A Ruined Girl Page 5

  A sound upstairs. A door opening.

  Shit.

  Shit shit shit.

  He opens the print queue but he doesn’t know how it works, because who prints stuff? And the thing’s spitting out paper and whatever he clicks – delete, pause print job – doesn’t do anything. He’s on his feet now, reaching up to the stupid machine that’s sucking and clattering like it’s laying a road. He tries to pull the thing out and get to the power button wherever the fuck it is and make it just stop.

  All of a sudden there’s silence again, the red light blinking. It’s out of paper. He slumps back into the chair almost laughing. Relief swarms over him, and the blood thudding in his ears slows.

  And then there’s a buzz, and the striplight above his head goes on.

  He screws his eyes shut against the sudden glare and when he opens them again she’s there. Paige. Standing in the doorway, wearing a T-shirt that only just covers her knickers.

  ‘Luke.’

  He doesn’t move.

  She rubs a fist into her eye and blinks at him. ‘What are you doing up?’

  From the corner of his vision he sees that red light going on and off on the printer that’s still making a wheezing cool-down noise. In his head he tells her don’t look. Says it silently again and again like he can programme her. Don’t look. Just don’t look.

  She yawns. He’s never seen her with no make-up before, and it’s like seeing her underwater, or asleep, like something he’s not supposed to see. He opens his mouth but he hasn’t got an answer.

  She shrugs, already bored. ‘Go to sleep, Lukey. You’ve got school.’

  Paige turns away, switches off the light, and Luke’s breath solidifies in his throat.

  It’s where it is, Mel had said. It’s what it looks like.

  In that second, when Paige turned away and her T-shirt lifted with her arm, what it looked like was a pinched circle, blotchy and red, like a string of beads had pressed into her flesh, hard enough to leave deep pits. Back of her leg, right at the top, just underneath the lace edge of her little shorts.

  What it looked like was teeth marks.

  5

  Now

  It is a café chosen by a perfect storm of necessity and conveniently steamed-up glazing, and in any other circumstance Wren would have walked right by. But she’s starving, Ash-worth is sullen, it’s shitting it down, and so it’ll have to do.

  Inside, the atmosphere is heavy with atomised grease. Wren goes to the counter and orders a tea and a ham sandwich. She calls over to Ashworth for his order but he just shrugs and says he’ll have the same. He gets up and goes off to the gents without another word.

  Wren chooses a table, and starts an internet search on her phone for Leah’s grandad. But even if she does track the old guy down, what possible justification could she invent for visiting him? Your granddaughter mentioned you vaguely to my offender, I want to know why? No. She pockets her phone when the order arrives, and taps the backs of her nails on the thick mug, watching the rings rise and spread in the surface of her tea.

  Thinking. Trying to ignore the inane pop music from a tinny speaker in the kitchen out the back. And thinking.

  Wren has never claimed to be any genius of psychology. She understands that it takes a while to get a decent understanding of someone, or a situation, a relationship. To date, she’s spent maybe eight hours with Ashworth, not including the time spent on his files. No one would expect her to have a measure of a person in that time. But what just happened in there with Leah Amberley: that didn’t make any kind of sense.

  Ashworth returns from the gents drying his hands on his trousers, and Wren waits until he’s folded himself into the booth opposite her.

  Elbows on the table, she appraises him.

  ‘Do you know how long it took to get the CAP from an idea to a thing we’re actually trying out, Rob?’

  He bites into his sandwich, chews, and gives a slow shrug. ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll tell you.’ She takes a sip from her mug, eyeing him over the rim. The tea is disgusting, as if the teabag had just come to the end of a long and arduous career. ‘Twenty-two months, start to finish.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Best part of two years. A development panel of four core members of staff, maybe three dozen expert consultants. Thirty-odd drafts for the Department of Justice guidance, nine for the briefing to the minister. Fourteen versions of the handbook. Thousands and thousands of pages of research, evidence, projections. That kind of thing.’

  ‘OK.’

  She leans over the table. ‘We got all the details down. How far we follow the sphere of the crime’s influence. The way we approach the victims. Reporting, safeguarding, analysis, briefing, debriefing. Per diems. Do you want to know the one thing we couldn’t decide on?’

  ‘Nope.’ He sends a cascade of sugar into his tea from a glass container.

  ‘Outcomes. How we measure forgiveness, and remorse. At what point we can say, yep, this man has understood the gravity of his crime, and sincerely tried to apologise.’

  He draws his finger and thumb down the corners of his mouth. ‘I did apologise. I tried sincerely to apologise.’

  ‘You didn’t have to try very hard though, did you?’ ‘Are you saying I did it wrong, in there with Leah?’ Black nothingness in his eyes where anyone else might have a smirk, or a wavering arrogance, or worry. Anything at all.

  ‘I’m asking you,’ she says, resting her chin on her fist, ‘how come Leah isn’t angry?’

  Ashworth sighs and lets his eyeline drift high. He has a way of doing silences that make you feel he’s already said all the things that matter to him, and that no one has been listening, and now he’s given up.

  ‘She was Paige’s best friend, Rob. You got any idea what that means when you’re fifteen?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do you, really?’

  Little buttons of muscle pop in and out at his jaw. ‘No,’ he says eventually. ‘Is that better?’

  They sit in silence for a while. The plates are collected and Wren looks through the file. The next visit is the children’s home where Paige had lived. Beech View. She can feel his eyes burning into the sheets on the table.

  And the thought strikes her all at once, like a kick to the back of the knees: maybe she is out of her depth.

  If this was a normal probation case, there would be none of this cat-and-mouse. There would be meetings and agreements and no grey areas. Doing this job, Wren doesn’t take other people’s shit to heart: she wants them to go straight, because fewer knackers on the streets is fewer knackers on the streets. And until now, her job hasn’t been to treat their personality or make them care. They can be who they want to be, and they very rarely surprise her. Big hard bastards and cocky little twats and everything in between. Some of them were for real and others were fronting, desperate to hide how shit-scared they were of the real world outside. Some of them wanted everything she could offer; some of them couldn’t wait to get her off their backs and get up to their old tricks.

  But none of them had got to her like Robert Ashworth.

  Wren straightens up, remembering the other thing. ‘So, what was that about Leah’s grandad?’

  He shakes his head like he doesn’t know what she means.

  ‘Because you know that’s not something I’m going to be able to just forget about, right?’

  ‘Why?’

  She frowns. ‘What do you mean, why? Because it’s my job, Rob.’

  He cocks his head, looks at her too closely. ‘But it’s not, though. Your job is to do what we just did. Tell everyone what an arsehole I am, so they’ve got someone to blame.’

  ‘That’s not exactly—’

  ‘But if they want to forgive me, surely that’s OK too, right?’

  It’s true. It’s also true that there is something distinctly off here.

  As they’d left Leah’s house, she’d hugged him. Hugged him. The man who’d roped her best mate into an aggravated burglary
. The missing persons file is still open, but it’s been dropped to a rolling six-month ‘weed-date’, when some lowly DC will make a handful of maintenance calls to check for news. Without fresh evidence, that isn’t going to change.

  Wren looks down at her hands. She lets go of the folder, and the blood slowly returns to her knuckles.

  When girls like Paige ran away, they took their phones and their money and one of a handful of things happened. They were found and returned. They stayed on the streets and reappeared on the system some other way: drugs, crime, sex work. If they disappeared permanently, it was never good. It almost always meant other people were involved, and those people rarely had that girl’s interests at heart. At best, it meant serious exploitation. At best.

  And Paige’s closest friend – her lieutenant, her confidante, the girl who should have done her hair before their prom, and been maid of honour at her wedding and godmother to her kids – had welcomed Robert Ashworth into her home. She had buried her face in his shoulder like she’d been chalking off the days until she could hold him again.

  They drive back to his place in silence, more or less.

  Nearing his flat, he turns to her. ‘When can we start looking for Luke? And my mum?’

  ‘What do you mean, we?’

  ‘You’re going to help me. I need to find him.’

  She shrugs, feigning disinterest, but she’s interested. Him needing something from her can only be a good thing.

  He lowers his voice. ‘Please, Miss Reynolds.’

  Wren sighs. ‘If I’m going to help you do that, Rob – and I’m not saying I will – there’s going to have to be a bit of give and take.’

  ‘Like what? How much are we talking?’

  She glances over, and the face on him; she actually laughs aloud. ‘You can’t bribe me, Rob.’

  They arrive outside his block, and Wren pulls over and cuts the engine. ‘I’m talking about the truth. About Paige. I want to know what happened.’

  He gives her a long, slow nod. ‘The truth.’

  ‘If it’s not too much to ask.’ Just for a moment she lets herself believe that this is it. The moment where he cracks under the weight of the guilt. I can’t carry it around with me any more. That kind of thing.

  Her hope is short-lived. He gets out, closes the door behind him, and walks away.

  She winds down the window. ‘Bright and early tomorrow then, Rob,’ she calls after him. He lifts the back of his hand in return, and then he’s gone.

  After he disappears into the stairwell, she waits a few minutes until he reappears on the second-floor walkway, his hands in his pockets. A woman is trying to navigate the narrow path with a buggy, and he pauses to let her pass. Without him seeing, the mother turns back to get another look at him. Probably caught off-guard by his chivalry; the strong, brooding atmosphere of his face. He is the kind of bloke women like the look of. Kind of bloke girls trust.

  Number 28, his flat, is halfway along. He doesn’t look down until he has his key in the door. When he turns, he gives Wren a nod. I know you’re watching me, the look says.

  I know you’re watching me and I’m not going to give you a thing.

  6

  Now

  Wren can hardly open the front door when she gets home. The barricade is an increasingly alarming collection of boxes, stacked along the narrow hallway in what Suzy probably imagines is an orderly fashion. Stamped along the edge of the largest container are the words CuddleClose Co-Sleep Unit.

  Before she knew Suzy, she’d assumed that police officers were as neat and ordered off-duty as the job required them to be when on shift, but she had been very wrong. Even after ten years on the force, Suzy is as sloppy a homemaker as it is possible to be. Radclyffe, their curly-coated retriever, bounds down the stairs at her. He leaps up, knocking a smaller package to the floor with his tail and getting his claws caught in her buttonhole.

  She scratches under his collar and unhooks him. ‘I’m home,’ she calls out, replacing the fallen parcel on top of the pile. She pictures their joint account, supine and emaciated, begging for intervention.

  ‘Kitchen,’ comes the reply.

  Suzy is standing at the stove, stirring an impossibly huge silver pan that Wren has never seen before, an apron tied around her spherical stomach. Her cousin Marty, from an echelon of her vast and spreading family in which both the men and the women are built like Vikings, is sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by paperwork. Wren nods to Marty and pecks Suzy on the cheek.

  ‘Who is this woman, Marty?’ Suzy says archly, laying the spoon on the worktop and turning around. ‘I’m not sure we’ve met.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ Wren protests. It is true that she’s been working later than usual, but they’ve been over it already. She gets a couple of beers from the fridge, uncaps them and puts one in front of Marty.

  He looks at the bottle longingly, but pushes it away. ‘Sorry, can’t,’ he says, gesturing at the variously sized sheets of paper spread out in front of him.

  ‘Oh, the new job?’ Wren asks him. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘They’ve put him straight on the news desk,’ Suzy says without turning.

  He rolls his eyes. ‘You know how you said they’d be bastards?’

  Tipping the bottle into her mouth, Wren nods.

  ‘Well, they’re bastards.’

  She swallows and laughs. He’s recently changed careers, surprising everyone who knows him by eschewing the gardening he’s always loved in favour of journalism. He is a huge man, but was always happier when his work involved planting saplings than sledgehammering patios. Whether or not he’ll have the nose or the hide he needs to make it as a hack is yet to be seen.

  He glances at the clock, swears softly, and starts hastily shoving his research into his shoulder bag. ‘Evening shift. Should have been at my desk half an hour ago,’ he says, getting to his feet. Then, to Wren: ‘Can I have a word?’

  ‘What is it?’

  He looks to Suzy, who shrugs and goes back to her pot.

  ‘Younnis Ibrahim,’ he says to the table.

  Wren stares at him. ‘My Younnis Ibrahim?’

  Ibrahim was a rapist who’d been controversially freed ahead of schedule. He also happened to be the last offender on Wren’s caseload before she’d started on the CAP. It hadn’t ended well: he’d been recalled to prison two weeks after release, and was awaiting trial for assault. Wren glances at the papers Marty is collecting up, and realises what he’s saying.

  ‘Tell me you’re not writing about it.’

  ‘Just a little thing, pre-trial kind of…’ he says, trailing off.

  ‘Bit of a coincidence they gave you that as your first story, isn’t it?’

  ‘No arguing in my kitchen,’ Suzy says sharply.

  Wren raises her eyebrows and asks him, with exaggerated generosity, ‘What did you want to know?’

  ‘They wanted a kind of profile, human angle.’ The discomfort is so tight across his face, Wren almost feels sorry for him.

  ‘I can’t give you anything that’s not already in the public domain, Marty, you know that. The court will have all the—’

  ‘Not on him,’ he says, looking up. ‘On you.’

  Her stomach wouldn’t have lurched harder if she’d been dropped out of a plane. But she keeps her face pleasant and her voice level. ‘Things must be pretty lean at the Southwest Observer if they’re doing a profile on a probation officer.’

  ‘It’s because of the CAP. A lot of interest in it.’

  ‘Interest? It’s not interest, Marty, it’s an agenda. They were fanning the flames before we even got started.’ He opens his mouth to protest but Wren shakes her head. ‘The answer’s no. I don’t want to see my name in it.’

  He sighs, shoulders his bag, kisses Suzy on the cheek and leaves the room. Wren follows him. She gets between him and the front door before he has a chance to open it.

  ‘I want you to promise,’ she says, covering the latch with her hand, ‘that yo
u won’t make this about me.’

  ‘OK,’ he says petulantly. ‘Fine.’

  Wren forces a friendly, ‘Bye, Marty,’ and opens the door, standing aside as he murmurs a farewell and leaves. The moment she closes it behind him, the smile hits the floor. She stands for a moment with her forehead resting on the wood.

  She hadn’t expected this. It’s no surprise that the paper’s editor, ex-tabloid and as right-wing as they come, would be against anything remotely progressive in the judicial system. But that isn’t the issue. If Marty had seriously been sent over to dig the shit on Wren, that makes it something else.

  But then, it was only ever going to be a matter of time. She shakes herself and goes back into the kitchen.

  ‘It wouldn’t hurt, you know.’ Suzy is still busy with her pan. ‘It’s his first gig, after that massive slog at uni.’

  ‘You’re not serious,’ Wren says. ‘Do you not remember them baying for blood after Ibrahim went back inside? They’ll be all over the front garden.’

  Suzy gives her a look. ‘Let’s not be dramatic, chicken. It’s not exactly O.J., is it?’

  Wren, wanting the subject changed, takes a deep swig from her bottle and goes to join her at the hob. She slips her hands around Suzy’s waist and rests her chin on her shoulder.

  ‘What is that you’re making?’ Wren asks, kissing her ear. ‘And will I be expected to eat it?’

  ‘Chutney, and fuck off,’ Suzy says, shrugging her away. Pregnancy makes the skin more sensitive, she’d told Wren that before. It wasn’t to be taken personally.

  Radclyffe’s claws clack on the floor tiles as he comes in, his lead dangling from his mouth.

  ‘Take him out, will you?’ Suzy asks. ‘And careful of the boxes. Most of it’s going back.’

  ‘Again?’

  The last few months, the house has become a thoroughfare for short-stay items of nursery furniture and baby equipment. Each item painstakingly chosen, eagerly awaited, then falling short of Suzy’s expectations in some way upon receipt. Too mumsy, too pretentious, too cute, too boring. Cheap and nasty, or suddenly beyond our budget. But it isn’t the continual shopping itself that bothers Wren. It’s what it says about Suzy’s decisiveness, her ballsiness. The things she seems to be losing.