Easton smiled and fired up the engine. Dani stared over at the Grants’ house. There was no sign of Mary at the windows. But as Easton swung the car back out onto the street, Dani found herself focusing on the house opposite, because in the upstairs window she could clearly make out a man, standing close to the glass, facing out. Ed Francis, most likely. The same man who’d called the police three days ago, according to Easton. Dani held his gaze. It seemed like he was staring right at her, his eyes piercing and… menacing.

Francis stepped back from the window and his form disappeared into darkness. Dani shivered.

‘You ok, Dani?’ Easton said, snapping her from her thoughts.

‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ She squirmed in her seat and focused her eyes back on the road ahead. ‘Why?’

‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

Dani huffed. ‘No, not a ghost.’

She didn’t believe in ghosts. Quite what she’d seen, though, when she’d looked into Francis’s eyes, she really couldn’t explain.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

‘What did you make of Mary Grant then?’ Easton asked as they drove back towards central Birmingham, to the address they’d been given in Handsworth.

‘Hard to say.’

‘Do you really think her son would hit her?’

‘I can’t see why she’d say so if he didn’t.’

‘You don’t think she’s covering for the husband? That’s what the PCs initially reckoned, though the Mr and Mrs both denied it.’

‘If she was covering for the husband, do you not think she’d say she walked into a door handle or something like that? Why get her son into trouble?’

‘Fair point. And he does sound like he’s out of control. Drugs, drink driving, assaulting his own mother. Yet on the face of it they seem like such a respectable family.’

‘Kind of like Paul Reeve’s family then, don’t you think?’

Easton nodded. ‘Do you think Ethan is more than just an acquaintance then?’

‘You mean do I think he could be mixed up in drug dealing too?’

‘No. I mean, do you think he could be the killer? It’s possible, isn’t it? A history of violence, mixed up with drugs…’

‘Or he could be the next victim. We can’t rule out that there’s a multiple killer out there.’

‘A serial killer?’

Dani cringed at what Easton said. Serial killer. The words still sounded outlandish and ridiculous, even though she was the one who’d first mentioned the possibility, and even though she knew only too well that such people really did exist. And the life and death of Natalya still worried Dani. Why had she been bound like that? And what had happened to Grace Agnew?

Dani’s phone chirped in her bag. She lifted it out and saw the call was coming from a withheld number.

‘Yes?’ she said, answering it.