‘What did happen?’ Janet felt confused, angry.
‘She was abducted,’ her mother said, ‘on the way home from school one day. They found her in the woods, stuffed in a holdall.’
Her mum took back the photograph.
Janet tried to carry on with her revision, but it was impossible to concentrate. She brooded over it for the rest of the day: how could she not have known about a murder? But she realized that, aged six, she would not have watched the news, or read the papers. She used to walk home with Veronica sometimes. She remembered that. They weren’t best mates or anything, not in the same group at playtime, just lived in the same direction. One day, Veronica had been offered a lift. Janet said no – it had been drummed into them: Don’t take sweets from strangers, don’t go with a stranger, don’t get into a stranger’s car – but Veronica had known the driver. At least, that’s the impression Janet had got. But Janet knew that didn’t count for her. If she didn’t know the person herself, then she mustn’t get into the car. She had to say no. Was that the day of the abduction?
Janet felt sick. She laid awake half the night, trying to remember more, frustrated that she couldn’t. I should have stopped her, she thought, asked her who it was, if she really knew them. She might still be alive if I’d only done that.
Why hadn’t the police solved the murder? Why hadn’t they asked Janet about it? She could have described the car if it had been fresh in her memory.
The guilt grew like a fungus inside her. And the anxiety, the sensation of the floor heaving, something crawling up her spine, twisting in her belly.
In an effort to find out more, she went to Oldham Central Library and scoured the microfiche, nervous in case one of the librarians saw what she was looking up and told her off. She read what she could quickly, almost not wanting to know, the details lodging in her mind, her back tense, her mouth dry. A navy-blue holdall, a shallow grave, someone walking the dog, a brutal murder. They didn’t say exactly how Veronica died. What Janet didn’t know, she made up. Her darkest fantasies filling the vacuum.
The murder played over and over in her head like a reel of film. Veronica’s terror became her own. She felt the unease as the car drove away from town, the spittle of the killer on her face, his hand in her knickers, the soil in her nose and mouth.
She would open her biology textbook or King Lear
