The Perfect Girl

SAM

It’s déjà vu: Zoe Maisey sits in front of me, and once again she’s white with shock. The only difference is that there’s no glass in her hair this time, and no hospital outfit. She’s wearing a teenage-girl tracksuit-pyjama-type outfit, covered by a flimsy cardigan, which she’s wrapped around herself tightly. She’s shaking.

Beside her sits her uncle. He’s red-faced, sweating and he stinks of alcohol. I hope he hasn’t driven Zoe here because I suspect he’s probably still over the limit, but I reassure myself that surely somebody in this family would know better.

But the worst thing is, that in spite of the bloodshot eyes and the oily, widened pores, and the untended shock of hair that’s just starting to grey at the temples, he’s quite obviously a very nice and also a good-looking man. His manner is lovely and gentle, though he’s surprisingly posh. I never imagined Tess with a posh husband, but I can see instantly why she married him and I have to stop myself from hating him for this. I must not make comparisons between us. Jealousy would not be appropriate.

‘She really needs her aunt,’ Richard says to me. ‘My wife. We’ve been trying to get hold of her for hours, but she went out somewhere last night and left her mobile at home and we don’t know where she is.’

I know his name, but he doesn’t know that I know it, and I must be careful what I say.

I extend my hand to him. ‘Sam Locke,’ I say.

‘Richard Downing.’ His handshake trembles, and his palms are clammy. He gives a two-handed shake, and his wedding ring, identical to Tess’s, clashes with my knuckle when he encloses my hand with both of his. ‘I’m sorry to turn up like this, but I know how much you helped them before. My wife, Tessa, told me about it, and Zoe was desperate.’

I wonder why he never came to court in Devon, why he and I have never encountered each other before. I’ve no time to consider this, though, because he’s speaking urgently, almost furtively.

‘The thing is, I’m worried about her,’ he says. ‘I don’t know where she is. I’m sorry, I know it’s nothing on top of what happened last night, but it’s so unlike her. What if she’s come to harm too?’

He’s wide-eyed and genuinely worried, but I don’t want this conversation.

I glance at Zoe who’s looking at me with glazed eyes; I don’t think she’s taking in a thing that we’re saying.

‘I’m sure your wife will reappear,’ I tell Richard, rather shortly, because how can I reassure him that I know she’s OK. ‘Perhaps she stayed with a friend last night?’

He begins to respond but I absolutely can’t let this continue so I turn to Zoe and I ask the question that’s been bugging me since Jeanette called me: ‘Why have you come to me?’

‘Because it feels like before,’ she says. ‘It feels like before.’

And she breaks down into such awful, terrible sobbing that it’s as if the sound of it alone could wound you. But what I’m wondering, even while she vents her grief, is whether Zoe knows something and knows that she needs protecting.

Richard tries to comfort her. He puts his arms around her and her head falls on to his shoulder. He looks as though he’s feeling like death, and when our eyes meet his expression is one of compassion and confusion with a ‘help me’ in there too.

‘Why is it like before?’ I ask Zoe when her tears ebb a little. ‘Do you feel responsible in some way?’

Richard says, ‘Now hang on!’

‘I need to ask.’

‘She’s just lost her mother!’ Saying it chokes him up.

‘And I’m on her side, but I need to know why she wanted to come here.’

Zoe is emotionally and socially immature, but she’s also exceptionally intelligent. All the reports on her at the trial stressed this. She has the processing capabilities equal to any judge who might sit on her case and she has experience of the system too. Yes, she’s in shock, yes, her mother has just died, but she’s come to me for a reason and I need to know exactly what that is.

She peels herself from her uncle’s shoulder, which is now wet from her tears, and says, ‘Because I’m afraid.’

‘Afraid of what?’

‘Afraid of Tom Barlow.’

I remember him from the trial.

‘Why Tom Barlow?’

‘They’re saying he disrupted the concert yesterday, and came to the house afterwards,’ Richard explains, as Zoe fixes me with deer-in-headlight eyes.

‘Do you think he hurt your mum?’

‘I don’t know. He’s nice.’

She always said that at the time: Amelia Barlow is horrible, although her mum and dad are really nice.

‘The police say they’re going to talk to him,’ Richard adds.

‘If the police know about him then you mustn’t worry,’ I tell Zoe. ‘They won’t let him hurt you. What?’

She’s shaking her head madly. ‘But what if they blame me?’

I sigh. Zoe’s mind has raced ahead down the path of somebody who has a victim mentality. I take a tough line with her in response: ‘Is there anything to blame you for, Zoe?’

‘Oh dear God, you poor child.’ Richard rubs her back. ‘You don’t have to answer that.’

In her eyes I see she understands that I have to ask this, and that she’s ready to answer. It’s not the first time we’ve discussed her responsibility for somebody else’s death. Zoe and I have trodden these boards before and it doesn’t faze us, although Richard looks as though he might puke.

‘No,’ she says, ‘I was asleep. I fell asleep with my baby sister, my new sister. I went to sleep with her in her room. I didn’t hear anything because I had my headphones in.’

I’m about to reassure her that if that’s the case, then she should have nothing to worry about, and that there’s surely no reason for the police to think she would harm her own mother, but Richard interrupts me.

‘Tessa went to the concert!’ he blurts out, as if the memory is a big fish he’s suddenly managed to hook out of the empty lake of his booze-addled brain.

‘And she came to dinner with us afterwards,’ Zoe tells him. ‘She was there.’

‘Yes that’s right,’ Richard agrees, as Zoe reminds him of Tess’s movements, his neurons firing their way out of his hangover now, and putting last night into some kind of order. ‘She went to the concert, and we spoke afterwards and she said she was staying for dinner, but I didn’t see her after that.’

I did, I think, but I can’t say it.

‘We had bruschetta,’ Zoe tells Richard and tears still fall fatly down her cheeks. ‘But the police are there now, we’re not allowed home.’

While I often think of her as having a head that’s far too smart for her age, in front of me today she is very much a child and I feel slightly guilty for taking a hard questioning line with her, though really I had no choice.

What I realise is that I’m well beyond my professional remit here. This feels like more of a personal, not a professional visit, and that makes me feel extremely twitchy. If Tess had been with Zoe, she wouldn’t have let her come.

I stand up, look out of the window. I need to order my thoughts.

Various half-formed ideas scud across my mind: Zoe’s going to need huge amounts of help, but not the kind that I can give her. She’s here because she’s afraid, that’s all, not because she actually requires legal assistance. My gut tells me that she’s not involved in this as a perpetrator, and my gut is usually right, though not always.

But what floods me with apprehension, on top of that, and makes me try to wrench the window open further, hoping for a gasp of fresh air from the dank gulley separating our small building from the towering block beside us, is the newly forming realisation that, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t possibly help Zoe in this, in any of it, neither in an official capacity, nor a personal one. This is because the fact that I spent the night with Tess means two things: firstly, that I’m a potential witness, and, secondly, that our relationship is bound to become known.

I need, I think, a way out.