Silent Children (3 page)

"Right," he said without looking up.

That was the maximum enthusiasm he and his friends would let themselves betray about anything just now, but Leslie's mother took it for reluctance. "How can he," she said, leaning toward Leslie and lowering her voice, "if he knows..."

"He does."

Leslie's mother turned her face to him, but was apparently requiring him not to hear what she was about to murmur when he spoke. "They found a dead girl under our floor."

"Careful with the old tongue if you don't mind," Leslie's father said, his plump ruddy face still looking for a reason to be optimistic so that he could relax at the end of the day. "Sensitive souls present, remember."

"Thank you, Edward, but I'd like to hear it all."

"The man who fixed our house did it. My dad's aunt's house dad gave us when she died, and when mum and dad sold their old one we had the money to do things to it."

"And enough left over to help your mother open her business. Your father tried to do his best for everyone at least."

Whatever rebuke that was meant to contain, Leslie ignored it for Ian's sake, and he gave a shrug of his kind of agreement with her mother's words to hurry past the interruption. "Hector Woollie was the man we got. His wife runs a home for loonies and he had some of them helping him. He used to murder kids and bury them where there was going to be concrete. Only when he buried the one in our kitchen she wasn't—"

"We're cognisant of the facts, old chap. No need to wallow in them."

"Let him speak up for himself, Edward."

"One of the loonies saw a bit of her when they were putting in the concrete. We were staying here out of the mess, so we never saw. Then the loony started telling people, and his boss tried to drown him and got drowned instead. So the police brought the loony round to our house and said they'd have to dig it up, so we had to come back here again."

"Leslie, I don't know how you can stand the way he talks," her mother said. "I thought we weren't supposed to use derogatory terms for anyone these days."

"It's just his way at the moment, isn't it, Ian? I don't believe making too much of it will help. Anyway, look, we weren't talking about Ian to begin with."

"No, we were discussing something else that makes as little sense to me. Isn't your house still up for sale, or is that another idea you've abandoned?"

"I never saw anyone that was seriously interested in buying. They just wanted to prowl around the house, and I'd rather not think why. And sorry, but—"

"Allow me the floor for another moment. We're not wholly insensitive, whatever you may think. We realise you'd prefer to be living somewhere you could call your own, and your father would be prepared to arrange a loan for you. Tell her, Edward."

"Just until you shift the house you've got. We'd use it as collateral. It's not the kind of loan I can swing for everyone. Too little profit for the bank."

"Thanks, dad. I appreciate it." Behind him the Beatles were finding more syllables than melody in "ride," and she couldn't help raising her voice. "Only I was going to say before, I haven't abandoned anything. We're set on moving back in."

Her mother exhibited her open hands and let Leslie's unreasonableness weigh them down. "Whenever we have a conversation I feel as if we might as well not have had it at all."

"I think that's a slight exaggeration, Ivy, do you?"

Leslie's mother allowed the silence to answer for her, the Beatles having paused for breath between tracks, and then she said "Make an effort for me, Leslie. Try and help me understand."

"I have been."

"One more effort," she said as she might have addressed toddler Leslie on the toilet. "Give me one good reason why you insist on moving back to that place."

This melodrama of an argument and the impossibility of avoiding such confrontations while Leslie and her son were staying here was one, along with the oppressiveness of being treated like not much more than a child, but these were among the last things Leslie could say. "Help meee," the Beatles shrilled, and she was reminded of an old film she'd once seen on television—reminded of a fly with a man's head emitting that cry while a spider reeled it in. She'd found the image both absurd and frightening, and now she had to tell herself those words had no bearing on her future. She and Ian needed to return to the only place he seemed to regard as home, where she could ride out his adolescence and do her best to bring him up without her mother's attempts to help aggravating his behaviour. She managed to reduce all that to an answer she could risk uttering, one that her father might even persuade her mother had some sense in it, given time. "It's a challenge," she said.

Leslie had finished unpacking the toiletries she'd returned to the bathroom and was sharing a proprietary smile with herself—a smile that the halves of the mirror on the wall cupboard couldn't quite fit together—when the doorbell rang. "I'll see who it is," she called, and ran down the stairs that were once again hers.

She felt the front-door latch snag, its familiar trick that no amount of oil had overcome. Janet Hargreaves from the adjoining house was on the path, wiping her lined leathery forehead with the back of one hand in a gardening glove. "I just wanted to welcome you back," she announced loudly in her hoarse cigarette-ridden voice.

"I'm glad I am, Janet. Will you have a coffee? Ian's being mother."

"That's a promising development, isn't it? I'd better not, thanks," Janet said, lifting one earthy boot to demonstrate the reason. "Ring the bell whenever you want a chat. I just had my old man on the mobile from some motorway services over the border, and he agrees you made the right decision, whatever anyone else says."

"Anyone being..?"

"Whoever they are. As Vern says, they'd own up to who they were if they were anyone worth knowing."

"I'm lost. Who's been doing what?"

"Don't say you haven't been seeing the
Advertiser."

"I cancelled it while we weren't here."

"I'd have thought the estate agent might have shown you," Janet said, so obviously unhappy to be the bringer of the news that she almost took hold of her mouth with an earthy thumb and forefinger. "Shall I dig them out for you? They're in the recycling heap."

"You're kind."

"You'll see," Janet said and stumped off, scattering earth into the cracks of the path.

Leslie glanced along the hall. Ian was sprawling on a pine bench in the kitchen, one elbow on the table just about holding him up, his feet drumming on the concrete as the percolator kept him waiting. Beyond the kitchen window Melinda was raising the umbrella over the garden furniture, having provided herself and her car to help Leslie and Ian move. In the distance a church bell celebrated the hushed bright Sunday afternoon that eventually brought Janet back with an armful of issues of the
Wembley and Sudbury Advertiser.
"You aren't in all of these, I don't think," she said as some kind of reassurance. "I'll leave them with you, shall I, and get back to my spinach."

When Leslie saw the headline on the topmost newspaper she folded the bundle and jammed it under her arm to carry it past Ian. He was only tapping the floor with one heel now; it sounded not unlike an impatient finger. "I'll be down the garden," she said, as unnecessarily as his expression told her it was, and stepped into the spotlight of the sun.

HOUSE OF HORROR TO BE SOLD, declared the headline, as the bundle she dumped on the garden table spread itself. Staff reporter Verity Drew summarised the history of Leslie's house and expanded the headline to a paragraph, and that had been enough to start a correspondence. "Outraged Ratepayer" demanded why the house couldn't be compulsorily purchased by the council and torn down. "Concerned of Cricklewood" suggested this might damage the adjoining property but felt the motives of anyone who bought the house deserved to be questioned. "Retired of Wembley" recommended that any profit from the sale should at least be shared with the victim's family, but "Suburbanite" went further, insisting that anyone who touched the money would be tainted and quoting the Bible to prove it. Melinda was reading each item after Leslie, muttering "Ridiculous" and "Pity they've nothing better to do" and "I hope you aren't letting this get to you, Les," when Ian made his way to them, spilling not much of the contents of two mugs of coffee. The moment he'd set the mugs on the table he swung back toward the house. "Ian?" Leslie said.

"What?"

"Don't you want to see what we're reading?"

He took his time about turning the left side of his face to her. "I know."

She'd guessed as much. "Since when?"

"When it says. Stu showed me at school."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

He spoke toward the house, and she almost didn't hear him. "Thought it'd put you off coming back."

"It hasn't," Leslie said so vehemently that Melinda patted her hand, and more gently "Thanks for the coffee. Aren't you having a drink?"

His unequivocal answer was to slouch into the kitchen, where he filled half a glass with grapefruit juice and topped it up with lemonade. As he fed himself a gulp he screwed his eyes tight shut before letting them relax. "I take it that means he's enjoying it," Melinda said.

"I have to tell myself that about quite a few things. Maybe our parents had to about us."

"That's, you'll tell me if I shouldn't say this, but I wouldn't have expected to hear that from you."

"There's nothing like having a child to make you wonder how it was for your parents."

"That's a reason I'm never likely to have," Melinda said, immediately followed by a smile that didn't feel the need to be forgiving, and had little else to say until they put down their mugs with a united thud. "I should be on my way. Unless..."

"Don't miss the beat, Mel."

"I was just thinking if you wanted I could phone Sally and say I was staying here tonight, if you'd appreciate the company. Only don't let me make you feel you need it if you don't."

"That's really thoughtful of you, but I've got a young man about the house."

"Then forget I even thought I should offer."

That didn't help as much as it was meant to, but Leslie had realised what should. "As long as it's on your way home, could you give me a lift to Cricklewood? Me or us."

"The more the, I oughtn't to say merrier."

Ian was at the kitchen table, his elbows resting on it like clipped wings. "I'm going to visit the little girl's grave," Leslie said. "Coming with me?"

He stared at the floor and shook his head. "May go to Shaun's."

Her expressing disapproval of his friends would only make him more determined to keep them. She said as much to Melinda as the Volkswagen chugged through Wembley, and then no more during the twenty minutes it took to arrive at the church, a long concrete box practically featureless except for a triangular spire and a few coloured windows of various angular shapes. The Volkswagen puttered away toward Highgate as Leslie followed the flat white path beyond a metal sketch of gates. A railway ran behind the church, and a goods train spent some time ticking off its many wagons along the track, after which the churchyard grew quiet as stone except for a rustle of litter caught in the poplars beside the path. White headstones shone under the lowering sun, black ones glared like negative images of their neighbours. Leslie was close to where she remembered she had to go when a woman in a black tracksuit emerged from the church.

She was about Leslie's age but prematurely greying. Her plump sullen face, lined not unlike a balloon starting to deflate, wobbled as she stalked toward the gate. Leslie moved out of her way, having spotted a wreath leaning against a small thin headstone that did indeed belong to Harmony Duke, 1991-1999. REST NOW BABE, the gilded inscription said. Leslie crossed the chunky turf and had just reached the grave when the woman demanded "What are you after there?"

Leslie turned, thinking she ought to have acknowledged her with more than a passing smile, and met her pinched gaze. "Mrs. Duke..."

"Reporter, are you? No more stories. We want leaving alone for a change."

"I'm not a reporter. I—"

"You're not another frigging social worker," Mrs. Duke said, suggesting the opposite, and turned her fiercely dry eyes toward the grave as though to reassure herself her daughter hadn't heard her swearing. "If they'd kept their snouts out of our business Harmony might still be alive."

"I'm sorry," Leslie said before she realised that might sound more like an admission, but Mrs. Duke didn't let it interrupt her. "They made out she was at risk from the bloke I was living with," she said, close enough for Leslie to smell mints on her breath. "He'd gone with a girl he didn't know was under age, and you wouldn't have either if you'd seen her, like it was anyone's business but ours after he'd served his time, so when Harmony went missing they went for him and me as well like I knew he'd done it, and never looked where she was till it was too late."

"That's..." Rather than complete her thought, Leslie felt safer saying "I'm not a social worker."

Mrs. Duke's scrutiny felt like a weight on her face. "What's she to you, then?"

"I own the house where, where she was found, Mrs. Duke. I nearly came to the funeral, but I stayed by the gate, so I felt I had to come now."

"Why?"

The question was so hostile Leslie couldn't help being compelled to produce a motive more specific than in fact she was aware of. "I feel—not responsible exactly, but if we hadn't had the house fixed up..."

"You should."

Leslie thought it best to turn to the grave. She interleaved her fingers and gazed at the inscription so hard that she heard the words in her head. "I'll leave you alone now," she said once she was certain her voice wouldn't sound as though it were borrowing some of Mrs. Duke's grief.

As Leslie stepped back from the grave the other woman stepped between her and the path. "Selling the house, are you?"

"I've given up on that. We've moved back in."

When Mrs. Duke only stared, Leslie paced around her. She was on the path when she heard Mrs. Duke snarl "Living where he did that..." Leslie glanced back to see her crouched over the grave, a stance that looked both protective and threatening. "Stay away," Mrs. Duke said through her teeth. "You and your brat stay away from her and anything to do with her."