Secrets Read Free Page A

but 47 Charlton Street. In twenty-odd years of police service he’d been called hundreds of times to inform next of kin of a death, and it was always a painful duty. Yet when it was a child’s death it was a hideous task, for there were no words that could soothe the pain, nothing that could justify a healthy child being cut down without warning. But this was one of the worst cases he’d known, for the moment Rose Talbot opened the door, and Adele didn’t rush into her arms, he knew there was something badly wrong within the family.
    All the time he was explaining how the accident happened, he had been very aware of Adele still standing by the door. He so much wanted to call her over, sit her on his knee and comfort her, but that should have been the father’s job. Just as it should have been him who went to collect his small daughter on a dark, cold January night. Euston Road was not the sort of area any young girl should be out in alone. Every kind of scum hung around there – beggars, prostitutes and their pimps, men looking for a woman, thieves watching out for anyone to rob.
    Mike had to admit that the Talbots were a slight cut above most of their neighbours in this street. He knew families of eight or ten crowded into one room, where survival depended on the mother being wily and strong enough to wrench some money for food from her husband’s hands before he spent his wages in the pub. He knew others that rooted about in filth like animals, and some where the mother turned the kids out into the streets at night while she earned money to feed them lying on her back.
    The Talbots’ flat might be shabby but it was clean and warm, and an evening meal was prepared. Jim Talbot was still in work too, despite the financial depression which was slowly strangling the country.
    Mike thought that Rose Talbot was almost certainly from middle-class stock: she spoke correct English even if it was peppered with London slang, and she had a refined manner. He had noted that despite his shocking news, she had still quickly removed her pinafore and run her fingers through her untidy hair, as if ashamed of being caught unprepared for visitors. Her skirt and jumper were clearly from a market stall, yet the subdued shade of blue enhanced her lovely eyes and gave her a surprisingly stylish air.
    Jim, in contrast, was from the bottom of the social scale. Although tall and slender, he had that give-away stoop and awkwardness which always seemed to go with products of London slums. His London accent had a kind of nasal whine to it, and with his bad teeth, thinning sandy hair and washed-out blue eyes, he looked prematurely middle-aged, even though he was just thirty-two. He wasn’t the brightest of men either, for when Mike had asked him how secure his job was, he didn’t appear to understand the question. Why would an attractive and well-bred woman like Rose marry a man like Jim?
    Yet if the parents were ill matched, there was an even greater disparity between how they felt about their two children. There were several photographs of Pamela on display on the sideboard, and one of her paintings pinned on the wall, but there was nothing of Adele. Mike had noticed that Pamela had been wearing a good warm coat, she had mittens on her hands, and she was prettily plump. Adele, in contrast, was very thin and pasty-faced and her coat was an old adult hand-me-down. The coat wasn’t necessarily hers, it could be that she had grabbed her mother’s to run out in. But he didn’t think so, for looking at Adele now under a bright light, she seemed malnourished. Her stringy, mousy hair had no shine to it, and her navy blue school gym slip, like the coat, was far too big for her.
    Her appearance meant little in an area where there were hundreds of girls of a similar age even more shabbily dressed and ill fed. Yet Mike was pretty certain that all their mothers, even those who were drunken sluts, would be unable to ignore a child so obviously in need of