After the sandwiches we went looking for Auntie Vera and the cousins. It was a hot, still afternoon, but the estate had an eerie Marie Celeste emptiness, all the windows tightly closed and not a single kid playing; they were all inside, confused and antsy and safe under their parents’ eyes, trying to eavesdrop on the adult whispers and find out what was going on.
The Foleys were an unprepossessing bunch. The fifteen-year-old settled into an armchair and folded her arms, hitching up her bust like someone’s mammy, and gave us a pale, bored, supercilious stare; the ten-year-old looked like a cartoon pig and chewed gum with her mouth open, wriggling her rump on the sofa and occasionally flicking the gum out on her tongue and then back into her mouth again. Even the youngest was one of those deeply unnerving toddlers who look like bonsai adults: it had a prim, pudgy face with a beaky nose, and it stared at me from Vera’s lap, its lips pursing, and then retracted its chin disapprovingly into the folds of its neck. I had a nasty conviction that, if it said anything, its voice would be a deep, forty-a-day rasp. The house smelled of cabbage. I could not fathom why on earth Rosalind and Jessica would choose to spend any time there, and the fact that they had bothered me.
With the exception of the toddler, though, they all told the same story. Rosalind and Jessica, and sometimes Katy, spent the night there every few weeks or so (“I’d love to have them more often, of course I would,” said Vera, pinching tensely at a corner of a slipcover, “but I simply can’t, not with my nerves, you know”); less often, Valerie and Sharon stayed with the Devlins. Nobody was sure whose idea this particular sleepover had been, although Vera thought vaguely that it might have been Margaret who suggested it. On Monday night Rosalind and Jessica had come over somewhere around half past eight, watched television and played with the baby (I couldn’t imagine how; the kid had barely moved all the time we were there, it must have been like playing with a large potato), and gone to bed around eleven, sharing a camp bed in Valerie and Sharon’s room.
This, apparently, was where the trouble had started: unsurprisingly, they had all four been up talking and giggling most of the night. “Now they’re lovely girls, Officers, I’m not saying that, but sometimes the young people don’t realize how much of a strain they can put on us old folks, isn’t that right?” Vera tittered frantically and nudged the middle kid, who squirmed further away on the sofa. “I had to go in to them half a dozen times to tell them to be quiet—I can’t bear noise, you know. It must have been half past two in the morning, can you imagine, before they finally went off to sleep. And by that time, of course, my nerves were in such a state that I couldn’t settle at all, I had to get up and make myself a cup of tea. I didn’t get a wink of sleep. I was shattered the next morning. And then when Margaret rang, sure, we were all going frantic, weren’t we, girls? But I never imagined…sure, I thought she was only…” She pressed a thin, twitching hand over her mouth.
“Let’s go back to the night before,” Cassie said to the oldest kid. “What did you and your cousins talk about?”
The kid—Valerie, I think—rolled her eyes and pulled up her lip to show what a stupid question this was. “Stuff.”
“Did you talk about Katy at all?”
“I don’t know. Yeah, I guess. Rosalind was saying how brilliant it was that she was going to ballet school. I don’t see what’s so great about it.”
“What about your aunt and uncle? Did you mention them?”
“Yeah. Rosalind was saying they’re horrible to her. They never let her do anything.”
Vera gave a breathless little hoot. “Oh, now, Valerie, don’t be saying that! Sure, Officers, Margaret and Jonathan would do anything for those girls, they’ve themselves worn out—”
“Oh, yeah, sure. I guess that’s why Rosalind ran away, because they were too nice to her.”
Cassie and I both started to jump on this at once, but Vera got there first. “Valerie! What did I tell you? We don’t talk about that. It was all a misunderstanding, only. Rosalind was a very bold girl to be worrying her poor parents like that, but it’s all forgiven and forgotten….”
We waited for her to run down. “Why did Rosalind run away?” I asked Valerie.
She twitched one shoulder. “She was sick of her dad bossing her around. I think maybe he hit her or something.”
“Valerie! Now, Officers, I don’t know where she’s getting this. Jonathan would never lay a finger on those children, so he wouldn’t. Rosalind’s a sensitive girl; she had an argument with her daddy, and he didn’t realize how upset she was….”
Valerie sat back and stared at me, a smug smile creeping through the professional boredom. The middle kid wiped her nose on her sleeve and examined the result with interest.
“When was this?” Cassie asked.
“Ah, I wouldn’t remember. A long time ago—last year, I think it was—”
“May,” said Valerie. “This May.”
“How long was she gone?”
“Like three days. The police came and everything.”
“And where had she been, do you know?”
“She went off somewhere with a fella,” Valerie said, smirking.
“She did not,” Vera snapped shrilly. “She was only saying that to frighten her poor mother, God forgive her. She was staying with that friend of hers from school—what’s her name, Karen. She came home after the weekend and no harm done.”
“Whatever,” Valerie said, doing the one-shouldered shrug again.
“Want my tea,” the toddler stated firmly. I had been right: it had a voice like a bassoon.