Silent Voices

thought. She’d have been crap too. Much worse than Connie, or Jenny Lister, or even Veronica Eliot.
    There was a small room at the back of the house that she used as an office. Piles of paper that she had to climb over to get in, a computer that would soon be fit for a museum. She fired it up and went to make a cup of tea while it chugged into life. It still hadn’t quite made it by the time she returned with her mug and a packet of chocolate digestives. She had a quick memory of the child doctor who’d sent her to the health club to get fit, imagined her disapproval, then dismissed it. Digestives were wholewheat, weren’t they? Healthy enough.
    There was time for her to eat three biscuits before her email account was displayed on the screen. She opened the message from the scientist who’d been looking at the scraps of paper found in the bonfire burning in the garden at the Shaw house. Vera had asked Karen about the bonfire during the first interview in the neighbours’ house. ‘Did you or Derek light it before you went to work?’ It had seemed odd to Vera even then. Bonfires were for weekends, when you had the time to keep an eye on them. And Karen had looked at her as if she were mad, obviously had no idea what she was talking about. The bonfire had been nothing to do with her or Derek.
    Vera had persisted. ‘Danny then? Did he help you out in the garden sometimes?’
    At that, Karen had shaken her head sadly. ‘Danny didn’t really do helping. In the garden or anywhere else.’
    So the bonfire had been started by the murderer. That was the way Vera saw it. A mistake. Better to take any incriminating paper away with him and dispose of it carefully. So why the hurried fire in the garden? What was that about? Why the rush?
    There were really only scraps of text. Handwritten. By Jenny Lister. The forensic handwriting woman had been certain of that. It said so in the email: I’d be quite happy to appear in court. I’d stake my reputation . . . Blah, blah. Very dramatic. But good enough for Vera.
    They’d retrieved three different pages containing text, it seemed, and all three were partially charred, one so severely that they’d been lucky to get anything. The first page was the most intact, but contained what looked like a final paragraph. At least, the writing stopped a third of the way down the page. According to the lab, one corner was burned so the ends of some of the sentences were lost, and they’d re-created the pattern of the writing as accurately as they could on the screen. Vera thought that it wasn’t hard to make out the sense.
    and the importance of learning to build relationships early i
    The patterns of behaviour developed in childhood can oft
    no reason why another adult shouldn’t play this role. The child can then
    to sustain a normal and healthy relationship with his or her own children. However, in the case study described, we see deep problems that were never properly addressed and which would be impossible at this point to solve.
     
    Social-work bollocks, Vera thought. If Jenny had been hoping to write a popular book to explain her job to the layperson, she wouldn’t achieve it with stuff like this. Was she talking about Mattie in this piece? Vera assumed so. In that case, Vera had learned nothing from the notes on this page. Still, assumptions were always dangerous. There was no indication here about the gender of the subject of the case study, and Jenny could have been writing about somebody quite different. Besides, she’d been working with Mattie since she was a child. Would the model social worker really admit that she hadn’t ‘properly addressed’ Mattie’s problems during all those years of intervention?
    Vera moved away from the computer and stretched. In the lean-to at the back of the house she could hear rain dripping. The flat roof there leaked when the wind blew from the west. Usually it did blow from the west. She fetched a bucket and a bowl to catch the drips and went back to the office. Outside it was raining more heavily than ever.
    The second piece was certainly about Mattie, at least to some extent, because she was named. If the piece had finally achieved publication, Vera assumed that Jenny would have chosen a pseudonym for her, but at this early point of the process she clearly hadn’t seen the need. There was one complete sentence, then a number of gaps. It seemed that sparks had burned isolated little holes in the paper, without setting the whole