Silent Voices

Chapter Thirty-Three

That night it rained, a sudden torrential downpour like a tropical storm. It began as Vera was running towards her house from the car and she was drenched by the time she’d got the door open. She stood just inside and shook herself like a dog, in her head blaming Ashworth, who’d kept her standing in the Willows car park, listening over and over again to the voicemail left by Connie. Maybe the woman did sound a bit strained, but Vera always felt flustered when she found herself talking to an automated voice too. She thought her sergeant was over-reacting, making a fuss about nothing. He’d insisted they go to the cottage in Barnard Bridge and they’d even looked inside again, but of course there was nobody there. Connie had explained in her message that she’d be staying away for a while. Without all that fannying about, Vera would have been home in the dry.

Driving north, she’d thought she might call in to see her hippy neighbours for an hour to wind down. They were always welcoming. There’d likely be a pan of soup on the range and some of the home-brew that was a more effective relaxant than anything a doctor would prescribe. Now she couldn’t face the idea of wrapping herself up in waterproofs and paddling through the mud. Instead she lay in the bath listening to a gloomy play on the radio, then changed into the faded tracksuit she wore instead of pyjamas in the winter.

Because she had the idea of soup firmly in her mind, she went in search of some and found a tin at the back of the larder that must have been there since Hector was still alive. Oxtail. His favourite. Heating it in a small pan, the smell brought him vividly to life. Hector, big and bullying, picking away at her confidence. Blaming her, she thought now, for being alive when her mother was dead. But what sort of parent would Vera have made if she’d had the chance to have children? Crap, she thought. She’d have been crap too. Much worse than Connie, or Jenny Lister, or even Veronica Eliot.

There was a small room at the back of the house that she used as an office. Piles of paper that she had to climb over to get in, a computer that would soon be fit for a museum. She fired it up and went to make a cup of tea while it chugged into life. It still hadn’t quite made it by the time she returned with her mug and a packet of chocolate digestives. She had a quick memory of the child doctor who’d sent her to the health club to get fit, imagined her disapproval, then dismissed it. Digestives were wholewheat, weren’t they? Healthy enough.

There was time for her to eat three biscuits before her email account was displayed on the screen. She opened the message from the scientist who’d been looking at the scraps of paper found in the bonfire burning in the garden at the Shaw house. Vera had asked Karen about the bonfire during the first interview in the neighbours’ house. ‘Did you or Derek light it before you went to work?’ It had seemed odd to Vera even then. Bonfires were for weekends, when you had the time to keep an eye on them. And Karen had looked at her as if she were mad, obviously had no idea what she was talking about. The bonfire had been nothing to do with her or Derek.

Vera had persisted. ‘Danny then? Did he help you out in the garden sometimes?’

At that, Karen had shaken her head sadly. ‘Danny didn’t really do helping. In the garden or anywhere else.’

So the bonfire had been started by the murderer. That was the way Vera saw it. A mistake. Better to take any incriminating paper away with him and dispose of it carefully. So why the hurried fire in the garden? What was that about? Why the rush?

There were really only scraps of text. Handwritten. By Jenny Lister. The forensic handwriting woman had been certain of that. It said so in the email: I’d be quite happy to appear in court. I’d stake my reputation… Blah, blah. Very dramatic. But good enough for Vera.

They’d retrieved three different pages containing text, it seemed, and all three were partially charred, one so severely that they’d been lucky to get anything. The first page was the most intact, but contained what looked like a final paragraph. At least, the writing stopped a third of the way down the page. According to the lab, one corner was burned so the ends of some of the sentences were lost, and they’d re-created the pattern of the writing as accurately as they could on the screen. Vera thought that it wasn’t hard to make out the sense.

and the importance of learning to build relationships early i

The patterns of behaviour developed in childhood can oft

no reason why another adult shouldn’t play this role. The child can then

to sustain a normal and healthy relationship with his or her own children. However, in the case study described, we see deep problems that were never properly addressed and which would be impossible at this point to solve.

Social-work bollocks, Vera thought. If Jenny had been hoping to write a popular book to explain her job to the layperson, she wouldn’t achieve it with stuff like this. Was she talking about Mattie in this piece? Vera assumed so. In that case, Vera had learned nothing from the notes on this page. Still, assumptions were always dangerous. There was no indication here about the gender of the subject of the case study, and Jenny could have been writing about somebody quite different. Besides, she’d been working with Mattie since she was a child. Would the model social worker really admit that she hadn’t ‘properly addressed’ Mattie’s problems during all those years of intervention?

Vera moved away from the computer and stretched. In the lean-to at the back of the house she could hear rain dripping. The flat roof there leaked when the wind blew from the west. Usually it did blow from the west. She fetched a bucket and a bowl to catch the drips and went back to the office. Outside it was raining more heavily than ever.

The second piece was certainly about Mattie, at least to some extent, because she was named. If the piece had finally achieved publication, Vera assumed that Jenny would have chosen a pseudonym for her, but at this early point of the process she clearly hadn’t seen the need. There was one complete sentence, then a number of gaps. It seemed that sparks had burned isolated little holes in the paper, without setting the whole sheet alight. That at least was how it looked from the scanned image that the lab had attached, along with the words within the body of the email on the screen.

The complete sentence still read like an official report or undergraduate textbook: It is sometimes a mistake to blame an outsider for disrupting the balance of a family, when other factors could be in force. Did this mean that Jenny was making an excuse for Michael Morgan? Was she implying that Mattie was solely responsible for the death of her son? The rest of the words were scattered apparently at random as short phrases, separated by the burn marks.

Death by drowning is never t stice system substitute mother can someti

happiness s then the trigger n alternative way of Sometimes it’s best not to intervene. illness tie Jone

Vera stared at the screen. She felt suddenly cold and realized that the timer had switched off the heating. It was already late. She fetched her outdoor coat and sat in that, would have fancied a whisky, but couldn’t be arsed to get up again and fetch it. Still there was the background sound of rain, like shingle hurled against glass. The snatches of text tantalized her. Death by drowning surely meant Elias. But Veronica’s son was drowned too. What was the word that Jenny had written after ‘never’ in the first phrase? Vera printed off the scanned image of the charred and blasted paper, held a ruler across it so that she could see which words were written on the same line, but still it made no sense.

In frustration she turned to the third sheet of paper. This was the most damaged. In the email, the technician had said she thought it might have been torn in half before it was burned: there was one ragged edge. It seemed clear to Vera, even from the brief fragments that the tone was different, less formal. This wasn’t a note from an official report, but more like a personal diary entry.

What the hell

ing friendship

That word ‘friendship’ again. Vera had heard it that evening as Morgan had tried to scrabble his way out of the hole he’d dug by not telling them earlier about his meeting with Danny Shaw. It seemed to Vera that Jenny had had few real friends. There was the teacher, Anne, but that was more an arrangement of convenience. Two women of a similar age who enjoyed each other’s company. The relationship satisfied Anne’s need to admire, and Jenny’s to be admired. Friendship surely implied something stronger than that. Friendship was what Vera had with Joe Ashworth, but not yet with the hippy neighbours. And had Michael Morgan and Danny Shaw really been friends? The idea was improbable. They fed each other’s egos, nothing more, so why the sentimental drivel from Danny in his last conversation with Morgan?

Vera looked at her watch. Past midnight. The questions were too difficult for this time of night, and tomorrow would be an important day. She felt that she was grappling towards some sort of solution. Ashworth was right; they needed to find Connie. She shut down the computer and sat for a moment listening to it grind and chug to a close. When this case was over, she’d treat herself to a new machine. Perhaps Joe would come with her to buy one.

Lying in the bed she’d slept in as a child, between the sheets grey with washing, which had probably been in use since then too, images and ideas floated into her head and then fluttered away from her, like the charred tatters of paper blowing from a bonfire. Outside, it was still raining.