to one side. 'Do you want me to fetch him?'
Sasha quelled a nervous tremor in her stomach. 'That would be helpful,' she said. 'Thank you.'
Louise gave an abrupt laugh and reached for her cigarette packet on the mantelpiece. 'I wouldn't advise it. He suffered brain damage a while back and doesn't take too kindly to being quizzed about his past ... mostly because he can't remember it and hates being made to look a fool.' She lit a cigarette. 'It's weird the way the brain works. He's forgotten whole chunks of his life, but he can remember the form of all the horses back to 1980 and still work out odds in half a second flat On a good day he can make ten grand just by sitting at his computer.'
'Does he remember the rape?'
'I don't know,' said Louise, with a malicious glint in her eye. 'I've never been stupid enough to ask. Feel free, though. His study's past the kitchen.'
'Does he remember you?'
'What's that supposed to mean?'
'Are you part of a chunk that he remembers?'
Louise didn't answer immediately, as if fearing a trap. 'I've known him for years,' she said. 'He'd have to've forgotten his whole fucking life to cut me out completely.'
'Interesting,' remarked Sasha idly, thinking that Louise's language and accent were falling apart by the second. 'So what does he call you, Mrs. Fletcher? Louise? Daisy? Cill? Priscilla? It would be a very good indication of which ... er ...
'Priscilla,' she said, watching the younger woman through the smoke from her cigarette. 'The same name I've had for twenty years.' She smiled cynically. 'And, before you ask why, I was stoned when I chose it, so any thoughts of Cill were in subconscious. I used to think it was classier than Louise or Daisy ... probably because the Trevelyans were such snobs.'
Sasha let a pulse of silence pass. 'Why didn't you tell the police that Billy was a witness to the rape? He knew the names of the boys.'
'I was protecting him. The folks didn't know he'd been truanting.'
'Why didn't the school notice his absence?'
'I phoned in for him, pretending to be Mum. Said he was sick.'
'Why?'
'To get him off the hook, of course.' She took a pull at her cigarette. 'It was his one and only time ... he was so scared he never did it again. He should be grateful for small mercies instead of turning it into a drama.'
Sasha smiled again. 'I'm not sure he'd agree with you, Mrs. Fletcher.' She paused to push her spectacles up her nose. 'I meant, why did you want him with you that day? He told me the meeting with the boys was preplanned, and that you and Cill talked sex nonstop to get them excited. I can't see the point of having a ten- year-old tagging along in those circumstances.'
'That's rubbish,' retorted Louise angrily. 'There's no way it was preplanned ... couldn't have been. We'd never seen them before. We went down the arcade and bumped into them by accident, and Cill promptly got the hots for Roy. The only reason we were stuck with Billy was because he couldn't go into school without being quizzed and he couldn't go home because the folks were there.'
Sasha flicked back a few pages of her notepad. 'I understood it was Cill who persuaded him to go with you, and you were furious about it.'
There was a pronounced hesitation. 'I don't remember, but it's probably right,' she said. 'It made Cill feel better about herself if she could get the rest of us to bunk off with her.'
'Billy's interpretation is different. He says Cill wanted him along because she wasn't as keen to meet the boys as you were. He says you contributed to the rape ... and may even have ordered it because you were jealous that Roy fancied Cill more than he fancied you.'
'Dream on,' said Louise scornfully. 'If I'd ever wanted Roy that much, I'd still be married to him.'
Sasha located the page she wanted from a follow-up interview with Billy. 'Your brother doesn't buy into the idea that you were protecting him, Mrs. Fletcher, so he's looking for reasons why you didn't tell the police he was there. His childhood experience of you is that you got him into trouble at the drop of a hat to save your own skin.' She ran her finger down the lines of the notepad. 'These are some of the explanations he's offered. The boys were friends of yours and, as you didn't want them arrested, you couldn't afford to have Billy name them.' She briefly raised her eyes. 'No? Then perhaps you wanted a free hand to malign Cill because you knew how much your father liked her, and you didn't want Billy standing up for her?'
Louise squashed her cigarette into an ashtray. 'Dad couldn't have given a shit. It was Mr. Trevelyan got excited about it. How
Sasha let that go. 'How about this one? You knew where Cill was but you didn't want to be asked questions about it, so you diverted attention onto something that had happened three weeks earlier. If Billy was involved, he might have mentioned Grace Jefferies's name, and you didn't want that.' She deliberately echoed some of Louise's own words to Andrew Spicer. 'It was no big deal. Cill was alive ... she was safe while she was with Grace ... and as far as you were concerned she'd go home as soon as she was bored.' She looked up again and met the pale gaze.
'Billy never told you that.'
'No,' Sasha agreed, 'but he's not the only person I've spoken to, Mrs. Fletcher. Let's go back to the rape for a moment. Billy says you went to Grace for replacement clothes because Cill's were torn and bloody. What happened then? Did you take her to Grace's house so that she could have a bath and clean up?'
Louise's expression hardened, but she didn't say anything.
'Should I take that as a yes?' She looked for a reaction which she didn't get. 'Clearly, you couldn't tell the police about going to Grace's house,' she went on evenly, 'otherwise they'd have put two and two together and gone straight round to interview her about Cill's disappearance. And for some reason you didn't want that. Why
