ordinary – except for everyone in the café. All of them were acting strangely towards her. She shook her head. It had to be her. Just like she’d got Briggs so wrong, she’d made something out of nothing in the café.
She glanced back. June and Cyril had taken their favourite seats. He had his paper out in front of him and June had her knitting in her bag. Lucy smiled as she served Sally. No one was looking at her. A cold breeze caught her face and a grey cloud pushed past at speed above her. The branches on the church trees cracked and creaked, and she began to tremble under her coat. Something was going on, something she couldn’t put her finger on. Maybe it was her, finally she was losing it and there was nothing she could do to be rid of the uneasy feeling that was stalking her. She turned and glanced back but there was no one there except a lonely seagull pecking at a leftover kebab.
She sped up to a light jog until she reached her car. Staring up at the church for a second, she held her breath. An image flashed through her mind, a scene from The Omen film where the lightning rod falls from the church roof and impales the priest. Heart pounding, she got into the car and slammed the door closed as she glanced around. Breathe in and out, in and out. She couldn’t convince herself that everything was going to be okay. It wasn’t, she could feel it. Everything was as far away from okay as it could be and she had no idea how to fix it.
Chapter Forty-Four
‘You haven’t been waiting too long, have you?’ Gina ran towards Jacob’s car outside Isaac Slater’s house, disturbing the DS from his text. It was time to let her uneasiness go, for now. She had a killer to find and time was slipping through her fingers. With the press on their every move and first to criticise everything they were doing, she couldn’t stop for a break now.
‘Bloody hell. You made me jump.’ He rolled up his window and got out of his car. ‘I’ve only been here a couple of minutes. He’s in by the way, I just saw Isaac walk past the kitchen window.’
‘Great, let’s go and sound our arsonist out.’ Gina pushed open the old gate and headed to the front door. The quaint little cottage sat in the middle of its own acre of land. The grounds looked wintery dead, soggy and bare branched. In the distance she could just about make out Cleevesford, divided by the flyover and acres of asparagus fields. As she lifted the knocker, it almost came off the door. She placed it gently down and banged with her fist instead.
A man answered. The resemblance to his mugshot was still there but he had less hair on top and a couple of days’ worth under his chin, not like the angelic looking sixteen-year-old that had set five allotment sheds on fire. ‘Come in.’ His mucky jeans were belted and his polo shirt tucked in.
They followed him through the narrow hallway, trying not to bang heads on the low ceiling. Gina knocked her shoulder on the door frame as they went through to a snug. The room had a tiled fireplace at one end and an old burgundy cottage suite surrounding it. ‘Excuse the décor, my nan left me this place a few years ago. I’m still trying to do it up but you know what it’s like trying to get the cash together. What’s this about?’
‘May we sit down?’ The room was tiny, Gina felt as though she’d taken a bite of the ‘eat me’ cake from Alice in Wonderland, the one that made Alice taller.
‘Yes, but I have to make this quick. I have to get to work.’
‘What is it you do?’
‘Builder. I’m working on the new housing development in Cleevesford and I can’t afford to lose time.’ He slumped in the chair that took him lower than it should have, once again adding to the weird proportions of the room.
‘We’ve had a missing person’s report come in. A friend of yours called Penny Burton.’
He stared into the sooty fire. ‘The woman’s a crazy.’
Gina didn’t appreciate that term and she could tell instantly that Isaac thought he was funny by the smirk in the corner of his mouth. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘She’s just a drama queen. She isn’t missing, she’s just