A Ruined Girl Page 4

  ‘Fuck. Rob.’

  She takes a step forward, lifts her arms. Wren moves in before she connects, getting between them like a barrier, before she realises she’s got it wrong. Leah doesn’t want to bash the shit out of him. She’s trying to hug him.

  The rain clatters down. There isn’t room for both of them on the square of dry under the porch, not even if Wren was the same size as Leah, which she hasn’t been since she was about eleven. But Leah is in no rush to invite them in. Her face tightens as she rocks back onto her doormat, looking Wren over like last night’s condom.

  Wren doesn’t take it personally. The only thing she is interested in is what the hell is going on between these two people.

  Leah was Paige’s friend. She was her best friend.

  Ten minutes later, the three of them are sitting facing each other across a flimsy kitchen table. Scraps of bhangra drift in through a broken window pane, the missing shards inexpertly replaced with duct tape. Leah took her time making tea, and now three mugs sit between them.

  The protocol is that Ashworth reads his script first. With the acrid tang of Leah’s interrupted cleaning still thick in the air, Wren passes him the three sheets of paper, his script that he will be reading at every visit they make. It is the culmination of weeks of work: taken from statements, redrafted by Wren, approved by her boss, ratified by SIO and the state-appointed solicitor seconded to the CAP, then finally agreed by Ashworth himself, by post a week before release. The full mea culpa, while his audience of one sits across from him, blank-faced.

  Wren folds her arms and gives Ashworth a nod. ‘When you’re ready, then.’

  He clears his throat, and begins.

  ‘On the evening of the seventeenth of November 2012, after I finished work, I made a phone call to Paige Garrett, who lived at Beech View children’s home in Kingswood, Bristol. I arranged for her to come and meet me. I was driving a car I had stolen from the garage in which I was a trainee.’

  Wren fingers the handle of her mug, conjuring in her mind Paige’s face, her footsteps. Imagines the hammering of her heart under the Superdry jacket she was wearing.

  ‘I picked her up. We drove to the house of James Yardley, who had been Paige’s counsellor at school. When we arrived at the house, I told her to wait until I found an open window.’

  By the time police were made aware, the private firm providing the Yardleys’ security had selected the relevant footage from the family’s nineteen-camera array and sent it to their designated platform on the Avon and Somerset Police server. Faced with the overwhelming evidence, Ashworth had coughed for every charge without ado.

  ‘She kept saying she didn’t want to do it, but I needed her there. I went into every room in the house while Mr Yardley followed me. We could hear his wife, Lucilla, downstairs, crying and trying to get help. She was very upset and was threatening to call the police, so I instructed Paige to tie her to a chair in the kitchen.’

  Minutes pass as he reads, summarising the hour of panicked action – the travel, the break-in, the confrontation, the search. As he reads it aloud in flat, faltering staccato, Wren searches every pause, every trip of his voice for clues to anything he’s not saying, clues that could lead to what really happened to Paige. But there’s nothing. He might as well be telling a story about total strangers.

  Then, right at the end, something changes. His eyes move over the final line but his mouth closes, and he looks away. Apart from the suck and thump of the washing machine under the sink, there is silence. Leah, sensing the shift, starts inspecting her chewed fingernails.

  ‘You need to finish it,’ Wren tells him.

  He takes a deep breath. ‘I ran out of the house, we went different ways. I didn’t see her again.’ He lays the paper down on the table, almost reverently folding his hands across it. And looks up. ‘I don’t know where she is, Leah.’

  No one could doubt the sincerity in his voice. But if nearly three years in prison was going to teach a man something, it was the ability to lie convincingly.

  ‘Right. Well,’ Leah says, scraping her chair back and standing. ‘That’s that then.’

  Wren looks from Ashworth to Leah. ‘Nothing you want to ask?’

  ‘No. I’ve done what you said, I’ve heard his thing.’ Leah takes Wren’s half-full mug to the sink. ‘What else do you want me to do?’

  Give a shit, possibly? Wren wants to shout. But instead she tilts her head and says, ‘You know the victim, is that right? James Yardley?’

  ‘Sort of.’ In the immediate aftermath of the crime Leah had been quoted in a couple of local news stories, appealing for information about her friend. Both times, she’d mentioned Yardley: once she was featured in an accompanying photo sitting with him, holding a framed headshot of herself with Paige. The angle of the piece was more a response to Yardley’s instant forgiveness of Paige – she’s just a vulnerable child who made a very bad choice, was the phrase he used – but it was clear from the coverage that Leah and Yardley had been brought together by their lobbying efforts. ‘He’s all right. Didn’t deserve it. End of.’

  Wren tries again. ‘This is your chance, Leah. Don’t you want to know anything else about what happened? Why Rob did what he did?’

  Leah eyeballs her. ‘Firstly, he’ll tell me if he wants to, otherwise it’s none of my business. And secondly, are you really expecting us to have some kind of heart-to-heart in front of you? I don’t even fucking know you.’

  ‘Sure, fine,’ Wren says, trying not to think of all those empty check-boxes in the debrief paperwork. ‘How about telling us what it felt like when Paige disappeared?’

  ‘He’s not here about Paige going missing.’

  ‘Not exactly, but—’

  ‘I was cleared of that,’ Rob says, and takes an angry last mouthful of his tea before handing the empty mug to Leah. ‘All I did the time for was the burglary.’

  ‘Aggravated,’ Wren adds.

  ‘I don’t even know why you’re here, if I’m honest,’ Leah says, turning to fill the washing-up bowl.

  Wren has to raise her voice over the sound of the boiler heating the water. ‘The programme is for people affected by the crime to have the chance to understand it.’

  Leah twists the taps off but keeps her back to the room and starts dunking the mugs. ‘I understand it.’

  Wren wants to shake her. You can’t understand it. No one understands it. Any of it: why Paige chose that moment to throw her entire future away, in such a spectacular fashion; where she went. What secrets Ashworth is keeping.

  The answers, Wren is certain, are right here in this room. So why doesn’t Leah want to know?

  ‘We’re done here then, right?’ Leah says, drying her hands and gesturing back through towards the front door. ‘You can go now.’

  Without any good reason to delay her, Wren has no choice but to do as she is invited. ‘Come on then, Robert,’ she calls to him as she heads into the hall. One down, she thinks.

  As Wren pauses to put her shoes back on, she catches a murmur from the kitchen, and glances back at them. Leah is close to Ashworth, her lips moving.

  ‘…at my grandad’s,’ she’s saying.

  Ashworth lifts a quieting finger almost imperceptibly. Indicating Wren with an imploring flick of his eyes.

  4

  Before

  Everyone else is in bed. Luke crouches with his ear against the office door. Mel’s voice is low and muffled, and Paige has so far said pretty much nothing. If he hadn’t been at his window to see her come along the road ten minutes earlier, he’d hardly have known she was in there.

  ‘It’s not just because it’s my job,’ Mel says.

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘Paige, there are a lot of people out there who care about you—’

  ‘Only cos they want the money—’

  She laughs but not like it’s funny. ‘Well, OK, if you say so. But the rules say if you’re gone that long we need to have it agreed.’

  ‘It’s in the book
.’ Paige is chewing her thumb, he knows from her voice.

  ‘But you weren’t where you said you’d be, were you? Mr Polzeath went out looking for you after the house meeting. He was – very disappointed.’

  Silence from Paige.

  It’s just after half-two in the morning, and Paige is on a half-ten curfew. Luke would know if it had changed. But the police haven’t been called, so surely Mel must have known where she was. No one else gets to go missing for four hours without the police coming. It just doesn’t happen.

  Except it does. For Paige it does. He thinks back, works it out. Third time in twelve days.

  There’s the scrape of a chair, someone getting up. Luke freezes. Shit. He scans his mental map of the safest place to go. Dining room. He slips noiselessly behind the door and presses his ear against the wall. It’s thin, and he can hear them better.

  Mel’s saying in a hushed voice, ‘Well I’m going to have to put something down.’

  ‘It’s already in the fucking book!’

  ‘Not just about you being out late, Paige, even though we both know you’re not being truthful there. I mean about that.’

  Luke would do anything to know what she’s talking about.

  Paige says nothing. Luke imagines Mel watching her, head on the side, waiting. No one says anything for a really long time.

  Eventually Mel sighs loudly, frustrated.

  ‘I need a coffee.’

  There’s a pause, and then footsteps, and the office door opens. Luke drops to the floor and crawls, fast, under the dining-room table. She’ll have to walk right past him to get to the kitchen but it’s a big table, it should be enough to hide him.

  ‘Stay here. I mean it,’ Mel says to Paige. Even though she’s whispering now she sounds worried, not angry.

  Her feet appear, close enough to touch. Luke holds his breath, pulling his knees in tight. As she passes into the kitchen he realises that, once she’s out there, the angles mean she might just be able to see him. Especially if she switches on the dining-room light on her way through. She’s going to find him, and then Paige will know. Can he just get up and pretend he’s sleepwalking? Or that he came down for a drink and fell asleep? No. Fucking idiot, of course not.

  But she goes straight to the kitchen and flicks on the light. He hears Mel fill the kettle and flick it on. Paige opens the office door just long enough to call out, without bothering to keep her voice down. ‘Black with sweetener, thanks for offering.’

  Luke grins. She’s a cheeky cow sometimes.

  The kettle starts to rumble, and Mel gets her cigarettes out, puts one in her mouth while she rummages for her lighter. Making sure he doesn’t touch any of the chair legs surrounding him, he shifts a few inches to the side so he can peer through. Mel’s reaching up to unbolt the garden door. There’s the scrape of the key in the lock: it’s almost rusted shut. There’s fuck-all to do in the garden, just a couple of sagging footballs and knee-high grass, so no one goes out there except to smoke. Mel gives the door a few hard yanks to get it open, then squeezes herself through the narrow opening, phone in hand. A flick of flame and her face glows bright for a moment as she lights her cigarette. She doesn’t fully close the door behind her, so he can hear the sounds of the night outside.

  The security light out there hasn’t ever worked as far as he knows, but he can see her face clearly because she’s got her phone out now. She’s rubbing hard at her forehead with the wrist of the hand holding the cigarette, like it’s the toughest night of her life. Luke edges a bit closer. If Paige comes out he’s screwed but he’s got to know who Mel’s phoning, what she’s saying.

  The harsh, tarmacky smell of her cigarette finds him and there’s a flash across his mind of his front room at home; him coming back from school, and his mum there, jumping up and grabbing the ashtray and squealing with laughter, trying to run round him to hide it outside and him laughing too. Laughing even though he hated her smoking, used to shit himself about her getting cancer, because back then cancer was still the worst thing he could think of.

  He tries to block the thought that always comes after he remembers being at home, but it happens anyway. His front room that’s not his any more. The height chart they had, marking off how tall they were whenever it was Christmas or back-to-school or birthdays, gouged into the doorframe of the sitting room so they couldn’t even take it with them when they had to leave. His stuff gone, and Rob’s and his mum’s stuff gone, all their photos and everything, and a new family there instead. All the curtains changed, and everything painted white. And in his room, where he grew up, there’s a baby. He blinks hard to get rid of it, and concentrates on Mel.

  She’s got the phone against her ear now, smoking as she speaks. He can’t hear all of it but whatever she says, it’s quick. I knows and yeah buts and it doesn’t take a genius to see she’s not being listened to.

  ‘I’m just saying – no, she’s not bleeding, but there’s a mark – nothing, I’m not implying – I know what I said, I’m just saying if someone else sees – OK! All right. Fine.’ Then, after a deep breath, ‘I’m not comfortable about this, I want you to know that. She’s – this could go very wrong. For us, as well. Fine. Yes. Yes, I understand.’

  The blueish light goes out, and Mel shoves the phone into her back pocket, fury on her face. Luke shuffles back to the most hidden place, makes himself as small as he can. There’s the sound of her coming back in, locking the door, then the fridge opening and shutting and the ring of a teaspoon against a mug. The light flicks off, and Luke wills himself invisible, as Mel’s slippers pad on the carpet towards him. The stink of the smoke follows her like a cloud. She goes inside. Luke sags with relief, waits for the door to close, then moves back over to listen against the wall.

  Mel’s voice first. ‘OK. Look—’

  ‘No. You look,’ Paige says, and it’s obvious she’s been in there getting angrier and angrier. ‘It’s my fucking body. I get to do whatever I want with it.’

  Softly, ‘You’re a child.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake! It’s one little mark!’

  ‘It’s not about how big it is. It’s where it is. It’s what it looks like.’

  ‘Yeah, well. Like I said, we were mucking around.’

  ‘So you really are sticking with your story. That it was Leah who did… that.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Even though you know that if someone at your school sees it – your swimming teacher, for example – they’re going to have your social worker right up in your face about it.’

  A pause. ‘Whatever.’

  ‘I know there are things you don’t want going in the book, sweetheart—’

  ‘I said, whatever.’

  ‘I really don’t want to make it difficult for you, but if someone else sees what I’ve seen—’

  ‘Yeah, well, maybe you shouldn’t have fucking seen it at all! Maybe you shouldn’t have been eyeing me up in the first place!’

  ‘Oh, Paige, come on! I’ve had swimming cossies longer than that dress! How could I not see it?’

  ‘By not staring at my arse? How about putting down that you’re a fucking pervert in the book? I mean, I know you look like a fucking dyke but I didn’t think you’d go for little girls!’

  Luke’s eyes go wide. There’s nothing from Mel, and there’s nothing from Paige, not for ages.

  He has to screw his eyes up tight to hear what Paige says next.

  ‘I’m sorry. That was—’

  But Mel cuts her off. ‘OK. All right. Know what, I think that’s enough.’

  And she means it, she’s not even going to do a sanction, it’s like they’re past all of that. She sounds completely beaten. Luke can feel the regret coming off Paige through the wall. Mel cares about her. She can be spiky sometimes but he trusts her; she cares about the kids, she’s the only one who does.

  Paige says, ‘No, look, I’m sorry, I really am.’

  ‘Yep.’

  He hears the creak of a chair: they’re coming out. He
creeps quickly back under the table. The door opens.

  Whispering now, Paige says, ‘I’m sorry you had to wait up for me.’

  Mel sort of laughs again. ‘Well, that bit is my job. The curfew isn’t really the problem here, Paige.’

  They say goodnight and Mel takes the mugs back into the kitchen without bothering with the lights, then goes back to the hall. From where he’s crouching Luke sees her dig in her jeans and pull out a phone again but this time it’s her personal one with the diamond bits that have mostly come off. Not the shift phone. She pauses, like she’s deciding whether to do something, but then she tips her head straight up at the ceiling with her eyes shut, and sighs, and sticks it back in her pocket. And then she’s gone. He listens to her climbing the stairs, following Paige.

  There’s movement up there for a bit, toilets flushing and tiptoe-footsteps along the landings. Then the staff bedroom door closes and so does Paige’s. It’s not until Luke gets up that he realises how fucking freezing he is. He’s only got shorts and a T-shirt on and his feet are numb and his arms are prickled with goosebumps.

  He’s about to go up but he stops. Office door. He remembers the sound of it closing, but not the crank of the lock.

  He pushes the door, and it opens. He steps inside, quietly pulls it to. His eyes are already used to the dark so he leaves the light off. Without making a single sound he goes to the desk. He sits on the swivel chair, puts his hands on the keyboard. When he moves the mouse the screen comes to life and he’s straight in, no password, nothing. He thinks, fucking hell, and he’s grinning as he opens the file on the desktop marked Current Residents. He starts looking inside for anything on Fat Jake.

  But he changes his mind when he sees the folder marked Garrett, Paige.

  He lets the little arrow hover for all of about ten seconds. If he knows about her, he can be a better friend. He clicks twice. He starts to scroll down the documents. There are dozens of subfolders, called things like Medical and Education and Previous Placements, and he can’t decide where to start. He highlights all of them and does the thing to send them to his email, but the thrill of it is buzzing through him and he’s not thinking and before he realises he’s clicked the wrong icon, the printer on the shelf behind him whirrs into life and the noise of it is like a fucking train through the silent house.