Today's Reading
She thought he was being melodramatic. She’d contact social services in the morning. There must be some sort of emergency placement. She’d have to cope as best she could until then. But Limbrick was still talking. 'Most of them have been through foster care. But they’re older, often aggressive. Hard to manage.’
Vera nodded down at the pages of the diary. 'Even Chloe?’
He shrugged. 'Yeah. Even her.’ But he looked away and Vera could tell he didn’t mean it, that he thought this hadn’t been the right place for her. At least now that he’d read the girl’s diary.
'You can leave me to it for now,’ she said. 'Maybe you could talk to the kids. Tell them I’ll be speaking to them in the morning, but that they should get some sleep.’ A pause. 'Did Chloe have a special friend here?’
He shook his head. 'She was a bit of a loner.’
'Except for Josh.’ Vera looked at the diary she was still holding in her hand. 'It seems that she got on with him.’
Limbrick didn’t answer. He wandered back down the corridor. One of the kids shouted out to him through a half-open door. He gave them a few words, but told them nothing.
Vera shot a quick look back into Chloe Spence’s room and made her way outside.
Josh Woodburn was young. He lay on the edge of a rough path through a piece of scrub, close enough to the road for the street lamp outside Rosebank to cast a little light on his body. The PC had his back to Josh, looking out towards the sea and the lights of the town. Vera took out her torch to get a better look. Josh hardly looked old enough to be in a position of responsibility in a place like Rosebank, even if he was only on a temporary contract. He had floppy hair the colour of wheat and long, loose limbs. He was wearing jeans, a university sweatshirt and trainers. His face was turned towards Vera, but she could see the back of his head, the large round hole in the skull where he’d been hit, the blood that clotted and matted in the pale hay-coloured hair.
Oh Chloe, Vera thought. What have you done? And where are you now? And if this wasn’t you—and really there’s nothing in your diary to suggest that it was—are you still alive?
Because Chloe Spence had disappeared.
Vera stood next to the body and stared back towards Rosebank. She’d spent a bit of time volunteering in a children’s home when she was a cadet. In those days, young trainee cops were sent out into the community to get to know their patch. It wouldn’t hurt, Vera thought, if police training still included more good works and less sitting at a desk in the uni being talked at. The kids’ home had been a big house on the corner of a leafy street. There’d been a garden with bikes and a tyre swing tied on a big tree. She’d been there in November, and they’d built a bonfire, and the house parents had let off fire-works. The children had swung sparklers around their heads, eyes wide and bright. There were potatoes baked in foil and sausages and toffee the kids had made that afternoon. It had been nothing like this place.
To be fair, the kids in that home had been nothing like the Rosebank kids. They were younger. Distressed and traumatized maybe, but easier to handle. You could cuddle a seven-year-old, couldn’t you? Distract them with lights and sweets and stories. It would be hard to cuddle a fifteen-year-old lad, who’d punched his grandmother and stolen her pension to buy smack. Who’d just avoided the Young Offenders’ Institution because of the tales of abuse he’d suffered. Who was handed over to social services to be cared for instead.
All the same, Vera couldn’t see how being in that place was helping them. Inside, it was shabby and grey. It was as if all the light and the life had been sucked from it. Once, it had been a guest house for the workers who’d put up the new battery factory just up the coast. Before that, maybe for families who wanted a cheap holiday on the coast, though the beach here was still black with sea coal. Then it had become a bail hostel. Then a hostel for asylum seekers. And
now this. A bleak house on the edge of a former pit village, with threadbare carpets and everywhere small signs of violence: a door almost pulled off its hinges, a sofa with a scorch mark, not quite hidden by a cushion. How could a child feel safe or loved here? Vera knew what it felt like to be unloved, but she’d grown up in the hills, with space and clean air, and couldn’t remember ever feeling unsafe.
She said a few words to the officer, reassuring him that someone would be along to relieve him soon, and then reluctantly made her way back inside.
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