Silent Voices

impersonal, not too close to home.
    ‘No. Nothing like that. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t see something. We were both busy. Often she didn’t get back until late from work, and by then I’d be out with Si or holed up in my room revising. We were close, but there wasn’t a lot of time for chat.’
    ‘I’d like to talk again about Danny Shaw.’ Joe hesitated. This was more sensitive, but he wanted to broach it while he had Hannah to himself. ‘There’s a collage on his wall. His mother said you gave it to him. It sounds as if there was more between you than the fact that you went out together a few times. Karen says you were his first love, that he never quite got over you.’
    She stooped again to pull out more weeds, avoiding his eye.
    ‘I fancied myself in love with him for a while. I gave him the picture while I was still a little bit besotted.’
    ‘What went wrong?’
    ‘Nothing really. I hooked up with Simon and saw that Danny was basically a bit of a prat.’
    ‘So you dumped Danny for Simon? That wasn’t the impression you gave yesterday.’
    ‘Wasn’t it?’ She smiled. ‘I don’t know. All that stuff seems so important when you’re going through it, but later it hardly seems to matter. This is a small place. There aren’t that many people of our age. You tend to have been out with most of the available boys by the time you hit seventeen. It’s like one of those Scottish country dances. Change your partner when the music stops. In the end we just all become good friends.’
    Joe supposed that was true. It had been the same for him. He’d been out with a couple of his wife’s friends before hooking up with her; one had been to dinner at their house with her husband the week before. Teenage passion soon faded.
    He wanted to ask Hannah if she’d slept with Danny, if they’d been that close, but resisted. His reluctance was more a matter of knowing the question would have seemed ridiculous to her than of not wanting to pry.
    ‘Was Danny upset? You said yesterday he emailed and phoned you after you dumped him. Did he make a nuisance of himself?’
    She shrugged. ‘Nah. He soon got over it. He started going out with his new lass in freshers’ week, so he can’t have been that heart-broken.’
    She pushed the wheelbarrow to the end of the garden and lifted the weeds onto the compost heap. ‘Is that all you wanted to know? I don’t think I’ve been much help.’
    ‘Did Simon ever talk to you about Patrick?’ Joe hadn’t meant to ask her about the dead brother, but he thought it was important: the child drowning, the effect on the adult Simon.
    ‘Of course.’ She wiped a stray hair away from her face and left a streak of mud. ‘We tell each other everything.’
    ‘What did he say?’
    ‘That Patrick was like a ghost in their lives. Nothing of him remains. Veronica threw away all his toys and his clothes, and they hardly ever mentioned his name after the accident. Simon said that sometimes he felt as if Patrick had never existed, that he’d created the whole incident in his imagination.’
    ‘Would your mother have been working as a social worker then?’ Ashworth felt as if he was groping towards a connection, an explanation.
    ‘I suppose so.’ Hannah looked up sharply. ‘Do you think she worked with the Eliot family after the tragedy? I suppose she would have qualified by then, and we’d be living here.’
    ‘It just crossed my mind,’ Joe said. ‘But that would be too much of a coincidence. Your mother would surely have remembered the case, happening so close to home. She would have mentioned it.’
    ‘Oh, I don’t think she would.’ Hannah was quite certain. ‘She had a thing about confidentiality. She said work had to stay in the office, where it belonged.’ She leaned the empty wheelbarrow against the wall. ‘Look, I probably won’t do any more of this now. Do you want some tea?’
    ‘Does Simon feel responsible for his brother’s death?’
    She’d already started walking towards the back door of the house, and his question made her stop in her tracks.
    ‘Of course.’ She pulled out the band that was tying up her hair and shook it loose. ‘It’s made him the person he is.’

 
Chapter Thirty-Two
     
    Vera wanted to talk to Michael Morgan. She’d never admit it to Joe Ashworth, but she’d seriously cocked up that last meeting when they’d barged into the flat. Something about the man – his ease with his body, his assumption of