The Darkest Evening

sweater, but she was pale and willowy, lovely. Not at all Joe’s image of a farmer’s wife. The photo looked quirky, posed. He thought it could have been the design for an album cover, the old folk rock that Sal claimed to like. The woman had the look of a hippy music star of a different era, the sixties or seventies.
While the yard had been pristine, the house looked uncared for. Joe wouldn’t want a child of his crawling around on this floor, but perhaps Thomas would come to no harm. Vera always said he was obsessive about cleanliness.
The woman had changed since the photo had been taken, thickened round the waist. The blonde hair had been cut. Now she looked grey, and brown too, and had merged into the background, but it was clearly the same woman. The same cheekbones, the same eyes. She was sitting at the table peeling vegetables. She stood up.
‘Look who’s here.’ Helen’s voice was gentle. ‘It’s little Thomas come to see his grandma.’ She took a seat next to the woman. ‘Joe, this is Jill Falstone. Jill, this is one of the detectives looking into Lorna’s death.’
The woman didn’t reply. She held out her arms and Joe put Thomas into them. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, ‘about your daughter.’
She nodded her acknowledgement, but still she didn’t speak.
‘If this is too soon,’ Helen said, ‘there’s no pressure at all to take your grandson now. We can arrange for foster care for a little while. It’ll be a hard time for you both, coming to terms with Lorna’s death. Thomas could come to visit for days until you feel ready to look after him full-time.’
‘No!’ The answer was sharp and immediate. ‘No, this is where he belongs.’
‘And your husband feels the same way?’
‘He does.’ There was a pause. ‘He says we have a second chance with Thomas. We got everything wrong with Lorna. We lost her. Now we can give a better life to her son.’
Joe thought of the man in the yard, hardly looking at the baby, turning his back on him. Perhaps he’d wanted to hide his grief from strangers, but it was hard to believe that he really wanted a second chance with a child. He thought Jill Falstone was talking for herself. Guilt was in there somewhere, and a longing to be close to the child when she’d grown apart from Thomas’s mother.
‘I need to ask a few questions,’ he said. ‘Just to understand Lorna a bit better, to understand what might have happened to her.’
The woman nodded to show she appreciated that questions would be inevitable. ‘You’d best sit down.’
‘Would your husband like to join us?’ Joe thought they might get more out of the woman if they spoke to her on her own, but he didn’t want to alienate Falstone, to make him feel more excluded than he already seemed to be.
‘He’s busy,’ Jill said. ‘The farm won’t look after itself just because our daughter died. This weather, the sheep need feeding.’
Her husband’s words, Joe thought. ‘What happened with Lorna? Why did you lose touch?’ Holly had explained about her conversation with Sophie Blackstock and the possibility that Lorna could have had an eating disorder, but surely, Joe thought again, you wouldn’t cast out your child because they were ill.
There was silence, broken by the growl of a tractor. Jill Falstone sat on the other side of the table from him, Thomas on her knee. The child sat calmly looking around at them, then started playing with a couple of teaspoons.
‘We’d almost given up having children when I fell pregnant,’ Jill said. ‘He never said, but I think Robert was hoping for a boy, someone who might take on the farm. I know a girl can be a farmer too, but he’s old-fashioned that way.’
‘So, he was disappointed when you had a girl?’
‘No!’ The surprise Jill must have felt at her husband’s response showed in her voice now. ‘He doted on her. I was the one who found it hard after all those years of independence, of working with Robert to make a success of this place. I love farming. It’s in my blood. I took Lorna out with me as much as I could but she wasn’t an easy baby.’ Jill stroked Thomas’s hair. ‘His mother would never have sat like this. Lorna was always grizzling and demanding attention.’
‘So how did it go wrong?’ Joe asked. ‘If Robert loved her so much?’
There was a moment of hesitation. Joe thought she was deciding how open she should be. She glanced at the social worker. He wished he was there on his own. Social workers had the knack of making the best parents feel anxious, guilty.
‘When Lorna was growing up, her dad spoiled her to bits,’ Jill said. ‘She was horse-mad from a tot and he bought her a pony, then a better horse, put up jumps in the lower field, drove her all over the county when she wanted to compete.’
Joe heard the edge of resentment in her voice. Perhaps Jill had been the one to feel excluded, at least when Lorna had been a girl.
‘And later?’
‘It started going wrong when she was a teenager, thirteen or fourteen. She’d moved to the high school in Kimmerston then. It was a long day, eighteen miles each way in the school bus, longer if the weather was bad and some of the lanes were closed. She never really settled there. Of course there were other country kids, but she was an only child. She’d only known the bairns in the school in Kirkhill, and they were never very close. There were just a couple the same age as her and they were girly, you know, giggly. Not like our Lorna at all, though she was as pretty as any of them. Prettier, if anything. I think that made them jealous. And it must have been hard settling into the big school, all the noise, rough boys, strange faces.’
‘She was bullied?’ Joe asked.