The Killings on Jubilee Terrace by Robert Barnard

Author:Robert Barnard [Barnard, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1416560467
Published: 2009-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Private Lives

“Dying like that!” said Maggie Cardew. “The pain! The terror!”

“It doesn’t bear thinking about,” said her husband. But he looked as if he could think of nothing else.

“She were a lovely little girl,” his wife went on, dabbing at her eyes and looking as if she were in another world. “The sweetest and kindest thing imaginable when she were four.”

“Aye. And what was she when she were twelve?” said Danny Cardew bitterly. His words provoked a storm of tears, and he regretted them. “I’m sorry, love. I shouldn’t have said that. There’s nowt to be done about all that now.”

“But what shall we tell the policeman when he comes? We can’t tell him we haven’t seen her in the last eighteen months. She living in the same town an’ all.”

Her husband considered until the tears had died down. Then he said, “Them’s difficult years. Our Fiona were a handful when she were that age. Most girls are. But Fiona came through—look at her today. And worse girls come through, often. Something, we don’t know what, meant that Sylvia just went off the rails.”

“What are you trying to say, Danny?”

“I’m trying to say there’s no earthly good to be had from hiding things from the inspector. He’ll find out what she’s been these last years. He might as well find out from us. If it helps him to catch the coward as done this, we’ll have done Sylvia the last service we could do her. God knows, we tried.”

His wife thought.

“Do you mean that Sylvia was known to the police?”

“Must have been, I’d say. Probably got a record. If it had been in t’paper no one would have told us. If she were clever about it and kept out of that sort of trouble, there’s still plenty of men who could tell the police what she were and what she did.”

“But do we tell him everything, then? It’s like a sort of betrayal.”

“It’s no betrayal when Sylvia never hid owt. We tell him all we know. It’s little enough, God knows. But at the very least we’ll save the man’s time.”

So when Charlie knocked on their door prompt on two, after walking around the neighborhood and savoring the atmosphere of nicely aging semidetacheds with neat gardens of roses and peonies and the odd dated lavatera, he was welcomed, invited to sit down, and was showered from the beginning with information.

It was a sad enough tale. Sylvia had been a late addition to the family but one who, once arrived, was loved and probably spoiled by her three older siblings and by her parents. She was, they assured Charlie, the loveliest and most biddable of children until she reached about twelve, and then she went off the rails in ways that twelve-year-olds never knew about in the Cardews’ younger days, leaving them at a loss at how to impose a discipline and set of standards that had been missing till then.

“It was alcohol, drugs, and sex—sex at twelve!” said Maggie.

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