Desperate to get one up on Eddie bloody Mitchell, who he knew had enquired about the property, Jimmy had ignored her advice and bought the poxy place. Alice shook her head. If only Jimmy had listened to her warnings, their lives would have been so very different. The house had been cursed from the word go. So much badness had happened while they’d lived there, it was beyond belief. Jimmy having an affair had set the ball rolling. Alice had left him for years, but when she finally forgave him and moved back home, everything else started to go wrong. Jed got involved with Eddie Mitchell’s slut of a daughter, Frankie. Marky boy was killed by Eddie’s brothers, and just when Alice thought things could get no worse, her grandson Luke had had his brains blown out at poor Marky’s funeral. Then there was the last murder, the final nail in the coffin that had forced them to do a moonlight flit to Jimmy’s pal’s plot of land in Scotland.

‘Why fucking Scotland?’ Alice had screamed at her husband at the time.

‘Glasgow is the perfect place for us to hide out with the chavvies. It has such a small travelling community, it’ll be the last place anyone comes looking for us and even if they do, they’ll never find us on Mickey Maloney’s land,’ Jimmy had reassured her.

For once, her husband had been right. Mickey Maloney owned five acres of land situated off the southbound carriageway of the A80. Mickey’s family also lived on the land, along with four other travelling families. They were a happy, tight-knit little community that trusted one another implicitly and Alice had become especially friendly with Sarah, who lived in the mobile home opposite her.

Hearing the sound of her son’s cumbersome tipper truck approaching, Alice snapped out of her daydream and opened her eyes. When she and Jimmy had first moved to Scotland, they’d refused to tell their son Billy their whereabouts, because they didn’t trust his big-mouthed wife, Shannon. Billy had left Shannon just over a year ago and had since moved to Glasgow with his eighteen-year-old son, Mush. Alice loved having her son and grandson living next door to her. After losing so many important people in her life, the family she had left meant the world to her.

‘You seen or heard from your father on your travels?’ Alice asked, with a hint of annoyance in her voice. She’d been trying to get hold of Jimmy earlier, but he wasn’t answering his bloody phone.

‘Yeah, I spoke to him earlier. He was dropping a horse off in Stirling, then he was going for a game of cards with the lads.’