“Yes.”
“Reason for visiting, have you?”
“No,” Ralph said. “I just drive about Norfolk at random, calling at farmhouses whenever I feel like it.” He swung open his door and stepped out. “What is it you want? To look in the boot, is that it?” He walked around and unlocked it. “Okay. There you go. Get on with it.”
The officer didn’t know what he wanted, really; but he ferreted about in the boot of the Citroen, found a pair of Wellingtons, a jack, a toolbox, a bundle of old newspapers. “All right?” Ralph said. “It doesn’t make much sense, this, does it? If you think I’m supplying stolen goods to the people down there, why didn’t you search the car on the way down?”
“We might just go and check out the farm, now,” said the other constable, who was leaning against the police car.
“You are harassing Mrs. Glasse,” Ralph said. “You know perfectly well that all her market-trading is legal and aboveboard, but you like the thought of tormenting two women who can’t torment you back. But I can, and I will, because I know the procedure for making a complaint against the police, and I know when to make one and I know how to make it stick.”
“Had many dealings with the law, have you?”
“God’s my witness,” Ralph said, “I don’t know how you blokes keep your front teeth. Finished with me, have you?”
“Oh yes, sir. We’ve got your name and address.”
“Oh no, sir, you mean.” Ralph got back into his car, slammed the door, spoke through the window. “Right, so we’ll be seeing each other again, will we?”
“Look forward to it,” one of the policemen said.
At the Red House next morning, Melanie did not appear for her breakfast. “Leave her,” Ralph said. “Let her get some rest.” He sat at the breakfast table, trying to argue sensitivity into his younger daughter. “Be kind to Melanie,” he said.
“Why?” Rebecca asked.
Ralph looked at her in exasperation. “Because it might achieve something. And the opposite won’t.”
“Melanie,” Rebecca said, “is filthy and foul.”
“Perhaps,” Ralph said. “Maybe. But how will she get any better unless people treat her kindly? And you must ask yourself, before you start, if any of it is her fault. Melanie has what we call a personality disorder.”
“Oh, come offit,” Robin said. “She can’t have. She hasn’t got a personality. She just sits there with her mouth half open, staring at her boots.”
“If that were true,” Ralph said, “there wouldn’t be a problem. But I’m afraid she’s not really like that. Come on, Robin, I don’t expect much of your sister, but you ought to have some sense at your age. Melanie has barely been under this roof for twenty-four hours, you can’t know anything about her. Don’t tease her and don’t provoke her, because she can be violent.”
“Oh, we won’t stand for violence,” Kit said. “Robin will bring her to the ground with a flying tackle.”
“You don’t understand,” Ralph said mildly. “The violence would be against herself.” He paused. “When she comes downstairs, look carefully at her arms, the inside of her arms. You’ll see she has old scars there.”
“She cut herself,” Anna said. “Did she use a razor blade? Or something else?”
“You noticed, did you?”
“Of course I noticed,” Anna said, annoyed. “Do you think I’m as heedless as the children?”
“I’m sorry,” Ralph said.
“So you should be. You went out and left me with her yesterday afternoon, and you warned me about things she might sniff or inhale but you didn’t warn me about knives and scissors. When I noticed her arms I had to slide away, and then run around the house hiding anything sharp.”
“You’re right,” Ralph said, “I should have warned you, but it was a long time ago she did the cutting, she seems to have other means now of relieving the stress. She was bullied at school, that’s where it started, and so she played truant and then she got in with a gang of older girls, and they took her shoplifting.”
“The usual story,” Robin said.
“True,” Ralph said. “But with one piquant variation. She was taken into care, and after three months she was allowed back home. Her parents had sold her record player and her records, and they’d given away the toys she’d had as a baby, and her clothes. Anything they couldn’t sell or give away they’d just put out with the rubbish. Maybe the social workers hadn’t done their job properly, or maybe the family hadn’t listened, maybe they didn’t take in what they were told, because it was quite obvious that they never expected to see her again.”
The children were quiet. “So what did she do?” Robin said in the end; his tone respectful now.
“There’s some waste ground near her family’s council flat—she found some of her clothes there. In a black dustbin bag, she told me. She went around for a bit trying to find out who they’d sold her things to, and knocking at their doors trying to persuade them to give them back, but naturally as they’d parted with cash they thought they had a good title, as the lawyers would say. After that I don’t know what happened, it’s a blank, she won’t tell anybody. She turned up in London about ten days later. She hadn’t a penny on her when they brought her to the hostel. She had the dustbin bag, though.” He sighed. “We bought her some clothes, but she wouldn’t wear them. She wanted the originals, I suppose. She went out at the back and had a bonfire.”
Kit had stopped eating. “It seems a terrible thing,” she said. “That a child could be worth so little to its parents.”
“What do you expect?” Anna pushed her plate away. “We live in a world where children are aborted every day.”
“Hush,” Ralph said. He did not want Rebecca to start asking questions. Or anybody to start asking questions, really. He had not seen Julian since their confrontation two nights ago. His son had gone back to the coast and not
