BooksBarbecue
Back The Game
Chapters (68)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. NOW
  4. One
  5. BEFORE
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Eight
  13. Nine
  14. Ten
  15. Eleven
  16. Twelve
  17. Thirteen
  18. Fourteen
  19. Fifteen
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. NOW
  26. Twenty-One
  27. BEFORE
  28. Twenty-Two
  29. Twenty-Three
  30. Twenty-Four
  31. Twenty-Five
  32. Twenty-Six
  33. Twenty-Seven
  34. Twenty-Eight
  35. Twenty-Nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-One
  38. Thirty-Two
  39. Thirty-three
  40. Thirty-Four
  41. Thirty-Five
  42. Thirty-Six
  43. Thirty-Seven
  44. Thirty-Eight
  45. NOW
  46. Thirty-Nine
  47. BEFORE
  48. Forty
  49. Forty-One
  50. Forty-Two
  51. Forty-three
  52. Forty-Four
  53. Forty-Five
  54. Forty-Six
  55. Forty-Seven
  56. Forty-Eight
  57. Forty-Nine
  58. Fifty
  59. Fifty-One
  60. NOW
  61. Fifty-Two
  62. Fifty-Three
  63. Fifty-Four
  64. Fifty-Five
  65. AFTER
  66. Fifty-Six
  67. Acknowledgements
  68. About the Author

‘Exactly,’ Cavanagh continued, standing up and leaning on the back of the chair with two hands. ‘We’ve been going through Joanna’s phone, her laptop, everything we could possibly find. We don’t have a single link to Emily whatsoever. There’s nothing on social media, nothing in her emails, nothing at all. Even those names that came up with Emily – all the fake personas she created – not a single one seems to have had any interaction with Joanna at all. So why is Emily last seen a hundred yards away two nights earlier? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Not without Emily,’ Mark said, mirroring Cavanagh and leaning on a chair himself.

‘Precisely,’ DI Bennett said, standing up and crossing towards the door. ‘At the moment, however, I think we have to go with the obvious here. Emily’s disappearance may not be connected. Still, we need to find her to make sure.’

‘I’m working on it,’ Mark said, then felt the need to continue. ‘If someone doesn’t want to be found, it makes everything more difficult.’

Which wasn’t his first understatement of the week and he felt it wouldn’t be the last.

Twenty-Four

PLAYER ONE

This was the part she hated most.

The waiting.

She couldn’t stand the waiting.

Downstairs, she could hear her mum singing along to music in the kitchen. Some old song she’d never heard before, or was likely to again.

‘Alexa,’ Holly heard her mum shout, too loud for the new device she’d picked up for herself on sale a week earlier. She’d laughed when her mum had told her about the purchase, thinking she’d never be able to use the thing properly. Turned out it was more user-friendly than Holly had realised. Which meant all she heard when her mum was home was that stupid name shouted loud enough for the neighbours to hear.

‘Alexa – play “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” by Belinda Carlisle.’

Holly sighed and grabbed her headphones, set her iTunes playlist to shuffle and placed her phone back on the bed beside her. The pink laptop she’d had for three years was perched on her legs, running slower now than when she’d first got it.

She still hated the colour of it. When she’d unwrapped it, she had smiled and said thank you, thinking the entire time this isn’t what I wanted. Still, at least her parents had got her something that was useable. Other years, they’d given her cheap hair straighteners she’d never get out of the box, or vouchers for places she never shopped at.

With the laptop, she now had a reason to spend more of her time in her room, instead of having to do her homework on the ancient desktop they had in the dining room. The thing that took half an hour to send a document to the printer, even though it was sitting right next to it.