Silent Voices

Chapter Thirty-One

Sitting in the car outside the Shaw house, Joe Ashworth tried to imagine what it must have been like living there for the last few years. Derek, the strong man, who’d built houses, made money, provided well for his family, suddenly seeing himself as a failure. Living with dreams of what might have been. The woman, forced to give up the easy life and take work she despised. Had she blamed Derek? Secretly, and hating herself for it, had her resentment eaten into the marriage? Led her to find a lover, start an affair? Ashworth wouldn’t have been surprised. Then there was the boy, bright and charming and used to getting everything he wanted, thwarted first by Hannah and then by the change in his parents’ fortunes. Ashworth wished Vera had been with him for the interview. She would have teased out the implications of the situation. She would have made more sense of it.

He started the car and drove along the valley towards Barnard Bridge. Connie’s Nissan was still missing from outside the cottage, but he stopped there anyway, knocked on the door and looked through the windows. The post was sticking out through the letter-box. He pushed it through. Sitting in the garden, he worked through the names of Connie’s friends given to him by Frank, calling each in turn. It didn’t take long. There were only three of them, all women, and none had seen Connie for a while. ‘We sort of lost touch when she moved out west,’ one said, and that was the gist of each of the responses. They felt awkward because they hadn’t been better friends. Joe realized again how isolated Connie had become, too proud to keep up with the friends from her old life and ignored by the women in her new one. He tried Connie’s mobile once again, but the call was immediately transferred to the answering service.

On impulse he walked across the lane and up the drive to the big house where the Eliots lived. One time he’d have been nervous. He hadn’t liked policing when work took him into smart houses, was happier in the council estates, the small miners’ cottages. But Vera had worked on him: You’re as good as any of them. Don’t be intimidated by money. It doesn’t mean they’re brighter than you, and it certainly doesn’t make them better people.

Veronica Eliot opened the door. She didn’t invite him in and he felt about as welcome as a double-glazing salesman. At least the Shaws had been pleased to see him.

‘I wondered if you have any idea where Connie Masters might be?’ he asked.

‘Why would I?’

‘You were at her house yesterday afternoon when Jenny Lister’s bag was found. Being neighbourly. She’s having a tough time at the moment. I thought she might have told you. If she was hiding out from the press.’

‘I don’t think the press have got to her yet.’ Veronica seemed less hostile. Had she thought she might be the subject of his attention? ‘She didn’t mention anything to me about going away.’

‘Is there anywhere in the village she might be?’

Veronica appeared to consider, but he could tell she had already dismissed the idea out of hand. ‘She hasn’t made any close friends here. I must say, it seems unlikely.’

Perhaps because she was so offhand, Joe stayed on the doorstep. Vera had taught him to be stubborn, to face down the snotty middle classes. ‘It must have been hard,’ he said, ‘to see another child in the cottage down there.’

She looked at him with distaste. If he’d farted at one of her smart dinner parties, she couldn’t have despised him more.

‘I’m not entirely sure why you think you have the right to dig around in my family’s personal tragedies.’

He ignored that and continued, as if he were thinking aloud and no response were required. ‘There would have been an inquiry, I’m sure. A sudden death and the police would have been involved. Social services too, I expect. People must have talked. It can’t have been easy.’

Veronica lost control. The disintegration was sudden and completely unexpected, and it made him feel like a worm. Her face was flushed and she ranted at him, the words beating against him, making him flinch. ‘Do you really think I cared about that? I’d just lost my son. Do you imagine I worried that people might be talking?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘And it wasn’t just me. Christopher had lost his baby boy. I knew I couldn’t bear to have any more children after him. Simon had lost his brother. Have you any idea what that did to us?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ashworth said again.

It was as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘We never blamed Simon for what happened that day. Never. He was a child. But he was old enough to remember it. He knew he shouldn’t have run away from me. He thinks it was his fault. He’s had to live with the knowledge all his life. Do you think a bit of gossip is worse than the pain of that?’

‘No,’ Ashworth said. He had to stop himself putting up his hands to protect his head from the violence of the words. ‘No, of course not.’

The outburst ended as quickly as it had begun. Veronica became distant, icy, once again. ‘To answer your question, Sergeant, of course it was difficult to see a child playing where Patrick died. I had mixed feelings. Perhaps my response to Connie was coloured by my experience. I was unkind. But I’ve had nothing to do with her disappearance. I don’t know where she is.’

She made to turn away from him and shut the door, but Ashworth called her back.

‘Would it be possible to speak to Hannah?’

‘Hannah’s not here. She and Simon left soon after you did this morning. I assume they’re back in her house, but they didn’t say where they were going.’ She stood on the doorstep, a lonely and dignified figure, watching the detective walk away.

He found the girl in the garden behind the little house she’d shared with her mother. There was no answer when he knocked at the door and he was about to give up when Hilda waved at him from her living-room window, pointing to an arched gap in the terrace between their two houses.

Hannah was alone. Her red hair was tied back in an untidy plait and she was wearing wellingtons, a big hand-knitted sweater with a frayed rib and holes in the elbows. She was digging over the small vegetable patch. When she saw him she stopped and leaned on the fork. She was flushed and breathless.

‘Mum always planted a few new potatoes over the Easter holiday. Broad beans too. I didn’t want to let it go.’

‘You’ve been going at that like a dog at broth.’ One of his grandda’s sayings. ‘You’ll wear yourself out.’

‘I hope so.’ She smiled at him. ‘It’d be good to get to sleep without a pill. They make me feel lousy the next morning.’

‘Simon not with you?’

‘He’s taken Mum’s car to the supermarket in Hexham. I couldn’t face it – the supermarket or the car – so I said I’d stay here. We have to eat, I suppose, and I don’t want to go to the White House for meals every day.’ She bent absent-mindedly and pulled a strand of goose grass from the soil and threw it onto the wheelbarrow, then straightened. ‘Do you know who killed my mother yet?’

He shook his head. ‘Are you up to answering some questions?’

‘If you don’t mind doing it here. I feel better outside.’ And it seemed to him that she was much better, almost cheerful in the spring sunshine. She’d lost the pallor and the doped indifference.

‘Did your mum mention seeing anything unusual about the health club lately? We think one of the staff had been stealing from guests and other employees. It might be a motive.’ He wanted to start off with something impersonal, not too close to home.

‘No. Nothing like that. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t see something. We were both busy. Often she didn’t get back until late from work, and by then I’d be out with Si or holed up in my room revising. We were close, but there wasn’t a lot of time for chat.’

‘I’d like to talk again about Danny Shaw.’ Joe hesitated. This was more sensitive, but he wanted to broach it while he had Hannah to himself. ‘There’s a collage on his wall. His mother said you gave it to him. It sounds as if there was more between you than the fact that you went out together a few times. Karen says you were his first love, that he never quite got over you.’

She stooped again to pull out more weeds, avoiding his eye.

‘I fancied myself in love with him for a while. I gave him the picture while I was still a little bit besotted.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘Nothing really. I hooked up with Simon and saw that Danny was basically a bit of a prat.’

‘So you dumped Danny for Simon? That wasn’t the impression you gave yesterday.’

‘Wasn’t it?’ She smiled. ‘I don’t know. All that stuff seems so important when you’re going through it, but later it hardly seems to matter. This is a small place. There aren’t that many people of our age. You tend to have been out with most of the available boys by the time you hit seventeen. It’s like one of those Scottish country dances. Change your partner when the music stops. In the end we just all become good friends.’

Joe supposed that was true. It had been the same for him. He’d been out with a couple of his wife’s friends before hooking up with her; one had been to dinner at their house with her husband the week before. Teenage passion soon faded.

He wanted to ask Hannah if she’d slept with Danny, if they’d been that close, but resisted. His reluctance was more a matter of knowing the question would have seemed ridiculous to her than of not wanting to pry.

‘Was Danny upset? You said yesterday he emailed and phoned you after you dumped him. Did he make a nuisance of himself?’

She shrugged. ‘Nah. He soon got over it. He started going out with his new lass in freshers’ week, so he can’t have been that heart-broken.’

She pushed the wheelbarrow to the end of the garden and lifted the weeds onto the compost heap. ‘Is that all you wanted to know? I don’t think I’ve been much help.’

‘Did Simon ever talk to you about Patrick?’ Joe hadn’t meant to ask her about the dead brother, but he thought it was important: the child drowning, the effect on the adult Simon.

‘Of course.’ She wiped a stray hair away from her face and left a streak of mud. ‘We tell each other everything.’

‘What did he say?’

‘That Patrick was like a ghost in their lives. Nothing of him remains. Veronica threw away all his toys and his clothes, and they hardly ever mentioned his name after the accident. Simon said that sometimes he felt as if Patrick had never existed, that he’d created the whole incident in his imagination.’

‘Would your mother have been working as a social worker then?’ Ashworth felt as if he was groping towards a connection, an explanation.

‘I suppose so.’ Hannah looked up sharply. ‘Do you think she worked with the Eliot family after the tragedy? I suppose she would have qualified by then, and we’d be living here.’

‘It just crossed my mind,’ Joe said. ‘But that would be too much of a coincidence. Your mother would surely have remembered the case, happening so close to home. She would have mentioned it.’

‘Oh, I don’t think she would.’ Hannah was quite certain. ‘She had a thing about confidentiality. She said work had to stay in the office, where it belonged.’ She leaned the empty wheelbarrow against the wall. ‘Look, I probably won’t do any more of this now. Do you want some tea?’

‘Does Simon feel responsible for his brother’s death?’

She’d already started walking towards the back door of the house, and his question made her stop in her tracks.

‘Of course.’ She pulled out the band that was tying up her hair and shook it loose. ‘It’s made him the person he is.’