Joey in, that Connor drove Shauna and Aysha down to the police station and the true facts of the case came out. A Mrs Rothstein’s neighbours had told them she had a gardener called Joey Minghella so the police needed to speak to him as soon as they could because something awful had happened. Poor Mrs Rothstein had been the subject of a robbery, in the course of which she had suffered a stroke and died.

That evening, Shauna phoned Josh at his New York hotel, but they said he was out. Could she leave a message, they would make sure that Mr Flynn got it.

‘Tell him to phone me back, it’s his wife, it’s urgent,’ said Shauna.

‘Your number?’ asked the receptionist, who had seen Josh going through the lobby many times with an attractive middle-aged blonde woman.