Damaged Goods. Helen Black

      She snapped her head around. He had her attention now.

      ‘Like you say, no one’s interested, so anyone making some noise will have a clear field.’

      Barrows watched her hungry smile emerge. She needed recognition and publicity as much as he needed the hobby. Well, almost.

      ‘What angle could I use?’ she asked.

      He pretended to think about it. ‘I hear the police think her daughter did it, but they’re not pursuing it. Probably worried what the papers will make of it all.’

      ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

      He sighed at her incomprehension. She rarely grasped anything quickly and he often had to repeat and explain things as if she were retarded.

      ‘Social services and the police should have done something about this family years ago. They sat back and let a heroin-addicted prostitute keep vulnerable children. Can you imagine the life they’ve had?’

      Hermione nodded, but Barrows knew it was well beyond her wit to empathise with anyone who didn’t drive a BMW.

      He pressed on. ‘Those children will be damaged beyond repair. I should imagine the eldest was driven to killing her mother in sheer desperation.’

      ‘So what’s the point of pursuing it? What’s in it for …’ Hermione stopped short.

      Barrows prepared to deliver the clincher. ‘Whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, the child is dangerous, she shouldn’t be allowed to wander the streets.’ He paused for emphasis. ‘The voters in Luton are already terrified of the young people from the estates and they’ll be very glad that someone is taking it seriously.’

      He saw ambition light her face. ‘Tough on crime. Yes, they love that,’ she said.

      ‘And when the press turn on social services you’ll be right in the middle of it,’ he added. ‘Everyone will want to know your opinion on the matter.’

      Hermione looked faintly puzzled and Barrows berated himself for over-egging the pudding. He need not have worried.

      ‘You really should go into politics, darling, you’re even better at it than I am,’ she said with a self-deprecating giggle.

      Of course I am. It’s hardly rocket science. Any fool can be a politician. But I don’t need the spotlight to validate myself. My longing is for something else. Something less complex.

      After much negotiation with Lilly as to how late was too late on a school night, Sam was finally asleep.

      Lilly made a vast bowlful of pasta, doused it in olive oil infused with chilli, poured a generous glass of wine and settled down to do some work.

      She spread her case papers across the kitchen table and took a mouthful of food, savouring the spicy zing of the oil as it touched her tongue. If not Kelsey, then who had killed Grace? Could it have been Max, the man Mrs Mitchell had identified as a drug dealer? It seemed more likely than a child, even Jack had admitted that. She knew from experience that the police would keep pursuing Kelsey until they had another suspect. She just had to make Jack see that Max was the one who murdered Grace.

      Lilly smiled to herself at the thought of him. They’d enjoyed their drink together, even if Lilly had spent most of the time haranguing him about this case.

      ‘Do you ever let up?’ he’d said.

      ‘Not often,’ Lilly replied. ‘Anyhow, I bet you take your work home with you.’

      ‘Only the handcuffs,’ he said.

      They’d laughed a lot, like they always did, finding humour in the darkest places.

      ‘Name your all-time worst witness,’ he’d asked.

      ‘The man who was so pissed he fell asleep.’

      Jack threw his head back in glee.

      ‘I thought at one point the old sod was dead … Or how about the bloke who barricaded himself in his flat with the kids,’ she said. ‘And the armed police had to break down the door.’

      Jack snorted on his beer. ‘And when you asked him if the children had been frightened by the helicopters, he said no, they thought it was better than the telly.’

      It was easy with Jack. Easier than Lilly could remember with anyone else since David had left, and Lilly found herself wishing she could spend more time with him. Something had changed. Maybe it was Jack, maybe it was Lilly, or maybe the time was just right, but she knew that she wanted to be more than friends.

      If he felt the same then she ought to do something about it. But how was she to gauge his feelings on the matter?

      ‘If you haven’t got a crystal ball, better ask the question,’ her mother had always said, but Lilly hadn’t inherited her bottle – or her years in the south had worn it away.

      ‘They’re all soft down there,’ her dad used to say.

      Trust him. The silly sod had never been further than Skegness.

      She took a gulp of wine and looked at some photographs of the Brand family. They had been taken by a social worker on a trip to the beach only weeks before Grace put the girls in care. The trip was funded by Sunny Days, a charity set up to help children like these escape the estates, if only for a day.

      None of the girls had ever seen the sea before, and one photograph showed them playing in the waves with excitement and abandon.

      Lilly thought of her own early holidays in a caravan on the east coast. Sometimes they took Nan, who snored like a drill and the whole tin can would rattle. In the distance the fog horn at Robin Hood’s Bay would sound and the donkeys in the next field would start braying for their food around five. Dad would throw open the door, the pee bucket swinging from his arm. ‘There’s nothing like a rest at the seaside.’

      Lilly laughed and picked up the next picture. All four girls with their mother, sitting on a wall, eating ice cream. Kelsey, Gemma, Sophie and Scarlet. Peas in a pod. The same mousy hair covering most of their faces, the same tight mouths revealing chipped teeth. Grace at the end, squinting into the sun.

      Kelsey seemed different in the picture, somehow lighter than she was now. Lilly wouldn’t have described her face as happy but the despair wasn’t there.

      Lilly chased the last strand of spaghetti around her plate and picked up a housing transfer refusal. She placed it on top of the others and counted them. Five. In the past year Grace had made five applications to the council to move and had kept all five letters of refusal.

      There was even a letter from Grace’s MP thanking her for attending the surgery but apologising that she was unable to help as Grace had rent arrears, and it was local authority policy not to move anyone until all rent payments were up-to-date.

      Lilly was puzzled. Junkies rarely pursued anything so persistently, except their drug of choice. To make and actually keep an appointment with an MP was unheard of.

      Chocolate called. Lilly opened the fridge and fingered the small mountain of Kit-Kats, Snickers, Picnics and other bars she kept, as though it were pornography, on the top shelf.

      David had found her love affair with such confectionery downmarket. He described it as ‘cheap chocolate’ and encouraged her towards the dark, Belgian or Swiss varieties. Lilly had pointed out that Roald Dahl had shared her passion and he was a genius. And anyway, she couldn’t care less about the percentage of cocoa solids, she’d always been crap at maths.

      Now David was gone she could do what she liked. Apparently Cara didn’t eat chocolate at all, it played havoc with her chakras.

      Lilly took a bar and read the list of ingredients. Sugar, hydrogenated fat, emulsifier and salt. ‘Delicious,’ she said, and turned her mind once again to the housing applications.

      Had Grace been trying to escape from