Evelyn pushed her hair behind her ears, leaned her elbows on the tablecloth, looked at Helen squarely, and half smiled, not quite inviting questions, but at least resigned.
`Why did you want to listen?'
I thought I ought to know. I don't think that was bad. Besides, my mother's dead. It can't make any difference to her what I know or don't, and I like forensic details. Pathology, anatomy, bones, all that stuff. I want to be a doctor. Or a writer, maybe. I've read about these things.'
`Do you read a lot?'
`Yes, of course. All the time. You have to if you want to learn things. Especially if you know more than your teachers.' Her expression added, you also have to reply to a lot of silly questions like these.
Helen was puzzled. Something was out of kilter, not merely the garish earrings, which struck an elusive chord of recognition in her mind. There was something else quite apart, a fact from her reading of the Sumner case, some part of his statement clearly recalled, which now seemed unlikely.
I take it you're very good at school? I expect you are.'
`Yes, very good. They keep wanting me to stay down, but I'm far too clever. Teachers make me sick. My father should have paid for a better school. Better for science, I mean. He wouldn't, though. Mummy said it wasn't worth it. He probably couldn't afford it after all Mummy's clothes.' There was an overtone of profound if well- controlled resentment.
And Mr Sumner? Why did he come and teach you out of school?'
The regard was suddenly very wary, then far too nonchalant. 'Oh, I asked if he could. My English isn't as good as the rest, you see, and I wanted to take the exam a year early, to get it out of the way.'
For a child so articulate, Helen found this unconvincing, but refrained from saying so.
She was getting close to the limit of acceptable questions, but refused to resist the temptation to ask more. 'Did you like Mr Sumner?' she asked, but the child was uncomfortable.
`Like him?' she said loudly, voice full of infantile scorn. 'Like him? No, of course not. He's a teacher, isn't he?'
Evelyn bent her head to the cream of the second coffee, leaving Helen to wonder why a girl of fourteen, presumably with better things to do, should ask for extra tuition in a subject where she was highly unlikely to need it. She recalled in her own misspent teenage years avoiding official study like the plague, and remembered with sudden clarity her crush on a history master in the dim days of school. An hour alone with him would have been like an offer of paradise.
Perhaps Evelyn had suffered the same, persuaded her parents into a course that offered contact with the beloved. An idle thought. She turned and looked out of the window. 'You can see the whole world pass by from here,' she remarked cheerfully, sensing she would receive precious little more response from the girl. 'Look at all these familiar faces.' Adding calmly,
'Your father is coming up the street, Evelyn. I should duck unless you want him to see you.'
The child leaned back, pulled Bario's pink curtain in front of her face, smiled at Helen in sudden appreciation. John Blundell passed into his office two doors down.
All clear,' said Helen, and Evelyn released the curtain. One dislodged earring landed on the cloth. 'Yours,' Helen uttered as she proffered it back, turning again to face the view outside in order to hide the deliberately blank look on her face, forming one more question she knew would be the last. 'You do like jewellery, don't you?'
Evelyn was clipping the orb back on to her ear. 'Not this stuff, not really. I like the better stuff, but I have to wear this in case
… Well, never mind. I quite like it, really.'
Fastening it back with fingers made clumsy by her distaste.
`Yes, I think I know what you mean,' Helen ventured. 'We sometimes have to wear things people give us. Just to please them.' In her mind's eye was the drawing of Mrs Blundell's missing jewellery, purloined from Evelyn's father, jewellery so different from Evelyn's own the pieces she had seen yesterday, glittering on the desk, exhibits in the short case against William Featherstone. Evelyn was regarding her with a look of fathomless suspicion. 'Oh, yes,' Helen continued artlessly, 'you can see the whole population from here.'
Evelyn accepted the distraction, looked outside. 'Nobody's got any time. They never stop painting their bloody houses, buying bigger cars, and having breakdowns. I hate it here,' she said suddenly and vehemently with a force recognizable as something more than childish pique.
`So do I,' said Helen.
There was a full minute's awkward pause.
Evelyn fidgeted, eager to move on. Home, then, to their no doubt empty houses.
Helen paid the bill. 'Where now?' she asked by way of farewell as they stepped into the street.
`Don't know. Lunch, I expect,' Evelyn replied, eyes fixed forward, secretive again, anxious to be gone.
`Not back on the bus to court?'
No.' A brief smile, two retreating steps, a new anxiety as she turned on her heel and marched away.
A definite, hurried walk, hands in hip pockets, lovely lithe figure that would have been the envy of a mature woman in its immature perfection, still childish nevertheless. On impulse, Helen stood in the next shop doorway, watching Evelyn's progress, partly to see if her anxiety would force her to break into a run, partly to make sure she did not board the Waltham-bound bus, which had pulled into the stop a few yards beyond on the green. As Helen watched, William Featherstone jumped from the exit doors of the bus, bounding toward Evelyn, his face, even from Helen's distant view, alight with his best delirious smile, fading as the girl strode past him, a quick cut of her hand forbidding recognition, moving faster and out of sight.
He started towards her, took two steps in her direction, pulled himself up short, and stopped with the guilty embarrassment of one who has remembered some broken code of manners, looking around to see if his infringement was noticed. Then he resumed his grin and crossed the road with studied carelessness, hands in pockets, copying the way Evelyn had walked but with none of her authority. Poacher's pockets, thought Helen: and you know that girl as well as she knows you. William Featherstone, what is your business with Evelyn Blundell and her earrings?
Then the next thought: tell Bailey. Back to the instinct to tell Bailey all the odd details of her day. If he would listen, that was. If he did not choose to listen these days to the neater and far more relevant conclusions of his pretty detective constable. If he didn't say, 'Helen, my dear, just because she has lost her mother does not mean I am entitled to cross-examine all members of the family about all the aspects of their lives.'
Helen went home, looking at her feet, faintly ashamed of spying. I must learn, she told herself, to trust nothing but evidence. Learn to do as Branston does: go home and shut the doors. Stop looking in people's windows. They do not like snooping. It is not the way of a community bent on privacy. This village togetherness hides a sad apartness. Go home, Helen West. Go home and close the door.
CHAPTER EIGHT
God, what a poxy afternoon, Amanda silently complained, dreadful day from eight-thirty a.m. until now. What the hell had Bailey been doing all day, leaving her with all the legwork and, as it happened, a fair bit of humiliation thrown in? Perhaps he had calculated that last bit with the Featherstones. Amanda Scott pressed the horn on her car, tried to overtake a truck, realized her own dangerous speed, pulled back, and swore.
She only swore in private, found it therapeutic but considered it disgraceful in public.
The rage was dying, but she remained angry until she pulled into the forecourt of her block of flats in Woodford, where some sort of reconciliation with the world occurred as she parked the car. Come on, patting her hair in the mirror in an automatic gesture, it wasn't all bad: you might have found an opportunity today. But to be virtually chased out-of-doors by mad Harold Featherstone, behaving and appearing like a caveman, was humiliation indeed.
On top of that last labour of the afternoon, she had found Bailey still absent from the office at five, unobtainable anywhere by phone for her to recount how comprehensively she had fulfilled orders and what a good girl she had been. Amanda needed support, needed him to listen to her achievements, and besides which knew very well that it was imperative for an officer as ambitious as she to have her efficiency on record. She would have
