Silent Voices

answer directly. He wasn’t even convinced she’d heard the question. ‘Jenny Lister and Danny Shaw,’ she said. ‘Someone’s covering his tracks.’ She looked up at him and gave one of her old wicked grins. ‘Or her tracks. I thought I knew what had been going on here. Now I’m not so sure.’
    In Barnard Bridge there was a sense of a community under siege. There were sandbags piled outside all the doorways in the main street. The burn that had been just a trickle outside Connie’s cottage was more than a foot deep and the Tyne was brown and fierce, frothing under the bridge, covered with a cream-coloured scum. The place was deserted. Ashworth phoned Connie’s mobile again and left a message. ‘If it continues raining tonight, the river will flood. You should come and move your belongings while you can.’
    But, he thought, few of her belongings remained in the cottage. When he and Vera had checked her wardrobe, most of her clothes, and those of the child, had gone. The furniture was the property of the owner, not of Connie. After all, she had no reason to return. His message would have no effect, even if she picked it up.
    In the Lister house he found Hannah, Simon and a vicar, who was there, it seemed, to discuss Jenny’s funeral. Her body had been released to the undertaker and arrangements could now be made. The vicar was wearing jeans and had a Barbour jacket over his clerical collar. Hannah invited Ashworth in and offered him coffee, but the detective felt he couldn’t stay. Hannah would surely be safe in the company of these men, and religious people always made him slightly uncomfortable. There’d been a stern Sunday-school teacher in the Methodist Chapel where his mother had taken him as a boy. Instead, he went next door and knocked at Hilda’s house.
    She was there on her own. Maurice had been banished despite the weather.
    ‘Don’t worry about the boys,’ Hilda said, when Ashworth made a comment. He smiled to think of her husband and his friend as boys. ‘There’s a shed like a palace on that allotment of theirs. They were in the house all morning, but it’s cleared a bit now and they could do with some fresh air.’
    She was in the middle of cooking tea, but she invited him in anyway and he sat in the kitchen on a tall stool by the workbench while she rubbed fat into flour to make pastry.
    ‘That cottage by the burn where Connie Masters lives,’ he said. ‘Who lived there before it became a holiday let?’
    He’d been going over this in his head since his meeting with Vera in the hotel, trying to picture it. He wanted to prove to Vera that he had ideas too. Veronica Eliot would have been visiting the cottage when her son Patrick was drowned. Must have been, because the only access to the burn was through the cottage garden. So surely a woman of about Veronica’s age would have been staying there then, if they were friends, on visiting terms. A woman perhaps with young children. It could have been the mother of Mattie Jones, the mother who had given her up to care. Mattie would have been older than Veronica’s children, but not so much older. If she’d seen Patrick die in the water, had the image stuck with her? It would perhaps explain why Mattie had disciplined her own son in that way, why eventually she’d killed him.
    It occurred to him that this link was just what Jenny Lister had been looking for when she’d questioned Mattie for her book. It would make a good story after all, and social workers liked neat and tidy motives, just as some detectives did. Vera would say he was back in Jackanory land and fairy tales were just for bairns, but she was always taking leaps into the dark and it seemed to work for her.
    He waited now for Hilda to answer. She finished rubbing the fat into the flour, washed her hands under the tap and wiped them on a towel.
    ‘Mallow Cottage,’ she said at last. ‘It was never a happy house. Folk never seemed to stay there. They’d move in full of plans to do it up, but they all seemed to sell up before the work was done.’
    ‘I’d never have had you down as a superstitious type,’ Ashworth said.
    ‘Nothing to do with superstition!’ She fired the words back at him. ‘Damp and dark and too expensive to renovate – that was it, more like.’
    ‘But there was a tragedy there,’ Ashworth said. ‘A little boy died.’
    ‘Aye, Patrick Eliot. That would have been twenty years ago, almost to the day. We all turned out for the funeral. The