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Chapters (42)
  1. Chapter One
  2. Chapter Two
  3. Chapter Three
  4. Chapter Four
  5. Chapter Five
  6. Chapter Six
  7. Chapter Seven
  8. Chapter Eight
  9. Chapter Nine
  10. Chapter Ten
  11. Chapter Eleven
  12. Chapter Twelve
  13. Chapter Thirteen
  14. Chapter Fourteen
  15. Chapter Fifteen
  16. Chapter Sixteen
  17. Chapter Seventeen
  18. Chapter Eighteen
  19. Chapter Nineteen
  20. Chapter Twenty
  21. Chapter Twenty-One
  22. Chapter Twenty-Two
  23. Chapter Twenty-Three
  24. Chapter Twenty-Four
  25. Chapter Twenty-Five
  26. Chapter Twenty-Six
  27. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  28. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  29. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  30. Chapter Thirty
  31. Chapter Thirty-One
  32. Chapter Thirty-Two
  33. Chapter Thirty-Three
  34. Chapter Thirty-Four
  35. Chapter Thirty-Five
  36. Chapter Thirty-Six
  37. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  38. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  39. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  40. Chapter Forty
  41. Chapter Forty-One
  42. Chapter Forty-Two

Shaw looked at him as if he were mad. ‘What’s that got to do with this?’

‘Probably nothing.’ Another bee in Vera Stanhope’s bonnet. ‘But just humour me, eh?’

‘I nearly bought it at one time,’ Shaw said. ‘Christopher Eliot seemed close to settling. But in the end the rest of the family wouldn’t agree.’ He stared out of the window. ‘If I’d got that, we’d have been set up for life. Fifty executive homes. Danny would have had everything he’d wanted then.’

‘I’d like to see Danny’s room,’ Ashworth said. ‘Would you mind?’

‘The police have already been in,’ Karen said angrily. ‘They were there for hours, going through his things. He’d have hated that. I was never allowed in there, not even to change his sheets.’

‘I know. And I won’t disturb anything.’

She stood up and he followed her, expecting to be led upstairs. Instead they went along the corridor and into the ground-floor extension. Danny’s space was almost like a self-contained flat, its own shower room, its own outside door.

‘We built this when he was thirteen,’ Karen said. ‘When we still had the cash. Derek’s idea. A place he could have his friends to stay without disturbing us.’

Spoilt brat, Joe thought. Most kids would give their eye-teeth for a place like this, and he still wasn’t happy.

The room was long and low. It had the feel of a rather grand student bedsit. A guitar lay on the floor next to a pile of CDs. There was a television and PC. At one end a workbench with a kettle and microwave, a small fridge. Flat-pack bookshelves. The posters on the walls seemed to date back to school days. Rock musicians and weird prints that meant nothing to Joe. On one wall a huge collage made of scraps of fabric and shiny paper in vivid colours, arresting and vital. At first it seemed to have no apparent form, but staring, Joe made out a huge, smiling face. Karen saw him looking at it.

‘Hannah did that,’ she said. ‘She made it for her GCSE exam. Danny said he liked it and she gave it to him for a birthday present.’ There was a pause. ‘Sometimes I think things would have been different if he’d stayed with Hannah. That’s when we started to lose him: when she told him she didn’t want to see him any more. It was as if he gave up on us then.’

‘But he had a new girlfriend in Bristol?’ Joe wanted to believe that Danny had been happy at university.

‘Oh, yes.’ Karen walked around the room, picking up small objects. ‘And she was lovely too. But more like a trophy. Something else for him to possess. He’d never have been able to possess Hannah.’

Chapter Thirty-One