A Ruined Girl Read online

  Music from a poorly tuned radio billows from the back room as the woman returns.

  ‘You’re still National Probation Service?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘But just more optimistic.’ The woman tents her fingers under her chin, pleased with her joke.

  Wren points and winks, knowing better than to bother challenging the cynicism. ‘You got it.’

  ‘Proper job.’ She slides the ID and a plastic key card through on the tray. ‘All the way to the back, double doors, and follow it to the right.’

  Wren thanks her and turns away, but after a few steps the woman shouts after her.

  ‘Do you think it’ll work? I mean, really?’

  ‘Got to be worth a try,’ Wren calls back over her shoulder. It’s something she’s found herself saying a lot lately.

  Breakfast is only just over but the place is already dense with the high-volume catering smells of £1.27-or-less lunches: onions, meat, potato reconstituted from pellets. She mouth-breathes until she exits the wide central thoroughfare and emerges into the Community Building.

  The mechanism on the door receives her card, then gives her a green light. She steps inside. The room is overheated and smells of new paint. There are two access doors – the one for visitors, and another on the opposite wall which, when unlocked, opens into B-Wing. Three of the walls are regulation grey, the fourth matches the questionable exterior.

  Wren almost smiles. Carpet. Heating. She can practically feel the prison’s Victorian founders turning in their graves. Sipping her coffee, she goes to the window that looks out onto the rec yard.

  It is a grand view. The facility sits at the crest of Horfield looking north, away from the city, but the Community Building is afforded a broad, southerly sweep down to the best of Bristol, the postcard bits. Temple Meads; Suspension Bridge; St Mary Redcliffe; the blunt, unfinished-looking tower of the Wills Memorial. It strikes her that two hundred years ago when the first bricks of the prison were laid, most of that historic skyline hadn’t even been built. All the same, someone along the line had made the decision to construct the place with its back to the city that had grown lawless enough to need it.

  Or it could be that you’re overthinking it, Wren tells herself. Again.

  An office-supply clock on the wall informs her there are six minutes until the meeting. The prisoner will be on his way. She imagines him walking along the platform outside his cell, his shoes ringing out on the ironwork steps. Pausing every thirty feet for the warden to slide a new key in a new lock, and marvelling at his luck being chosen for the programme. Under the impression that release would be the end of all of it, of the shame and misery and boredom. The godawful food. Thinking that as long as he turns up to his appointments and keeps his curfews, everything he’s done to get himself in there will be water under the bridge. And the people who have been felled and broken and twisted into tight, bloody shreds by the grief he’s caused: all of those people might as well never have existed.

  And maybe he’ll be right about some of that. But not all of it.

  Her phone buzzes as soon as she sets it on the table. Suzy. She lets her thumb hover over the green circle for just a moment before she makes the decision and cuts the call. Guilt needles her from a distance but evaporates a second later when she hears voices in the corridor. Something dark shifts in her chest and she clasps her hands together, turns them inside out and pushes until her lats creak, reminding herself that the nerves are just because the project is new. New protocols, interest from the press, brass with a point to prove, more at stake than just letting them out and keeping them out of trouble.

  A beep from the lock on the other side of the room, the prisoner’s door. She squares her shoulders, straightens.

  The door swings open.

  ‘Miss Reynolds.’ The warden is not one she knows. Tall, thin, borderline friendly.

  Wren hasn’t been Miss anything for a very long time but she doesn’t correct him. She nods, and he steps aside.

  And there he is.

  Robert Malachy Ashworth, formerly of Isambard Court, Southmead. White, six-two. His hair is unchanged, cropped tight against his angular skull, but his narrow shoulders are rounded now, like he’s holding something in his belly. She wonders, briefly, if it’s remorse. She doubts it.

  Wren puts out a hand. He looks at it for a moment before turning his bottle-brown eyes to hers. The slightest frown gathers on his forehead but she doesn’t look away. The seconds are marked off by the ticking of the plastic clock. She takes in the threads of crimson in the whites of his eyes.

  In a soft baritone the warden says, ‘This lady’s your probation officer, Ashworth.’

  ‘Right.’

  Ashworth breaks eye contact, and Wren silently lets out the breath she hadn’t meant to hold.

  ‘Shake the lady’s hand, bud.’

  Ashworth does as he is told, with the air of a man who does as he is told.

  The skin of his palm is soft and warm against hers. An unpunished hand. Letting go, he passes his gaze down towards her throat, then straight to his shoes.

  Wren gives a nod to the pallid warden. ‘I can take it from here, thanks.’

  ‘Buzzer’s on the wall,’ he says before he leaves. ‘Hit it when you’re finished.’

  The door closes, and they are left alone.

  Somewhere in the building there is a short klaxon. Wren sits down, and invites Ashworth to do the same. The chair spreads slightly under her weight, and she crosses her legs to avoid the press of the armrests on the outside of her thighs. She smoothes her skirt across her lap, then unpacks: files, a single pen, notebook.

  She takes her time drinking the remaining inch of coffee, then slides the cup aside.

  ‘So,’ she says. ‘You’re getting out. Congratulations.’

  ‘Yeah.’ His voice is dry with disuse, and his face is set as hard as concrete. ‘They said I’ve got to do visits?’

  ‘That’s right. I’m going to take you round to see some people, and we’re going to have some conversations. The idea is that you find out what your actions have done, long term. Understand the wider repercussions.’

  ‘What people, though?’ Not a blink. Maybe not concrete after all, Wren thinks; maybe something older. Volcanic rock, perhaps.

  ‘There’s a list. Victims of the crime. Obviously in your case there’s going to be… more to it.’ She lets that sit for a moment, daring him to ask her why. Eventually she says, ‘For you, it’s your victim, and people connected to your accomplice.’

  ‘Accomp—you mean Paige?’

  She nods.

  ‘And by victim, you’re saying I’ve got to talk to Yardley.’

  ‘Being the man you burgled and assaulted, yes,’ she says. Settling into it now, hitting her stride. ‘That qualifies him as the victim.’

  Yardley, a former counsellor at Paige’s school who’d also acted as a consultant to the care company responsible for her, had been the first to reply to Wren’s letters. She’d expected the victim to be the most reluctant, especially in the circumstances, but she’d been wrong. People change, he’d told her later on the phone. If I didn’t believe that, I’d be in the wrong job.

  Ashworth sinks lower in his seat. ‘What am I supposed to say to him?’

  ‘Sorry is usually a good place to start. Sorry I cracked your head against that wall. Sorry I stole that big shiny twenty-grand bracelet that hasn’t been seen since. That sort of thing.’

  He says nothing to that.

  ‘And then there is the small matter of his wife.’

  A flinch, just a flick of the eyes.

  ‘Do you know she’s on four kinds of medication related to the trauma, Robert?’

  ‘It’s Rob.’ He rubs his fingertips slowly across his eyebrows. ‘And no. I did not know that.’

  ‘Well, Rob, she is.’ Wren flips open the file, making a point of finding the right page. ‘First year after you broke into her home and tied her up, she lost her hair. Alopecia. Know about
that?’

  A shrug.

  ‘Pretty much a recluse now. Can’t work. Scared of everyone.’

  He grunts, mutters something she doesn’t catch.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I said, I didn’t tie her up. Wasn’t me.’

  ‘Right.’ Technically, it’s true. ‘I’m not alone in doubting that Paige would have thought of that herself though.’

  Paige Garrett had still been a child. Fifteen, with a record that was not so much clean as immaculate. Non-existent. Which wouldn’t have been so notable, but coupled with the fact that she’d spent the preceding nine and a half years in state care, in some of the roughest boroughs in the West Country? It was more than a big deal. It was a miracle.

  Wren pulls the sheet of standard conditions from its plastic wallet and reads them aloud: he will report to her on a twice-weekly basis; they will form a plan regarding his accommodation and return to work; the breaking of any licence condition could mean recall to prison. You will, you will not. If you do x, then y. The state’s last attempt at drilling in the causal nature of crime and punishment. He nods at each clause, until she is done.

  ‘And then there’s the special conditions,’ she says. ‘For the programme.’

  He looks up. Full attention.

  She reads him the list of names, the people they will be meeting. The victims, obviously. Paige’s friends. Teachers.

  ‘Paige’s teachers?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because in the absence of a family, we have to go a little further to find the people who loved her.’

  ‘But I didn’t do anything to her!’

  ‘You did,’ Wren says. Ashworth opens his mouth to complain but she holds up a finger. ‘You did. And you don’t get to control what we do here. Understood?’

  He gives her a long, flat look. ‘Fine.’

  She continues the list of visits: Paige’s friends, the children’s home where she lived – which had also been the home of Ashworth’s younger brother, Luke. With every name, his stare slides lower until he is directing the full beam of it into the table, as if he is trying to set the thing on fire.

  ‘Did they find Paige?’

  She looks up slowly from the sheet.

  Ashworth was the last person to see her before she disappeared. The private CCTV from Yardley’s house on the night of the burglary showed her leaving, with him: her long blonde hair flashing white in the night-vision settings, her bare ankles glowing green under her skinny jeans and checked shirt. They went their separate ways. Ashworth was found a few hours later, and the bracelet he and Paige had stolen – solid platinum, set with almost a hundred diamonds and a single huge Colombian emerald at its heart – was already gone. Questions had been asked about their specificity, their restraint almost, in taking just the bracelet. There had been countless other things they could have stolen – paintings, antiques, huge quantities of jewellery dangling from mirrors and nestling in drawers. But one hot item was easier to offload than an armful, as Ashworth had put it, and so they’d made their choice. Upon arrest, Ashworth had initially claimed no knowledge of the theft, but then changed his story, saying he’d sold it and used the money to pay off a debt. But the bracelet isn’t what interests Wren.

  What bothers her is that Paige hasn’t been seen since.

  She watches for a flinch, a flick of the eyes. A tell. But nothing comes. ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  But she sees it, a glint of it escaping before he manages to get it locked down.

  Fear.

  But of what?

  There are forms that need signing. When they’re finished with the paperwork she rings the buzzer, and almost immediately footsteps sound in the corridor again. The heavy door swings open.

  ‘All done?’ the warden asks.

  ‘For now.’ She gestures to Ashworth that he can stand, that they’re finished, but he doesn’t move.

  He nods, infinitesimally, at her folder. ‘What about Luke?’

  ‘Your brother?’

  Another nod. ‘Haven’t seen him since I got here.’

  Luke was the link between his older brother and Paige. He was just fourteen at the time, making him seventeen now. He’d been Paige’s friend. Questioned on three occasions by the police about her disappearance, but his alibi was tight. The transcripts read like a seance: lots of questions, very few answers.

  ‘He’s not on the list, no. But there’s no restriction on you getting in touch with him,’ she says, tidying her gear away. The warden ushers Ashworth towards the door.

  ‘Or my mum?’ Just for a few seconds, the muscled, crop-headed facade falls away and Robert Ashworth is a boy.

  The file under her arm is slim, but it doesn’t hold everything she knows. It doesn’t say how it feels to have your mother institutionalised. It doesn’t say what a child like the one he’d been must sacrifice to survive in a world without a parent. She’d need a wheelie-bin to cart around that file, the one with all the humanity in it.

  But that part isn’t her job. And even if it was, she’s not sure she’d do it for him, under the circumstances.

  He glances up at her, granite-eyed and angry, and the boy is gone. ‘Did you track her down too?’

  ‘Your mum didn’t know Paige. So no, she’s not on the list.’ Wren doesn’t say that she tried – that Carrie Ashworth’s last known whereabouts, the studio flat a social worker had arranged for her when she was finally discharged to out-patient care, had apparently only been her home for a few weeks. After that, she’d packed up and left without leaving a forwarding address, and without, it seemed, dropping in on her first-born before she did so.

  ‘Luke might know where she is.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  ‘Paige.’ He keeps his eyes hard on Wren’s. ‘He might know where she went. But I sure as hell don’t.’

  ‘Ashworth,’ warns the screw. ‘Now.’

  Ashworth waits, resisting the pull of the hand on his thick bicep.

  ‘We’ll see,’ Wren tells him, like it’s nothing much to her. ‘Plenty of time.’

  Something like life flickers for a moment around his eyes, before he remembers where he is and crushes it. The warden jerks suddenly sideways as Ashworth releases his counterbalance and moves as bidden into the corridor. He gives Wren one last look before the door swings closed.

  2

  Before

  Luke Ashworth closes the door behind him and signs in. He puts the bag down with a soft bump. Half the point of buying something like that, spending all that money, is the bag. It’s made of white card, with ribbon handles. It hardly weighs a thing but his shoulder aches from carrying it home, carefully holding it away from his body so it didn’t get dented.

  He takes his time untying his trainers. Behind him he can hear Fat Jake and Cameron playing PS3 and, further back into the knocked-through house, cooking sounds from the kitchen. Pans and plates and instructions. The whole place is dense with a sweet tomatoey smell: pasta sauce. Meaning Paige will kick off again probably. She won’t eat pasta, says it makes her fat. She’s not fat. She’s perfect. She’s got hair Luke wants to twist his hand into.

  By the front door there’s a shoe rack thing with ten spaces, one drawer for each kid, although there’s eleven of them in the home right now because of the twins. Luke pulls out his, the one at the bottom. Geraint had given him that one when he first arrived, said it was because he’s closest to the ground, which was supposed to be funny but wasn’t, and anyway Luke’s grown since then so he can go fuck himself. Taped onto the front is a bit of card saying LUKE A because when he got to Beech View last year there was Luke Forbes as well, but he’s moved out now, thank fuck. He puts the trainers in, side by side, careful even though they were like £25 and proper embarrassing. But he bought them cheap because then he had some left from his mum’s auntie’s birthday money. Two hundred Canadian dollars she’d se
nt – she’s lived out there since before he was born. The cash came with a card and a letter, a load of her curly writing going on about how she’d really love to help more, even though he can’t remember her ever doing jack-shit for any of them. He jams the shoe box back in, hard. The money was to make herself feel better. Because that’s what people do, just sit around and think about their fucking selves while he’s stuck in here with staff who couldn’t give a fuck about anything except getting paid.

  Fuck her, he thinks. And fuck the rest of them. But then a stem of guilt pushes out: not Rob, not his big brother. Rob’s always been there for him. He comes twice every week, and he’s coming tomorrow, and he said he’ll have got paid so he’ll take them to Maccy D’s. Just for a second, Luke smiles. It’s only five weeks until Rob turns eighteen. After that, he’s going to do the guardianship thing. He’s going to get Luke out.

  The smile drops when Luke’s eyes settle on Paige’s box, and he remembers the problem. That if he gets out, that’ll be it. They’re not even in the same year at school.

  Luke checks over his shoulder, then he sneaks the quickest of quick looks into her drawer. The label just says Paige. There’s only one of her.

  Her shoes are in there. Red converse. A tiny 34 printed inside them – he looked it up and it meant she’s a size two or something stupid. There’s a massive dent in the wire mesh of her box where she always kicks it shut. Yesterday she got sanctioned for it: Mel had done the whole let’s remember to respect our home thing and Paige had given her the finger, which got her extra washing-up duty. He touches one of the shoes and something pulls tight in his chest like a thread.

  ‘Forget your phone today, Mr Ashworth?’ says Geraint from the doorway, and Luke jumps out of his skin like a fucking bedwetter.

  Geraint laughs, and refills his spoon with cereal from the bowl he’s holding – the bowl he’s basically holding every minute of every shift he works. Drops of milk cling to his hipster beard, and he wipes them off, glancing back into the TV room. From the sounds of it, Cameron’s beating the shit out of Fat Jake. Even though Geraint is right fucking there watching.