Silent Voices

unlikely.’
    Perhaps because she was so offhand, Joe stayed on the doorstep. Vera had taught him to be stubborn, to face down the snotty middle classes. ‘It must have been hard,’ he said, ‘to see another child in the cottage down there.’
    She looked at him with distaste. If he’d farted at one of her smart dinner parties, she couldn’t have despised him more.
    ‘I’m not entirely sure why you think you have the right to dig around in my family’s personal tragedies.’
    He ignored that and continued, as if he were thinking aloud and no response were required. ‘There would have been an inquiry, I’m sure. A sudden death and the police would have been involved. Social services too, I expect. People must have talked. It can’t have been easy.’
    Veronica lost control. The disintegration was sudden and completely unexpected, and it made him feel like a worm. Her face was flushed and she ranted at him, the words beating against him, making him flinch. ‘Do you really think I cared about that? I’d just lost my son. Do you imagine I worried that people might be talking?’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘And it wasn’t just me. Christopher had lost his baby boy. I knew I couldn’t bear to have any more children after him. Simon had lost his brother. Have you any idea what that did to us?’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Ashworth said again.
    It was as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘We never blamed Simon for what happened that day. Never. He was a child. But he was old enough to remember it. He knew he shouldn’t have run away from me. He thinks it was his fault. He’s had to live with the knowledge all his life. Do you think a bit of gossip is worse than the pain of that?’
    ‘No,’ Ashworth said. He had to stop himself putting up his hands to protect his head from the violence of the words. ‘No, of course not.’
    The outburst ended as quickly as it had begun. Veronica became distant, icy, once again. ‘To answer your question, Sergeant, of course it was difficult to see a child playing where Patrick died. I had mixed feelings. Perhaps my response to Connie was coloured by my experience. I was unkind. But I’ve had nothing to do with her disappearance. I don’t know where she is.’
    She made to turn away from him and shut the door, but Ashworth called her back.
    ‘Would it be possible to speak to Hannah?’
    ‘Hannah’s not here. She and Simon left soon after you did this morning. I assume they’re back in her house, but they didn’t say where they were going.’ She stood on the doorstep, a lonely and dignified figure, watching the detective walk away.
    He found the girl in the garden behind the little house she’d shared with her mother. There was no answer when he knocked at the door and he was about to give up when Hilda waved at him from her living-room window, pointing to an arched gap in the terrace between their two houses.
    Hannah was alone. Her red hair was tied back in an untidy plait and she was wearing wellingtons, a big hand-knitted sweater with a frayed rib and holes in the elbows. She was digging over the small vegetable patch. When she saw him she stopped and leaned on the fork. She was flushed and breathless.
    ‘Mum always planted a few new potatoes over the Easter holiday. Broad beans too. I didn’t want to let it go.’
    ‘You’ve been going at that like a dog at broth.’ One of his grandda’s sayings. ‘You’ll wear yourself out.’
    ‘I hope so.’ She smiled at him. ‘It’d be good to get to sleep without a pill. They make me feel lousy the next morning.’
    ‘Simon not with you?’
    ‘He’s taken Mum’s car to the supermarket in Hexham. I couldn’t face it – the supermarket or the car – so I said I’d stay here. We have to eat, I suppose, and I don’t want to go to the White House for meals every day.’ She bent absent-mindedly and pulled a strand of goose grass from the soil and threw it onto the wheelbarrow, then straightened. ‘Do you know who killed my mother yet?’
    He shook his head. ‘Are you up to answering some questions?’
    ‘If you don’t mind doing it here. I feel better outside.’ And it seemed to him that she was much better, almost cheerful in the spring sunshine. She’d lost the pallor and the doped indifference.
    ‘Did your mum mention seeing anything unusual about the health club lately? We think one of the staff had been stealing from guests and other employees. It might be a motive.’ He wanted to start off with something