‘How long did this go on for?’
‘Three months or so,’ Loewe said. ‘One morning I got up and found her in here eating a bowl of cereal. She wasn’t right, though. Or better. Not really. She was just up and moving about and she could answer a question with a word or two.’ Loewe scrubbed out her cigarette and reached for a half-smoked joint in the ashtray before she thought better of it. ‘She’d got up because she had exams coming and she thought that if she missed them, she’d be wasting all the effort Lola put into her education. She’d missed so much school that when she got her results they were a lot weaker than she was expecting. That set her back a bit. But she found a job and she was going to retake her A-levels the next year.’ Loewe smiled absently. ‘I was so proud of how she started pulling it together again.’
‘But then she was arrested?’ Ferreira asked.
Loewe nodded.
Ferreira tried to imagine how it must have felt to Nadia, fighting slowly through her obliterating grief, working to do her mother’s memory proud, be the girl she’d raised. Only to find herself spirited away to Long Fleet. Locked up, the last strands of stability she’d been clinging to snatched away.
How had she survived? Had she turned in on herself again?
Or had the grief numbed her so comprehensively that even Long Fleet’s regime, its claustrophobia and threats, the assault by Joshua Ainsworth, couldn’t get through?
Murray took over, breaking the silence that had fallen between them.
‘How long had Nadia been living here?’
‘She and Lola moved in five years ago,’ Loewe said, her face clouding over. ‘They’d been shunted around from pillar to post before that. Private rentals here are astronomical and not many landlords will take housing benefit. I don’t usually, to be honest, but I liked Lola and I could see what a good mother she was.’ She smiled, as if at the memory of them. ‘Every child deserves a stable roof over their head and Lola worked hard to make sure she could provide that for Nadia. I tried to do right by Lola and look after Nadia when she passed.’ She blinked quickly. ‘I did my best.’
Another momentary silence and Ferreira could feel the pain radiating from the woman, something like shame too. She’d never mentioned visiting Nadia in Long Fleet or staying in contact with her, and Ferreira wondered if that guilt was biting now.
‘Are there any friends we could contact?’ Murray asked.
‘They disappeared pretty fast when Nadia took to her bed,’ Loewe said disapprovingly. ‘Lives to get on with, exams and uni and gap years, all that stuff.’
‘What about a boyfriend?’
‘Not that I knew of. But Nadia was very … demure, I suppose. She wouldn’t have brought anyone back here, I think. She wouldn’t have thought it was proper.’
‘What about her church?’ Murray asked, picking up on the hint Ferreira was about to pursue. ‘We’ll need their details in case Nadia reached out to someone there.’
Loewe gave them the address, the name of the priest who she’d called to the house for Nadia.
Murray noted down the details.
‘We’re discussing her like she’s dead,’ Loewe muttered, looking away from them into the back garden. ‘Do you really think she’s in danger?’
‘Anyone coming out of a facility is vulnerable,’ Ferreira said, thinking of the gangs who preyed on young adults spat out by the care system and women released from prison into halfway houses. ‘The fact is Nadia has been out for almost two months now and we have no idea where she is.’
‘Maybe she went back to Ghana?’
‘No, we have no record of her leaving the country.’
‘Have you let her room out?’ Murray asked.
Loewe nodded. ‘I would have held it for her if I could, but … it’s been a year and my bank isn’t quite as sentimental as I am.’
‘Did you keep any of her things?’
‘There wasn’t much,’ Loewe said. ‘I boxed everything up and put it in the garage. You’re welcome to have a look through it, if you think it’ll help.’
She took them outside, heaving up the cranky metal door, and pointed them to the two modest cardboard boxes with Nadia’s name written on them. On the shelves above and below were boxes from other former residents and Ferreira wondered why Loewe had kept them – if everyone had left under such unusual circumstances and if she was waiting for their returns too.
Murray started to go through the boxes as Ferreira stood with Loewe on the driveway. She asked about her other lodgers and how many she had in the house, finding that she let out two bedrooms and a bedsit in the converted loft and that none of her current tenants had been living here at the same time as Nadia.
‘Do you have contact details for anyone who was?’ Ferreira asked.
Loewe went to get her phone book, a slim item that seemed to belong to another century. But Ferreira was glad of it. Lately they’d started struggling with contact details, as people lost and changed their phones and didn’t always back up their information.
She took down the names and numbers and email addresses of the two people who had shared the house with Nadia, hoping that one of them might have got to know her better than Deborah Loewe, maybe even well enough to be her first port of call when she left the hostel.
Nadia hadn’t done that on a whim, she thought.
She had a solid destination in mind.
Murray came out of the garage.
‘Nothing obvious, but maybe we should take it with us.’ Loewe looked momentarily uncomfortable. ‘We’ll give you a receipt for it, ma’am. And if Nadia returns in the meantime, you can tell her we have her things.’
She nodded her reluctant agreement and Ferreira left Murray to deal with the paperwork while she checked her messages. Bloom reporting another potential suspect struck off the list
