Finding Jennifer Jones

by Anne Cassidy

  “But I thought you rowed and she walked off.”

  “We did row and she did walk off but I followed her.”

  “You saw what happened to her?”

  Both police officers were leaning forward.

  “Did you see who hit her? Who did you see? What did you see, Jennifer?”

  Jennifer understood then. They didn’t know. They thought someone else had hit Michelle.

  “Now, Jennifer,” DI Temple said, “did you see someone hit Michelle?”

  “I…”

  “What?”

  “I hit Michelle.”

  Jennifer turned to her mother but she was looking down at her skirt, picking at something on the fabric. She willed her mother to look up at her.

  “No, Jennifer, we’re not talking about the squabble you had. We’re talking about something much more serious. When she walked off and you followed her, did you see a man, a ranger? A walker? A teenage boy?”

  Jennifer shook her head. There were too many questions.

  “I didn’t see anyone.”

  She did see the feral cat. After she’d hit Michelle she turned round and saw it sitting on a rock. It lifted its paw and began to lick it, cleaning itself as she stood and looked down at her friend on the ground.

  DI Temple sighed loudly. Margaret was frowning. Jennifer glanced at her mother who looked fed up, as if she wanted to be out of there, perhaps in her bedroom getting ready to go out somewhere.

  She had to tell them what happened.

  “I hit Michelle with the baseball bat and then I threw it into the reeds by the lake. It was me. I did it. There was no one else there.”

  There was silence in the room. Then Jennifer started to cry.

  Fourteen

  Jennifer sat in her bedroom. It was quite different to the one she had in the cottage on Water Lane. This one had a window where the glass was bubbly. It gave a lot of light but she couldn’t see out. The room itself was about the same size as her one at home but the door was different. It had three thin glass panels in it which let in fingers of electric light from the corridor outside at night. There was also a spy hole. Sometimes Jennifer saw the shape of one of the people who worked there as they peered into the tiny hole. They were checking on her. Like a prison warden, but they weren’t called that.

  The walls of her room had pictures. Scenes from fairy tales and some children’s book characters. There were books to read and some games to play. There were no toys. Jennifer was too old to play with toys. She and Michelle had made that quite clear to the other kids in their class. JJ and Michelle used to read teenage magazines and listen to music and talk about boyfriends and pop bands. They left it to the other kids to play running games.

  Jennifer lay back down on the bed. A single sob escaped from her lips. She turned to the side and pulled her knees up. It was possible to take up the smallest amount of space by lying like this. But she was cold so she dragged the corner of the duvet over and covered herself right up to the bridge of her nose. Only her eyes were above it.

  It was gone nine but it wasn’t dark yet. She was listening for the trains. They went past at regular intervals and the sound of them seemed to get louder as the evening wore on. In the day they were just in the background but as the noise of the building died down, as the children spent quiet time in their rooms, the trains seemed to come closer as if they were running outside her window.

  She wasn’t quite sure where this place was. It had been a long drive in the back of a car with Jan, one of the workers, sitting beside her. We’re going to the Facility, she’d said. They had sped through countryside and then passed streets and streets of houses, the buildings getting bigger, more and more shops and heavier traffic. Jennifer saw a sign for Norwich Town Centre and wondered if that was where they were heading. They passed a huge hospital and then turned off into a road that had car showrooms and some houses. The car sat at some gates for a while as Jan spoke to someone on a mobile phone. The gates opened and the car drove in and Jan took Jennifer to the place where she was to stay until she had to see the judge again.

  Tomorrow her mother was coming. It would be the first time since she’d seen the judge. That was maybe a week and a half ago. She was bringing some of Jennifer’s things; her clothes and schoolbooks and Macy, her old doll. She had no intention of playing with Macy any more, she was too old for that. It was just that she wanted something of her own there for when the door closed at night.

  The solicitor was coming as well. Jennifer had already seen her a few times. Her name was Alma Morris and she had very short grey hair like a man’s. She wore a dark suit and had a very heavy-looking briefcase. The handles were worn and one looked as though it was just about to rip away from the case. The solicitor told her to call her Alma and said that she would be looking after Jennifer while this whole horrible process was going on.

  There were noises in the hallway and a face popped round the door. It was Jan.

  “Main lights are being turned down now, Jennifer. You can watch your television until nine thirty. After that, room lights out.”

  Jennifer didn’t feel like watching television so she lay in the quiet listening to the trains. When the room lights went out she stared at the strips of light from the hallway. They were like bars.

  The Facility wasn’t a prison, Jan had said, but Jennifer knew that it was.

  The next morning the solicitor came at ten. Jennifer was in a meeting room waiting for her. There was a pot plant on the window and the same bubble glass that was in her room. Alma was puffed as though she’d run from somewhere. She was carrying her briefcase and a bottle of water which she placed on the table. Jennifer noticed a brooch on her lapel. It was in the shape of a heart.

  “Now, Jennifer,” she said, giving a tiny smile. “Are you OK? Are you being treated well? Is everything all right here?”

  Jennifer nodded. She had Laura, the tutor, who did some reading and Maths with her. She could play Monopoly with Jan or one of the other women if she wanted or watch television in her room. She was allowed out in the small play area as long as there was someone available to be with her. There were other teenagers there, but no one her own age to talk to. It meant that she spent long periods of time on her own, but she was used to that. At least she had been used to that before they moved to Berwick. At Berwick she had had Michelle, her best friend. She had never had a friend as good as Michelle.

  “Are you all right, Jennifer? You look a bit peaky.”

  “I’m all right,” she said, her mouth dry, her eyes heavy.

  “Now, I want to go over what’s going to happen when we go back to court and I have some quite grown-up questions to ask you, Jennifer. I know that you’re going to try and be very sensible here…”

  Jennifer nodded.

  “Do you know the difference between murder and manslaughter?”

  Jennifer shook her head. Her teeth were firmly clenched together and her jaw felt like stone. She couldn’t have opened her mouth if she wanted to. Alma was touching her hair, pulling at the strands as if she wished it was longer.

  “For a person to murder another person they have to have planned it in advance. Like they have to have sat down and thought about it for a while. In their head they might have thought things like I really hate that person. I want to get rid of that person. I’m going to hurt that person. So in their head they might have decided what they were going to do. They might, if they had a gun, say…”

  Jennifer frowned.

  “Let’s imagine that a man might know where a gun is, go and get that gun and wait until the person he hated had his back to him. Then he would shoot him. And kill him. Do you understand? That is murder.”

  Jennifer didn’t answer. She had a picture in her head of a man with a gun. She had no idea what that had to do with her.

  “Manslaughter, on the other hand, is different. It’s not so serious.”

  The word slaughter seemed to fill the room.

  “What manslaughter means is t
hat a person kills someone else but they did it without planning it. They didn’t think of it in advance. So that man I was describing might get really upset with a person and the gun just happened to be there in front of him and he picked it up without thinking and pulled the trigger.”

  “Like the baseball bat?”

  Alma seemed to falter, shuffling her papers. She looked down at her notes for a moment. Jennifer wondered about the heart-shaped brooch on her lapel. She wondered who had bought it for her.

  “Yes, Jennifer, like the baseball bat. So what we’re doing is we’re going to plead innocent to a charge of murder and argue that what you did is more like manslaughter.”

  Jennifer could only hear the word slaughter. She imagined the judge’s face hardening at her, like a slab of stone. Slaughter.

  “Will I be able to go home? After seeing the judge again?”

  Alma’s mouth pursed up as if she was sucking a sweet.

  “I don’t think so, Jennifer. I don’t think you’ll be going home for a while.”

  That afternoon her mother came. She saw her in a different visitors’ room. She had a holdall with her.

  “I brought your things, Jen,” she said. She was still dressing the way she had when she’d been with her in the interviews at the police station. She had on a dark blouse and knee-length skirt with some flat pumps. Her hair had been trimmed and was hanging neatly around her face, as if every hair had been stuck into place. Jennifer wondered what she’d done with her other clothes, her skin-tight jeans and high-heeled shoes. She wondered if they had been packed away in a suitcase in the wardrobe of her bedroom near to where she used to keep the pink fifty-pound notes in a cardboard box.

  Her mother handed her the bag. Jennifer didn’t open it.

  “I shoved everything in. I’ve been busy, what with the move. They got me a flat in Norwich. It’s a bus ride from here.”

  “Why did you have to move?” Jennifer said, thinking of the cottage in Water Lane where they had lived.

  “Neighbour’s not too happy about me being there. What with Michelle’s mother next door. Not that she’s there now. They’re staying with relatives. She’ll probably move back now I’ve gone.”

  Her mother shrugged.

  “This isn’t bad. What are the staff like?”

  “They’re nice,” Jennifer said. “I saw Alma, this morning, the lady from court.”

  “The solicitor? Yeah she’s been round to me a couple of times. What with her and the social workers. Question after question. God, it’s driving me mad! Honestly, Jen. I don’t know what to say to you about this. I suppose it was just an accident or something! You’ve always had a bit of a temper. Like that day you hit that girl at school.…”

  Jennifer remembered the day when she hit Sonia Matthews in the music lesson. It was just after the classes had gone to Berwick Waters for the day. Sonia had been friendly with Michelle and Jennifer had been upset, more upset than she could explain. Sonia had teased her, keeping on and on and then the recorder that she had had in her hand seemed to rise up and hit out at her.

  “The solicitor knows of course. There are reports at school. I tried to defend you,” her mother said. “I don’t want them saying that you were a bad sort. No way, I’m not having that. I know you did a terrible thing. I’m not saying what you did wasn’t terrible but you were always a sweet kid, Jen. Just because of this stuff up at the lake I want you to know I don’t think none the worst of you. I wish it hadn’t happened, of course I do.”

  ”I wish it hadn’t happened…”

  But Jennifer’s mother continued speaking, talking over Jennifer.

  “The solicitor keeps questioning me. Like it might be my fault. Like maybe I was always hitting you so you went out and hit someone else. That’s what she’s saying. But it’s not true, Jen. We both know that!”

  Jennifer grabbed her mother’s hand. It wasn’t true. Her mother never hit her. Not once. She felt her mother’s soft skin and let her fingers play with her mother’s nails, short, unusually with no polish. After a few moments her mother took her hand back and looked around the room. Her gaze stayed on one place and Jennifer looked round and saw a camera there on the wall.

  “Thing is, Jen,” her mother said, leaning forward, lowering her voice. “What I said to you, in the police station, you have remembered it, right? About the photos? About Mr Cottis. You know you mustn’t say a thing about them otherwise you and me will never be able to live together again.”

  “Why?” Jennifer said.

  “People don’t understand stuff like that. They read bad things into it.”

  Her mother exhaled a couple of times.

  “They’ll try and blame me. That’s what the authorities are like. Then I could go to prison and then when you come out you’ll have to go to foster care. We might never see each other again!”

  Jennifer felt her eyes fill up. She rubbed them with her fingers. She looked away from her mother and had a picture in her mind of the days when she was first at school and she’d look out the classroom window and see her mum standing there, head and shoulders above the other mums, her blonde hair shining out, her smile lighting up the grey playground. Sometimes she’d wear casual clothes, or maybe shorts and a vest top, showing off her long legs, her tiny breasts. She was like a film star. Now she looked completely different. Just like one of the other mums.

  “Don’t cry, Jen. We have to keep our wits about us here. What happened was an accident, most probably, and you won’t have to stay here for very long. If we keep quiet, about the photos, then we’ll be back to normal in a year or two, or three.”

  Her mother gave her a hug before she went. Jennifer went back to her room carrying the holdall. When she got there she unpacked it piece by piece. She placed her school books on the small desk and her clothes in the drawers. When she got to the bottom of the bag she frowned. Her doll, Macy, was there but she was naked. Jennifer pulled her out. Where were her clothes? She had lots of outfits in the cardboard box where she kept her. Now she had nothing on. Her mother had forgotten her clothes.

  Jennifer put her back in the bag and zipped it up.

  Macy was no good without her clothes. No good at all.

  Fifteen

  On the ninth of June it was her birthday. She was eleven years old. Jan came into her room after breakfast and gave her a card. On the front there was a drawing of a puppy dog and the words On Your Birthday! Inside it said, Many Happy Returns from Jan and Laura.

  “There will be no celebrations, Jennifer, we don’t have parties here,” Jan said, “although your mother and grandmother are coming to see you today.”

  Jennifer nodded. She’d known there would be no party. She hadn’t expected anything at all so the card came as a surprise and she’d looked at it with a sense of guilt. She would have liked her birthday to go past without anyone noticing. She wished she’d said, Can I ignore my birthday? But she had no idea who to say it to or whether that statement, in itself, might have been taken as her being dramatic.

  So she put the card on the table beside her bed.

  She’d had a birthday party the year before when they’d lived with Perry, her mum’s boyfriend before they lived in Berwick. He had spent all afternoon making her a Star Wars birthday cake and given her a tiny camera as a present. Jennifer had taken photographs of the cake and of Perry’s collection of Star Wars figures. When her mum came in from work she’d rolled her eyes at the cake but she’d still smiled for a photo. Jennifer had wanted to have the film developed and had taken it out of the camera but she’d done something wrong and spoiled it so the photos had never come out.

  The cake lasted a few days though.

  Her mother came in the afternoon with her grandmother. They had the visitors’ room to themselves.

  “How are you, Jen?” her gran said.

  “I’m all right.”

  “It seems quite nice here. I’ve passed this place on the bus over the years but never knew it was a prison.”

&nbs
p; “It’s not a prison, Mum!” her mother said. “It’s a special place…”

  “It’s called a Facility,” Jennifer said.

  “When I used to get the twenty-nine bus. That’s when I saw it.”

  Her gran’s fingers were tapping on the table. Jennifer looked at the No Smoking sign on the wall and knew that her gran was suffering. Her mum leaned down to a carrier bag and pulled out a wrapped present. It was flat and looked like a book or a game.

  “Thanks,” she said, pulling at the paper.

  “It’s from both of us,” her gran said “Well, I paid for it. Your mum’s promised to pay me back but I’m not holding my breath.”

  “I will, Thursday. When I get my benefits. I told you.”

  It was a jewellery-making set. Jennifer smiled at it, pleased. There were rows of coloured beads and threads. There were some clasps and pins for a brooch. There was some coloured felt and on the front of the box was a photograph of a felt brooch in the shape of a flower. She was instantly reminded of Alma’s heart-shaped brooch.

  “This is really nice,” she said.

  “Well, I thought you should have something creative,” her mother said. “It’s good to be able to make things. Look at all the clothes your gran makes.”

  Her gran smiled and looked down at the top she was wearing. She fingered the neckline as though checking for a piece of thread.

  “I’ve always made my own clothes,” she said. “I’d have made some for your mum if she’d let me. But no, my dressmaking was never good enough for Miss Carol Jones! No, she wanted clothes from Topshop.”

  “I did wear some of the clothes you made me!”

  “Hardly ever. But that was your mum, Jennifer, always did her own thing. Never cared about hurting other people’s feelings.”

  “Don’t go on, Mum.”

  Her gran continued talking and Jennifer looked at her mother. She was frowning and had moved her chair back a little, further away from the table. She noticed then that her mother’s hair was a lighter colour than recently and she was wearing a fitted blouse which was deep pink. She had eyeliner on and it made little flicks at the corner of her eyes. She looked nice again, not like she had when Jennifer first came to the Facility.