Page 45 of The Girl in the Grave
The smile disappeared from the woman’s face as she stood up. ‘You’d better come in. I’m Lyn and this is Sue.’
Beth found herself being let through a narrow door and led into the small office. The woman who’d opened the door waited for her to speak, and Beth wondered if she was out of her mind. This wasn’t her job at all. She was truly pushing all boundaries now.
‘I’m the pathologist who conducted Chantel’s post-mortem when she was brought into the mortuary. I’d like to know a little bit about her background, we know so little about her.’
The women looked at each other.
Beth wondered how she was going to play this. ‘I just wondered what Chantel was like as a person and why no one had even noticed she was missing? And, can I be honest with you both?’
They nodded.
‘It’s upset me on a very personal level and that doesn’t happen very often.’
Lyn smiled. ‘Bless you, lovely. I guess you never get used to it. The kids come here when they’re sixteen, and they stay until their eighteenth birthday and it’s hard to watch them leave when they choose to go off into the big wide world to fend for themselves. A lot of the time they think they can handle it, that they’re old enough to look after themselves. The sad reality is that very few are really ready. It’s a huge adjustment. They’re vulnerable and people take advantage of them.’
‘Why? Why did Chantel leave? Why was there no support for her just because she was eighteen?’
‘A number of factors, really. It depends on the level of care each person needs. Chantel was, shall we say, very independent.’
Sue nodded. ‘She was from the day she moved here. She didn’t make friends very easy, kept to herself and was forever running away and not coming back; the police brought her back a few times.’
‘That’s true,’ Lyn took up again. ‘The moment she got a new boyfriend we didn’t see her for days.’
Beth found herself feeling even sadder for the life this young girl led. ‘Why didn’t she have many friends?’
‘She was a bit of a… what can you call it without being disrespectful to the dead?’
It was Sue who answered. ‘She was a bitch. Liked the boys, hated the girls. She’d sleep with anything for a bit of weed. Argued with the girls over anything and everything.’
‘What about her family, did she have any?’
‘Her mum was the same: would sleep with anyone for drugs, vodka or money. Took men home all the time, all hours of the day and night. She’d leave Chantel on her own whilst she was out drinking and picking them up. Chantel got put into care when she was six, after she’d told the teacher at school she wanted to be a whore like her mum.’
Lyn nodded. ‘It’s sad, but true. You’d be amazed how many vulnerable kids are in dire situations—’
‘And then they end up idolising the parents who neglect them,’ Sue said.
‘Where’s her mum now?’
‘She died a couple of years ago; overdosed on Tramadol and vodka.’
Beth nodded. ‘How sad.’
The women shrugged. Sue said, ‘It’s life, just the norm. Well, at least it is for these kids.’
Lyn asked, ‘When’s Chantel’s funeral?’
‘I have no idea,’ Beth said. ‘At the moment we are keeping her at the mortuary until the police locate her next of kin and the investigation into her murder is complete.’
She stood up. ‘Thank you for your time. I’m sorry to have bothered you.’
She walked out, glancing at the girls, who were now whispering to each other and staring at her. Beth didn’t look back. She let the door slam shut behind her as she walked to her car and blinked back the tears for the girl who’d never stood a chance at life.
Sixty-Two
At home Beth poured herself a glass of wine, though she knew she shouldn’t have. It was becoming a habit, but she had little other way of relaxing and needed to take away the sadness inside her after visiting Dalton View. She stared at the cream envelope on the kitchen counter, the second one in a week in handwriting she knew so well. Her name and address were written in small, square, uniform block capitals. She sat down at the breakfast bar, drank a couple of mouthfuls of wine and waited for it to begin the familiar feeling of warming up her frozen insides. It took the edge off her permanently stressed state of being. She stared at the letter, willing it to spontaneously combust. It didn’t.
How did he even have her new address? She’d ensured she wasn’t on the electoral register when she bought the house, had even registered the land in her mother’s name, though the deeds for the house were all hers. Slowly sipping the wine, she relished every single mouthful, swirling it around as if to numb her tongue, gums, teeth and lips. She wanted to numb every single living, breathing part of her body and hide from the pain that he’d caused her.
