The Silent Ones: An absolutely gripping psychological thriller(38)

‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t realise. Dana Sewell.’ She held out her hand.

Helen ignored it. ‘I know who you are.’

Dana pulled out a chair. ‘Please, Helen, take a seat. Can I get you a coffee?’

Helen shook her head and hesitated, but then sat down, twisting the strap of her handbag between her fingers.

‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ Dana offered limply.

‘I… I still can’t believe it.’ Helen stared vacantly at the tabletop. ‘I can’t stay long, but someone said you were in the café and so I had to come in. I just had to.’

‘I’m glad you did.’ Dana pressed her lips together. ‘I can’t imagine how you must be feeling—’

‘Of course you can’t. That’s why I had to see for myself the woman who’s helping those two… girls, the so-called children who murdered my mother.’ Helen’s eyes were trained like lasers on Dana’s face, the sadness in her voice now replaced by a brusque harshness.

Dana swallowed. ‘Helen, I know how terribly difficult it must be for you right now—’

‘I mean, how could you?’ Helen leaned forward, her words louder now and flying at Dana’s face like tiny poisoned arrows. ‘How will you sleep at night while you’re putting your efforts into helping those little monsters and their families while my loving, gentle mother is lying in the morgue?’

Dana sighed and held up her hands in a placating gesture.

‘It’s about finding out what really happened, Helen. We have to establish the facts, and to do that, we have to understand the girls’ state of mind.’

‘Rubbish!’ Helen’s voice ramped up an octave. The hum of voices in the café faltered slightly and heads began to turn towards them. ‘You’re trying to get them off.’ She hesitated for a moment as if thinking better of continuing, but then let rip again, her mouth twisting into an ugly sneer. ‘I’ve already been told all about where your loyalties lie, working with these troubled kids who get excluded from school and commit crimes. You’re nothing but an apologist for delinquency!’

Dana shook her head. ‘Helen, please. Just calm down a moment and let me explain. I’m not a police officer, I’m a family therapist. It’s not my job to decide who’s guilty or innocent.’

‘Exactly. So you make excuses for these families like the Fletchers and the Voces, the ones who raised those… those little beasts.’ She spat out the words as if she was glad to be rid of them. ‘The two of them looking so innocent, skipping around the village with their ponytails… It’s all an act. Can’t you see that? Everyone’s saying they were known to be up to no good.’

The café was deathly silent now, and Dana looked up to see several people looking at her with the same expression as Bessie’s daughter. She felt a twinge in her throat. Maybe it was time to leave.

‘It’s not just idle gossip,’ Helen hissed. ‘There’s stuff you don’t know about that family. Stuff hardly anyone knows.’

The village had become a critical hive mind. Somehow it knew about every development in the case, and judgements were being formed accordingly.

Dana couldn’t ask what Helen was alluding to. Not here in the tea shop. She was working with the police, and she couldn’t be seen to be gossiping with the victim’s daughter in public.

‘Helen, I know it must be very—’

‘She was fired herself for breaking the rules,’ a man sitting at the front called out, breaking Dana’s train of thought. ‘Middle-class liberals like her, they’re nothing but bloody do-gooders sticking their oar in. Discipline is what kids like that need. I say make an example of the two of ’em.’

‘Hear, hear,’ a woman’s voice piped up.

Dana stood up and pulled her handbag strap over her shoulder.

‘I’d really like to speak to you, Helen, but not here.’

‘What’s the point?’ The venom had gone from Helen’s voice, leaving it sounding flat and hopeless. ‘You’ve got one goal and that’s to get them off. That’s the truth of the matter and you know it. We all know it.’

It was only a few yards to the door of the café, but to Dana it felt like a country mile.

When she passed the table at the front, she leaned forward and spoke to the man who’d levelled his criticism so publicly at her.

‘Just for the record, I wasn’t fired. I was suspended pending an investigation that has now cleared me of any wrongdoing. Get your facts right next time.’

It was a mistake to challenge him.

‘Suspended, fired, it’s all the same,’ he roared back. ‘You’ll bend over backwards to help them that really need banging up to teach them a—’

The rest of his words remained trapped inside the café as Dana stepped out into the fresh air and pulled the door closed behind her.

She’d known tensions were running high in the village, but the altercation had taken her by surprise. Everyone she’d met so far seemed utterly convinced about what had happened in Bessie Wilford’s house today.

It was obvious that most of them had already tried and convicted Maddy Fletcher and Brianna Voce.





Twenty-Five