by Kate Simants
Fortified by his silence, she squares her shoulders. ‘Paige trusted us to care for her and you lured her away. You used your brother to get close to her and then you decided that close wasn’t enough. You had to ruin her too. Isn’t that right?’
Too late, Wren sees the change in his face and knows what is coming. Ashworth launches at the other woman, so quickly that in the time it takes for Wren to get her arms locked around his elbows, holding his back tight against her chest, Alice only just manages to shrink back against the wardrobe.
‘Not him,’ he growls. ‘Not him, you bitch, all right? He loved her. He did his fucking best for her. You leave my fucking brother alone.’
‘Robert,’ Wren hisses into his ear. ‘Cool it. Don’t mess this up.’
Alice, coughing and eyes wide, darts out of the room and down the stairs.
As Wren holds him, waiting for the fury to subside before she releases her grip, a wave of clarity nearly knocks the wind out of her.
She’s been looking at it all wrong. It wasn’t ever about wearing him down.
The key is Luke.
Alice Polzeath watches from the bay window, as Ashworth, wordless and compliant, straps himself into the passenger seat. Wren stands on the pavement, the adrenaline still crackling in her blood.
‘You are one lucky little shit,’ she spits at him. ‘Stay here, don’t fucking move, or you’re going back to Horfield faster than you can say immediate recall.’
She locks the door, points a finger at him through the window, and goes back inside. Alice stays hovering in the hall by the door. She’s already said she isn’t going to make a formal complaint, but that hasn’t put a dent in the righteous indignation.
‘I’m going to need a signature on here,’ Wren says, handing her the forms, ‘and here.’
The woman scribbles angrily. ‘I don’t want to see him, or hear from him, or even hear from you, ever again.’ She hands the clipboard back. ‘He’s an animal, just like his brother. I should never have agreed.’
‘You feel very strongly about Luke,’ Wren observes softly.
The cup of coffee she’s holding becomes suddenly interesting to her. Wren waits as she takes a long, slow drink from it.
‘Mrs Polzeath.’
She wipes her mouth of nothing at all. ‘The police questioned Luke after she disappeared, several times. We already knew he was… overly keen on her, let’s say, but it turned out he’d broken into her records here. Read everything we had about her.’
Wren keeps her face impassive, but it rings like a bell in her head. Is that true?
‘Why would he have done that?’ she says, then, ‘Do you think Robert and Luke were, I don’t know, working together, somehow?’
Alice rubs her face with her hand. ‘I don’t know. But Luke was obsessed. Oliver found him more than once asleep outside her room. I mean, does that strike you as normal?’
‘That’s not what I’m asking,’ Wren says levelly. ‘Do you have any reason to believe that Luke was involved in the burglary?’
‘I gave my evidence, Miss Reynolds. This whole thing,’ she says, gesturing expansively to include Ashworth, Wren, the bedroom, possibly the years in between as well, ‘is not about me. But no one ever sees that, do they? People like me put their whole lives into caring for the young, and something like this happens and we still get blamed.’
‘We came here so Robert could apologise. No one’s blaming you.’
‘Really? And did he apologise?’
‘Yes.’ Albeit minimally.
She rolls her eyes and moves past Wren, heading back into the kitchen.
‘Mrs Polzeath,’ Wren says, following her, ‘all I want to do is ensure that Robert is held properly accountable. We’re on the same side.’
She turns back, drying her hands delicately on a stained tea towel. ‘Are we now.’
‘Yeah. Tell me what I’m missing.’
She sighs heavily. ‘Do you know what we do here?’
‘Tell me.’
‘We look after damaged, unhappy children. We care for them. We feed them when no one else wants to.’ There’s a break in her voice, and she looks away, clearing her throat.
Wren realises that maybe she’s made a mistake here. From what was in the files, she’d taken the Polzeaths for a power-couple with a string of businesses whose security had been shamed. In all the police interviews and social services reports she’d read, she’d just assumed that their concern was merely corporate; that they’d simply appropriated the anxiety about Paige’s welfare expressed by her friends and reconstituted it as their own, to deflect attention from their failure to care for her properly.
Every one of those judgements had been made by her own prejudice, and she hadn’t even seen it happening.
‘Look, I didn’t know Robert Ashworth any more than anyone did here,’ Alice says finally. ‘He was a family member of one of our children. End of story.’ She looks Wren in the eye. ‘Is that all right? Are we finished?’
Wren can’t push it any further. She puts out her hand, thanks the other woman.
And as she walks down the path back to the car, where Ashworth waits sullenly like a caged beast, she feels the rectangular block of Paige’s letters beneath her shirt, their secrets rigid against her skin.
11
Before
Sun’s going down, and he’s getting cold. He’s been waiting for her round the edge of the music block because Tuesdays she’s got counselling in there half-three to half-four, but he must have missed her coming out. It’s ten to now, and the caretaker’s locking up.
Luke sticks his shitty phone back in his pocket and cuts through to the main building. School seems all right when it’s just him there. Without the people, it’s not that bad. Same for Beech View.
Same for anywhere.
He goes out the front, ten-foot shadow in front of him, a muddy sunset mirrored in the glass of the art block. Through the gates, and he’s out. He starts the walk back to Beech View.
Heading through the park and out onto the road, he’s thinking about the thing he’s supposed to be handing in on Jane Eyre in the morning.
He steps off the kerb. There’s a massive blare of a car horn, way too close.
‘Bloody moron!’ the driver screams at him. ‘Watch where you’re fucking going!’
And he’s still standing there on the pavement, every muscle jittering and his breath coming in quick snips like a rabbit’s, when he hears his name. A hand on his back.
‘Shit, Luke, what the fuck?’
It’s Paige, and he opens his mouth to say something – what a dick that driver was, or whatever – when there’s someone else there too, running up behind her. It’s Mr Yardley, the school counsellor.
‘Narrow escape there, Luke,’ he says, looking him over. ‘You all right, mate?’
‘Yeah. What are you doing here?’ Luke asks, before realising how it sounds and adding, ‘Sir.’
‘Just walking over to yours, as it happens.’ Yardley takes a last drag of his cigarette – roll-up, liquorice paper. ‘Doing a bit of training with the staff.’ He blows the smoke out in a thin stream, squinting at Luke through the flop of wavy brown hair in front of his eyes.
Paige says, ‘That’ll be good then, Lukey. You’re always saying how you wish you could have more counselling, and now you can!’
‘Fuck off,’ he says, trying and failing to keep half a smile off his face. She’s a sarcastic bitch sometimes.
They start walking, awkwardly. Luke wants Yardley to fuck off for at least ten different reasons, the main one being who the fuck walks home from school with a teacher without getting the royal piss taken out of them the next day?
‘We had that panel thing,’ Paige tells Luke, like she’s not even bothered there’s a middle-aged man walking next to her. ‘I tried to find you but you’d already gone.’
The panel – fuck. Mel had reminded him about it this morning. Free pass for the afternoon – social workers and the council and Mr
and Mrs Polzeath. They’re trying to get some contract with the council to open another load of kids’ homes.
‘Go all right?’ Luke asks Paige, but it’s Yardley who answers.
‘Pretty dull,’ he says.
Luke hadn’t known Yardley would be there. Yardley says, ‘They wanted me there for the liaison.’ He puts little speech marks round the word with his fingers, and Luke sniffs a laugh.
‘So stupid,’ Paige says. ‘One of them wanted to know if I’d recommend Beech View to other young people. I mean, what the fuck is that supposed to even mean?’
‘Like you’d be in that dump if you had the choice,’ Yardley says.
Luke and Paige look at him. ‘What?’ he says. ‘You’ve both told me that.’
He’s right, it’s a dump, but it’s their dump, and he should know that. It’s like how you can slag off your brother but if anyone else does it they get a smack.
Yardley changes the subject, saying how Paige did such a good job with the panel. She’s got this Care Ambassador thing where she gets asked about stuff to do with how the home gets run, and even though there’s nothing in it for her, she goes along, does what they ask her. It’s because she actually cares about it. He’s seen her talking some of the younger ones down when things have kicked off. She does all that, but there’s no one looking out for her, not properly.
But then he remembers what he read in her file, and the dark thing takes shape in his throat again and he tucks his chin in and keeps walking.
‘You don’t fancy it yourself, Luke? Being an ambassador?’ Yardley says.
‘No.’
Yardley laughs. ‘Man who knows his own mind, aren’t you?’ But he takes the hint, and hangs back to do something on his phone.
Luke waits until they’re out of earshot. ‘Twat,’ he says.
Paige wrinkles her nose. ‘I don’t know. He’s only trying to help. I think he does actually get it, a bit.’
Luke rolls his eyes.
‘He was in care for a while, you know. He told me.’
‘Bullshit. Yardley?’ He pulls a face to say he doesn’t buy it.
‘You don’t trust people much, do you?’ she says, laughing.
He doesn’t have to answer it. She’s right though, he thinks.
I do not trust people one little bit.
Not even you.
Then they’ve arrived at Beech View and Luke swings the gate open and heads up the path. And when they get to the front door, without having any reason to do it, she puts an arm around him and gives him a squeeze. His skin lights up like she’s plugged him in to the mains. He’d wanted to talk to her but he can’t now. He goes solid, and she immediately pulls back.
‘What’s up, Lukey?’ she says, hurt all over her face.
He shrugs, and the opportunity’s gone. She goes inside and up to her room.
Luke takes his shoes off. He’s got to put it away somewhere, whatever that feeling is when he’s close to her now, since he read what he read in her file. He knows what a massive arsehole he is for reading it in the first place. She’d never talk to him again if she knew. He wishes he’d never seen it.
But it’s too late for that now.
MTP, it said, which he had to look up. Medical termination of pregnancy.
She’d had an abortion. When she had just turned thirteen.
And it’s nothing to do with the baby, he’s not that much of a dick; it’s her business and he didn’t even know her then.
It’s that she looked him in the eye and told him she was a virgin, and it was a lie. And he wants to forgive her for that.
But he can’t.
12
Now
Forcing herself to keep her eyes shut despite having been wide awake for hours, Wren shifts onto her side, tucks herself around Suzy’s sleeping form and tries again. If she gets up now, that’ll be it, all hope of another few hours’ rest gone. So she does the breathing exercises that never work, and the mindless alphabetical lists that are supposed to beat insomnia. But nothing helps: she can’t even bore herself to sleep. Not with her mind being drawn, as if magnetised, towards what’s in her glovebox.
Eventually, she admits defeat. Careful not to disturb Suzy, she slips out of bed. She blindly, noiselessly selects underwear from the drawer and a shirt, skirt and jacket from the wardrobe, then goes out, taking her time to close the door without a click.
Ten minutes later, she’s showered, dressed, and writing Suzy a quick note to leave on the kitchen table. Couldn’t sleep, it says, thought I’d go out for breakfast and make an early start. She pauses, considers redacting the lie. But it’s half true: it is work. It’s just not the kind of work she’s going to do in a café, any more than she’d risk doing it at the kitchen table. Because how would she explain it if Suzy came in? They’re personal letters that I don’t have any permission to read, but I just couldn’t stop myself?
No.
So Wren clicks the pen a couple of times, adds a few kisses at the bottom, and leaves.
She drives vaguely north without a destination in mind, then turns after a while into a side road up near the UWE campus. She quiets the engine.
And before she can change her mind, she unclips the latch of the glovebox. She takes the bundle of letters out, slips the first one from its envelope, smooths it against the steering wheel, and starts to read.
It takes her a whole hour. The story the letters tell is piercingly familiar to her, so much so that several times, as she finishes one and opens up the next, she finds that her hands are shaking.
There is a hope in the first few messages, a mother’s promises that Paige must have believed, early on. I’ll come back for you.
I’m trying really hard.
I love you very much.
As time passes, though, the promises sound emptier and emptier, the positivity dwindles into nothing, and the letters get shorter. Strained questions about how Paige is doing, about her friends and activities, until, without anything new to say, they tail off altogether, and stop.
Wren finds nothing at all that could shine a light on what might have happened to Paige in the end. What had she been hoping for exactly, to make this risk worthwhile – a threatening note from Ashworth tucked in there? An incriminating photograph? A conveniently damning diary entry, like in one of Suzy’s beloved psychological thrillers?
All they are is a record of someone else’s pain. Each letter is leathery with age and handling, as if they have been taken out over and over again, read and re-read. At first, maybe Paige would have cherished them. But if Wren’s own childhood taught her anything, it’s that no fifteen-year-old who’d been left in the system as long as Paige was going to read these letters about love and reunification and happy-ever-after and truly believe that the mother who wrote them meant a single goddamned word of it. Not when all the other evidence pointed, as it did, in entirely the opposite direction.
By the time the sun’s rising, Wren is squaring the corners of the bundle ready to stow it away again, and her face is a ruin of tears. Most of it is for Paige, for this dereliction of a blameless girl who just wanted a proper home and someone to care about her. But some of it, Wren has to concede, is for herself.
A cholesterol-bomb of a drive-through breakfast inside her, Wren stands on the walkway outside Ashworth’s flat, knocking. She’s redone her makeup and is ready with an easy lie about a head cold to explain the redness in her eyes. Not that Ashworth is the type to ask after her health.
There’s a finger-thick view between the rollerblind and the window frame into the kitchenette. Clean crockery stands in the drainer, and a pile of folded clothes sits on the arm of the sofa. But there are no lights on.
‘Rob,’ she calls again. No answer. She bends down to shout through the letterbox, making a note to talk to the landlord about the draught from the flap-less catflap. He’s taped some cardboard on the inside but it’s hanging down from one corner now. She does have a spare key to his flat, but it’s only to be used in emergen
cies.
‘Robert. Come on, seriously.’
It’s day three. And day three is James Yardley, the victim.
Straightening up, Wren checks her watch. Thinking of Code 17.
In the event that an offender absconds, the Probation Officer must inform their immediate supervisor or equivalent at the earliest opportunity.
It’s been ten minutes. She thinks of the office, and of her boss, his desk heaving with unfinished paperwork.
Hi, Callum, she’d have to say. Afraid my offender’s done one. Yeah, I know we’re only three days in. Yeah, I know you’re going to have to call the Home Office. No, I don’t think the press are going to be all that kind about it either.
Wren leans her forehead against the door and bangs, hard, until her fist hurts, and then she pulls out her phone and punches in his number. She listens at the letterbox for the sound of his phone ringing. Nothing.
The touch on her shoulder makes her actually squeak. She spins around.
‘Sorry,’ he says, hands up.
‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘The river.’
‘What?’
‘Walking. I go every morning.’ He takes a step back and unhooks the plastic bag dangling from his wrist. ‘Needed supplies, too.’ Inside there are two cans of a vicious-looking energy drink, ibuprofen, and a Twix. ‘Knackered,’ he says. ‘Couldn’t sleep last night.’
The proof is all over his face. Not so much bags as bin liners under eyes that are redder than they are white. He’s dressed, at least, and he smells showered. More importantly, he hasn’t absconded.
‘Let’s go,’ she says, heading towards the stairwell.
In the car, after he’s sunk both cans and the chocolate, he leans his head back against the headrest and closes his eyes. ‘How long have we got?’
‘Not long enough for a nap, if that’s what you mean.’
With some effort, he opens his eyes again.
‘I’m going to the office later,’ she tells him. ‘See if I can dig anything out on Luke.’