Gill was dreaming, more of a nightmare than a dream. Dave had moved back in with her, bringing the whore of Pendlebury and her spawn, and Gill was having to sleep on the sofa while they took the master bedroom. The smoke alarm was beeping but Gill couldn’t find it. She ran upstairs and down again, Dave shouting at her to turn the bloody thing off but she couldn’t see it. They’d all die in their beds. She came awake to find her phone ringing, the middle of the night. She picked it up. Trevor Hyatt, the fire investigation officer.
‘Trevor?’
‘Sorry to be so early but I knew you’d want to hear.’
‘What?’
‘The warehouse fire, Shuttling Way…’
‘Yes?’ She was expecting, if anything, him to say it was definitely the same accelerant or even that someone had seen the twins, but wouldn’t that wait till morning?
‘We found two bodies.’
Oh my God. Her heart rate doubled. She was wide awake now, mind spinning, trying to grasp all the ramifications.
‘I’m on my way.’
She snapped on the light.
Two bodies. Two more bodies. What the fuck was going on?
The warehouse was a huge structure, five storeys high and extending for over a hundred yards alongside the canal. In its heyday it would’ve housed bales of cotton for transport by the waterway to the ports at Manchester and Liverpool. Lorries would’ve done the job latterly.
Surveying the scene in the first light of dawn reminded Gill of photographs from the Second World War, bombings in Coventry and Dresden, everything shattered, black.