Silent Voices

sheet alight. That at least was how it looked from the scanned image that the lab had attached, along with the words within the body of the email on the screen.
    The complete sentence still read like an official report or undergraduate textbook: It is sometimes a mistake to blame an outsider for disrupting the balance of a family, when other factors could be in force. Did this mean that Jenny was making an excuse for Michael Morgan? Was she implying that Mattie was solely responsible for the death of her son? The rest of the words were scattered apparently at random as short phrases, separated by the burn marks.
    Death by drowning is never t stice system substitute mother can someti
    happiness s then the trigger n alternative way of Sometimes it’s best not to intervene. illness tie Jone
     
    Vera stared at the screen. She felt suddenly cold and realized that the timer had switched off the heating. It was already late. She fetched her outdoor coat and sat in that, would have fancied a whisky, but couldn’t be arsed to get up again and fetch it. Still there was the background sound of rain, like shingle hurled against glass. The snatches of text tantalized her. Death by drowning surely meant Elias. But Veronica’s son was drowned too. What was the word that Jenny had written after ‘never’ in the first phrase? Vera printed off the scanned image of the charred and blasted paper, held a ruler across it so that she could see which words were written on the same line, but still it made no sense.
    In frustration she turned to the third sheet of paper. This was the most damaged. In the email, the technician had said she thought it might have been torn in half before it was burned: there was one ragged edge. It seemed clear to Vera, even from the brief fragments that the tone was different, less formal. This wasn’t a note from an official report, but more like a personal diary entry.
    What the hell
    ing friendship
     
    That word ‘friendship’ again. Vera had heard it that evening as Morgan had tried to scrabble his way out of the hole he’d dug by not telling them earlier about his meeting with Danny Shaw. It seemed to Vera that Jenny had had few real friends. There was the teacher, Anne, but that was more an arrangement of convenience. Two women of a similar age who enjoyed each other’s company. The relationship satisfied Anne’s need to admire, and Jenny’s to be admired. Friendship surely implied something stronger than that. Friendship was what Vera had with Joe Ashworth, but not yet with the hippy neighbours. And had Michael Morgan and Danny Shaw really been friends? The idea was improbable. They fed each other’s egos, nothing more, so why the sentimental drivel from Danny in his last conversation with Morgan?
    Vera looked at her watch. Past midnight. The questions were too difficult for this time of night, and tomorrow would be an important day. She felt that she was grappling towards some sort of solution. Ashworth was right; they needed to find Connie. She shut down the computer and sat for a moment listening to it grind and chug to a close. When this case was over, she’d treat herself to a new machine. Perhaps Joe would come with her to buy one.
    Lying in the bed she’d slept in as a child, between the sheets grey with washing, which had probably been in use since then too, images and ideas floated into her head and then fluttered away from her, like the charred tatters of paper blowing from a bonfire. Outside, it was still raining.

 
Chapter Thirty-Four
     
    Joe Ashworth hated the rain. It meant his kids were trapped indoors and his wife moaned about mud and mess. He thought she had that illness, SAD – seasonal affective disorder. She seemed to wilt without the sun, to become crabby and ungenerous. Mornings like this, he envied Vera’s solitary life. It would be great to be selfish without the guilt. He drove away from the house, from the damp children’s clothes stretched over radiators, the toy-strewn living room, the whining baby, and told himself he was the breadwinner, that he couldn’t be expected to do it all.
    Travelling towards the police station for the morning briefing, he hit a traffic jam. It was still raining and the standing water had caused a minor accident on the way into town. His windscreen-wiper blades were faulty and squeaked at the same pitch as the baby’s cries. He switched them off and couldn’t see, put them back on and got the noise that set his teeth on edge