Silent Voices

asked.
    ‘He’s very protective,’ Freya said. ‘But I told him it was OK. That was when the social worker asked more personal things, prying actually. About our relationship, my background, all that.’
    ‘What do your parents think of Michael?’ Again Ashworth found it impossible to keep quiet. No way was his daughter going to end up with some pervy man old enough to be her father. He’d make sure of that. What was Freya’s family thinking of?
    ‘My parents don’t give a shit actually. They moved to Spain, bought a bar. Act as if they’re twenty again. No responsibilities, pissed every night.’
    ‘Living the dream,’ Vera muttered, only loud enough for Ashworth to hear.
    ‘That social worker was a patronizing cow,’ the girl went on. ‘I had teachers like her. The ones that talk to you as if you’re daft, as if they always know best. You could see how she might wind someone up so they lost their temper and killed her.’
    ‘Where did you meet Michael?’ Ashworth asked. Outside in the main village street the shops were closing for the evening. The light had faded. The mist had seeped in from the sea and they could hear the foghorn at the mouth of the Tyne. From the metro station the first commuters were coming home from work. The waiter lit the candle on their table and the sudden flare of the flame lit up the girl’s face.
    ‘At the Willows,’ she said, brushing her long hair away from her face. ‘You know, the smart hotel on the other side of town. He used to run a clinic once a week in the health club. I’ve been working as a waitress there at weekends since I was fifteen. We met at the beginning of December, the staff Christmas party.’

 
Chapter Twenty-One
     
    Vera sat alone in the house that had once been her father’s. Nights like this, a few glasses in to a bottle of Scotch, she could still imagine him there, lording it in the only comfortable armchair close to the fire. Or at the table, spread with plastic sheeting, his hand up the backside of some dead bird, preparing to stuff it, his eyes narrowed in concentration. That smell of dead flesh and chemicals.
    ‘Taxidermy. Art and science combined,’ he’d say.
    And theft. And murder. Because he’d taken rare birds from the wild, killed them to the order of collectors as barking mad as he was, and she’d never shopped him. What had that made her? It came to her now that this case was all about families, the weird ties between kids and their parents. Blood and water, she thought, remembering Elias, drowned by the mother who claimed to love him.
    She’d grown up with Hector’s insults, mocking, masked as humour: ‘Your mother was a beautiful woman. I only ever collect beautiful objects. Oh, Vee, whatever happened to you? Where did you spring from? Must be my side of the family, eh? Let’s hope you have my brains.’
    Only I didn’t even get the brains, she thought now, throwing another log onto the fire, watching it spit, the bark peel and split. I should have checked for a connection between Michael Morgan and the Willows. Basic policing.
    All the way north in the car she’d ranted at poor Joe Ashworth. ‘Do I have to think of everything? I asked for a staff list. For cross-checks between all suspects and the health club. Charlie was supposed to be doing it. What’s the idle bastard been up to?’ Driving too fast through the fog, enjoying seeing him grow pale, wincing when they almost hit an oncoming vehicle, his mouth clamped shut.
    Finally she’d provoked the reaction she’d hoped for. He’d cracked, lost it too. ‘Just because you don’t have a life worth saving, you don’t have to take me down with you. I have a wife, kids. People who actually care about me. And if you spent your time supervising your team, like an SIO should, instead of doing their work for them, you’d know what Charlie had been up to.’
    She’d dropped him off at the end of his street, with a curt arrangement to collect him the next morning: ‘Make sure you’re ready. I don’t want to hang around while you’re changing a nappy or kissing your brood goodbye.’ No invitation to come back to her house for a drink first, although she’d been looking forward to that all afternoon: the chance to put things into perspective, to relax with the one man she’d ever really been close to. She’d had it in mind since suggesting that he leave his car in the Tyne valley.
    How sad is that! It was her father sneaking inside her head again.