The big disappointment was Rutherford. Everything he’d heard about Carol Jordan signalled that she was one of a kind. He didn’t think Rutherford had that degree of individuality or originality. The briefing that morning hadn’t done anything to change that opinion. It had felt sketchy, not thought through. And now here he was, kicking his heels in some social worker’s office while she tried to find someone who had actually had any face-to-face dealings with the nuns of the Blessed Pearl.
The woman had been flustered, unwilling at first to cooperate. But Steve had laid it on thick. This could be a murder inquiry, he reminded her. It wouldn’t look good if it came out later that the council’s social work department hadn’t gone out of its way to try to identify some of these child victims. He could see the calculation going on behind her eyes, remembering the way social work bosses had been destroyed in the media over perceived past failings. So off she’d scuttled to track down one of the poor sods whose names were on the files.
Steve was on his third game of online Scrabble when the door opened and a head appeared round the edge. Hair in a neat brown bob, glasses with oversized black frames, an anxious expression and a nervous half-smile. ‘Sergeant Nisbet?’ The voice was surprisingly confident, warm and cultivated.
Steve sprang to his feet. ‘That’s me. Come in.’
A different woman entered, plump and self-effacing, a folder clutched to her chest, a plain wedding band tight on a chubby finger. He imagined her married to some Guardian-reading couch potato. She gave a nervous smile. ‘Sarah said we could use her office.’ She looked around for somewhere to sit that wasn’t her boss’s chair but had to give up. She edged round the desk and perched uneasily on the chair. ‘I’m Jackie Johnston. Sarah said you wanted to talk to the social worker who dealt with the children at the St Margaret Clitherow Refuge and School?’
‘That’s right.’
She nodded. ‘That would be me, certainly for the last few years they were up and running.’
‘You’ll have heard about the discoveries that have been made in the grounds of the convent of the Blessed Pearl?’ Unless you’ve been walking around with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears.
She closed her eyes momentarily. ‘It’s appalling. And I know we’re going to end up carrying the can for it.’
‘It’s not my job to dish out blame, Jackie. I’m just trying to get a picture of what the home was like. How it was run. How much you knew about the lives of the children there.’
She made a nervous sound in the back of her throat. ‘The answer is, a lot less than you probably expect.’ She picked up a pen from the desk and fiddled with it, clicking it on and off continuously.
‘You’re going to have to explain that to me, Jackie.’ Keep using her name, remind her she’s here, now.
‘We didn’t technically have responsibility for most of the girls in the home,’ she said in a rush. ‘Very few of them were placed there by the local authority. And those were the only ones we actually had any authority for. We had no records of anybody else.’
‘What? There was an orphanage full of girls on your patch and you had no idea how many? Or who they were? Or where they came from?’ Steve couldn’t keep the incredulity from his voice or his face.
Jackie shuffled backwards in the chair. ‘The nuns turned evasiveness into a fine art,’ she said, a hint of defiance in her tone. They weren’t the only ones, Steve thought. ‘They’d deny that any of the other girls were permanent residents. They’d say the girls were there for a visit. Or to give their mothers respite after a new baby, a difficult birth. Or to get fresh country air. Or because their parents had split up and the family hadn’t made alternative arrangements yet. It was all very plausible, very matter-of-fact. There was no way we could disprove it, not without records. And we had no right to their records.’
‘I’m struggling to credit this.’ Steve scratched his head furiously. ‘So where did these other girls come from?’
‘The Mother Superior, Sister Mary Patrick, she said they were mostly there on the recommendation of their parish priests. She said they came from various parts of the country. Some were even from Ireland.’ Jackie sighed. ‘I tried, I really tried. But it was impossible. It wasn’t like they were going to a local school where we might have been able to get access to their names and their records. They were educated in the convent. Perfectly properly, I might say.’
‘It sounds like they were prisoners, not residents.’
‘Whenever I visited, there was no sign of duress. They all seemed well-behaved and contented.’
‘How many did you have responsibility for?’
‘St Margaret Clitherow’s was on my caseload for four years. I had seven girls there permanently for those four years. Six of them were orphans and the other one, her mother had died and her father wasn’t able to take care of her. They were all Catholic girls and the refuge seemed like the best option.’
‘How often did you visit?’
Jackie opened her file. ‘Every six months.’ She looked up swiftly, fearful. ‘Look, I know that sounds bad. But like everybody in this department, I don’t have a caseload so much as a case overload. I had – I have to deal with domestic violence, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, mental health problems, threats of eviction, allegations of child sex abuse, teenage runaways, issues with benefits. The home was run on proper lines, the girls were divided up into small family-style groups in the care of two or three nuns. The girls we sent to the nuns seemed well nourished, well cared for, well educated. They never had much to say for themselves, they were always quite subdued.
