Silent Voices

even without seeing her, the geek would want to prove how clever he was. Holly was also known to get a bit above herself, and Vera occasionally gave her boring jobs to put her in her place.
    ‘There’s no way a non-member could get into the pool area?’
    ‘In theory,’ Taylor said. ‘Unless she was a guest of someone who does belong to the club. Then we’d ask the member to show her own card at the desk and sign the guest in.’
    Vera replayed her own visits to the club in her head. She was always in a hurry, often swiped the plastic card upside down so that the turnstile wouldn’t work, and dropped her towel because she was flustered, holding up the people behind her. But there was usually a yellow-clad woman at the nearby desk to put her straight.
    ‘You said “In theory”,’ Vera said. ‘What about in practice? How hard would it be for an impostor to get in?’
    ‘Not hard at all. You’d have to know the set-up, but there are ways round the system.’
    ‘Such as?’ Something about the round little man was starting to irritate. It was his good humour, she thought. Nothing seemed to rattle him. Happy people really got on her tits.
    ‘Well, you could claim to have forgotten your card. People do that all the time. We’d ask you to sign in, but we’d never check your signature against a members’ list. Karen on the desk would just click you through.’
    ‘So you could sign it as anything?’
    ‘Pretty much.’
    ‘How else could you get round the system?’
    ‘Borrow a card from a mate. We’re pretty sure that happens all the time, especially with younger members. Each card has a photo, but we don’t usually look at them. It’s there for its deterrent effect as much as anything.’ He seemed quite unconcerned that the system was being abused – to find it rather a joke.
    ‘Great,’ Vera said. ‘Bloody great.’ But really she was already intrigued by the complications of the case. She was a good detective. She didn’t often enough get the chance to prove it.

 
Chapter Three
     
    Connie waited outside the church hall in the spring sunshine. There were primroses in clumps on the bank on the other side of the lane. One time she’d have thought this idyllic: the sun, the kids’ voices coming through the open windows of the hall, bird-song from the bushes along the burn and from the trees marking the boundary of the churchyard. After a winter of snow and rain, it was good just to see the blue sky. But now she felt the tension that came with every trip to pick up Alice. Other mothers were wandering along to collect their children from playgroup. Connie always made sure she got to the hall first. She couldn’t cope with the turned faces, the occasional false, pitying smile, then the accusing silence that lasted just as long as she walked past the waiting women to join the queue.
    The playgroup leader opened the door and Connie went in ahead of the crowd. Best just to pick up her daughter and get out of there. Alice was sitting on the mat, back straight, legs crossed. She caught sight of her mother and beamed at her, but her posture remained just the same. Connie wanted to say: Don’t try so hard, sweetie. Don’t care what they all think of you. But Alice wanted to be popular with the other kids and she wanted to please the middle-aged women who ran the group. It was only at night that her control gave way. Then she wet the bed, was tormented by nightmares and climbed trembling in beside Connie to sleep. In the morning she refused to talk about the night terrors. Connie had never found out the exact cause of the scary dreams, but she could guess. She was haunted herself by memories of being chased down the street by a flock of reporters.
    ‘Alice, your mummy is here.’ It was Auntie Elizabeth. The play leaders were known collectively as ‘the aunties’. Elizabeth was plump and pleasant. The vicar’s wife. Connie thought she was itching to get inside Connie’s house and inside her head. Maybe she thought her faith gave her permission to be curious and to poke around in other people’s lives. Connie could understand the compulsion: she’d spent her working life being nosy too. But she knew that the woman looked out for Alice and she was grateful for that. The child shot to her feet and ran over to her mother. The kids must have been playing outside in the sun, because her freckles seemed brighter and there was a patch of mud on the knee of her jeans. For a moment Connie wondered if