by K. L. Slater
She’d driven back to the village to feed her unimpressed cat, Heston, who was particularly keen on regular mealtimes, always appearing from nowhere a minute before the next one was due.
But when she opened the fridge to feed herself, she found it bare save for a tub of spreadable butter and a solitary egg. She vaguely remembered planning on picking up a few items from the supermarket, but that was as far as she’d got.
She decided to take a walk out to the row of shops at the end of the road and get a sandwich from the small general store as the bakery closed at four.
As she turned the corner, the pretty cornflower-blue canopy of Hetty’s Café caught her eye and a sudden craving for one of their speciality salmon and cream cheese bagels set her stomach rumbling.
She ordered her sandwich and a latte, and when her coffee was ready, she took it over to a small table tucked away in the corner and sat down, easing her feet out of the new flat pumps she’d bought last week. She hadn’t broken them in properly and they’d skinned both her heels.
She felt tired, but it was a good tired. She’d missed the adrenalin of a case that swallowed up the hours in a working day in a flash. She’d missed the total absorption in her work, the feeling of driving as hard as she could towards the truth.
Yet her blossoming relationship with Lizzie was a welcome new addition to her life and so she was mindful of not screwing it up like she’d done with Orla. She had to at least try and strive for that mythical work–life balance thing that filled half of the women’s magazines she read.
Still, she’d invited Lizzie round for a takeaway and a movie later, so that was a good start to her plan. And Lizzie had insisted on cooking rather than ordering food in, which Dana had appreciated. They were taking things very slowly, which suited Dana. Although she’d missed having someone special around, she’d also found herself wary of complicated relationships.
She and Lizzie hadn’t sat down and robotically dissected their approach on the matter, but they had agreed there was no rush, and were enjoying just getting to know each other, with the odd show of affection, before moving on to the next stage.
While she waited for her order to arrive, she reluctantly took out her phone.
It was essential she keep tabs on the mood of online posts. While Neary and his team did the same thing in an effort to contain local uproar, Dana knew that the girls’ families would be affected by what was being said online. This sense of unease and possibly fear and shame could be subconsciously passed on to the girls in the interactions their parents had with them.
Online abuse could be devastating to both the victims and the accused families.
Dana looked up at the sound of a tinkling bell and watched as a middle-aged woman with cropped blonde hair and dark roots entered the café.
There was something about the way she didn’t gravitate towards the counter to be served like the other customers that was unnerving. Instead, she looked around, spotted Dana and walked purposefully towards her table, only stopping when she was standing directly in front of her.
‘Can I help you?’ Dana said in a pleasant voice that belied the creeping sense of dread in her lower abdomen.
She didn’t need to be told that the woman standing before her was going through a rough time. She looked dishevelled, with her smudged mascara and creased black trousers, but the Hobbs jacket and the black leather Radley handbag showed that this was someone who usually prided herself on looking smart.
‘I’m Helen Bootle,’ she said simply, and Dana saw the effort it took for her not to give in to the sea of emotion roiling just under the surface. ‘I’m Bessie Wilford’s daughter.’
Dana stood up immediately, her chair scraping on the floor in her haste.
‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t realise. Dana Sewell.’ She held out her hand.
Helen ignored it. ‘I know who you are.’
Dana pulled out a chair. ‘Please, Helen, take a seat. Can I get you a coffee?’
Helen shook her head and hesitated, but then sat down, twisting the strap of her handbag between her fingers.
‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ Dana offered limply.
‘I… I still can’t believe it.’ Helen stared vacantly at the tabletop. ‘I can’t stay long, but someone said you were in the café and so I had to come in. I just had to.’
‘I’m glad you did.’ Dana pressed her lips together. ‘I can’t imagine how you must be feeling—’
‘Of course you can’t. That’s why I had to see for myself the woman who’s helping those two… girls, the so-called children who murdered my mother.’ Helen’s eyes were trained like lasers on Dana’s face, the sadness in her voice now replaced by a brusque harshness.
Dana swallowed. ‘Helen, I know how terribly difficult it must be for you right now—’
‘I mean, how could you?’ Helen leaned forward, her words louder now and flying at Dana’s face like tiny poisoned arrows. ‘How will you sleep at night while you’re putting your efforts into helping those little monsters and their families while my loving, gentle mother is lying in the morgue?’
Dana sighed and held up her hands in a placating gesture.
‘It’s about finding out what really happened, Helen. We have to establish the facts, and to do that, we have to understand the girls’ state of mind.’
‘Rubbish!’ Helen’s voice ramped up an octave. The hum of voices in the café faltered slightly and heads began to turn towards them. ‘You’re trying to get them off.’ She hesitated for a moment as if thinking better of continuing, but then let rip again, her mouth twisting into an ugly sneer. ‘I’ve already been told all about where your loyalties lie, working with these troubled kids who get excluded from school and commit crimes. You’re nothing but an apologist for delinquency!’
Dana shook her head. ‘Helen, please. Just calm down a moment and let me explain. I’m not a police officer, I’m a family therapist. It’s not my job to decide who’s guilty or innocent.’
‘Exactly. So you make excuses for these families like the Fletchers and the Voces, the ones who raised those… those little beasts.’ She spat out the words as if she was glad to be rid of them. ‘The two of them looking so innocent, skipping around the village with their ponytails… It’s all an act. Can’t you see that? Everyone’s saying they were known to be up to no good.’
The café was deathly silent now, and Dana looked up to see several people looking at her with the same expression as Bessie’s daughter. She felt a twinge in her throat. Maybe it was time to leave.
‘It’s not just idle gossip,’ Helen hissed. ‘There’s stuff you don’t know about that family. Stuff hardly anyone knows.’
The village had become a critical hive mind. Somehow it knew about every development in the case, and judgements were being formed accordingly.
Dana couldn’t ask what Helen was alluding to. Not here in the tea shop. She was working with the police, and she couldn’t be seen to be gossiping with the victim’s daughter in public.
‘Helen, I know it must be very—’
‘She was fired herself for breaking the rules,’ a man sitting at the front called out, breaking Dana’s train of thought. ‘Middle-class liberals like her, they’re nothing but bloody do-gooders sticking their oar in. Discipline is what kids like that need. I say make an example of the two of ’em.’
‘Hear, hear,’ a woman’s voice piped up.
Dana stood up and pulled her handbag strap over her shoulder.
‘I’d really like to speak to you, Helen, but not here.’
‘What’s the point?’ The venom had gone from Helen’s voice, leaving it sounding flat and hopeless. ‘You’ve got one goal and that’s to get them off. That’s the truth of the matter and you know it. We all know it.’
It was only a few yards to the door of the café, but to Dana it felt like a country mile.
When she passed the table at the front, she leaned forward and spoke to the man who’d levelled his criticism so publicly at
her.
‘Just for the record, I wasn’t fired. I was suspended pending an investigation that has now cleared me of any wrongdoing. Get your facts right next time.’
It was a mistake to challenge him.
‘Suspended, fired, it’s all the same,’ he roared back. ‘You’ll bend over backwards to help them that really need banging up to teach them a—’
The rest of his words remained trapped inside the café as Dana stepped out into the fresh air and pulled the door closed behind her.
She’d known tensions were running high in the village, but the altercation had taken her by surprise. Everyone she’d met so far seemed utterly convinced about what had happened in Bessie Wilford’s house today.
It was obvious that most of them had already tried and convicted Maddy Fletcher and Brianna Voce.
Twenty-Five
2003
Juliet and Corey walked past the brown, crisping front lawns of the smaller houses of the village and then up Derby Road, where the expansive red roofs of the big detached houses steamed in the heat.
Corey’s chatter was a constant backdrop to the walk. He hated silence and would do anything he could to fill it, but Juliet had stopped listening a while back.
When they finally reached the warren, around a mile from home, she was struggling. The soporific effect of the medication, paired with exhaustion from little sleep, had tightened its grip on her, and she was feeling more and more drowsy.
She should have accepted Chloe’s grudging offer to accompany them.
‘Come on, slowcoach!’ Corey sang repeatedly as he skipped effortlessly ahead.
The vast expanse of bracken and wooded areas stretched out before them. Incredibly, given the parched conditions, it was still quite green, although Juliet saw that the curling ends of the bracken had turned brown and the usually lush long grass that bordered the footpaths had a sort of half-baked, bone-dry look about it.
She usually felt a sense of freedom coming here, but today, she was overwhelmed by the distance she’d have to cover to get to the thicker bracken that was essential for den-making.
‘Maybe we’ll do just a little walk today,’ she suggested hopefully, but Corey was having none of it.
‘I want to climb Stony Side Hill,’ he insisted. ‘I want to find my den. I have to find it, Juliet. Can we find it? Pleease!’
Last time they’d been here, a couple of weeks earlier, she’d helped Corey make a start on what he proclaimed was his best den yet.
One side of Stony Side – Corey’s favourite hill – was rich with bracken and soft slopes; the other side was barren and rocky. They always stayed on the safer green side and during their last visit had located the perfect pitch for a den. It was sheltered from the wind and in a bit of a dip where it couldn’t easily be spotted from the ground.
They’d started by constructing the floor, stamping down the clay-rich soil and laying a carpet of bracken so that it wouldn’t turn into a sea of mud if it rained. That had been a good afternoon, and Juliet had enjoyed spending time with her brother, but today would be different and she couldn’t wait for it to be over.
By the time they reached the top of the hill, she was really flagging. Her back was slick with sweat and she felt weak and light-headed.
‘I’ll just have to have a little lie-down,’ she gasped. ‘Have a quick search around and shout me when you find the den.’
She lay back and looked up at the blue sky, scattered with white clouds. The grass tickled the back of her neck and a cool breeze soothed her fevered brow. The sun beat down on the pale skin of her face and she vaguely berated herself for only applying sunscreen to her arms.
She watched the tendrils of wispy white entwine in the vast blue above her, slowly drifting across and out of view… so slowly, so serenely.
She allowed her eyes to gently close.
She’d rest for just for a minute or two. If she could gather her energy a little, she’d surely be good as new, and it would give Corey time to find his den before they began work on it again.
* * *
Juliet sat bolt upright. The sun had disappeared behind a thick puff of candyfloss cloud, and she shivered even though it was still very warm.
‘Corey!’ she yelled, standing up so she could easily spot her brother’s bright green Teletubbies T-shirt.
But he was nowhere to be seen. Her own T-shirt felt damp and clammy on her back, and the skin on her face tingled unpleasantly. When she touched her nose and cheeks, she knew immediately that she had burned badly in the sun.
‘Corey!’ she called again, but there was no answer.
She checked her watch. It was 4.20. She’d been asleep for thirty-five minutes! She never napped in the day; that was a habit for old people like her parents. It drove her mad when Mum and Dad slept after Sunday lunch and instructed the three of them not to make a sound for the next hour. Trying to keep Corey quiet was like trying to harness the wind.
‘Corey? It’s time to go home now,’ she called, and began to walk across the brow of the hill to the large rock at the top that acted as a viewing platform.
She climbed onto it and peered over the edge, down the steep side that gave the hill its name. It was dotted with sharp, jutting rocks that all the kids around here had been warned to stay away from.
Suddenly her eyes narrowed in disbelief and horror. Halfway down the slope lay a small, crumpled body, T-shirt glowing neon green as the sun finally managed to break through the cloud again.
Twenty-Six
The village
After the incident with Helen Bootle at the tea shop, Dana had returned to her small terraced house, relieved to be away from the harsh judgement of the locals.
She didn’t feel in the least bit hungry, even though she had ended up leaving without her lunch.
She sat quietly in her living room, exploring her own thoughts and feelings. She had come across the attitude Helen had expressed many times before. Lots of people found it difficult to understand how she could support people who had been accused or convicted of serious crimes.
Dana’s closest friend at university, Polly, had become a criminal defence lawyer. She frequently dealt with abuse on the street because she willingly took on clients who had committed rape and murder and gave them the best defence she could in court.
‘If I don’t do my job, then justice can’t be done,’ was her stock answer, but people didn’t understand it and it never won her any points when there was trouble.
But Dana got it completely. It wasn’t about getting people off, or helping them get away with criminal acts.
She believed as much as Helen Bootle and the café customers that justice should be seen to be served in each and every case. The catch was that the only way that could happen was to ensure that all parties had their say. Both defence and prosecution should have a chance to put forward evidence that could then be carefully considered and judged by a lawful legal process.
She could understand Helen Bootle’s frustration, of course she could. But equally, she realised there was nothing she could have said to make her feel better. In fact, if Dana had told her what she really thought, she’d have only succeeded in making Helen even angrier.
In the Strang case, everyone had believed that fifteen-year-old Collette was responsible for the death of her best friend. All the evidence had seemed to point that way; Dana had been the lone voice of doubt. But gut feelings didn’t carry the same weight as witness statements and forensic detail.
The police had instructed her to back off. Neary hadn’t been leading that team, but he knew about it and advised her to let it go. She ignored him. She ignored all of them.
The academy management cautioned her, put her on another case, but still she couldn’t ignore the feeling that there was more to it, that Collette was innocent.
So, after another full day of deliberation, she’d taken it upon herself to follow up with the family of the dead girl in her own time, speak to a few people off the record.
Her family had sued the police for mismanagement of the case, saying that Dana’s off-the-record visits proved that the authorities were squabbling and disagreeing amongst themselves instead of following procedure. The judge agreed, and the family were awarded substantial damages.
There had been nothing spooky about Dana’s intuition in the case.
The stuff people told her either added up or it didn’t. Simple as. And right now, she felt convinced that the families of the two girls were hiding something.
She could just sense there was something stuck at the back of all their throats like a fish bone. Something they wanted to protect at all costs, whether they consciously realised it or not.
It might be invisible to Neary and the rest of them, but to Dana, it was glaringly obvious. The stilted communication between family members, the clandestine glances and tense body language that some of them displayed and some didn’t.
Just like her last case, she wasn’t about to ignore it.
Twenty-Seven
The police station
It was just before five o’clock and Dana was scheduled to speak to the girls again. DC Carol Hall had given the parents refreshments and had requested, via Neary, that they have no contact with their daughters during the break.
Surprisingly, they had agreed without protest, on the understanding that they could sit in on the next interview. Chloe began to put up an argument based on what Seetal had told her were her legal rights, but with no support from Tom and Juliet, she reluctantly backed down.
When Dana entered the room, she saw that the girls were sitting in the same places as before. Each child had her mother present, sitting on their right-hand side, with the lawyer tucked at the end. Apparently Maddy’s father, Tom, had left to attend a work meeting.
