‘Don’t think so.’ Marlene thought harder. ‘No.’ She leaned forward, her head tilted, as if she’d share a confidence. ‘And I am the all-seeing-eye,’ she laughed.
It was a miracle Denise Finn was still talking and walking, given the trauma she’d been through. Where did she summon the strength to carry on? Perhaps after Nathan had died, she kept going for Lisa. But now? I couldn’t do it, Janet thought, I would just lay down and die, a bit of help maybe, from the car exhaust, stones in pockets, pills and booze. But it wasn’t true. She’d weathered hard times, survived. Not only with the baby, but before then. When she got ill.
Thinking of it brought the old, familiar tremor of anxiety. Like a faint aftershock from an earthquake, travelling from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head. She allowed herself to revisit the memories as she made the journey back to the office, having discovered that, if she tried to deny the feelings and not think about the events that had first triggered them, it only seemed to feed her fears, making them stronger, more feral.
Fifteen, studying for GCSEs and worried about her exams, Janet was finding it hard to sleep at night. They all expected her to do well. Her mother was sorting through a box of old photographs, one of her clean-ups. Janet at the dining-room table, trying to learn chunks of King Lear to regurgitate for the English Paper. Oh, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven…
‘Look at you there, then’ – her mother thrust an old school photograph under her nose – ‘butter wouldn’t melt.’
Janet glanced dutifully at the photo. Primary school, class picture. She was seated, cross-legged on the front row. She could remember the hall, which doubled as a gym, the parquet floor that stank of polish and feet. The way you could make squeaky noises as you walked, especially with your pumps on.
‘And there’s Veronica next to you.’
Janet grunted. Veronica had bad teeth, sort of greeny grey at the front, that reminded her of bread with mould on. She had a plastic coat that was meant to look like leather but didn’t. The coat squeaked too.
‘They never did find out who killed her,’ Janet’s mother mused.
Time stopped. Janet stared at the girl’s face; Veronica was grinning. ‘What?’
‘She was murdered,’ her mum said. ‘Awful.’
‘You said she’d gone away.’ Janet looked at her mother.
‘You were six,’ her mother said. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you what had really happened. You’d have been petrified.’
