Free Unforgotten by Clare Francis Page A

displease him. ‘Where is she? Still in Madras?’
    ‘Till tomorrow.’
    ‘Then north, is it?’
    ‘Yes. She should reach Calcutta in about a week.’
    ‘By bus?’
    ‘I think so.’
    They never worried about Lou, who at eighteen was responsible and level-headed, and far more organised than anyone else in the family. When she had finished trekking through India with her friend Chrissie she was going on to Sri Lanka to do two months’ voluntary work in an orphanage before coming home to read medicine at Edinburgh. She e-mailed at least once a week and regularly posted smiling snapshots on a travellers’ website.
    They carried the supper to the table and Hugh went back for the wine.
    ‘By the way,’ he said as they sat down, ‘there was a hoodie-style kid hanging around the gate when I got back.’
    ‘Oh?’ she said calmly. ‘One of Charlie’s old crowd?’
    ‘Could have been.’
    ‘You’d think they’d have got the message by now. That he’s away at college.’
    ‘Ah, but they don’t get the message, do they? That’s their trouble – they’re too spaced out.’
    ‘You’re sure it wasn’t Joel? Back from wherever he’s been.’
    ‘Canada. No, it definitely wasn’t Joel.’ Joel was the son of the people who lived two houses away; a gangling monosyllabic youth with bad skin who shared Charlie’s passion for IT.
    ‘I can’t say I’ve ever really taken to Joel,’ Lizzie said, ‘but at least he’s not into anything worse than computers.’
    ‘Charlie gets on with him okay.’
    ‘Yes, that’s all that matters.’
    Now they were back on to Charlie, Hugh was tempted to leave the subject of the youth behind. But he felt bound to add, ‘If you see the hoodie hanging around the gate again, you’ll call the police straight away, won’t you, Lizzie? Or get help from a neighbour.’
    ‘Oh, I’ll be all right, darling. Don’t forget, I deal with hoodies all day. They don’t worry me.’
    ‘Well, perhaps they should.’
    She gazed at him for a moment before asking, ‘Is that how you got wet?’
    ‘Mmm?’
    ‘Talking to the hoodie?’
    ‘Well . . . trying to talk to him.’
    ‘Ah.’ She put on a solemn expression, to assure him of her sympathy. ‘He ran away?’
    ‘Sprinted, more like.’
    ‘Probably just as well you didn’t catch him.’
    ‘Huh. If I’d just had the chance!’
    ‘Well, what would you have done with him if you’d got him?’
    ‘I’d have given him a bloody good hiding.’
    Lizzie’s eyes gleamed with a suppressed smile.
    ‘And why the hell not?’
    ‘You might have come out of it worse.’
    ‘No way.’
    ‘Anyway, with most of these kids it’s all show, isn’t it, the hood business. They’re just trying to look cool.’
    ‘He was up to no good.’
    ‘Why, because he ran away? He was probably scared out of his wits.’
    ‘It’d be nice to think so. Trouble is, Lizzie, you only get to see the hoodies who make it as far as the Citizens Advice, the ones who’re together enough to ask for help.’
    ‘Oh, I get some fairly untogether ones as well.’
    ‘Really? I thought they were too busy robbing off-licences and mugging old ladies.’
    She shot him a look of tolerant rebuke, and he withdrew the remark with a wave of his glass. He loved this Merlot, so silky on the throat, so soothing on the brain. Already he felt the day’s problems miraculously postponed, his thoughts spirallinghappily around Lizzie, the meal, the hours till sleep. He asked, ‘What customers did you have today?’
    ‘Well, it was a Monday, so it was non-stop. I had a credit card debt, a couple of eviction notices, a loan-shark victim in hock for ten thousand. Oh and, last thing, Gloria James, the woman from the Carstairs who’s so desperate to be rehoused.’ Seeing that he was struggling to remember, she prompted, ‘The one with the agoraphobic son.’
    ‘Oh yes,’ Hugh said, as the story came back to him. The Carstairs was a notorious council estate on the northern borders of