Free Sins of the Fathers by Patricia Hall Page B

wondered if her own reservations about what she had been ordered to do were oversensitive. Perhaps Emma needed publicity. But her doubts returned with full force as she saw a nurse bearing down on her from the other end of the ward with a fiercely disapproving expression on her face.
    ‘Are you a relative?’ she asked.
    ‘I’m from the Bradfield Gazette. I just wanted to know how…’
    ‘Out!’ the nurse snapped, without waiting for more.‘You’ve no right to be in here. It’s Press intrusion. Gross intrusion. If you’re not out of that door in ten seconds I’ll send for security and have you thrown out.’
    Laura shrugged and turned to go. Val Ridley stood up and followed her to the door.
    ‘You were lucky to get as far as you did,’ she said mildly as they made their way back out of the hospital side by side. ‘But I’ll let you know if there’s any change in her condition. We need to find some relatives, we really do, and something in the paper might help with that. The poor kid will end up in care if no one comes forward soon and I couldn’t bear that.’
    Laura looked at Val Ridley for a moment and wondered what had made the normally cool and detached detective so emotionally concerned about the injured girl’s future. But she knew better than to ask directly.
    ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said. ‘And thanks.’
    Half an hour later Laura was sitting in Dawn Brough’s neat sitting room holding a cup of tea and looking out of the picture window at the family’s bleak winter garden where a few daffodils where just beginning to force their way through the half-frozen soil. She had driven up to Staveley for the second time that week, determined this time to find out more about the family whose life in the village had been so brutally curtailed. After parking briefly outside the Christie’s cottage, which was still wreathed in police tape, she had turned the car and driven slowly back down the waterlogged lane where she had spotted Dawn closing the garden gate of the first small detached house in the new development between the village proper and Moor Edge. She had stopped and wound down her window.
    ‘Have you got yourself lost?’ Dawn had asked.
    ‘Not really,’ Laura said and introduced herself. For asecond the other women’s blue eyes clouded and she pushed untidy blonde hair away from her broad, open face.
    ‘The Gazette ?’ she said uncertainly.
    ‘I’m writing about Emma Christie,’ Laura said. ‘The police are trying to find the rest of her family but they’re not having much success. There must be some relatives somewhere…’
    ‘Poor kiddie,’ Dawn said. ‘It’s wicked, what happened, isn’t it? I feel terrible about it, actually. I’m lying awake at night wondering if there was something I could have done to prevent it.’
    She must have realised from Laura’s astonished expression that she had said more than she could leave at that.
    ‘You’d better come in,’ she said. ‘I was just making a cup of tea.’
    Having settled her visitor in her comfortable sitting room and plied her with tea and biscuits, a professional hazard, Laura thought wryly as she turned down the unwanted calories, Dawn sat down herself and sighed heavily.
    ‘Linda didn’t have many friends in the village,’ she said. ‘It was just an accident that we got to know each other outside the school gate. You know? As you do?’
    Laura smiled encouragingly, knowing nothing from experience about what went on outside school gates.
    ‘Anyway, it turned out we lived close, and our Stephen was in the same class as Scott, and we used to arrange for the two little ones to play together sometimes. I’m furious with myself now. I should have seen this coming.’
    ‘You mean you knew her husband was violent?’ Laura asked, surprised.
    ‘Not as violent as he turned out to be, obviously,’ Dawn said quickly. ‘But I knew he hit her. She tried to keep thebruises covered up but I saw her shoulder once,