Dead To Me - [25]

The place was well maintained, with landscaped gardens and a play area in the large front plot. Shiny red double doors between the pillars of the porch leading into the house. Double-glazed and carpeted.

Marlene was the manager, had been for years. She remembered Janet and they exchanged pleasantries before getting down to business.

‘I liked her,’ Marlene said, ‘and she didn’t make it easy. I think, with more support, if she had been able to stay off the drugs, she might have done all right, but…’ she sighed. ‘The boyfriend, Sean Broughton – worst thing that could have happened. Lisa didn’t let anyone get close, trusted no one, and then rolled out the red carpet when he came along.’

‘What about the family? She spent some time with her mum?’ Janet had read through Rachel’s report on the interview with James Raleigh, noting the key facts ahead of this visit.

‘The mother tried, but, well, not exactly gifted with parenting skills. The acting out at the onset of puberty – Lisa wanted attention, she needed boundaries. The early disruption had left her quite damaged. Denise Finn didn’t have the wherewithal. Problems of her own. Then the brother’s suicide…’

‘He hung himself,’ Janet said.

‘From a lamppost outside his mother’s house.’

‘Oh, God.’ Janet tried to imagine it, opening the door or the curtains and seeing that, facing that, Taisie or Elise swinging. She squashed the thought. But how would you ever forget the image? The rope or the belt, the body suspended, still, the face distorted. How did you ever reach a place where the earlier, innocent photos of school and holidays came into your head, instead of the ghastly death mask?

Janet had sat with victims’ relatives in the past, heard them say, I just can’t get it out of my head, seeing her that way. Every time I close my eyes… One distraught young son had seen his mother beaten to death with a poker by her ex-husband: It’s stuck there, he cried, I can’t remember what she really looked like, she’s just gone. At least with Joshua, he’d looked peaceful, as if he was sleeping. Janet swallowed, fixed on what Marlene was saying.

‘Nathan had problems of his own, was off his head on everything going. He’d started shooting up, stealing off Denise, mugging people. We offered Lisa bereavement counselling. I think she went a couple of times.’

‘Tell me about Lisa’s drug use when she was here,’ Janet said.

Marlene raised her hands, a gesture of frustration. ‘It’s impossible to police. We’re a home, not a secure unit. Drugs are out there, they get in here. Lisa was caught with aerosols, glue, weed – well, most of them try weed,’ she said as an aside.

‘Any Class A?’

‘That only started once Sean came on the scene. We could see the signs. But she was never found with any.’

‘He supplied it?’

‘That’d be my guess,’ Marlene said.

‘James Raleigh had been talking to her about rehab,’ Janet said.

There was a scuffling sound at the door and it swung wide open. An Asian girl wearing an outsize tracksuit and a red baseball cap burst into the room. ‘Marlene? Oh, soz.’

‘I’ll be a few more minutes, Punam.’

‘Cool.’ The girl flicked a peace sign in their direction and left. Janet smiled; the energy, the liveliness, reminded her of Taisie on a good day.

‘She’s a doll,’ Marlene said. ‘She’ll make it.’ She stretched in her seat. ‘Lisa’s social worker, Martin Dalbeattie, retired this spring. We’ve still got his number – I’m sure he’d be happy to talk to you, if you needed to know any more details about her time here.’

Janet thanked her and would have left it at that, but Rachel’s persistent questions meant she had to ask. Just to convince herself there was nothing to it. ‘Sean Broughton – had he been around here before he latched on to Lisa?’

‘Don’t think so.’ Marlene thought harder. ‘No.’ She leaned forward, her head tilted, as if she’d share a confidence. ‘And I am the all-seeing-eye,’ she laughed.

It was a miracle Denise Finn was still talking and walking, given the trauma she’d been through. Where did she summon the strength to carry on? Perhaps after Nathan had died, she kept going for Lisa. But now? I couldn’t do it, Janet thought, I would just lay down and die, a bit of help maybe, from the car exhaust, stones in pockets, pills and booze. But it wasn’t true. She’d weathered hard times, survived. Not only with the baby, but before then. When she got ill.

Thinking of it brought the old, familiar tremor of anxiety. Like a faint aftershock from an earthquake, travelling from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head. She allowed herself to revisit the memories as she made the journey back to the office, having discovered that, if she tried to deny the feelings and not think about the events that had first triggered them, it only seemed to feed her fears, making them stronger, more feral.

Fifteen, studying for GCSEs and worried about her exams, Janet was finding it hard to sleep at night. They all expected her to do well. Her mother was sorting through a box of old photographs, one of her clean-ups. Janet at the dining-room table, trying to learn chunks of