trying to feel something other than numb, at a picture of the river bank just outside the city, and a rucksack containing a homeless girl’s entire belongings, including a pair of roller skates, lying in the mud. There had been no trace of the owner. After several weeks and an extensive police search, the young woman called Ezzy Sheeran had been declared missing, presumed dead.
‘Not everyone who goes in the river comes out again,’ Joe says. ‘The police think she was washed into the Ouse and then out into the North Sea.’
‘A body would be good, though,’ Torquil says. ‘Just to make it official.’
Joe cannot bring himself to agree with this. Not out loud, at any rate.
‘This time last year, wasn’t it?’ Torquil says. ‘That she first turned up, I mean.’
‘Last Friday in June.’
‘I’m probably stating the obvious, but your mum and her mates have considered a link between what happened to Miss Sheeran in April and Bella Barnes’ death, haven’t they?’
It takes Joe a second or two to catch up. ‘You think they could both have been murdered? By the same killer?’
‘Is it impossible?’
‘Bella was stabbed. The theory is that Ezzy committed suicide after what she did to me.’
‘But in the light of new information, I mean Bella’s murder, maybe Ezzy suffered a similar fate and her body was thrown in the river.’
Delilah hasn’t said a word about any new theories regarding Ezzy Sheeran’s disappearance. Joe feels sure she wouldn’t keep him in the dark. On the other hand, she knows how difficult it is for him to talk about what happened in April.
Torquil is watching him closely. ‘Pint?’ he offers.
Joe shakes his head. ‘I’ve got my first session back at St Martin’s. It wasn’t available on Tuesday. Exam time.’
‘Want me to come?’
Joe reaches out a hand and pats Torquil on the shoulder. ‘Mate,’ he says, ‘I’m fine.’
The look his supervisor gives him as Joe turns away is one he’s seen many times before. Usually, though, on his mother’s face.
* * *
‘But I only looked at the baby.’ A tear zigzags down the elderly woman’s cheek. Her face is so wrinkled it can’t flow in a vertical line.
‘Dora, you took the baby out of its pram while its mother was attending to an older child. You know you can’t touch other people’s babies.’
‘She hit me.’
‘The baby hit you?’
‘The mother. She snatched it back and hit me. She called me horrible names. She should have been arrested, not me.’
Behind Dora, the woman from the charity who organises the weekly drop-in is hovering. His next appointment is waiting.
‘Mothers are fierce if they think their babies are under threat,’ he says.
‘I wouldn’t hurt a baby.’
Dora’s lip is trembling and another tear spills out from the corner of her eye.
‘I know,’ Joe says, although the truth is, he doesn’t, because decades earlier, married to a solicitor and teaching at a local girls’ school, Dora lost three infants to cot death. Sympathy at the time was huge, until she was arrested and charged with the murder of her own children. The charges were dropped for lack of evidence, but the resulting depression cost Dora her job and her marriage. Long ago, she began drinking and lost her home. Now she lives on the streets and no one knows whether she is the unluckiest woman alive, or a monster.
‘You’ve been cautioned again, haven’t you, Dora?’ Joe says. ‘An incident in the shopping centre.’
‘Those girls were bullying Martin,’ Dora says. ‘I couldn’t do nothing.’
Martin is one of Dora’s homeless friends who got into an argument with some school girls. Dora, begging nearby, pitched into the fray, swinging her shopping trolley at one of the girls and giving her a nasty cut on the leg.
‘You’ll be arrested if you do it again. You could go to prison.’
‘You won’t let that happen to me.’ Dora grips Joe’s hand. Her skin is scaled and rough. ‘You have a word with that mum of yours. Tell her I wouldn’t do any harm.’
Joe sighs. No one is supposed to know his mother is with the police.
‘When can I see you again?’ Dora asks. She still hasn’t released his hand. ‘It hasn’t been the same without you these last few weeks.’
‘I’ll be here on Tuesday. How about twenty past eight?’
‘Is that your last appointment?’
It isn’t, but he’s learned from experience never to give Dora the last appointment of the evening. Getting her to leave is always twice as hard.
‘Last available. Look, I’ll write it down for you.’
He writes 8.20pm, Tuesday on a