“Nobody knows what to say,” Hazel whispered, pressing away her tears as she gestured him to the sofa. “It’s not like she was hit by a car, or was ill. They don’t know what you say when someone’s been—” She hesitated, but balked at the word and her sentence ended in a gargantuan sniff.
“I’m sorry,” said Strike, taking his turn. “I know this is a terrible time for you.”
The sitting room was immaculate and somehow unwelcoming, perhaps because of its chilly color scheme. A three-piece suite covered in striped silvery-gray cloth, white wallpaper with a thin gray stripe, cushions angled on their points, ornaments on the mantelpiece perfectly symmetrical. The dust-free television screen gleamed with reflected light from the window.
Sheryl’s misty form trotted past on the other side of the net curtains, wiping her eyes. Ray shuffled past the sitting-room door on his bare feet, dabbing under his glasses with the end of his toweling-robe belt, his shoulders stooped. As though she had read Strike’s mind, Hazel explained:
“Ray broke his back trying to get a family out of a boarding house that caught fire. Wall gave way and his ladder fell. Three stories.”
“Christ,” said Strike.
Hazel’s lips and hands were trembling. Strike remembered what Wardle had said: that the police had mishandled Hazel. Suspicion or rough questioning of her Ray would have seemed unforgivable cruelty to her in this state of shock, an inexcusable exacerbation of their appalling ordeal. Strike knew a lot about the brutal intrusion of officialdom into private devastation. He had been on both sides of the fence.
“Anyone want a brew?” Ray called huskily from what Strike assumed was the kitchen.
“Go to bed!” Hazel called back, clutching a sodden ball of tissues. “I can make ’em! Go to bed!”
“You sure?”
“Get to bed, I’ll wake you at three!”
Hazel wiped her whole face with a fresh tissue, as though it were a face cloth.
“He’s not one for disability pay and all that, but nobody wants to give him a proper job,” she told Strike quietly as Ray shuffled, sniffing, back past the door. “Not with his back and his age and his lungs not being the best. Cash in hand... shift work...”
Her voice trailed away, her mouth trembled, and for the first time she looked Strike directly in the eye.
“I don’t really know why I asked you to come,” she confessed. “It’s all confused in my head. They said she wrote to you but you never wrote back and then you got sent her — her—”
“It must have been an appalling shock to you,” said Strike, fully aware that anything he could say would understate the case.
“It’s been—” she said feverishly “—terrible. Terrible. We didn’t know anything, anything at all. We thought she was on a college placement. When the police came to the door — she said she was going away with college and I believed her, some residential placement at a school. It sounded right — I never thought — but she was such a liar. She lied all the time. Three years she’s been living with me and I still haven’t — I mean, I couldn’t get her to stop.”
“What did she tell lies about?” asked Strike.
“Anything,” said Hazel, with a slightly wild gesture. “If it was Tuesday she’d say it was Wednesday. Sometimes there was no point to it at all. I don’t know why. I don’t know.”
“Why was she living with you?” Strike asked.
“She’s my — she was my half-sister. Same mum. We lost Dad when I was twenty. Mum married a guy from work and had Kelsey. There were twenty-four years between us — I’d left home — I was more like an auntie to her than a sister. Then Mum and Malcolm had a car crash out in Spain three years ago. Drunk driver. Malcolm died outright, Mum was in a coma for four days and then she passed, too. There isn’t any other family, so I took Kelsey in.”
The extreme tidiness of their surroundings, the cushions on their points, surfaces clear and highly polished, made Strike wonder how a teenager had fitted in here.
“Me and Kelsey didn’t get on,” said Hazel, again seeming to read Strike’s thoughts. Tears flowed once more as she pointed upstairs, where Ray had gone to bed. “He was much more patient with all her moodiness and her sulks. He’s got a grown-up son who’s working abroad. He’s better with kids than me. Then the police come jack-booting in here,” she said on a sudden rush of fury, “and tell us she’s been — they start questioning Ray like he’d — like he’d ever, in a million years — I said to him, it’s like a nightmare. You see people on the news, don’t you, appealing for kids to come home — people put on trial for things they never did — you never think... you never think... but we never even knew she was missing. We’d have looked. We never knew. The police asking Ray questions — where he was and I don’t know what—”
“They’ve told me he didn’t have anything to do with it,” Strike said.
“Yeah, they believe that now,” said Hazel through angry tears, “after three men told them he was with them every minute of the stag weekend and showed them the bloody photos to prove it...”
She would never think it reasonable that the man who had been living with Kelsey should be questioned about her death. Strike, who had heard the testimony of Brittany Brockbank and Rhona Laing and many others like them, knew that most women’s rapists and killers were not strangers in masks who reached out of the dark space under the stairs. They were the father, the husband, the mother’s or the sister’s boyfriend...
Hazel wiped the tears away as fast as they fell onto her round cheeks, then suddenly asked:
“What did you do with her silly letter anyway?”
“My assistant put it in the drawer where we keep unusual correspondence,” said Strike.
“The police said you never wrote back to her. They say they was forged, the letters they found.”
“That’s right,” said Strike.
“So whoever done it must’ve known she was interested in you.”
“Yes,” said Strike.
Hazel blew her nose vigorously, then asked:
“D’you want a cuppa, then?”
He accepted only because he thought she wanted a chance to pull herself together. Once she had left the room he looked around openly. The only photograph stood on a small nest of tables in the corner beside him. It showed a beaming woman in her sixties wearing a straw hat. This, he assumed, was Hazel and Kelsey’s mother. A slightly darker stripe on the surface of the table beside the picture suggested that another had stood beside it, preventing the sun bleaching that small strip on the cheap wood. Strike guessed that this had been the school photograph of Kelsey, the picture that all the papers had printed.
Hazel returned carrying a tray bearing mugs of tea and a plate of biscuits. After she had carefully positioned his tea on a coaster beside her mother’s photograph, Strike said:
“I hear Kelsey had a boyfriend.”
“Rubbish,” retorted Hazel, dropping back into her armchair. “More porkies.”
“What makes you—?”
“She said his name was Niall. Niall. Honestly.”
Her eyes leaked more tears. Strike was at a loss to understand why Kelsey’s boyfriend might not have been called Niall and his incomprehension showed.
“One Direction,” she said over the top of her tissue.
“Sorry,” said Strike, completely at sea. “I don’t—”
“The band. They’re a band that came third on The X Factor. She’s obsessed — she was obsessed — and Niall was her favorite. So when she says she’s met a boy called Niall and he’s eighteen and he’s got a motorbike, I mean, what were we supposed to think?”