by Kate Simants
‘Yeah, well, fuck you.’ Luke’s shoulders are right up and he wipes the back of his hand angrily against his nose. ‘You’ve got no fucking idea.’
Because someone’s got to help her and no one’s doing it. Even Mel’s acting like nothing’s going on when it clearly is. Paige is out more nights than she’s in. And she needs to live somewhere safe, where people give a toss about her.
Rob’s holding his shoulders. ‘Come on, mate. Calm down. You’ve got to breathe, Luke.’
It comes to Luke so quickly then that he can’t believe he hasn’t thought of it before. Can he get her out of there?
He does as his brother says and breathes, then ducks Rob’s grip and takes a step back and his vision settles. It’s like he’s taller, growing with the idea itself, filling out, because maybe—
Maybe he can get her out. Maybe he’s her chance. All he needs is evidence.
He takes a deep sniff and wipes his eyes on the back of his sleeve. And he smiles.
8
Now
Ashworth, who has stared wordlessly ahead the whole way here, becomes suddenly animated as Wren turns across the threshold of the school grounds and enters the car park.
‘Used to pick Luke up from here,’ he says, craning his neck to see the buildings. ‘Every Thursday.’
‘Yeah? Why?’ Wren has been there herself at kicking-out time and it’s the same as any other state comp. The kids walk themselves home.
‘Keep an eye on him,’ he says, defensive. ‘Let people know he weren’t an easy target. Why else?’
A clutch of girls swings past the front of the car, sharing a secret. Mid-teen, every aspect of their uniforms hitched up or nipped in for maximum impact. Ashworth watches them, then clocks Wren’s raised eyebrow, and looks pointedly away.
She checks her phone. Since the previous day, she’s left two messages for Leah Amberley, on the pretence that there’s an additional form she needs her to sign. So far there has been no reply, which if deliberate is a mistake on Leah’s part. All it tells Wren is that she has something to hide.
Putting her phone away and getting out of the car, she spots the head teacher striding across the car park to meet them. Ahmed Bashir is as straight-backed as he is broad-shouldered. Late thirties, with one of those double-grasp handshakes Wren knows for a stone-cold fact he’s learned from management training. She doubts he’s done a day’s teaching in his life, especially in a school like Westmead.
Wren gets the shake first, then Ashworth.
‘Ms Reynolds, so good to meet you in person,’ he says. ‘And, uh, Mr Ashworth. Welcome.’ They follow him into the building to sign in.
‘There are a handful of students in our sixth form who were contemporaries of Paige’s who’ve agreed to come and meet you, and some teachers,’ he says. Wren knows from their exchange of emails that he’d never met Paige personally, hadn’t started at the school until after she’d gone missing. To Wren he says, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t been able to find any forwarding address for Luke.’
Wren nods, thanks him for trying.
‘Not at all. I did try to get someone who had been involved in the Care Ambassador project – Oliver something? – but hit a brick wall there I’m afraid.’
‘Oliver Polzeath.’ Polzeath and his wife Alice owned the chain in charge of the unit that had been home to both Paige and Luke. Paige had been a Care Ambassador, part of an initiative set up by the council.
‘No matter,’ Wren says. ‘He’s on our list for a visit anyway.’
They follow Bashir along a corridor and through another set of doors into a bright atrium. ‘This is the new IT department. You’ll be in what we call the Outside-the-Box room.’
She forces a smile, thinking instantly of Suzy, making a mental note to tell her later. It’s the kind of mindless management crap she just loves to hate.
‘Are we likely to get this finished before the students break for lunch?’ Bashir asks, with an apologetic wring of his hands. ‘Just to minimise disruption.’
‘Of course,’ Wren says, knowing that it’s got nothing to do with disruption and everything to do with exposure. If one un-briefed student recognised Ashworth, the place would be swarming with local news decrying the presence of a convicted criminal on school property. ‘We’ll do what we can.’
‘Bring you some coffee maybe, help you get started?’
‘Yeah,’ Ashworth says.
‘No, thank you. We’ll be fine,’ Wren says, then, turning to Ashworth, ‘Ready?’
‘Not really,’ he says emptily.
Wren pushes open the doors.
The room has been laid out like an interview, but one where the panel consists of half a dozen teachers and the same number of teenage girls. Straight lines of desks facing two chairs. The entire place falls silent as they go inside.
Less like an interview, actually, and more like a courtroom.
Wren thanks everyone for coming, and then makes them all stand up. Once the tables have been pushed against the walls, she rearranges the chairs into a ring, and sits down.
‘That’s better.’ She gestures Ashworth to take the chair beside hers.
He scans the room. ‘Where is he?’
‘Who?’
‘Yardley,’ he whispers, eyes darting.
‘Not today, Rob.’
His shoulders drop with relief, but it’s soon replaced by confusion. ‘Then why are we here?’
The chairs fill, with a scramble from the girls to ensure they sit together. All but one of the girls is white, each indistinguishable from the next with their long, straightened hair and skinny jeans. The one black girl is dressed the same and has an armful of highlighted braids twisted into a fat knot behind her head.
Every pair of eyes in the room is staring right at Ashworth. Unease, edging into panic, twitches on his face.
She can’t force him to talk. But that look on his face, the shame, the desperation: that she can use. That, in answer to his question, is why they are here.
Wren starts her spiel.
‘Everyone in this room has been affected in some way by what Robert Ashworth and Paige Garrett did to a member of staff at this school. As you all know from the letters I sent, what we’re here to do today is talk about that crime, and the ways in which your lives have been altered by it.’
She turns to Ashworth, who is busy trying to drill an exit into the middle of the carpet by staring at it. ‘We’re going to start by introducing ourselves, Rob.’
He looks up. Clears his throat. ‘I’m Rob. Robert Ash-worth. I’m twenty-one.’
‘Go on.’
‘I’m unemployed, but I’ve done some training in—’
‘Why don’t you tell us what you did?’ the black girl says suddenly. Her chin is up, defiant, and she’s staring Ashworth hard in the face. ‘Cos this is kind of bullshit otherwise, isn’t it?’ She transfers her glare to Wren. ‘I didn’t come here to hear about his career plans.’
Wren feels Rob looking at her for guidance.
‘Where did Paige go?’ the girl goes on. ‘After you knocked off Mr Yardley’s place? Did you kill her?’
‘Lily,’ commands one of the teachers, a woman with strings of magenta and purple beads round her neck and pink streaks in her curly brown bob. A plastic A2-size portfolio leans against her chair. Art teacher, Wren guesses. ‘That’s not what we’re here to do.’
‘No? Then what are we here to do? Tell him we forgive him?’ She scowls. ‘Well, I don’t. I don’t forgive him. Paige was doing fine. And then this piece of shit got her into stuff she would never have done.’
The art teacher stands up. ‘OK, come on. Outside. We need to talk.’
‘Come on, Miss, I’m just saying—’
‘Outside, now.’
The girl gets up, delivers a death glare first to Ashworth and then to Wren, and does as she’s directed. The art teacher closes the door behind them, re-entering half a minute later alone.
‘We’ve decided that it’s maybe
best that Lily doesn’t participate after all,’ she says. ‘There’s quite a lot of anger there still. It’s not appropriate for… this.’
‘But that’s exactly what we’re here for,’ Wren says, doing her best to hide her frustration. Ashworth needs to see it. She needs to see it.
But the woman is back in her seat. She shakes her head tightly. ‘No, not today. I’m sorry. My duty of care is to the students.’
‘Paige was one of your students,’ Wren says.
‘Indeed she was,’ the woman says, missing the implication. She reaches down for the folder and lifts it onto her lap. Laying her hands in it she says, ‘I brought along some of Paige’s artwork. Would you like to see it?’
Ashworth closes his eyes.
‘Yes,’ Wren says.
The teacher goes to the whiteboard and uses circular magnets to attach a large rectangle of paper to it, maybe a couple of feet in width. ‘This was for a year ten project. The last term before she disappeared.’
It’s a painting, black into greys into browns in the background, reds and purples and blues in the foreground. The whole thing like a bruise.
‘We were doing a project about emotion, and how artists have expressed their feelings through their art,’ the teacher says.
Chairs scrape as the participants turn to peer at it. An amorphous border of shadow made from layer upon layer of handprints, the fingers pointing towards the centre. Wren can picture Paige painting it: coating her hands in a hundred different shades of dark and placing them on the sheet, repainting, turning the sheet, printing again. Soft hands. Not even fully grown.
‘Paige spent hours on this. She came back in during the lunch break and asked if she could finish it. We don’t get that very often.’
In the centre of the sheet there is a figure. The proportions are all wrong – legs too short, fingers lumpy and overlong – but it is recognisably female. Arms wrapped around her naked body. Protective, futile. Next to Wren, Ashworth is staring ahead. Through the wall, actively avoiding the whiteboard.
‘The prompt Paige was given to work from was “anticipation”. For reference, these,’ she says, drawing out another few sheets and positioning them alongside Paige’s picture, ‘are what some of the others produced.’
Other students had painted abstracts of bright colours, sparks, smiling faces with eyes gripped shut. A line of fireworks with their fuses just lit.
‘I thought she had misunderstood. Her classmates had taken the word to mean excitement about the future, that kind of thing. But to Paige, anticipation was about what she expected to happen.’
One of the girls sniffs, and another covers her face.
Wren turns to Ashworth. ‘You want to respond to this at all?’
He rubs his hand over his mouth and shifts his gaze briefly from his feet to the teacher. Wren wants to shake him. She wants to kick the chair from under him, make him look. But it is as if the picture is invisible. It is nothing to him.
She had been nothing to him.
And all he says is, ‘I didn’t hurt her.’
*
After Ashworth has read his script, the remaining time in the classroom is spent listening to the stories of the people who’d known Paige. They damn her unintentionally with faint praise. She wasn’t stupid, but not a genius; cheerful, sometimes, but also moody. A teenager, essentially. Wren is left with the impression that none of them had known her, not truly.
There is a conversation about a fight that broke out once, a few months before Paige disappeared, in which a boy Paige’s age had started a rumour about Robert and Luke’s mother. One girl recounts how Paige had been present when both brothers had ambushed the boy outside the school in retaliation, and how she’d stuck up for Luke when he was disciplined later.
‘She was pretty tight with Luke,’ one of the girls says, ‘even if she didn’t exactly hang around with him here. She kind of got him, you know? All the stuff about his mum. Because of what happened with her family, I suppose.’ She addresses this to the floor, then glances up to see Ashworth’s response, but he is unreadable.
The art teacher leans forward and says, gently, ‘It must have been very hard for Luke.’ Glancing at Ashworth, she adds, ‘And for you, I should think.’
Everyone looks at Ashworth, who shifts in his seat and glares hard out of the window.
Bashir calls the meeting to a close ten clear minutes before the lunch bell, and Wren deposits Ashworth back in the car for safekeeping before heading back in to find Lily. On the way, she tries Leah again but it goes to voicemail.
Wren finds Lily in the library. She’s wearing glasses, a textbook open in front of her. Even from the other side of the room it’s clear she isn’t reading it. Wren is right next to her by the time she looks up.
‘What do you want?’ she says, in a whisper.
‘Can we talk?’
She sighs, annoyed, but relents, and Wren follows her out to a heavy door that leads to stairs at the back of the building. The fire door thumps shut, and Lily folds her arms, glaring.
‘You get what you came for?’ she asks, her voice echoing in the hollow stairwell.
Wren gives a loose nod, non-committal. ‘Would have liked your input.’
‘Yeah, well. They just wanted to have it over and done with. Like everyone else. Forget it ever happened.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘People thought she was OK before but—I don’t know. Say what you like about Mr Yardley, no one could believe she’d done what she did to him. I mean, seriously – tying the wife to a chair? What the fuck?’ She shakes her head, incredulous.
‘What do people say about Mr Yardley?’
She rolls her eyes like it’s a stupid question. ‘I don’t mean like that. Just – fucking do-gooder. All caring and bullshit.’
‘Paige was your friend?’ Wren says, trying a different way in.
‘Why else would I have been in that room?’ There is a practised disdain on her face but she is young and it is only thin. Transparent to the forgiving eye.
‘Had you known her long?’
Her gaze drifts, defocusing. ‘She got moved around a bit but we went to primary school together for a while, year four and a bit of year five. Then she got a new placement or something and I didn’t see her until she started here in year eight.’
Wren smiles. It isn’t hard to imagine them together as little girls – Paige’s hair still white-blonde, Lily maybe in braids and bobbles. ‘How did she get on here, really?’
Lily starts to pick at a loose thread on the cuff of her sweatshirt. ‘She was… things were tough for her. I mean, obviously they were tough, or she wouldn’t have been in care. Her mum was a smackhead or something, hadn’t even tried to contact her in years and years. I mean, can you imagine doing that to a kid?’
She didn’t want an answer, and Wren couldn’t even begin to formulate one.
Lily sighed. ‘But I mean, even before that. She was one of them people who’ve got like a shit-magnet, you know what I mean?’
Wren tells her she does.
‘Even when we were little, crap just used to happen to her. And then as soon as she was old enough to bother about boys she had this way of picking out the bastards.’
‘Bastards? In what way? Who are we talking about?’ Wren has read Leah Amberley’s statement to the police maybe a dozen times. She was asked explicitly whether there was anyone Paige seemed afraid of, or whether she’d ever talked about anyone being abusive to her. The answer had been no. No and no.
But Lily is looking at Wren like she’s defective. ‘Robert Ashworth not strike you as a bastard? She hung out with him a lot.’
‘They were a couple?’
‘I don’t know. They hung out. I didn’t say she was with him.’
Something about the way she says it makes all the circuits flash in Wren’s head. ‘But there was someone else?’
‘Maybe. I thought so but…’ she trails off, shrugs. ‘She kept it way secret. It wa
s kind of the reason I didn’t see much of her in the last few months before she… before it happened. We’d been friends all that time and then she started being, I don’t know. Secretive. Closed-off.’
‘Did the police ever ask you about Paige?’
‘For like five minutes. I told them what I’m telling you.’
‘It wasn’t followed up?’
‘Why would it be? There wasn’t anyone else there that night. Just Paige and your guy.’ She looks away, wraps her thin arms around her ribs.
Wren waits for a moment before saying, gently, ‘It hit you hard.’
The girl’s expression goes through defiance and derision before settling into what looks like its natural state: a sadness so profound Wren can almost feel its weight in the gravity around her.
‘I just laid low for a while, after she disappeared. I mean, I say that, but actually I couldn’t get out of bed, once the search was called off.’ Her eyes go misty, and then wet. ‘Not for weeks. I was off school for like three months. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. By the time I got back it was all over, they’d forgotten her and that – that wanker you brought here was in prison. And we all just had to get on with it.’
‘Paige never contacted you?’
Lily snorts. ‘Give me a fucking break.’
‘Why do you say that?’
She drops her head backwards and closes her eyes. ‘Because she’s very fucking obviously dead, that’s why.’
‘We don’t know that.’ Wren forces herself to maintain eye contact.
Lily’s mouth hardens, defiance sparking. ‘Yeah we do. They said she didn’t use her phone from the day before she disappeared. She was glued to that phone. And anyway, she didn’t have any relatives or she wouldn’t have been in Beech View. So even if she was alive, where would she have gone?’ Lily leans against the wall, looking away. ‘I never really felt like a kid again, after what happened. Everything changed.’
‘Is there anything I can do to convince you to come and tell this to him?’
‘No.’
‘You’re—’
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ Lily says, and she looks it. ‘I thought I could do it but I can’t. I’m too fucking angry, do you know what I mean?’