THIRTY-FIVE

Linda switched the television off as soon as she got back to the house. She checked to see how Charli and Danny were, wept for a while in the bathroom, then went back downstairs. She moved from room to room, unable to settle, then began rooting aimlessly through the cupboards. In a plastic bag she found a few CDs that the previous occupants had left behind and smiled when she came across a nineties compilation. She put the CD on and stood listening to the first song. She was happy that she could remember the lyrics. In the kitchen, she exchanged a few words with Gallagher and the other uniformed PC, then brought a bottle of wine back into the living room.

She was halfway through it when Helen arrived.

‘Want me to get you one?’ Linda held up her glass.

‘I’m fine,’ Helen said. She sat down in one of the armchairs. ‘I had a couple with lunch.’

‘Nice?’

‘Not bad. Some Italian place Tom found.’

‘He all right?’

‘Yeah, he’s good,’ Helen said. She was still thinking about what Thorne had told her in the restaurant. Bodies lying undiscovered for too long. Sums that needed doing again.

Linda nodded towards the stereo. ‘Remember this?’

‘Course,’ Helen said. She listened for a while. R.E.M.: ‘Man On The Moon’. ‘I think it was playing when Colin Sharples tried to feel me up at a school disco.’

Linda laughed. ‘I let him feel me up. It was Whitney Houston, though, if I remember.’ She sang along quietly with a couple of lines from the R.E.M. track, hummed when the words were indistinct.

‘I never knew what that bit was either,’ Helen said. ‘Somebody wrestling?’

Linda took a mouthful of wine, then let her head fall back. ‘Steve’s lost weight,’ she said.

‘Really? It’s only been a couple of days.’

‘That suit was hanging off him.’

Helen knew that Bates’ clothes would have been seized immediately after his arrest, that any suit he owned would have been bagged up for forensics. ‘They’ll have given him that to wear,’ she said. ‘There’s always a box of clothes knocking about in the station.’

‘Must have belonged to a darts player,’ Linda said. ‘He looked pale as well.’

‘He won’t have been getting a lot of sleep.’

‘Probably because they’ve not let him, right?’ Linda looked at Helen. ‘That’s what you lot do, isn’t it? Drag them into interview rooms in the middle of the night, so they can’t think straight.’

‘Nobody gets dragged anywhere,’ Helen said. ‘And if a suspect was tired, their solicitor would be all over us. We do have rules.’

They said nothing for a few seconds as the R.E.M. track faded out. They both groaned when it was replaced by Right Said Fred singing ‘Deeply Dippy’.

‘Sorry.’ Linda held up her glass. ‘I wasn’t having a go, honest. He just looked awful, that’s all. It was hard . . . seeing him.’

‘I know.’

They both looked to the door when it opened suddenly. Sophie Carson put her head round.

‘Everyone doing OK in here?’

‘We’re fine,’ Helen said.

‘What are you listening to?’ Helen knew that the DS was doing her job, that ears were still being kept open, but for a moment or two Sophie Carson just looked like a woman who was miffed at being excluded from a girlie chat.

‘What’s happening outside?’ Linda asked.

‘Usual.’ Carson stepped into the room, straightened her jacket. ‘There’s probably a dozen uniforms out there now, trying to keep it all under control.’

‘Stupid,’ Linda said.

‘Yeah, well that’s the thing,’ Carson said. ‘A lot of those officers would be a damn sight more use to everyone looking for Poppy Johnston.’

‘Hey,’ Helen said. Carson had been staring at Linda. ‘It’s not her fault.’

‘I never said it was.’

‘That’s how it sounded.’

‘I’m just saying . . . if it gets any worse we might need to think about moving you.’

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Linda said. ‘I’m not under arrest, so you can’t make me.’ She turned to Helen. ‘They can’t, right?’

‘It would be for your own safety,’ Carson said. ‘You and the kids.’

‘Why are we not safe?’ Linda looked towards the window. ‘You’re not thinking of inviting any of them in, are you?’

Helen was pleased to see Carson at a loss for a comeback. Suddenly a memory rose up from nowhere of an argument Helen had witnessed between Linda and one of their teachers at school.

They would both have been twelve, thirteen maybe. They had been given the results of a comprehension test in English; a passage about a gypsy camp. One of the questions had been about the gypsies cooking hedgehogs and the question was about why they baked the animals in clay. Linda had demanded to know why her answer had been marked wrong. ‘They bake them in clay so the spines get pulled out,’ she had insisted. The teacher had shaken his head and handed Linda’s exercise book back to her. ‘But it doesn’t say that anywhere in the passage, does it?’ Linda had said that she knew that was the reason, that it didn’t matter if it said so in the passage or not. The teacher would not listen and told her he was docking her another mark for arguing. Walking back to her desk, Linda had tossed her exercise book out of the window.

That was when Helen had decided that Linda was clever and liked a fight; that she would be fun to hang around with.

‘Why wouldn’t he look at me?’ Linda asked when Carson had left. ‘Steve.’

‘I don’t know,’ Helen said.

‘Yes you do. Or you think you do.’

‘I’ve seen people in the dock do all sorts of strange things.’

‘Guilty conscience, right?’

‘Linda—’

‘It’s OK, really.’ Linda smiled. ‘Why should you think anything different from the rest of them? If I was at home watching all this on the telly, reading about it in the papers every day, I’m sure I’d think exactly the same thing.’ She leaned forward for the bottle and poured what was left into her glass. ‘Funny how your attitude changes when you’re on the other side of it. The way you judge people, I mean, all that “no smoke without fire” shit. Well, you know now, right?’

Helen looked at her.

Linda reached behind the cushion to the side of her and took out a folded-up copy of a tabloid. She unfolded it and smoothed it out on her lap, stared down at the front page; the picture of Thorne and Helen. ‘They were reading this in the kitchen,’ she said. ‘Carson and the rest.’

‘I bet they were,’ Helen said.

‘It says all sorts of things in here about your boyfriend.’

‘I read it.’

‘Stuff he’s been accused of in the past.’

‘Look which paper you’re reading,’ Helen said.

‘Says he might have been responsible for a man’s death, on some island.’

‘He wasn’t.’

‘Well, you’re bound to say that, aren’t you?’

‘Listen, I know him, all right?’ Helen kept her tone good and even. ‘Whatever it says in that rag, I don’t believe Tom did anything wrong.’

Linda nodded. She folded up the paper and slid it back behind the cushion. She said, ‘Well, now you know how I feel.’