She sprinted to the road. The first thing she saw was his car, his dark green Mercedes parked at an odd angle in the middle of the road and then, beyond that, Richard himself. He was kneeling with his back to her, his shoulders heaving, and as she reached him, she saw that he was sobbing, his tears falling onto the broken body of her child. “Oh God oh God oh please God no, please God no. She was in the road, Janine, she was in the middle of the road. Oh please God no please God.”
Janine grabbed his arm, started to pull him to his feet. “You have to go,” she was saying, her voice sounding weirdly matter-of-fact even to her own ears. “You have to get in the car and go, go right now. Go, Richard, I’ll take care of her. Go on!”
“She’s bleeding, Janine, it’s bad. Oh Christ, it’s bad.”
“You have to go,” she said again, and when he didn’t move, she started to shout. “Now, Richard! Leave! Just go now. You weren’t here. You were never here.”
Liar liar.
* * *
All that would come out later. Everyone told Laura （everyone being her parents and the doctor and her counselor） not to google what had happened, that it wouldn’t help, it would only upset her, frighten her, give her nightmares. Which Laura, who might have only just turned eleven but wasn’t born yesterday, thought was bollocks, also quite suspicious, and she was right about that, wasn’t she?
The first thing she found when she googled herself was a news story with the headline man jailed for hit and run and a picture of her looking like a twat in her school uniform, grinning goofily at the camera. She started reading:
Art dealer Richard Blake was yesterday sentenced to four months in prison for the hit-and-run accident which seriously injured local schoolgirl, Laura Kilbride, 11.
Laura read that sentence again. Richard?
But that couldn’t be right. She knew Richard. Richard was the man who taught the art classes her mum went to; Richard was nice. He had an open, friendly face; he was always laughing. Laura liked Richard, he was kind to her, they’d played football together once in the car park when she was waiting for her mum to finish up in the supermarket. Richard wouldn’t have done that to her. He would never have driven away without calling an ambulance.
The revelation about Richard Blake was quickly forgotten, though, in the shock of what was to come:
Mr. Blake, 45, who pleaded guilty to failing to stop and failing to report an accident, was conducting a relationship with the child’s mother, Janine Kilbride, at the time of the accident. Mrs. Kilbride, 43, who arrived on the scene shortly after the accident, called an ambulance to attend to her child, but told police she did not see the vehicle that struck her. Janine Kilbride was fined ￡800 for giving false information to the police.
When Laura looked back on that period, she identified the moment that she read that paragraph as the beginning of the end. Her body was already broken, of course, her brain function already affected, but that was the sort of damage from which a person can recover. But this? The knowledge that she been lied to, by both of her parents, by everyone who’d been caring for her, that was a knockout blow, the sort that lays you out, the sort from which you do not get back up. That knowledge, the sense of betrayal that came with it, that changed her. It left her marked.
It left her angry.
TWENTY
Miriam could recognize damaged goods when she saw them. People always went on about the eyes, about guarded expressions, haunted looks, that sort of thing. Possibly, Miriam thought, but it was more about movement, about the way you carried yourself. She couldn’t see it in herself, of course, but she could feel it—she might be old and heavy and slow now, but she was still on the balls of her feet. Still wary. Ready for that rush of blood to the head.
Miriam saw Laura creating havoc outside the launderette and seized her opportunity. She stepped in quickly, picked up Laura’s rucksack, apologized to the exasperated owner, and escorted the girl smartly away. She offered her a cup of tea on the boat, but Laura turned her down. Understandable, under the circumstances. When you considered the mess she got herself into last time she went down there.
They went to Laura’s place instead. An ordeal, to put it mildly. Laura lived in a council flat in a tower block over by Spa Fields, up on the seventh floor and the lift was out. Miriam was unsure she’d make it all the way up; she had to stop several times, her breath short and the sweat pouring off her. Little toerags in the stairwell laughing, making jokes. Shit bruv, your nan’s having a heart attack.
When she got up there, though, the climb felt almost worth it. A stiff breeze, none of the stink of the canal, and a view—a glorious view! The spire of Saint James in the foreground, behind that the hulking brutalist towers of the Barbican, the quiet splendor of St. Paul’s, and farther still, the city’s shining glass facades. London, in all its glory, the one you forgot about when you lived with your nose so close to the ground.