Skeletons by Jane Fallon Page A

had the air of a sixth form common room. Handwritten notices adorned every spare inch of the walls, advertising rooms to let or help with computer skills. There was a distinct aroma of unwashed clothes in the place. The funk of forty
thousand rucksacks. Her coffee tasted of dishwasher soap.
    There were various people called Cass or Cassandra
Richards on Facebook and Twitter but they were too old, too young or on the wrong side of the world. There were several who had no details, not even a
photograph on show. There were a couple of others whose pictures may have been Cass when she was younger, but it was almost impossible to tell. Jen kept going. There were Cassandra Richardses working in Woking and Hull, but one gave horse-riding lessons and the other worked in the refuse
department of the local council, and neither of those seemed right. Although what she had to base that feeling on, she didn’t know. There was one who lived in Coventry. Jen racked her brain. Had there been any clues when they’d met?
    She couldn’t remember Cass having had a Midlands accent, but she had barely said a whole sentence and, even if she didn’t, that didn’t mean anything. You could be brought up in London and then move to Coventry. You could go off
and become an officer in the refuse department at Hull City Council, for that matter.
    She had already used up twenty-eight of her forty-five minutes. She needed a strategy. Concentric circles, she decided. She would start by checking out all the Cassandra Richardses in London and then, if none of them came through, widen out the
search from there. One-sixth of the country’s population lived in the capital. Good odds.
    She rushed through the list, discarding as many as she could on the grounds of age, nationality, anything. She was left with three that seemed to merit further investigation. She pored over any details she could find about the first – listed as a
systems analyst in Barking. She
wrote down the number of her office. She would decide what to do with it later. The second had a Facebook page that Jen was denied access to. She was a member of a sailing club in Westminster, and had taken part in
their annual race. On their website there was a picture of her with a trophy. A smiling, pretty, athletic-looking black woman who had come in second place. Jen scored her name off the list.
    The third seemed to be very gregarious. She had a Facebook page, a Twitter account (Jen scrolled back – no mention of meeting up with her lover at his office recently – in fact, most of her tweets were pictures of her two dogs) and a blog where
she wrote about baking. On the blog she mentioned her husband and three children. Jen didn’t even want to think about what Cass might be doing to her own family, as well as the Mastersons. She also talked about her weight and her futile attempts to exercise and resist the call of
home-made scones. ‘Scales still hitting sixteen stone four!’ Jen read on one recent entry.
    Next.
    So, after all that, she was left with the systems analyst in Barking and a phone number. It could be her, it was possible. It just hardly felt inspiring, that was all. There were probably countless more Cassandra Richardses she had missed. Or she
may have disregarded the right one for the wrong reason. Or Cass might live in Wales or Cornwall. Or she might be called Cassiopeia. Or she might have absolutely no presence on the internet, although Jen wasn’t sure that was possible these days. She started to pack up her things. She
would call the Barking number
and see what she could find out. After that, who knew? Maybe this was someone’s way of trying to tell her she should leave well alone. Not that Jen believed in that stuff – fate and karma and spirit guides – that
was much more Jessie’s arena. At this point, though, she was prepared to accept anything.
    There were a couple of minutes left on the clock, but she didn’t have the heart to start a whole new search. She was