From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL
Paula studied the young woman sitting opposite her in the interview room. She’d have put Louise Brand in her mid-to late-twenties. Her long dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail which did her slightly pudgy face no favours. Her brows had been severely plucked, her mascara so thickly applied it had clumped in places. She’d chewed off most of her pale pink lipstick, revealing chapped skin underneath. A line of silver star-shaped studs ran up the helix of her left ear.
‘Thanks for coming in to talk to us, Louise. I understand you spent some time living in the St Margaret Clitherow Refuge? And going to the school there.’
Louise took a deep shuddering breath. ‘I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, but I saw about the bodies on the news this morning and it freaked me out.’
‘I’m not surprised.’ That was all Paula managed before Louise was off again.
‘Because I might have known some of them, with me being there for the best part of three years. And some lasses did just vanish. We were told their families had come for them, or they were being adopted, or they’d had an accident and had to go to hospital and when they didn’t come back, the nuns just brushed it off, said they’d been moved to another kids’ home where they’d fit in better. And now it looks like that were a load of bollocks.’ She ran out of steam and looked around her. ‘I bet I can’t smoke in here, right?’
Paula nodded. ‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Typical. And then when my dad came back for me, well, it kind of made me believe what the nuns had said. Because that’s what did happen to me.’
‘I want to take you through this in order,’ Paula said patiently. ‘But first, I need some details about you.’
Some witnesses needed to be drawn out carefully and thoughtfully. Some drowned their interviewer in a torrent of information, inference, rumour, gossip and speculation. Paula knew already which kind Louise was. Within minutes, she had permission to record their conversation; the woman’s full name; a d.o.b. that put her a few years younger than Paula had guessed; the address where she lived with her father and her stepmother, though Louise didn’t think of her as the motherly type, not like her own mum who had died, and besides, her dad wasn’t married to the new one; the name of the pub where she worked five nights a week, on the books like a proper person, nothing dodgy there; and that she was studying for a Certificate of Higher Education in Children and Families at the Open University. Paula was experienced enough not to show her surprise at that last piece of information and chided herself mentally for being too quick to judge.
‘I didn’t do well at school. Margaret Clitherow put me right off, and I never really settled after that, but I want to work with children. Maybe be a nursery worker or even a nanny and I saw about the Open University on the telly and I thought, that’s not for the likes of you, Lou, but my boss at work, she said I should go for it. So I did,’ Louise blurted out. ‘It’s weird, doing homework at my age, but it turns out I’m quite good at it. Who knew?’
‘Good for you. It’s never too late. So, can you tell me when you were at St Margaret Clitherow?’
‘Maggie Clit, we used to call it.’ Louise sniggered. ‘I didn’t even know what a clit was when I went there. I was nine. And I was there till just before my twelfth birthday. You can do the sums.’
‘How did you end up there?’
Louise’s spark dimmed. ‘My mum got cancer. She was proper poorly, and I was a wild little madam. Then she died, and I went even more wild. Stealing from the local shops, but in a totally crap way, like I didn’t care if I was caught or not. Stopping out late, bunking off school, being a right bastard to my dad. He couldn’t manage, poor sod. He couldn’t deal with his own grief because I was using up all his energy. The parish priest said he could put me into Maggie Clit’s till I’d calmed down and got it out of my system, then my dad could bring me home. So I got dumped with that bunch of sadistic cows. I thought it would just be for a couple of weeks, but it ended up being nearly three years. I cried myself to sleep wishing for my dad to come back for bloody months.’ For a moment, she had nothing more to say, silenced by the weight of the memory.
‘Did your dad not visit?’
A bitter laugh and a knitting of the forehead. ‘Twice, he came. At the time, I thought he was getting his own back on me for being such a total shit to him. But after I went home, I fronted him up about it and he said the nuns told him to stay away. That it made the girls unsettled if their families visited. It was all about making their lives easier – those bitches. He’d wanted to see me. He’d even come to the Blessed Pearl a couple of other times and they made excuses. Said I was out on a day trip. Which was bollocks, because we never went out on day trips. It was like being in jail.’
Paula let the silence grow, respecting the other woman’s corrosive memories. Then she said softly, ‘How did they treat you?’
Louise picked at the skin round her thumbnail. ‘It was harsh.’ She met Paula’s eyes, her own bright with unshed tears. ‘There was a lot of talk there about the love of God but not one of them ever showed us a scrap
