HEARTS AND ARROWS
The following chapters contain some strong language.
Copyright © Kate Hanney
ONE - SHANE
We didn’t even wake up ’til they got to the top of the stairs.
My eyes and the bedroom door shot open together, but there were no time; there weren’t nothing I could do. Two of them dragged me out of bed, pushed my face into the duvet, then nearly dislocated my shoulders as they yanked my arms up behind my back. I twisted my head and saw a third one blocking the door.
‘Shane!’ The bed moved as Jasmine sat up and shouted.
‘It’s OK. Don’t worry, it’ll be alright.’ I tried to turn my head to face her but they weren’t having it; I got a gobful of duvet as they shoved me even deeper into the bed.
‘Shane Johnson?’ said the guy in the doorway.
That made me feel better; nobody that were proper serious would’ve stopped to ask questions.
I nodded as much as I could; there were no point taking the piss.
‘You’re under arrest on suspicion of the murder of Benjamin Kayler. You do not have to say anything, but it might harm your defence …’
Jasmine like proper cried then.
Shit. Where had that come from? The duvet started to feel damp round my face. Did they actually believe I’d done it? Would everybody ... including Jasmine?
The handcuffs sliced into my wrists and made me flinch, but at least they pulled me up on to my feet then.
‘What d’you mean, Benjy’s murder? You’re wrong.’ Jasmine flew round to my side of the bed. ‘Shane, tell them. Tell them they’re wrong.’ She were almost screaming now.
The guy in the doorway, who were about twice as old as the other two, came over and stood between me and her. ‘I suggest you try and calm down,’ he said to Jasmine. Then he turned to me. ‘And you’d better get some clothes on; you’re coming with us.’
He went back to the door and switched the light on. The sun were already shining in through the curtains though, so it didn’t make that much difference to the brightness in the room. Then he picked a pair of jeans up off the floor, checked the pockets and held them out to me. I looked at him. What did he think I were gonna put them on with, my teeth?
One of the other cops took them though, then we all had to move over so he could open the drawer and get me a T-shirt out. It were pretty crowded when there were just us in it, that bedroom, but with them three as well, we hardly had room to breathe.
It were a bit of a pantomime, me trying to get dressed. They had to take the cuffs off at one point, but only for a second, and when they put them back on again it felt like they were gonna cut my wrists all the way through.
As I tried to get my feet into my trainers without using my hands, a snuffling noise from the cot made everybody look over. The fluffy pink blanket twitched as Evie moved her head from side to side, then she started to cry.
Jasmine spun round and picked her up; she held her close to her chest and stared at the cops that all stood watching her. The baby went quiet again straight away and reached her tiny hand up towards Jasmine’s face.
‘Is she yours?’ one of the cops asked Jasmine.
‘Yes,’ she answered, tightening her hold on Evie.
‘How old are you?’
‘Why?’
‘Is there anyone who can come round? To be with you after we’ve gone?’
Jasmine shook her head. ‘No. We’ll be fine.’ She stared up at me. ‘You’ll be back soon, won’t you?’
I closed my eyes for a second. I know I’m not exactly ancient, but she just looked so young, standing there in that Winnie the Pooh nightshirt; a kid looking after a kid. What were she gonna do?
I looked across at the older guy. ‘Is there anybody ya can get to help her out for a bit?’
‘I’ll request that someone makes a referral to Social Services, I’m sure –’
‘No! She’s fine; we look after her properly. She’s taken care of.’ Jasmine were crying again.
‘We can see that.’ The copper’s voice were suddenly softer. ‘It’s just to offer you some support, someone to be around if you need them.’
Jasmine still weren’t sure, but the cops didn’t give us chance to say nothing else, they just got to work collecting loads of my stuff. The first thing were my phone from the side of the bed, then my jacket and some other clothes, my keys, some bags of weed and cash from the top drawer. Maybe some other stuff, I’m not sure.
Me and Jasmine stared at each other. We were all we had; just us and the baby. And we’d been doing OK as well. Even when Evie did nothing but cry, even when we’d been proper skint and we’d had to move again. Yeah there’d been arguments, but nothing right serious, not like proper shouting or either of us getting proper pissed off.
But now I had to leave her. After everything I’d risked to keep us together, I had to leave her and Evie on their own.
One of the cops got hold of my arm again. ‘Come on then, son,’ he said, and he pulled me towards the door.
But I stood my ground as Jasmine stepped up to me. She changed her hold on the baby so she’d got her in one arm, then she flung the other one round my neck. Her tears tasted salty as I kissed her cheeks, and I wanted so much to be able to put my arms round her and hold her tight. But the guy tugged at me harder, and I felt her hand slowly slip away.
Downstairs, two more cops’d hit the kitchen like a tornado. Rice Krispies and baby milk formula covered the floorboards. The front door were wide open and the air coming through it made me shiver. The frame round the lock had been ripped away from the wall and it’d splintered into loads of bits.
‘Who’s gonna sort all this out for her?’ I asked the guy that were holding my arm.
He raised his eyebrows and smirked. ‘Oh, I’m sure she’ll find somebody ... to sort her out.’
My heart’d been racing since they’d first bust in, and somehow I’d managed to keep it all together. But the greasy look on his face were way too much.
‘You slimy bastard. What ya tryin’ to say?’ I pulled backwards hard and tried to yank his hands off me. My wrists twisted against the cuffs, and I’m telling you, he wouldn’t have been smirking for long if I could’ve got to him.
But I couldn’t, could I? There were no chance of him letting me go, and if anything, I think I made the cuffs even tighter. His mate grabbed my other arm then, and the slimy one laughed. ‘That’ll do, sunshine. No need to lose your temper.’
I kept my gob shut as they pushed me down the path and into the cop car. The older guy were already in the front, a woman were driving, and slime-face got in the back next to me. Although I could’ve really done without him, I decided it were better than him staying in the house with Jasmine.
Everybody were quiet for a few minutes and when my breathing started to slow down a bit, I decided to try and find a few things out.
‘Where ya takin’ me to?’ I said, to anybody that were listening.
‘Back to Sheffield,’ said the guy in the front.
I thought they would, but I’d hoped they weren’t.
‘So, what’s it all about?’ I asked.
Slime-face looked at me. ‘You’ll find out soon enough, mate. Why don’t you just sit back and enjoy the view?’
Enjoy the view? Yeah, I could do that, couldn’t I? Cos there weren’t nothing else on my mind. Like what, exactly, did they have on me? Enough to actually get me done for stabbing that kid to death? Or were they just pulling in anybody that’d lived in the area and that might have something to do with it? Were Jake even in the frame? Could I get myself off without telling them the truth and grassing him up? And if I did have to grass him up, what would Paulie and Tyler the other boys do about it?
Get done for murder, or grass and have half of S16 after me? What were worse? The second one, obviously – it scared me shitless.
But murderers get banged up for a long time, and I didn’t want to be away from Jasmine and Evie for a long time.
Maybe I could do both; convince them it weren’t me without actually telling them it were Jake? I mean, they’ve got all sorts of clever forensic stuff now, haven’t they? Perhaps they’ll sort it out all by themselves? There were plenty of stuff they could get me on: possession of class As, intent to supply, carrying a bladed object, actual bodily harm maybe? They’d still get a result. But the sentence for them things wouldn’t be that much. I’d be back with Jasmine after a few months.
If she still wanted me.
I turned it all over in my head for the next hour, without really coming up with any answers. Then, Holly House came into view. A few seconds later we passed Frankie’s, and by the time we pulled into the car park behind Chapel Cross police station, a cold sweat made my T-shirt stick to my back like Sellotape.
TWO – JASMINE
Although the police car with Shane in it had disappeared ages ago, I still stared at the corner at the end of our road. My insides felt hollow. He wasn’t coming home, was he? Not later that day, probably not the day after; maybe not for a long time. I could tell with the look he’d given me when we were upstairs, when I’d said he’d be back soon; I could tell he knew it wouldn’t be as simple as that.
Had he done it? Killed Benjy?
My stomach twisted. I wrapped my arms around myself and closed my eyes. He’d been mixed up in it all, I knew that; with the drugs and the postcode gang stuff. When he used to buy me clothes or take me out, I knew full-well where all the money came from. Even though neither of us ever mentioned it, I knew he was involved in all the fights between Mark Donovan’s friends and my uncle’s. But none of that meant he’d been there that night, when Benjy got stabbed, did it? In fact, when Mark Donovan – or Donny as they all called him – got shot a few months later in that takeaway, everybody just assumed it’d been him who killed Benjy, and that now things were even.
So why, all of a sudden, had Shane been arrested for it?
A clatter made me jump and I turned around. A photo frame with Evie’s picture in it lay on the floorboards, and one of the cops bent down to pick it back up. He laid it on the top of my drawers where it belonged, but didn’t stand it up properly. Then he opened the drawer and started rummaging through it. I cringed; my bras, knickers, tampons, everything; all my personal stuff was in there. It made me feel sick. I took Evie out of her cot and made my way downstairs; they might have to do all that, but I didn’t have to stand there and watch them.
Downstairs though, it was just as bad. It looked like a gang of robbers had broken in, not the police. A trail of them carried stuff out steadily, and I couldn’t believe some of the things they took; two more of Shane’s jackets, a mirror out of the kitchen, even Evie’s dark red teddy bear with the checked bow-tie. Some things though, I could believe: the money, a knife, his other phone.
Out of the things they left behind, nothing was where it’d been before. Furniture had been turned upside down, some of the doors were shattered, and Evie’s pram was on the front garden. The throw I’d saved up for, to cover the stains on the settee, lay screwed up in a corner. I went through into the kitchen and my heart sank like an anchor. The cupboards were empty, and somehow a tin of beans and a packet of soup had ended up in the sink. The floor was covered in white powder – not the kind they were looking for – just baby milk formula, which immediately made me furious; what the hell was I going to feed Evie?
When I went over to check though, there was just enough left in the tub, so I made her a bottle, and while she drank it I leaned against the settee and watched the cops carry on taking the house to bits.
By the time Evie had finished, I’d rubbed her back and she’d dropped off to sleep again, most of the police had drifted away. Eventually there was just me, a woman officer and this other woman who’d turned up, but who wasn’t in a uniform.
The police woman checked her watch, checked her phone, then sent a text to somebody. The other woman turned a chair the right way up, brushed some fluff off it and sat down. ‘I’m Connie,’ she said. ‘I work for Sheffield Social Care.’
‘What?’ I’d never said OK to that, how could they do that without my permission? I picked Evie up from her bouncy chair and glared at the woman. ‘Yeah, so? What do you want?’
‘We know who you are, Jasmine, and that you absconded from a care home. And even though you’re sixteen now, we still have to make sure you have somewhere safe to live ...’ she paused, ‘... somewhere that’s safe for you and your little girl.’
I ignored the tone of her voice and kept my face blank. ‘We do; here’s safe.’
‘Is it?’ She looked around and pulled a face. ‘Who owns this house?’
My back tensed. I couldn’t do questions like that; questions like that would get us into even more trouble. I glanced away and shrugged.
‘You don’t know who owns the house you’re living in?’
Oh, God, couldn’t she just leave it? If I told her Shane’d sorted it, and that Barker owned it, that’d mix us up in all kinds of other stuff. The subject needed changing. ‘We err ... well, I mean, where else could we go?’
‘That’s what I need to talk to you about. You don’t necessarily have to go back into local authority accommodation, but we do need to find you a suitable alternative. Are there any adults who you could stay with?’
That’s where most people would have said they could stay with their mum, or dad, or auntie, or at least a friend of their mum, or dad, or auntie. But there was nobody. That’s why when my mum died I ended up in Holly House. My dad ... well, he wasn’t even worth thinking about. I could be dead for all he knew, or cared, and the one auntie I could remember moved to London ten years ago and had never been heard of since.
‘There’s nobody,’ I said quietly.
‘Are you sure? Nowhere you could go even for a short while?’ she asked, as she picked some fluff of her skirt.
I shook my head.
‘Well, I can’t leave you here on your own, I’m afraid, so we’ll have to find you somewhere.’
I frowned. ‘What kind of somewhere?’ Then I put my stroppiest face on and shook my head. ‘Don’t even think about sending us to one of those hostels or B and B places. No way am I taking Evie somewhere like that. I’ve seen them; they’re disgusting, stinking places, full of crack-heads.’
‘Jasmine, I think you’re being a little over-dramatic, some –’
‘Am I? Would you take your baby to live in one?’
She shifted in her seat and didn’t answer. Then after a bit, she said, ‘I suppose I could see if we have any mother and baby foster places available. There aren’t many, not for the number of girls we have to look after, but I could see.’
I turned to look out of the window. Shane had nightmares about Evie going into foster care. Honestly, every few weeks he woke up in a real state, sweating and struggling to breathe. He checked her cot, and only when he could touch her and he knew she was really there, would he even start to breathe normally again.
Would I be letting him down if I took Evie to live somewhere like that?
A little hand tugged on my hair, and I realised Evie’s eyes had opened again. I unravelled her fingers and kissed her. Then, as I glanced back up, a dark blue BMW slowed outside. The officer’s car was parked right at the top of our path, and the BMW cruised around it then shot off. I knew that car and I knew who it belonged to. If that cop car hadn’t been there, would Barker have come inside the house?
I spun back round. ‘OK, if you can sort us somewhere out, somewhere clean and safe for Evie, then we’ll go.’
Connie nodded her head and smiled.
And twenty minutes later, I walked out of that house. That tiny, one-bedroomed house, with no carpets, drafty windows and dodgy heating. But it was the house where me and Shane and Evie had been together, and as the bashed-in door closed behind us, I honesty had no idea when we’d all be together again.
The following chapters contain some strong language.
Copyright © Kate Hanney
ONE - SHANE
We didn’t even wake up ’til they got to the top of the stairs.
My eyes and the bedroom door shot open together, but there were no time; there weren’t nothing I could do. Two of them dragged me out of bed, pushed my face into the duvet, then nearly dislocated my shoulders as they yanked my arms up behind my back. I twisted my head and saw a third one blocking the door.
‘Shane!’ The bed moved as Jasmine sat up and shouted.
‘It’s OK. Don’t worry, it’ll be alright.’ I tried to turn my head to face her but they weren’t having it; I got a gobful of duvet as they shoved me even deeper into the bed.
‘Shane Johnson?’ said the guy in the doorway.
That made me feel better; nobody that were proper serious would’ve stopped to ask questions.
I nodded as much as I could; there were no point taking the piss.
‘You’re under arrest on suspicion of the murder of Benjamin Kayler. You do not have to say anything, but it might harm your defence …’
Jasmine like proper cried then.
Shit. Where had that come from? The duvet started to feel damp round my face. Did they actually believe I’d done it? Would everybody ... including Jasmine?
The handcuffs sliced into my wrists and made me flinch, but at least they pulled me up on to my feet then.
‘What d’you mean, Benjy’s murder? You’re wrong.’ Jasmine flew round to my side of the bed. ‘Shane, tell them. Tell them they’re wrong.’ She were almost screaming now.
The guy in the doorway, who were about twice as old as the other two, came over and stood between me and her. ‘I suggest you try and calm down,’ he said to Jasmine. Then he turned to me. ‘And you’d better get some clothes on; you’re coming with us.’
He went back to the door and switched the light on. The sun were already shining in through the curtains though, so it didn’t make that much difference to the brightness in the room. Then he picked a pair of jeans up off the floor, checked the pockets and held them out to me. I looked at him. What did he think I were gonna put them on with, my teeth?
One of the other cops took them though, then we all had to move over so he could open the drawer and get me a T-shirt out. It were pretty crowded when there were just us in it, that bedroom, but with them three as well, we hardly had room to breathe.
It were a bit of a pantomime, me trying to get dressed. They had to take the cuffs off at one point, but only for a second, and when they put them back on again it felt like they were gonna cut my wrists all the way through.
As I tried to get my feet into my trainers without using my hands, a snuffling noise from the cot made everybody look over. The fluffy pink blanket twitched as Evie moved her head from side to side, then she started to cry.
Jasmine spun round and picked her up; she held her close to her chest and stared at the cops that all stood watching her. The baby went quiet again straight away and reached her tiny hand up towards Jasmine’s face.
‘Is she yours?’ one of the cops asked Jasmine.
‘Yes,’ she answered, tightening her hold on Evie.
‘How old are you?’
‘Why?’
‘Is there anyone who can come round? To be with you after we’ve gone?’
Jasmine shook her head. ‘No. We’ll be fine.’ She stared up at me. ‘You’ll be back soon, won’t you?’
I closed my eyes for a second. I know I’m not exactly ancient, but she just looked so young, standing there in that Winnie the Pooh nightshirt; a kid looking after a kid. What were she gonna do?
I looked across at the older guy. ‘Is there anybody ya can get to help her out for a bit?’
‘I’ll request that someone makes a referral to Social Services, I’m sure –’
‘No! She’s fine; we look after her properly. She’s taken care of.’ Jasmine were crying again.
‘We can see that.’ The copper’s voice were suddenly softer. ‘It’s just to offer you some support, someone to be around if you need them.’
Jasmine still weren’t sure, but the cops didn’t give us chance to say nothing else, they just got to work collecting loads of my stuff. The first thing were my phone from the side of the bed, then my jacket and some other clothes, my keys, some bags of weed and cash from the top drawer. Maybe some other stuff, I’m not sure.
Me and Jasmine stared at each other. We were all we had; just us and the baby. And we’d been doing OK as well. Even when Evie did nothing but cry, even when we’d been proper skint and we’d had to move again. Yeah there’d been arguments, but nothing right serious, not like proper shouting or either of us getting proper pissed off.
But now I had to leave her. After everything I’d risked to keep us together, I had to leave her and Evie on their own.
One of the cops got hold of my arm again. ‘Come on then, son,’ he said, and he pulled me towards the door.
But I stood my ground as Jasmine stepped up to me. She changed her hold on the baby so she’d got her in one arm, then she flung the other one round my neck. Her tears tasted salty as I kissed her cheeks, and I wanted so much to be able to put my arms round her and hold her tight. But the guy tugged at me harder, and I felt her hand slowly slip away.
Downstairs, two more cops’d hit the kitchen like a tornado. Rice Krispies and baby milk formula covered the floorboards. The front door were wide open and the air coming through it made me shiver. The frame round the lock had been ripped away from the wall and it’d splintered into loads of bits.
‘Who’s gonna sort all this out for her?’ I asked the guy that were holding my arm.
He raised his eyebrows and smirked. ‘Oh, I’m sure she’ll find somebody ... to sort her out.’
My heart’d been racing since they’d first bust in, and somehow I’d managed to keep it all together. But the greasy look on his face were way too much.
‘You slimy bastard. What ya tryin’ to say?’ I pulled backwards hard and tried to yank his hands off me. My wrists twisted against the cuffs, and I’m telling you, he wouldn’t have been smirking for long if I could’ve got to him.
But I couldn’t, could I? There were no chance of him letting me go, and if anything, I think I made the cuffs even tighter. His mate grabbed my other arm then, and the slimy one laughed. ‘That’ll do, sunshine. No need to lose your temper.’
I kept my gob shut as they pushed me down the path and into the cop car. The older guy were already in the front, a woman were driving, and slime-face got in the back next to me. Although I could’ve really done without him, I decided it were better than him staying in the house with Jasmine.
Everybody were quiet for a few minutes and when my breathing started to slow down a bit, I decided to try and find a few things out.
‘Where ya takin’ me to?’ I said, to anybody that were listening.
‘Back to Sheffield,’ said the guy in the front.
I thought they would, but I’d hoped they weren’t.
‘So, what’s it all about?’ I asked.
Slime-face looked at me. ‘You’ll find out soon enough, mate. Why don’t you just sit back and enjoy the view?’
Enjoy the view? Yeah, I could do that, couldn’t I? Cos there weren’t nothing else on my mind. Like what, exactly, did they have on me? Enough to actually get me done for stabbing that kid to death? Or were they just pulling in anybody that’d lived in the area and that might have something to do with it? Were Jake even in the frame? Could I get myself off without telling them the truth and grassing him up? And if I did have to grass him up, what would Paulie and Tyler the other boys do about it?
Get done for murder, or grass and have half of S16 after me? What were worse? The second one, obviously – it scared me shitless.
But murderers get banged up for a long time, and I didn’t want to be away from Jasmine and Evie for a long time.
Maybe I could do both; convince them it weren’t me without actually telling them it were Jake? I mean, they’ve got all sorts of clever forensic stuff now, haven’t they? Perhaps they’ll sort it out all by themselves? There were plenty of stuff they could get me on: possession of class As, intent to supply, carrying a bladed object, actual bodily harm maybe? They’d still get a result. But the sentence for them things wouldn’t be that much. I’d be back with Jasmine after a few months.
If she still wanted me.
I turned it all over in my head for the next hour, without really coming up with any answers. Then, Holly House came into view. A few seconds later we passed Frankie’s, and by the time we pulled into the car park behind Chapel Cross police station, a cold sweat made my T-shirt stick to my back like Sellotape.
TWO – JASMINE
Although the police car with Shane in it had disappeared ages ago, I still stared at the corner at the end of our road. My insides felt hollow. He wasn’t coming home, was he? Not later that day, probably not the day after; maybe not for a long time. I could tell with the look he’d given me when we were upstairs, when I’d said he’d be back soon; I could tell he knew it wouldn’t be as simple as that.
Had he done it? Killed Benjy?
My stomach twisted. I wrapped my arms around myself and closed my eyes. He’d been mixed up in it all, I knew that; with the drugs and the postcode gang stuff. When he used to buy me clothes or take me out, I knew full-well where all the money came from. Even though neither of us ever mentioned it, I knew he was involved in all the fights between Mark Donovan’s friends and my uncle’s. But none of that meant he’d been there that night, when Benjy got stabbed, did it? In fact, when Mark Donovan – or Donny as they all called him – got shot a few months later in that takeaway, everybody just assumed it’d been him who killed Benjy, and that now things were even.
So why, all of a sudden, had Shane been arrested for it?
A clatter made me jump and I turned around. A photo frame with Evie’s picture in it lay on the floorboards, and one of the cops bent down to pick it back up. He laid it on the top of my drawers where it belonged, but didn’t stand it up properly. Then he opened the drawer and started rummaging through it. I cringed; my bras, knickers, tampons, everything; all my personal stuff was in there. It made me feel sick. I took Evie out of her cot and made my way downstairs; they might have to do all that, but I didn’t have to stand there and watch them.
Downstairs though, it was just as bad. It looked like a gang of robbers had broken in, not the police. A trail of them carried stuff out steadily, and I couldn’t believe some of the things they took; two more of Shane’s jackets, a mirror out of the kitchen, even Evie’s dark red teddy bear with the checked bow-tie. Some things though, I could believe: the money, a knife, his other phone.
Out of the things they left behind, nothing was where it’d been before. Furniture had been turned upside down, some of the doors were shattered, and Evie’s pram was on the front garden. The throw I’d saved up for, to cover the stains on the settee, lay screwed up in a corner. I went through into the kitchen and my heart sank like an anchor. The cupboards were empty, and somehow a tin of beans and a packet of soup had ended up in the sink. The floor was covered in white powder – not the kind they were looking for – just baby milk formula, which immediately made me furious; what the hell was I going to feed Evie?
When I went over to check though, there was just enough left in the tub, so I made her a bottle, and while she drank it I leaned against the settee and watched the cops carry on taking the house to bits.
By the time Evie had finished, I’d rubbed her back and she’d dropped off to sleep again, most of the police had drifted away. Eventually there was just me, a woman officer and this other woman who’d turned up, but who wasn’t in a uniform.
The police woman checked her watch, checked her phone, then sent a text to somebody. The other woman turned a chair the right way up, brushed some fluff off it and sat down. ‘I’m Connie,’ she said. ‘I work for Sheffield Social Care.’
‘What?’ I’d never said OK to that, how could they do that without my permission? I picked Evie up from her bouncy chair and glared at the woman. ‘Yeah, so? What do you want?’
‘We know who you are, Jasmine, and that you absconded from a care home. And even though you’re sixteen now, we still have to make sure you have somewhere safe to live ...’ she paused, ‘... somewhere that’s safe for you and your little girl.’
I ignored the tone of her voice and kept my face blank. ‘We do; here’s safe.’
‘Is it?’ She looked around and pulled a face. ‘Who owns this house?’
My back tensed. I couldn’t do questions like that; questions like that would get us into even more trouble. I glanced away and shrugged.
‘You don’t know who owns the house you’re living in?’
Oh, God, couldn’t she just leave it? If I told her Shane’d sorted it, and that Barker owned it, that’d mix us up in all kinds of other stuff. The subject needed changing. ‘We err ... well, I mean, where else could we go?’
‘That’s what I need to talk to you about. You don’t necessarily have to go back into local authority accommodation, but we do need to find you a suitable alternative. Are there any adults who you could stay with?’
That’s where most people would have said they could stay with their mum, or dad, or auntie, or at least a friend of their mum, or dad, or auntie. But there was nobody. That’s why when my mum died I ended up in Holly House. My dad ... well, he wasn’t even worth thinking about. I could be dead for all he knew, or cared, and the one auntie I could remember moved to London ten years ago and had never been heard of since.
‘There’s nobody,’ I said quietly.
‘Are you sure? Nowhere you could go even for a short while?’ she asked, as she picked some fluff of her skirt.
I shook my head.
‘Well, I can’t leave you here on your own, I’m afraid, so we’ll have to find you somewhere.’
I frowned. ‘What kind of somewhere?’ Then I put my stroppiest face on and shook my head. ‘Don’t even think about sending us to one of those hostels or B and B places. No way am I taking Evie somewhere like that. I’ve seen them; they’re disgusting, stinking places, full of crack-heads.’
‘Jasmine, I think you’re being a little over-dramatic, some –’
‘Am I? Would you take your baby to live in one?’
She shifted in her seat and didn’t answer. Then after a bit, she said, ‘I suppose I could see if we have any mother and baby foster places available. There aren’t many, not for the number of girls we have to look after, but I could see.’
I turned to look out of the window. Shane had nightmares about Evie going into foster care. Honestly, every few weeks he woke up in a real state, sweating and struggling to breathe. He checked her cot, and only when he could touch her and he knew she was really there, would he even start to breathe normally again.
Would I be letting him down if I took Evie to live somewhere like that?
A little hand tugged on my hair, and I realised Evie’s eyes had opened again. I unravelled her fingers and kissed her. Then, as I glanced back up, a dark blue BMW slowed outside. The officer’s car was parked right at the top of our path, and the BMW cruised around it then shot off. I knew that car and I knew who it belonged to. If that cop car hadn’t been there, would Barker have come inside the house?
I spun back round. ‘OK, if you can sort us somewhere out, somewhere clean and safe for Evie, then we’ll go.’
Connie nodded her head and smiled.
And twenty minutes later, I walked out of that house. That tiny, one-bedroomed house, with no carpets, drafty windows and dodgy heating. But it was the house where me and Shane and Evie had been together, and as the bashed-in door closed behind us, I honesty had no idea when we’d all be together again.
