The Girls (23 page)

‘Clique?’ WPC Cross looked up at her again with those penetratingly clear blue eyes.

‘Yes. Gang. You know. Anyway, we all helped clear up after the barbecue. Drank some more. Talked. Then at about nine o’clock it was obvious that Grace’s mum Clare had probably had a bit too much to drink. I don’t think she’s much of a drinker. Small bones, you know?’ She laughed nervously. ‘Anyway, she was a bit wobbly on her feet and Leo offered to get her home but Pip said she could manage.’

‘And Pip is Grace’s sister?’

‘Yes. She’s twelve. Very sensible girl. Anyway, that was at about nine. Then I made Leo go over and check on them both – I was a bit worried, not sure Pip could handle it by herself. So he took the dog and went over and spoke to Pip …’

‘And this was roughly what time?’

‘I guess, just after nine?’

‘OK, thank you.’

‘Leo came back about twenty minutes later, then my sister and her family left. Her children had fallen asleep on the sofa. In their pyjamas. They got a minicab back to Willesden.’

‘And then?’

‘Leo and I tidied up. Went back on to the terrace. Had another glass of wine.’

‘And did you see any of the children during this time?’

‘Yes, we saw them come down the hill and head into the playground. At about a quarter to ten.’

‘Did you speak to them?’

‘No, I waved, but they didn’t see.’

‘And was Grace with them?’

And there it was. The black spot on Adele’s consciousness, the moment she had replayed and replayed until she’d driven herself almost insane the past two nights. She had seen the children as an amorphous mass that had looked roughly the right size and shape. She could not remember who had been in the group. Not specifically.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know,’ she said, her face filling with colour, her heart racing with nerves, feeling inexplicably culpable.

‘That’s OK, Mrs Howes. That’s fine. We can put the rest of the picture together talking to other people. You’ve given us loads. Plenty. We’ll go and ring on a few doorbells. And if we wanted to speak to your husband and your children, when would be a good time to come back?’

‘Well, Leo normally gets back from work around six, unless he’s with clients, in which case it might be a lot later. I can call him now, if you like? See what his plans are?’

‘Don’t worry about that. We’ll just try again after six and if he’s not here, we’ll maybe get him to come into the station.’

‘The station?’

‘Yes. Just for convenience. But really, whatever’s easier.’ WPC Tara Cross put her barely drunk mug of tea on the coffee table, put her neat leather bag over her shoulder, exchanged a look with PC Michaelides and got up to leave.

In the hallway she popped her head into the kitchen. ‘Bye, girls, see you later!’

They all looked up from their textbooks and Willow jumped to her feet and ran to the doorway. ‘Are you coming back to ask us questions?’

‘Possibly,’ said WPC Cross. ‘We’ll see how it goes.’

‘Please come and ask us questions. It will be so exciting.’

Adele tutted. ‘Willow,’ she said. ‘Grace is in hospital. In a coma. Show some respect.’

‘I
am
being respectful. I want to help the police find out who hurt her. What’s disrespectful about that?’

‘Just …’ Adele sighed, threw the police an apologetic look, ‘maybe try not to be so excited about everything. It’s not a time for excitement.’

‘You know Grace had a boyfriend?’ Willow asked, not showing much sign of being any less excited.

The police officers stopped and turned back. ‘Really?’ said WPC Cross. ‘What kind of boyfriend?’

‘Dylan,’ said Willow, her eyes shining. ‘He’s our friend. We’ve known him, like, forever.’

WPC Cross turned to Adele. ‘Is this the same Dylan you mentioned earlier?’

‘Yes. I suppose it is. Although, boyfriend and girlfriend at that age’ – she laughed – ‘well, you know, it’s not exactly a
relationship
, it’s—’

Willow cut her off. ‘It is,’ she said, her back pressed into the doorframe, climbing up the other side of the frame with her bare feet, until she was suspended halfway up, something she did all the time but that looked decidedly odd in the presence of a pair of police officers. ‘It is a proper relationship. They
lurve
each other.’

Catkin and Fern were both tutting loudly now and looking appalled. Adele pulled Willow gently by the hand to detach her from the inside of the doorframe and as she slid down her T-shirt rose up, revealing two large bruises in the small of her back.

‘Nasty bruises you’ve got there,’ said WPC Cross.

Adele looked at the bruises in horror. They were violent and fresh, the result of a fall off the swings in the dark on Saturday night. She’d landed backwards on a child’s plastic toy and appeared on the terrace crying like a five-year-old. Adele had administered tiger balm and hugs and sent her back on her way a while later.

‘Fell off the swing.’ Willow shrugged and skipped back to her schoolbook. ‘Didn’t hurt.’

‘You’re a brave girl then,’ said WPC Cross, smiling, her eyes tracing an arc around the interior of the kitchen, over Adele’s bruised children, her choices, her lifestyle, before smiling again and saying goodbye.

Adele closed the front door behind the two officers a moment later and leaned heavily against it. She was shaking slightly, feeling horribly incriminated in some deeply irrational way. She’d agreed to them talking to the children later, but only if Leo was present. After Willow’s unexpected outburst about Grace and Dylan being in love and the revelation of the awful bruises, which looked like those of a child who’d been kicked in the back with a hobnailed boot whilst lying in a foetal ball on the floor, she couldn’t face another interrogation without another grown-up in the room.

Gordon appeared in the hallway then, his prosthetic foot in his hand, leaning heavily on his carved African stick. ‘What the hell did they want?’

‘They’re just trying to piece together what happened on Saturday night,’ she said, trying to sound as though the whole episode had been perfectly pleasant. ‘Asking around the neighbourhood. They’re coming back later to talk to the rest of you.’

‘Not much point talking to me,’ he muttered, hopping towards the living-room door. ‘Don’t know diddly.’ He grimaced and called over his shoulder, ‘Give me a hand with this blessed contraption, will you, Mrs H.? They keep telling me it’s easy and it’s not fucking easy. I’d like to see them try.’

She followed him into the living room and hoisted his leg up on to the pouffe.

‘What time are they coming back?’ he said after a moment’s silence.

‘Six-ish,’ she said, rolling up his trouser leg, marvelling at the neatness of what remained of his lower leg; where once there had been putrefaction and decay now there was a shiny pink and white knob of flesh and bone.

‘Don’t know why they’re bothering,’ he said. ‘No one’s going to know anything. And anyone who does isn’t going to say anything. If there was foul play involved we’d know by now. Just one of those things,’ he said, ‘like that Rednough girl. Stupid little girls get in over their heads. And look what happens. Just look what happens.’

He shook his head heavily from side to side and Adele resisted the temptation to whack him over his big fat crown with his prosthetic foot and storm out. Even now, she thought, with a young girl in a hospital bed, wired up to machinery, her mother in the next room, probably unable to eat or form a thought beyond her daughter’s welfare, even now this horrible old man could find not a shred of normal human decency within him, not an iota of empathy.

She fitted his prosthetic in icy cold silence and then returned to her daughters in their kitchen classroom, feeling as though every aspect of her perfect life had been taken out of its box, bent out of shape and left in a warped, unappealing heap on the floor.

Twenty-three

The WPC turned up at the hospital again early on Monday morning. She’d introduced herself the day before but Clare couldn’t recall her name.

‘So, Grace. How old is she?’

‘Well, she’s thirteen. It was her birthday. On Saturday. So, only just.’

‘And what sort of girl would you say she was? Generally?’

‘Well, you know. A bit moody. A bit stroppy. Prone to unpredictable outbursts of affection.’

The WPC looked at her with arctic-blue eyes. ‘Mature for her age?’

‘Physically, well, yes, I guess so. She’s tall. Big-boned. Developed. In, you know, some ways.’

‘Mm-hm. OK.’ She wrote this down. Clare couldn’t think why. ‘Lots of friends?’

‘A few. Yes. She just started a new school in January, and she hasn’t really found her feet socially there yet. But in the communal garden, yes, she’s definitely part of the scene out there. She spends a lot of time with a family over the way. They have three daughters, similar ages.’

‘Ah, yes.’ The WPC flipped some pages in her notepad. ‘The Howeses?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Leo and Adele.’ Clare blanched at the memory of the way she’d behaved on Saturday night.

‘I’ve just come from theirs. They said you were there on Saturday night. From …’ She ran her finger along the lines of her handwriting. ‘… five till about nine?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘And you had your youngest daughter with you?’

‘Yes. For most of the time.’

‘And Grace was hanging about with the other teenagers?’

‘Yes.’ Clare only knew that because Pip had told her. She had barely given Grace a thought from approximately her third glass of wine.

‘So when would you say was the last time you saw Grace before she was found?’

The answer to this question sat painfully on the tip of Clare’s tongue. ‘Well, I saw her for a little while during the barbecue. At the Howeses’. She was there for a few minutes. Not very long. But before that, the last time I saw her properly was around two p.m.’ Her eyes fell to the floor.

‘Two p.m.?’

‘Yes. I threw her a little birthday party – well, not even a party really, just a gathering. On our patio. We had non-alcoholic cocktails, presents, cake.’

‘OK. And who was there?’

‘Me and the girls, obviously. The three sisters. Another girl from the garden called Tyler. A boy called Dylan.’

The WPC stabbed her notepad triumphantly. ‘Maxwell-Reid!’

‘Who …? What …?’

‘Dylan Maxwell-Reid?’

‘Is he?’ said Clare, confused. ‘I don’t know. Anyway, he was there. And my mother came too.’

‘No one else?’

‘No.’

‘Grace’s father?’

‘No,’ Clare replied circumspectly. ‘We’re estranged.’

‘OK. So what happened at two p.m.? Party ended?’

‘Yes. The party ended. The older ones disappeared. Pip and I tidied up. Then Pip went out into the communal garden – she was taking part in some pet competition thing. My mother left a few minutes later and I sat in my back garden for a while, reading. Then Pip came back, said she wanted me to come and look at some animals with her, some kind of petting zoo. I don’t know. We looked for Grace then. Couldn’t find her anywhere. So I called her …’

‘When was this?’

‘I don’t know. Fourish, I guess. She was at Tyler’s house.’

She checked her notes again. ‘Tyler Rednough?’

‘I don’t know what her surname is.’

‘And where does she live, this Tyler?’

‘Just over the way from us, the mansion block on the right.’

‘And does Grace spend a lot of time at Tyler’s house?’

Clare shook her head. ‘No, no – I think this was the first time she’d been there. As far as I know. Her flat doesn’t open on to the garden. So you have to leave the garden, walk on the road to get in and out. And I thought she knew she wasn’t supposed to do that.’

‘But clearly she didn’t.’

‘No.’ Clare cast her eyes down. ‘No. I told her I wasn’t happy about it. But, you know, it was her birthday. I didn’t make her come back. Didn’t want to cramp her style.’

‘No.’ The WPC looked at her sympathetically. ‘Of course not. And do you have any idea what she was doing between then and seven o’clock when she came to the Howeses’ for the barbecue?’

‘She was at the face-painting stall, as far as I know. And then I sent Pip to check on her at about six o’clock and Pip said she was up on the hill, their usual spot, with all the others.’

‘So,’ said the WPC in a let’s-get-this-straight tone. ‘Two p.m., she left your house. Four p.m. she was at Tyler’s flat. Six p.m. she was on top of the hill with her friends. Seven p.m. she was at the Howeses’ having her dinner. So really we’re looking at a big black hole between seven thirty and ten o’clock when your younger daughter found her. Can you tell me where you were between those times?’

‘Well, I was at the Howeses’ until about nine o’clock. Then Pip and I walked home and I went to bed.’

‘At nine p.m.?’

‘I was feeling a bit unwell.’ Clare felt her mouth grow dry. She reached for a plastic cup of water on the table in front of her and spilt some down the front of her top. She wiped it away with the back of her hand. ‘I was sick.’ No point lying. The police would be talking to everyone, she assumed. Someone was bound to mention the fact that she’d been paralytic, that her twelve-year-old had had to virtually carry her home.

‘Ah, yes. Mrs Howes mentioned you were a bit the worse for wear. And your younger daughter? What was she doing while you were asleep?’

Clare gave up the façade. She didn’t have the energy for it any more. She let her head drop into her hands; then she lifted it again and looked at the WPC openly and frankly. ‘I have no idea,’ she said, with a wry smile. ‘I was out cold.’

‘But she was with you?’

‘Yes. I assume. She says she sat with me for a while and then she went to get her phone to try to call Grace, to get her to come in. But apparently Grace’s phone was out of charge. Oh, and she said Leo Howes came to check on us both, shortly after we got back. And then at some point she left me and went out to look for Grace.’ She shrugged, as if to say:
Take me to the stocks, take me to the ducking pond
.
I am the worst mother in the world
.

‘Well, me and my colleague are going back to the Howeses’ later to talk to their daughters. They were out with Grace for most of the evening so they might be able to shed some light on that vital couple of hours. And we’ll talk to Mr Howes. But just generally, Ms Wild. Grace – did she have any problems on the garden? Anyone who might have wished her harm? Any complicated relationships with her friends? That kind of thing?’