فصل 35

35

ERIN

Josh was sitting on the pavement opposite the house as we left. He watched us walking towards the car, crossing the road quickly once we’d got fifty yards or so down the street and disappearing into the house. The DI, in his own world, didn’t seem to notice.

“She wouldn’t rest until she saw Nel pay?” I repeated when we reached the car. “Does that not sound like a threat to you?”

Sean regarded me with his familiar, blank expression, his irritating look of not-really-there-ness. He said nothing.

“I mean, doesn’t it seem odd that Lena wouldn’t even mention that to us? And Josh? That business about them all being asleep? It was such an obvious lie . . .”

He nodded curtly. “Yes. It seemed so. But I wouldn’t set too much store by the tales of grieving children,” he said quietly. “There’s no telling what he’s feeling or imagining, or what he thinks he should or shouldn’t be saying. He knows that we know that his mother bore a grudge against Nel Abbott, and I imagine he’s afraid that she’s going to be blamed, that she’s going to be taken away from him. You have to think about how much he’s already lost.” He paused. “As for Lena, if she truly was as hysterical as Louise suggests, she may not even remember the incident clearly; she may remember very little other than her own distress.”

For my part, I was finding it difficult to marry Louise’s description of Lena that day—a howling, wounded beast—with the usually self-contained and occasionally venomous girl we had encountered. It seemed bizarre to me that her reaction to her friend’s death would be so extreme, so visceral, when her reaction to her mother’s was so restrained. Was it possible that Lena had been so affected by Louise’s grief, by Louise’s conviction that Nel was to blame for Katie’s death, that she had come to believe it herself? A prickle ran over my skin. It didn’t seem likely, but what if, like Louise, Lena blamed her mother for Katie’s death? And what if she decided to do something about that?