‘Which never happened?’
‘No, Lisa stayed at Ryelands until April. You’ve heard about Nathan’s death?’ he said.
‘Yeah.’
‘Lisa took it very hard. Even though she and Nathan had been apart a lot, he was a significant person, only sibling. Her big brother.’
Dom, Rachel thought, my little brother. It was two years now, more, since she’d seen him. He’d written at first. She’d burnt the letters.
‘Was Nathan living at home, then?’
‘Yes. You can imagine, Lisa’s gearing up to leave Ryelands, starting out on her own, and Nathan dies. Very difficult for her.’
‘Lisa was using drugs?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Heroin?’
‘Amongst others,’ he said.
‘Her mother thought she had been introduced to drugs while she was in care.’
‘It happens,’ he said. ‘We’re dealing with very vulnerable kids. Drugs can be a way of fitting in, buckling under peer pressure, or an escape, a way of checking out for a bit. Most teenagers experiment, ours even more so.’ His phone rang.
‘Do you need…’ Rachel said.
‘Voicemail’s on.’
‘What can you tell me about Sean?’
‘He wasn’t helping, that’s for sure.’ James Raleigh closed the file and sat back in his chair. ‘They’d met before she began living independently. He was known as a small-time drug user. We got her the flat on the understanding that it was a sole tenancy, so he couldn’t just move in there wholesale, but he had his feet under the table from the get-go.’
‘And their relationship?’ Rachel said.
‘He was an enabler. Without Sean, Lisa might have kicked the drugs into touch. An outside chance. With Sean, forget it. Like trying to stop smoking when someone’s waving a full pack of King Size in front of your face, lighter at the ready.’
Rachel instantly craved a cigarette. ‘We’ve had reports of domestic violence,’ she said.
He gave a nod. ‘According to her records, Lisa had a reputation for violence when she was in Ryelands. Now and then she’d explode. A lot of anger.’
‘Can’t think why,’ Rachel said.
He smiled. ‘Sean, I don’t know so much about, but he doesn’t have any compunction about hitting a woman.’
‘But it wasn’t necessarily Lisa who was the punchbag?’
‘No, though he’d be stronger than her.’
Rachel agreed. He wasn’t a big lad, but he wasn’t a weed either, and Lisa had been slightly built. ‘Did Lisa ever use a knife?’ She thought of the crime-scene album, the blood. Had Lisa gone for Sean and he’d wrested the weapon from her, used it?
‘Not that I’ve come across. Anything to hand, I’d imagine. You think he might have done it?’ Raleigh asked.
