What Came Before He Shot Her by Elizabeth George Page A

without a backward glance.
    T HE OTHER THREE made an odd sight walking along the verge: Toby wearing his seaside life ring, Joel in his ill-fitting Oxfam clothes, and Kendra dressed in cream and navy blue, as if she intended this visit as a substitute for afternoon tea at a country hotel. When she had admittance past the guard gate, Kendra led her nephews along a curving driveway. This skirted a broad expanse of lawn on which oak trees stood—bare of leaves—near flowerbeds that were colourless in the winter weather. In the distance sprawled their ultimate destination: the body, wings, spires, and turrets of an unwashed Gothic revival building, its facing stones streaked with mould and grime, the nooks and cran-nies of its exterior a nesting place for birds.
    Crows cawed and hurtled upward into the sky as Kendra and the boys reached the wide front steps. There the building’s windows looked blankly out at them, hung outside with vertical iron bars, inside with crooked Venetian blinds. Before the massive front door, Toby faltered.
    Armed with his life ring, he’d trotted along so easily from the time they’d left the railway station that his sudden hesitation took Kendra by surprise.
    Joel said to her hastily, “’S okay, Aunt Ken. He don’t know where we are ’xactly. But he’ll be fine once he sees Mum.”
    Kendra avoided asking the obvious question: How could Toby
not
know where they were? He’d been coming here for most of his life.
    And Joel avoided giving her the obvious answer: that Toby had already retreated to Sose. Instead, Joel pushed open the front door and held it for his aunt. He urged Toby to follow her inside.
    Reception was to the left of the entrance, black and white lino squares over which lay a doormat that was tattered at the edges. An umbrella stand and a wooden bench were the only furniture in the foyer. A small lobby with a wide wooden staircase opened off this. The staircase made sharp turns as it climbed to the first and second floors of the building.
    Joel went to Reception, Toby’s hand in his and their aunt following.
    The woman at the desk was someone he recognised from his earlier visits although he didn’t know her name. But he remembered her face, which was yellow and lined. She smelled quite strongly of smoked cigarettes.
    She handed passes over automatically. She said, “Mind you keep them pinned to your clothes.”
    Joel said, “Cheers. She in her room?”
    Reception waved him off with a gesture towards the stairs. “You’ll have to ask above. Go on with you, then. Doesn’t do anyone good with you lolling round here.”
    That wasn’t supposed to be the case, however. Not in the broader sense. People came to this place—or were put here by their families, by magistrates, by judges, or by their GPs—because it would do them good, which was another way of saying that it would cure them, making them normal and able to cope.
    On the second floor, Joel stopped at another desk. A male nurse looked up from a computer terminal. He said, “Telly room, Joel,” and went back to work.
    They walked along a lino-floored corridor, where rooms opened to the left and windows ran along the right. Like those on the floors below, the windows were covered with bars. They had the same Venetian blinds as well, the sort that declared “Institution” by their width, their lopsided angles of repose, and the amount of dust gathered on them.
    Kendra took in everything as she followed her nephew. She’d never been inside this place. On the rare occasions when she’d come to see Carole, she’d met her outside because the weather had been fine. She wished the weather had been fine today: unseasonably warm and a good excuse for further avoidance.
    The television room was at the end of the corridor. When Joel opened the door, the smells assailed them. Someone had been playing with the radiators, and the blazing heat that resulted from this was melding together the odours of unwashed bodies, soiled