that, Jane had had Sophie, a first-year undergraduate who rented a bed-sit in the student house next door to Jane. She’d turned up on the doorstep just before the start of term and introduced herself, offering her services as a childminder. Jane, after contacting Sophie’s parents, smallholders on the east coast, was happy to take up her offer, and the arrangement had worked well. Sophie was inexperienced and unsophisticated, but she was bright and sensible and fun. Jane liked her, Lucy adored her, she was just next door and could fit in with Jane’s elastic schedule. But then, quite suddenly, she’d dropped out of her course and left.
Emma was a fellow student. She had been one of the regular visitors at the student house – a house with a lot of coming and going – but Jane and Suzanne hadn’t met her properly until after Christmas when Sophie had introduced her: ‘Do you mind if Emma comes with me and Lucy?’ And she had, imperceptibly, drifted into their lives, a quiet, rather serious young woman, a contrast to Sophie’s vivacity. She had moved in to the student house in March, and had rather diffidently offered herself as a replacement when Sophie left. Jane had been pleased at first, especially to have someone whom she and Lucy both knew, but she was starting to have second thoughts. Emma was younger than Sophie, and, Suzanne was beginning to realize, a lot less responsible. She listened with increasing unease as Jane expressed her doubts. Since Sophie had left, Emma had become moody and unreliable. Lucy had started having nightmares, nightmares about monsters, about ‘the Ash Man’, Jane said, about Emma being chased by monsters. Sometimes she’d come back from the park with the smell of tobacco smoke lingering on her clothes. ‘I know Em smokes,’ Jane said. ‘Her lungs are her business. But she knows not to smoke near Lucy.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Oh, she said she thought it wouldn’t matter in the open air. I suppose … I don’t know … I don’t want Lucy to have another upheaval. She likes Emma. It’s just …’
‘The monsters?’
‘Yes …’ Jane frowned at her painting, brushing away a tiny spider that was running on the surface. ‘No.’ She looked up at Suzanne. ‘I’ve decided. I’m not letting Emma look after her again. I’ll find someone else.’
By the time Suzanne had finished talking to Jane, it was nearly eleven. She let herself in through the back door and stepped over the pile of shoes on the doormat. The breakfast dishes were in the sink and the worktops were a mess of toast crumbs, butter and a congealing pool of spilt milk and sugar where she had eaten breakfast. A fly was exploring this, and she aimed a swat at it. It flew up, its drone filling the air for a moment, then stopping as it settled again.
She walked through the middle room to the side door to collect the post. Three brown envelopes lay on the mat. She picked them up and flicked through them. Bills, but not red ones. She put them into the in-tray she kept on the dining table. The new additions caused a minor landslide, and she had to scoop up a pile of envelopes from the floor and cram them back.
She needed to go and do some work.
Upstairs in her study, she closed the door behind her and felt a sense of peace. Her study was in the small attic room under the roof. It had a dormer window, high and narrow, that opened at just the right height for her to lean her arms on the sill and look out across the rooftops. She did that now, enjoying the high, cloudless sky and the gleam of the sunlight off the wet roofs that tumbled up the other side of the valley. In front of her, the slates of her own roof sloped down into the guttering, concealing the drop down to the road below. If she craned her neck, she could just see Jane still sitting on her front step, her head bent intently over her drawing.
But she had work to do. Inside, the study was cool and shadowed. Her desk stood in the light from the window. Further back into the room, the walls were lined with shelves of books, all sorted by subject and author. A filing cabinet, functional metallic grey, stood against one wall, and an easy chair, a splash of colour, fire-engine red, occupied one corner under a small reading lamp. Shelves at the side of her desk held her set of audio tapes, the start of her research project.
If she wanted to study the way the young men on the Alpha Project communicated, she had to record them, study their language, to see if they employed all the strategies and skills of conversation that researchers had identified over the years. When the negotiation degenerated into violence, was it because they wanted to fight, to assert themselves, to establish their dominance, or was it because they couldn’t read those subtle signals of language that meant I am being polite, I don’t like what you are saying, I am asking you to do something? When they looked blank and nodded in vague agreement to something they hadn’t heard, or hadn’t understood, was it because they didn’t want to hear, or was it because they didn’t know they hadn’t understood, or didn’t know how to say they hadn’t understood? And did the resulting frustration boil over into anti-social behaviour?
As a first step, she’d been recording quite formal interviews with some of the young men on the programme. She’d asked for, and been given, the ones with the most serious or the most persistent records. One frustrating thing was that she didn’t actually know what they had done, and might never if they themselves didn’t volunteer the information. The Alpha management had been grudging with their permission, and draconian about confidentiality.
She took the tapes of the individual interviews out of her bag. She wasn’t supposed to have them here. They were supposed to be kept secure at the university. She’d interviewed three of the young offenders so far. Dean – seventeen, and on the programme as a condition of his parole – she was sure could be violent. He had been monosyllabic, sullen, occasionally aggressive; then she’d interviewed Lee – also seventeen, bright, lively and endlessly in trouble. He’d shown flashes of insight when he forgot his manic clowning. And Ashley. That interview had been odd. She knew Ashley better than any of the others, and yet he had been halting, incoherent, illogical. She had listened to the tape several times in the four weeks since she had actually carried out the interview, and she still had trouble making sense of it.
Q. Tell me about your family, Ashley.
A. Er … It’s not …
Q. Sorry, you don’t have to tell me if you’d rather not.
A. Yes.
Q. You want to tell me?
A. Brothers and sisters?
Q. If …
A. (Laughs.) Brothers and sisters.
Q. Sorry, Ashley, I don’t understand.
A. Er … So … em … loose …
Q. What?
A. Simon.
Q. Simon is your brother?
A. Yes.
Q. Tell me about Simon.
A. (Laughs.) Simon says …
Q. Yes?
A. Not much. (Laughs.)
At the time, she had kept thinking, Odd, odd. He had become increasingly uncomfortable and, in the end, he’d cut the interview short. She wondered if he would let her tape him again. He might be the first one who could provide her with data that would support her theory. Ironically, she had been doubtful about his suitability for her research, as he was classified as having ‘learning difficulties’, and she wasn’t sure if that would skew her results. She needed more background on Ashley before
