What Came Before He Shot Her by Elizabeth George

off and waited for the other woman’s reply. In a moment, she thanked her stars that Glory Campbell had forced an acceptable form of the English language upon all her children. In this circumstance, being able to produce grammati-cally correct speech in an acceptable accent served Kendra well. She knew that it made her more believable than she would have been had she fallen into the dialect that Mrs. Harper had no doubt expected to hear on the other end of the phone when she’d placed her call.
    “I’ll let her teachers know, then,” Mrs. Harper said. “And please do next time keep us informed, Mrs. Osborne.”
    Kendra refused to be offended by the admission offi cer’s imperative.
    So thankful was she that the woman had accepted her unlikely tale of Ness caring for Carole Campbell that, short of a direct insult, she would have found any comment from Mrs. Harper tolerable. She felt relieved that she’d been able to concoct a story on the spur of the moment but shortly after she’d ended the call, the very fact that she’d been
forced
to concoct such a story sent her pacing. She was still doing that when Joel and Toby stopped by on their way home from the learning centre.
    Toby was carrying a workbook on whose individual pages colourful stickers had been fixed, celebrating his successful completion of the phonetic drills meant to help him with his reading. He had more stickers on his life ring, declaring “Well done!,” “Excellent!,” and “Top form!” in bright blue, red, and yellow. Kendra saw these but did not remark upon them. She instead said to Joel, “Where’s she been going every day?”
    Joel wasn’t stupid, but he was bound by that rule about telling tales.
    He frowned and played dumb. “Who?”
    “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. The admissions officer rang me. Where’s Ness been going? Is she with this girl
What’s her name? Six? And why haven’t I met her?”
    Joel dropped his head to avoid replying. Toby said, “Lookit my stickers, Aunt Ken. I got to make a purchase from the comic books cos I got enough stickers now. I chose Spiderman. Joel got it in his rucksack.”
    The mention of rucksack put Kendra in the picture about what Ness had been doing, and she cursed herself for being a fool. So when she got back to the estate that evening—keeping Joel and Toby with her until it was time to close the shop so that Joel would not have the chance to warn his sister about the game being up—the first thing she did was scoop Ness’s rucksack off the back of the chair on which she’d hung it. Kendra opened it unceremoniously and dumped its contents on the kitchen table where Ness had been chatting to someone on the phone while she idly leafed through the most recent prospectus from Kensington and Chelsea College every bit as if she actually intended to make something of her life.
    Ness’s glance went from the prospectus to the pile of her belongings, from there to her aunt’s face. She said into the phone, “I got to go,” and rang off, watching Kendra with an expression that might have been called wary had it not also been so calculating.
    Kendra sorted through the contents of the rucksack. Ness looked beyond her to where Joel hung in the doorway. Her eyes narrowed as she evaluated her brother and his potential as a grass. She rejected this.
    Joel was all right. The information, she decided, must have come from another source. Toby? That, she told herself, was not bloody likely.
    Toby was generally with the cuckoos.
    Kendra tried to read the contents of Ness’s rucksack like a priest practising divination. She unrolled the blue jeans and unfolded the black T-shirt whose golden inscription “Tight Pussy” resulted in its being deposited directly into the bin. She fingered through makeup, nail varnish, hair spray, hair picks, matches, and cigarettes, and she stuffed her hands into the high-heeled boots to see if there was anything hidden inside them. Finally,