Joe thought they had too much to go on. He stood up, and the others followed. Vera gave a strange, enigmatic smile and disappeared into her office.
Joe phoned Shirley Hewarth to make an appointment. She sounded brisk and efficient. ‘Of course, Sergeant. Can we make it early this afternoon? One-thirty? I’ve got meetings all morning.’
He went home for lunch because Sal always moaned that she never saw him when he was in the middle of a case. He hadn’t warned her that he was coming and she was in the garden drinking coffee, reading a novel while the toddler was having a midday nap. He felt a moment of resentment, so intense that it felt close to hatred. If she had time to read during the day, why did she expect him to get up at night with the baby? Then he asked himself if he’d want to be with the kids all day – especially Jess, who was almost a teenager and behaving like one – and he thought Sal deserved a moment’s peace. When he stroked the back of her neck it was warm from the sun, and when he kissed her she tasted of the chocolate biscuit she’d just eaten with her coffee. So she’d stopped the diet again. He was about to kiss her again when the baby woke up. Sal grinned and said she’d make him a sandwich. ‘You should have come back a bit earlier, so we could have had some time to ourselves.’
He arrived in Bebington just as a meeting had finished in the charity’s office and waited at the door to let a group of women come out. He thought Holly would have judged them immediately because of their clothes – market-stall tops over leggings worn thin with washing – their obesity and their poor skin. She’d have labelled them, without even talking to them, as offenders, offenders’ partners or possible informants. It would be inconceivable to her that one of them could become her friend. Joe had grown up with women like these as neighbours and he’d been in and out of their homes, playing with their kids. Now, standing on the pavement as they walked past, listening to snatches of their conversation, he felt nostalgic for his childhood, the mucky chaos of many of the houses in the street where they’d lived. The warmth and lack of pretension.
Shirley Hewarth was waiting for him in the office upstairs. She was on her own and saw him look at the empty second desk. ‘I’m not a one-woman band, Sergeant, but the others are volunteers and they don’t always turn up. Life gets in the way, and I don’t blame them. Coffee?’
She was dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt and a navy skirt. Tights, despite the heat, and smart shoes with a bit of a heel. She looked more like a lawyer than most social workers he’d met, especially those who worked in the voluntary sector.
They sat on two easy chairs in one corner. Joe shifted his seat so that the sun wasn’t in his eyes. She set the tray on a low table. ‘Isn’t this amazing weather for April?’ She flashed out an automatic smile; she’d be used to making small talk to put her clients at ease. ‘I suppose global warming has its advantages.’
‘You went to visit Lizzie Redhead in prison.’
He’d hoped the direct approach might make her uncomfortable, but she answered immediately. ‘Lizzie was referred to us by her probation officer. I’ve visited twice. Last time was to set up plans for her release. She’ll be out over the weekend.’
‘Do you visit every client referred by the probation service?’ Joe was still in his jacket, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to stand up and take it off. Hewarth seemed cool and unflustered, though he thought she’d be a good actor. She’d have stood up to thugs and bullies and imperious lawyers. It would be hard to tell what was going on inside her head.
She gave a little laugh. ‘Not at all. But I thought it was important to talk to Elizabeth before her release date. She’s an interesting young woman.’ There was a pause. ‘Despite the support from her parents, she has a history of self-destructive behaviour. I can’t go into details, but this was one case in which I felt I could make a difference. I used to be a probation officer, and I didn’t have so many of those in my career.’
There was a silence. ‘Why did you leave the service?’ Joe couldn’t understand that. Why leave a job with reasonable pay and prospects for a good pension to join a bunch of amateurs in a rundown office in an ex-mining town?
It took her a while to answer. ‘When I joined the service our remit was to assist, advise and befriend offenders. The system wasn’t always perfect, but most of us did our best to help the people we were supervising. That’s all changed. I didn’t want to be a glorified cop. It wasn’t what I was trained for.’
‘Tell me a little more about Lizzie Redhead.’
‘Ah.’ Hewarth leaned back in the chair. The front of her shirt gaped a little and he caught a glimpse of a white lacy bra.
Joe thought she wasn’t much younger than Vera, but there was something sexy about her. Slightly provocative. He had to drag his attention back to the conversation, to listen to what the woman was saying.
‘You’ll know that Elizabeth was charged with GBH after a fight in a bar.’ Shirley sat upright again and the blouse fell back into place. Joe thought she was deciding how much she could tell him without breaking her client’s confidence. ‘Before that she had a history of drug and alcohol abuse. Not a cause of her problems, I think, but a symptom of them. She was a hyperactive child, easily bored, and that continued into her adult life.’
Shirley reached out and poured more coffee.
‘Was Lizzie ever admitted to hospital? To get clean?’
‘No. I suspect her parents might have tried to persuade her to accept help, but as I explained, I don’t think addiction was at the root of her problems. They were looking for easy answers, and Lizzie’s anything but easy.’ Shirley gave a little smile. ‘The bright, sparky ones seldom are.’
‘I was looking for a connection between her and Martin Benton,’ Joe said. ‘You can’t think of anything?’
‘No!’ Her voice was suddenly icy. ‘I think you’re looking in quite the wrong direction there, Sergeant. Lizzie didn’t become a client of Hope until she went to prison. The two of them never met.’
Another silence. Punctuated by a siren in the distance. The phone ringing in the office upstairs.
‘Lizzie was mixed up with Jason Crow. You’ll have heard of him, if you work round here,’ Joe said. He was still trying to work out what motivated Hewarth. She seemed affluent enough. She must be of an age when she could have taken early retirement from the probation service if she didn’t like the new regime, could be drinking cocktails and walking her dogs, like the retired hedonists in Valley Farm. She didn’t seem moved by the sort of passion for justice that carried his Methodist father to preach in dingy chapels or to knock on doors at election time. But perhaps do-gooders could wear lacy bras too.
‘Oh, we’ve all heard of Jay Crow,’ Shirley said. ‘Most of the people who come through our doors are more scared of him than they are of you and your colleagues.’
‘Have you met him?’
There was a moment of hesitation. ‘I knew the family. Supervised his mother on and off, for most of my career. He was intimidating even as a boy.’
‘Should Lizzie still be scared of him?’
She paused again. ‘I don’t think so. I hear Lizzie’s parents bought him off.’