Neil White 3 Book Bundle. Neil White

a victim of the cutbacks. After fifty yards or so further on, they came to a double-fronted detached house in dirty white pebble-dash. As they came to a stop, there were three teenagers sitting on the front step, smoking cigarettes. They started to laugh as Sheldon led the way.

      ‘Your clothes don’t fit, man,’ one of them said to Sheldon, making the other two laugh more loudly than the jibe deserved.

      Sheldon smiled at them. ‘Who’s in charge in there?’ he said, and pointed towards the house.

      ‘We are.’ More laughter. ‘No, I’m serious.’

      Sheldon rolled his eyes and stepped past them, going through the front door, Ted behind him. As they crossed the threshold, the same teenager shouted, ‘Marian?’

      A large woman appeared from a room at the end of the hall. The kitchen, Sheldon guessed. She had hair cropped short, dyed purple, and a stud in her nose, although it didn’t match the lines round her mouth that put her somewhere near to fifty.

      ‘Can I help you?’ she said, stepping towards them.

      Sheldon pulled his identification from his pocket. ‘From Oulton police.’

      ‘You don’t look like the police,’ she said, looking at his clothes. And then she pointed at Ted Kenyon. ‘I know you.’

      ‘It’s a long story,’ Sheldon said, interrupting. ‘I want to ask you about Lucy Crane.’

      She looked confused for a moment, and then her eyes widened. ‘I haven’t heard that name for a long time. You need to update your records if you think she’s here though. She left, oh, three years or more.’

      ‘Tell me about her.’

      She looked suspicious. ‘Why do you want to know?’

      ‘It could be important,’ Sheldon said. ‘I don’t want to see her records. I just want to know about her.’

      Marian thought about that, and then she nodded them through to the kitchen. It was wide and spacious, with plates piled high on the side, waiting for their turn in the dishwasher.

      ‘So I’ll ask again; why do you want to know?’ Marian said, as she hauled herself onto a high stool next to a breakfast bar.

      ‘I can’t tell you that.’

      ‘So I can’t tell you about Lucy,’ she said, and shrugged, her hands held out.

      Sheldon had expected that, but he thought it was worth trying for information without giving anything away.

      ‘It’s about the Billy Privett murder,’ Sheldon said. ‘She might have some useful information.’

      Marian pointed at Ted. ‘Now I know you. You’re Alice Kenyon’s father.’

      Ted smiled, trying to win her over. ‘This could be important. Please help us.’

      Marian looked at Sheldon, and then back at Ted. Then she softened. ‘She was trouble.’

      ‘Aren’t they all?’ Sheldon said.

      ‘Most are troubled, yes, but trouble? Not always. The kids that come here are like any group of people. They form hierarchies, where some follow, others lead. Whether the kids get in trouble depends on who is doing the leading. Sometimes you get kids who just like some fun, and will even work at school. The home is a good place to be then, and all the kids have a chance.’

      ‘But?’

      Marian smiled. She knew the but was there. ‘But sometimes you get leaders who are just too much trouble, and they drink too much, get into drugs, and they take at least a couple with them.’

      ‘And Lucy?’

      ‘Lucy, well,’ and Marian laughed. ‘She was all about sex. I tried not to judge her, because I knew the background she brought into the home, from her family background, and I am sure as hell not going to tell you, but she was good looking, and she knew it gave her a weapon. She developed early, and she used what she had to get what she wanted. I think she realised that her looks would take her further than her academic skills, and so she would flaunt it. There was even a care worker who lost his job over her, who forgot where the line was when she came at him fresh from the shower. She just wanted him to let her go out drinking, but she had to persuade him. Someone walked in on him groping her, but she was on her back, letting him touch her.’ Marian shook her head. ‘He said she came on to him, and I believe that, but he was supposed to say no, he was the adult, except that Lucy didn’t know the word no when she heard it.’

      ‘What happened to her?’ Sheldon said.

      ‘She was always going missing, although she was never really going missing, if you know what I mean. She was just hanging out with adults. They would get what they wanted, and they would keep her in booze and fags. It was just the local men at first, the deadbeats who hang around the parks with beer cans, but then other people started calling round for her. They thought of themselves as artists, anarchists, squatters, people like that, but they were just people who had opted out. She would go missing for days at a time, and we called the police, but then one day she never returned.’

      ‘Don’t you worry about them, the ones who end up like that?’

      Marian thought about that, and then said, ‘Some I do. It’s the ones who are weak that I worry about, because they will give in to whatever pressure is put on them. Drugs, crime, prostitution, and so just about any bad thing that can happen to a person will happen to them. They are the ones who end up hanging themselves in jail when they get to thirty and realise that their sorry little life was going to stay sorry. The strong ones I don’t worry about. They’ll manage somehow. Lucy was one of the strong ones, in her own way.’

      Marian was lost in her memories for a while, before she said, ‘So what did she have to do with Billy Privett? I saw on the news that he had been killed.’

      ‘There was a young woman who was at his house the morning after his body was discovered, and we think it might have been Lucy, which if it was, I’m suspicious, because it means that she lied about who she was. Do you have any photographs of her?’

      ‘We don’t keep mug shots,’ Marian said, scorn in her voice, and then she paused, looking unsure, as if something had occurred to her. ‘Wait there.’

      She bustled out of the room. Ted raised his eyebrows. ‘What do you think?’

      ‘It sounds like the same kind of person, but it’s all based upon one officer’s memory jolted from a police station CCTV still.’

      ‘She has probably been in trouble,’ Ted said. ‘Won’t you have mug shots?’

      ‘I’m on sick leave, remember.’

      ‘That isn’t the same as suspended though, is it?’ Ted said. ‘You could still go in and look at the computers.’

      Before Sheldon could answer, Marian brought in a photograph album.

      ‘This is from four years ago,’ she said. ‘We went on a weekend in the Lakes. Rafting, adventures in the woods, that kind of thing.’

      Marian put the album on the breakfast bar and started to flick through the pages. Cellophane-covered photographs went past in a blur, children in red lifejackets by water and boats. Marian stopped occasionally, and then she stepped back. ‘There,’ she said, and tapped a photograph at the top of a page.

      Sheldon got closer to have a look, and then he started to nod to himself.

      The picture was of a teenage girl, laughing, her blonde hair in a ponytail, but it was wet, with strands across her face, the top of a bright red lifejacket visible. It was Christina. The cheeks were less defined, but the smile was the same, and that confidence he remembered in her eyes.

      ‘That’s her,’ Sheldon said. He moved to one side to let Ted Kenyon have a look, but when Ted got close, he put his hand over his mouth.

      ‘What