bill you haven’t paid.’
Mum stared at the window. ‘Oh, Kerry, don’t nag,’ she said. ‘Hurry up. You’ll be late.’ She shifted restlessly from foot to foot. Kerry wanted to say something, but Mum looked at her so blankly that she couldn’t think of anything. She picked up her bag and looked in the mirror again. This time it was just Kerry who looked back, but somehow she couldn’t care about it any more.
She left the house, heading towards the bus stop, her feet moving slower and slower. She opened the letter from school as she walked. It was the usual stuff. Dear Mrs Fraser…Mum didn’t call herself Mrs Fraser any more, but the school kept making that mistake, because Kerry went on being Kerry Fraser. Dear Mrs Fraser…Kerry pulled a face. Blah, blah, blah…unexcused absences…blah, blah…She was about to screw it up and throw it away, when a phrase caught her eye:…excluded for a period…She read the letter closely, but it was all right. She wasn’t excluded, but she had to stay after school on Friday. She would be excluded if she missed that…without good reason…At least they couldn’t phone Mum now. She remembered the last time the school had phoned. Mum’s eyes had looked tired. ‘I can’t cope with this,’ she’d said. And Kerry had felt cold inside. What if Mum sent her away? What if she put Kerry in care? That’s what she’d done to Lyn. Then what could she do to help Dad?
But the phone had been cut off. That was another bill Mum hadn’t paid. Kerry had told Lyn, and Lyn had pulled one of those faces, but she’d given Kerry the phone. ‘Don’t let her get it,’ Lyn said. ‘I worked hard to buy that.’
She kept it deep down in her bag, where Mum wouldn’t see it, and she kept it switched off so it wouldn’t beep and give her away. She switched it on now. She wanted to call Lyn, but if Lyn was mad at her she might not talk. She thought for a moment, then keyed in sori I woz l8. She pressed ‘send’, holding her breath. Was Lyn so mad she wouldn’t get in touch? She sat on the low wall by the bus stop, the phone in her hand, watching up the road for the bus. It didn’t mean anything if there wasn’t a reply. Lyn’s phone might be switched off, she might be busy, anything.
She could see the bus in the distance now, pulling in to the stop further along the road. She was about to stow the phone safely in her bag when it beeped. She nearly dropped it. The message signal was flashing. She felt breathless as she pressed the read button. It was all right. Lyn wasn’t mad at her – Lyn was worried. The letters ran across the screen.
RUOK?
Eliza got up early and watched the sun rise over the canal. She hadn’t slept much the night before. Every time she began to drop into sleep, she thought she heard those soft footsteps again on the other side of the wall.
By eight, she was dressed and breakfasted, and glad to go downstairs and start work, to get back to the world of the normal, the commonplace, the everyday.
Jonathan arrived late. He’d had a bad night, he explained irritably, and he didn’t want to spend all day shut in his office in the gallery. That reminded Eliza she was supposed to check and sign the statement she’d given to DC Barraclough the day before. She was probably the last-known person to have seen – or at least to have heard – Cara alive. Jonathan sighed when she told him.
‘I’ve got to go out,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a meeting and I don’t want to leave Mel on her own.’
This was the first Eliza had heard of any meeting. ‘Can’t it wait? Mel needs supervising.’ Or she’ll spend all morning with her feet up and her magazines.
‘Mel’s fine,’ he said.
She looked at him. He seemed tense and anxious. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Oh…’ His sigh was audible. ‘The police have been in touch. They’ve searched her flat, and the stairs, and now they want to look over the gallery.’ So that was the reason for the sudden appointment. He didn’t want the hassle of dealing with them. There was nothing she could do about that. ‘When will you be back?’ he said.
‘I’ve no idea,’ she said, more sharply than she’d intended. ‘I’ve never been involved in a murder inquiry before.’
He looked a bit shamefaced at that. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Oh, well, you’ll have to go. Oh, I suppose I can rearrange things.’
Eliza left early for her appointment. She wanted ten minutes to herself with some decent coffee before she had to think about Cara again, about Cara’s death, about the shabby flat and the still bundle in the cot. She walked along to the canal basin, to the café, and sat in the window in a soft chair, watching the boats, people coming and going along the towpath. Something caught her eye. A picture in a newspaper being read by a young man, glimpsed as he ambled by.
There were newspapers in the racks and on the tables. She went to look, flicking through the nationals, not seeing what she was looking for. Then she saw that the early edition of the local paper was out. She opened it, and the photograph looked back at her. Cara and Briony Rose. She put the paper down on the table in front of her. What had she expected? Of course it would be in the local paper. It was probably in the nationals somewhere. She looked at the headline. She read it once without taking it in, then she read it again. CONCERN FOR CHILD IN PROSTITUTE KILLING. It must be the wrong story. The story didn’t go with the picture. It…
She read the article slowly, her heart sinking. The police were treating Cara’s death as suspicious; and they believed that Cara had been a prostitute. She had been out on the streets the night she was killed, the article said. That was ridiculous. Cara hadn’t been a prostitute. She…But Eliza’s rejection of the idea was starting to lose its force. The gallery was very near to the red-light areas of West Bar Green and Corporation Street. Eliza had seen the prostitutes waiting at the kerb side often enough. And Cara had been young, lonely and poor.
But the main focus of the article was the baby. Eliza had a feeling that, if it hadn’t been for the involvement of the child, Cara’s death – Cara’s murder? The police hadn’t said anything about murder – would have merited only a brief paragraph on an inside page. She read on. Briony Rose had been hypothermic and dehydrated when she was found, having been shut in the flat for over twelve hours. She was still being treated, but was ‘expected to make a full recovery’. Cara must have left the baby while she went out to work. And then the editorial rehashed Ellie’s murder in a dramatic ‘canal of death’ paragraph.
She read through the article twice, trying to make sense of it, then she looked at her watch. Shit! She was late. She grabbed her things and ran along the road and up the hill towards the brick block that housed the police headquarters.
‘Ms Eliot, thank you for coming in.’ It was DC Barraclough, the young woman Eliza had talked to the day before. She was still tired and heavyeyed. It looked as though she had a social life to match her appearance. ‘I know you’re busy at the gallery.’
‘It’s the private view on Friday,’ Eliza said, moving automatically into PR mode. ‘Why don’t you come?’ she added, remembering the woman’s interest – I thought it was a red horse…
DC Barraclough looked surprised. ‘Maybe I will,’ she said.
‘I’ll send you an invitation,’ Eliza said.
The other woman focused on the papers in front of her. ‘There’s one or two things in your statement I wanted to check…’ she said now. She frowned as she looked round the room.
