‘How could she?’
‘Arthur got to know a nasty little boy inside, thought he might be useful.’
‘Hunter.’ Marty knew, she thought. Or guessed. It was impossible to keep secrets in prison. He’d wanted her to know too.
‘Hunter went to see Frank at the pub and persuaded him it wouldn’t be a good idea to remember the man who’d been looking for Mel. We thought Frank was uncooperative because he didn’t like the police, but it was more than that. Rosie got an accurate description out of him.’
‘Arthur.’
Porteous nodded. ‘Later Frank had second thoughts and told Hunter what he’d done.’
‘And Arthur told Hunter to kill her?’
Porteous didn’t answer directly. ‘Hunter recognized the name. Got greedy.’
‘How did you work it all out?’ In time to save my daughter.
‘Dr Cornish had saved a book from Redwood. It was a record of all the kids she’d worked with, but Arthur’s name was in the staff register at the back. I missed it first time. And his car was seen close to Alec Reeves’s house on the night he was murdered. By then Arthur was panicking, desperate to throw suspicion elsewhere. Like Mel, Alec was starting to ask questions…’
There was a silence. ‘Rosie’s tough,’ Porteous said. ‘Brave. She’ll be OK.’
Perhaps, Hannah thought. But will I? She looked out over the flat water to the hills on the opposite bank. In a few weeks her reckless daughter would be away to university. She’d live on her own and Hannah wouldn’t know where she was or what she was doing. Hannah would retreat to the safety of the prison with its rules and its walls, but Rosie would dance and shimmy through the strange town in the south and there’d be nothing Hannah could do to protect her.
As Peter Porteous filled her glass his hand touched hers. ‘Really,’ he said. ‘She’ll be OK.’
Yes, Hannah thought. Of course we will. Both of us.
Ann Cleeves
Ann Cleeves lives in West Yorkshire with her husband and their two daughters. As a member of the ‘Murder Squad’, she works with other Northern writers to promote crime fiction.
She is also the author of the Inspector Ramsay series. More recently she has turned to writing psychological suspense novels, of which The Crow Trap was the first, followed by The Sleeping And The Dead. Her latest novel, Burial of Ghosts, will be available in Macmillan hardback in early 2003.
