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Back Silent Voices Save as PDF
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

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 and made him feel like putting his fist through the glass.