Nina had been trustworthy. She had gone to the library when she said she was going, stayed until it closed and then gone home. It’s only until the exams, she told herself, then life can begin. Nina had read an article online about middle-class kids going to festivals after their exams and she giggled as she imagined what the staff would say if she asked for a ticket for a birthday present.
‘Hey, what’s funny?’ Nina looked up, embarrassed to be caught laughing to herself in the street. People will think I’m like Bilbo, she thought.
‘Nothing,’ she said.
‘Oh, sorry,’ said the person.
She sounded genuinely sad, and Nina couldn’t resist taking a quick look to see who she had offended. The girl looked about Nina’s age, possibly a little older. She spoke with a slight accent that Nina could only identify as foreign. Her clothes were fashionable in a casual way, baggy jeans drawn in at the waist, a short leather jacket and purple trainers. Nina squirmed slightly. The clothing allowance for looked-after children did not run to leather jackets and smart trainers.
‘I’ve seen you before,’ the girl said, ‘going to the library. You’re always going to the library. You must be clever.’
Nina wasn’t sure what to say. She hadn’t had much experience of random friend-making and she couldn’t help thinking that this girl must be after something. She shrugged her shoulders.
‘I’m not that clever,’ she said. ‘I like it there, that’s all.’
‘Do you mind if I come with you?’
Nina did mind. She minded a lot, and she didn’t know what the girl wanted. She hesitated.
‘It’s OK,’ the girl said, ‘I can take a hint. I’m going into town, anyway, I’m going to get some new trainers.’
Nina couldn’t stop herself from looking at the trainers the girl was wearing. They were spotless. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to get a second pair of trainers when your first pair was still brand new. Stop being so materialistic, she told herself, it’s not about what you’ve got. They had talked about that in sociology and she had realised that everyone thought too much about possessions and not enough about the important things. Charity shops and recycled fashion, that’s what the climate change protesters talked about and Nina knew they were right. She just couldn’t help wanting stuff, that was all. Random stuff like purple trainers and silver earrings and a little dog and a mum waiting at home, eager to hear how her school day had gone. Unattainable things.
‘You can come if you like,’ the girl said, ‘unless you’d rather go in there.’
Nina looked at the library across the road. It wasn’t a big one, it often didn’t even have the books she wanted, but it was a safe place. It was the place she had said she was going to. But it was her birthday, her sixteenth. She made up her mind.
‘OK,’ Nina said, ‘I might as well come with you.’
Nina thought the girl would be pleased, but there was something almost sad in her expression. As if she hadn’t wanted Nina to come, really.
‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’m not bothered whether you come or not.’
Nina thought that might be true.
‘No,’ said the girl, as if she was remembering something, ‘no, it will be fun. I’m Shaz. What’s your name?’
The girl looked older, suddenly, and Nina wished she hadn’t agreed to go. And when Nina said her name, Shaz looked bored. Nina had an odd feeling that she had already known it.
‘Nina,’ she said, ‘fancy that. Come on then.’
Nina thought that she might have made a mistake. The girl seemed indifferent now, less friendly. She picked at her fingernails in a way that made Nina feel queasy.
‘Have you got a boyfriend then?’ Shaz said. ‘I bet you have.’
‘No,’ said Nina, startled into telling the truth, ‘can’t be bothered.’
Shaz laughed.
‘I didn’t know it was a bother,’ she said. ‘I’d better remember that.’
Nina realised that she had said something stupid. She wished she hadn’t agreed to go. She had been looking forward to going to the library although she would never, ever have admitted it. She liked the order of the books, the quiet, the space. She liked studying. Nina looked at Shaz. She was tall, with short blonde hair cut so that one side was longer than the other.
‘I, I, erm, like your hair,’ Nina said.
Shaz glanced at Nina’s hair and laughed.
‘Yours would be OK,’ she said, ‘if you, like, put a bit of colour in it or something.’
Nina’s hair was long and dark. She wished that she had taken more trouble this morning, put it up on top of her head, plaited it, done anything rather than leaving it hanging.
‘Are you at school or college or something?’ Nina said.
‘Nah,’ said Shaz. ‘I wasn’t much good at that kind of stuff so I stopped going.’
Nina made a mental note never to tell Shaz how much she loved reading, and learning new things.
‘You’d never get away with it though,’ said Shaz. ‘They’re stricter on that kind of thing, you know, if you’re in care.’
It was true, Nina knew it. Things were much more cut and dried for looked-after kids, much harder to skip school without anyone knowing. Not that she wanted to, school was the best thing she had, but that wasn’t something she would ever admit either.
‘Guess what? It’s my birthday today,’ Nina said.
As soon as the words were out of her mouth she regretted them. It felt childish, saying it out loud, and she didn’t know why she had said it. Some acknowledgement, that was what she wanted. Nina had moved schools a lot. At least five secondary schools if you didn’t count the holding placements they used sometimes while she waited for a proper place. If you counted those she wasn’t even sure how many she had been to but in not one of them had she ever mentioned that it was her birthday. There was no point. She had watched the others celebrate with their friends and talk about parties and birthday outings but she had never been invited. Not to one bowling alley, garden party or cinema trip. There hadn’t been a chance for her to learn how to make friends with the other girls. She didn’t blame them. It wasn’t worth putting the effort in for a looked-after child. They moved too often.
Nina looked over at Shaz and wondered why she had told her. Shaz wouldn’t care that it was her birthday; Shaz was definitely older and they had nothing in common. She wasn’t the library-going, study-partner type of girl that Nina had dreamed of meeting. She wondered if it was too late to turn around, go back towards her original destination, get herself out of this ridiculous trip.
‘Oh wow,’ said Shaz, ‘that’s amazing. Your birthday, sweet sixteen, that’s so adorable. Hey, we’re totally going to do this, it’s going to be fun.’
Thinking back on it later, Nina would wonder whether there was a mechanical quality to Shaz’s words. Whether she sounded like a talking doll with only twenty set phrases. Rehearsed, that’s what it seemed to be, only at the time Nina was pleased to have the attention, pleased to feel special even if it was to someone she had only just met.
‘What’s your favourite thing to eat?’ Shaz asked. ‘McDonald’s, Nando’s, pizza, you name it and that’s where we’re going.’
‘Oh,’ Nina said, trying to work out what would be the right thing to say. ‘Erm, I’m not sure, what do you like best?’
Shaz laughed. ‘It’s not my birthday,’ she said, ‘but if it was, let me think, yes, maybe the most fattening thing in McDonald’s, maybe a massive burger and a milkshake. How about that?’
‘Great,’ said Nina. Her heart sank. She was a vegetarian and she had strong feelings about it. She’d seen clips online of cows crying for their babies and chickens pecking off their own legs because they were so confined. ‘McDonald’s it is,’ she said. She decided not to tell Shaz that she didn’t eat meat. Or that she hated McDonald’s.
The truth was, Nina had bad memories of McDonald’s. It had been the place where she went to see her mother, when she still
went to see her. Whatever social worker she was with at the time would take her and then sit at a table nearby. They always pretended it was a normal thing, an ordinary girl out with her mum on a Saturday morning.
The last time had been when Nina was eleven. She had tried so hard to make her mother respond but it hadn’t worked. Nina’s mother was distant. Quiet and sad and often unable to think of a single thing to say, even when Nina brought her school books or a story she had written. She had her report this time, the last one from primary school. It was brilliant, and Nina was sure her mum would be pleased.
Nina had arrived at the McDonald’s early with her social worker. She had brought daffodils, and she laid them out carefully next to the space where her mother would sit. Everyone liked daffodils, Nina thought. She waited for her mum to arrive. The whole place was full of families, noisy kids and happy adults. She knew that the meeting might not be as good as she had planned, but there was a tingle of anticipation in her stomach nonetheless. Nina watched the clock and waited for her mother to arrive.
She refused to give up for over two hours, convinced there had been a mistake, that her mother was lying hurt somewhere, or being kept hostage. She loved the Saturday sessions as much as Nina did, Nina was sure of it. She didn’t say much, but that was OK. At the end they would both keep each other in their sights for as long as they could, walking backwards, banging into things, it was their special way of saying goodbye. She wouldn’t just not turn up. Nina had to stay, to wait for her.
In the end the social worker had to call for help, and another social worker came and helped her to move Nina away, still sobbing, still clutching the daffodils. She hadn’t seen her mother since and she hadn’t been back to McDonald’s.
Nina tried to smile. Surely it was different, going to McDonald’s in a happy way, going with a friend. Even though at times talking to Shaz was like talking to her unresponsive mother.
‘Veggie burgers? They’re crap, they make them out of dust and shit from the floor,’ Shaz said when Nina gave her choice.
Nina tried to think of what they could talk about, what they might have in common. They settled eventually on a TV show that Nina didn’t really like, and some talk about trainers, but the whole thing was awkward.
What was she supposed to do on her birthday, though, she thought afterwards. Hang out with Bilbo?
It was only later, when she was back at the home and watching Mr Bean with the others, while Bilbo watched her anxiously and laughed whenever she did. Only then that Nina thought, did Shaz talk about her being in care before she could possibly have brought it up? Nina knew that was the case because she would never have brought it up. Wouldn’t even have used those outdated words anyway. Nina would have said ‘looked after’. Nina never told anyone that she lived in a residential home, but Shaz had definitely said that things were stricter for children in care.
And another thing, Nina’s brain dredged up, just as she was falling asleep. Another thing, how did Shaz know it was Nina’s sixteenth birthday? Was everything about her and her life written on her face, clear for everyone to see?
Chapter Four
Daphne
Monday, 25 February
Daphne was a worrier. She worried about everything, from big worries like climate change to the smaller ones like how much money she should give to a person who was begging. She always kept her pockets full of money and sometimes she gave away surprising amounts. Some days Daphne gave to every single appeal she saw online and the amount she owned still didn’t go down. She had too much money, that was the difficulty.
Today, Daphne felt overwhelmed. This was different, helping someone directly rather than doling out cash. It brought back so much. She couldn’t stay in Meg’s house. It was too much: the girl, the man, the hiding and the being scared. Daphne was familiar with being scared but that didn’t dilute it in any way. In fact, she thought, it made it worse. It meant that the echo of previous scary times was always with her. She had her own personal bogeyman who never left her wardrobe.
Daphne looked up and down the tree-lined street. She should have stayed with the others, she thought. Who the hell did she think she was, sneaking off? She felt brightly lit, easy to spot, even though the day was grey and miserable. No one else around. The man from the café was probably miles away by now. She shivered. She tried to control an impulse to look up into the trees, check that he wasn’t sitting there on a branch waiting. That bruise, she thought. That bruise on the girl, it was familiar.
‘Time to get off the fence, Daffers,’ she said to herself. ‘That girl needs you, stop thinking about yourself. Woman up.’ She said it out loud but quietly, and it helped a little. Daphne had never been a team player. She wasn’t sure why. She had wanted to be, that much she knew. For a moment back there, things had seemed different. For a moment, she had let herself think about how lovely it would be to be in a team, a gang, a group of women with an aim.
‘Nonsense, Daff,’ she said to herself in the quiet street. ‘They’ll manage just fine without you. That Grace, she could do anything, she’ll make things OK. That amazing Grace.’ Daphne smiled at the pun, and wondered if she would ever be able to tell her. People probably said it to her all the time, Daphne thought, everyone must surely notice how amazing she was.
Daphne thought again about the man who had chased the girl into the café. Chased, that was the word for it, even though he had pretended to be casual, pretended to be looking in there on the off chance. She wasn’t sure if the others had noticed his eyes. Maybe they had, maybe it was obvious that his eyes were dead. Cold and fishy, that’s how they had looked, as if he had swapped his human eyes for the eyes of a giant dead fish. Daphne shuddered at the thought that somewhere in the world there might be a large fish wearing the man’s human eyes.
It was less than a ten-minute walk between the two houses, but Daphne had never been to Meg’s house before. She had sometimes wondered where they lived, Meg and Grace, what sort of places they had and whether they lived alone like her. She thought about it in the Pilates class when she was supposed to be strengthening her core. She had imagined Meg living in a house with tasteful souvenirs from other countries on the wall, and little framed embroidered phrases that other people had given her. Embroidered phrases such as:
Why raise a princess when you can raise a warrior?
Go singing to the fashioning of a new world.
Your kids’ mental health is more important than their grades.
That was the sort of thing she had imagined, but it hadn’t been like that at all, Daphne thought. In fact, what she had seen of Meg’s house had been plain, almost like a hotel or a tableau from a dull furniture shop. Nothing on the walls. And small, it was a little house, and that had been surprising to Daphne. She always forgot that her own house was so large. So pointlessly large, although when she was in it it seemed fairly normal. It was embarrassing, and Daphne had long ago stopped inviting people round. Good luck can be as alienating as bad, this had been clear to Daphne for a long time.
The last real visitor to Daphne’s house had been a woman from work, probably fifteen years ago now and on the way back from a conference. She had popped in to use the toilet after giving Daphne a lift back from Derby. Daphne tried to think now what her name had been – Ann, maybe, or Caroline. She had stood still in the living room, Ann or Caroline, toilet needs forgotten and staring round open-mouthed at the high ceilings and the paintings on the walls as if she was in a stately home. As if she had paid several pounds for a ticket and was determined to get her money’s worth. Daphne hated thinking about that. Her safe place at her beloved work had never been the same afterwards. She had never been sure whether people knew, whether it made them hate her, whether they were talking about her behind her back.
She’d moved on as soon as she could, taken another promotion with a different council and kept herself even more separate from her co-workers. It was a shame, she had always known it was a shame, always lived another life in her head.
A coward, Daphne thought, that’s what she was. A big fat coward, running away from her own shadow. Those women need you, she thought now; that poor girl, so small and helpless. It’s not about you, or what happened, none of that matters.
Daphne stood still in the middle of the pavement. It had become sunny in the way that late February could, backlighting her decision. Both choices seemed impossible. She could go home, lock the door, keep safe, stay out of trouble. That made the most sense. Daphne was a woman who knew what trouble was, what it looked like, what it did to a person. Or she could go back to Meg’s, she thought, ring the bell and say, hi, sorry I disappeared, but I’m back and I want to help. After all, it wasn’t Grace and Meg’s responsibility to sort things out any more than it was hers. The girl, Nina, had approached all of them. In fact, Daphne thought that Nina might have looked directly at her. She might have recognised that Daphne knew more than the others about what she had been through.
Daphne looked once in the direction of her safe, secure house and then turned, determined to go back, face up to things and try to help. She could hear her own footsteps in the quiet street and she wondered why everything was so silent. It made her decision seem more loaded than it was, like a film where something unpleasant is about to happen. She stepped out on to the road to cross towards Meg’s and a black Range Rover appeared, speeding towards her out of nowhere. She hadn’t seen it or heard it until it was right there. Daphne had time only to jump back, tripping on the kerb as she went. There was a shouting and a blaring of horns and Daphne sat down hard on the pavement. She stayed down for a moment, gathering her wits and her strength to stand up. Something about the car, she thought, something not quite right about the car.
The world looked different from the ground. The trees seemed taller and darker against the sky and it was colder. Daphne tried to remember what the man in the Range Rover had shouted but she wasn’t sure. He had sounded angry, and there were expletives in the sentence, but Daphne couldn’t catch what he said. One thing she knew though, she absolutely did not want to be on her own. To open the door to her big lovely house and call hello, pretending that someone was there. To check the doors and windows were locked and look under the bed, and yes, she still checked everywhere, in every cupboard, every day.
A Beginner’s Guide to Murder Page 4