For a few days the story stuck. Lorna was given a teddy bear and allowed to use a PlayStation in the common room. Every afternoon she had a little walk in the garden. She assumed that she was in some kind of children’s home, but she didn’t see any other children there. On the third day they put a TV in her room. It only had a few channels, and none of the good ones either. She wanted Cartoon Network and MTV but the nice lady, the social worker, wasn’t there any more. There was a different one now, a police lady. Even though she didn’t dress like one, Lorna knew what she was. When they asked her questions, this lady sat next to her, but didn’t take her hand. When she smiled she didn’t smile with her eyes either. And it was always the same boring questions, too. Not even about anything really. Nothing interesting anyway. They asked about the fire.
‘I don’t know anything about the fire.’
‘Did Marianne tell you about it?’
‘No.’
‘When did you find out about it?’
‘When you told me.’
‘You didn’t seem surprised when we told you. Why do you think that was?’
‘Don’t know. Shock?’
‘Were you shocked?’
‘Yeah. Course.’
They asked about Pete, about her mum, about Carl, if Carl had been mean to her. They kept asking, even when she let her words trail off. Even when she began to cry. They’d just pause, briefly, and then start all over again, same questions, same expressions on their faces, cold. They were cold, mean people.
‘When I first told you about your mum, about the fire, you didn’t cry,’ the policeman said.
‘I did.’
‘No, I remember asking you if you needed to take a break, if you were upset.’
Lorna said nothing.
‘And your dogs? Your pet dogs? Are you upset that they’re dead?’ he asked, and Lorna felt so bored that she swore at him. She saw the police lady smile.
Then they took the TV away altogether. They said the PlayStation was broken. In the meantime, she had some books, and pads of paper. ‘You can write your own stories. If you get bored,’ the police lady had said.
It was so boring! Only those stupid books, the same ones Claire had given her. And the same crappy drawing paper they’d had in school. But she did start drawing. And writing. She drew castles and ballerinas and models with heads wider than their waists. She drew diamond rings and high-heeled shoes. She drew dogs. One of them bit a ballerina in half. Her tutu stuck out from his mouth like bloody pink lettuce. She wrote little poems. Outside, summer had started; how long had she been here anyway?
When they started to ask her real questions, the questions she’d expected at the start, it was almost a relief. Not that she was going to answer them, that’d be stupid. They acted like they knew things that she was sure they couldn’t. They showed her a picture of her mum, and Lorna knew that she should cry, but it was a picture she’d never seen before, and it just looked funny, something about the expression on her face, and her hair was different. Anyway, it was funny. But they didn’t think it was funny. They said all sorts of irritating, ominous things. Things about fire, about pain. About missing your mummy. They said she’d never spoken about her. And that was strange? Don’t you think so, Lorna? Never to mention your mum? And to laugh when you see her picture?
She began to think that maybe things weren’t going that well after all.
So she stopped answering questions altogether. One time she gave the police lady a kick. She drew filthy words on the ballerina pictures, drew cocks in Anne and George’s mouths. That was fun. During her outside time she turned cartwheels and lay on the floor refusing to get up when it was time to go back inside. Another lady, a doctor, came to see her, and, pointing at the corner of the room, told her that their conversation was being filmed. Lorna laughed and spat at her. It was over. She knew it.
43
The case dominated the headlines for a few weeks, until a natural disaster in Asia trumped it. Lorna – she was so young that her real name was never released by the press –- Child M, they called her – was brought to trial for the manslaughter of Marianne Cairns.
The true story of the fire never came out. The CPS didn’t have enough evidence, or even the will to link Lorna to the crime. There was a half-hearted attempt to implicate Marianne in it, but it couldn’t stand up. The fire remained, officially, unsolved.
The press loved the tale of the child being abused by a trusted saviour, hurt and hectored to the point of blind panic; a girl who finally lashed out, only in an attempt to escape, not kill. Although there were none of the inept, beaky court caricatures broadcast, Claire imagined them clearly, would close her eyes, and listen to the trial summary on the radio; a frail girl with brown hair skirting her brows, head down, voice shaky, recounting a level of abuse she had no business even understanding, let alone experiencing.
Child M was a painful reminder of the damage we as a society do to our youngsters with our lack of curiosity, care, our prudish sense of privacy. The papers briefly had a field day with it. Claire went down to the library in Truro and sat stiffly in a scratchy nylon chair, reading all the papers obsessively. She hesitantly booked internet time, carefully looking for any link anybody might have made between Marianne’s killing and the fire. But there was none. At home, Benji close by, the rolling TV news on, she made scratchy, coded notes that she destroyed afterwards. The notes were always the same. Either, A, Lorna hadn’t told the police about her, or B, she had, but they hadn’t believed her. There was no connection between Lorna and herself. Was there? Nobody – short of the woman in the beach café, the mother in the open farm and the taciturn barber – had seen them together in Cornwall. And there were no pictures of Lorna to jog their memories. Marianne and Lorna had always left Claire behind. It was Marianne and Lorna who were seen in Truro; at the doctor’s, the herbalist’s, the dance classes. Marianne had even let it slip that Lorna had mistakenly called her Mum, on a few occasions. Everything, everything pointed to Marianne.
But the relief was always short-lived, because Claire knew that if she was safe, she was only safe through the grace of Lorna.
44
She left Cornwall in August, and arrived back in her hometown a mere seven hours later, with sand still in her shoes. Mother’s house was clean, fresh-smelling; Pippa and Derek had kept their promise to look after the place. Benji pattered around the unfamiliar space, sniffing out Johnny’s favourite corners and exploring the garden, and Claire, taking a deep breath, phoned Derek. He answered on the first ring.
‘Claire! You’re back?’