Casey Watson - The Silent Witness

‘Oh, of course,’ Bella said, as if it had never occurred to her that it might be otherwise. Which was refreshing; more and more it seemed teenagers treated laptops as extensions of themselves, to be operated from laps – ideally hidden from view, in their bedrooms. But this didn’t seem to be the case with Bella, who, as far as I knew, had never owned a laptop – or else surely she’d have brought one along with her.

I left her to it and went to the kitchen to make some porridge with syrup – something (in fact the only thing) Bella had so far expressed a liking for. And while I stirred, I thought about the email I’d been reading and the picture I was building up of her family life before the ‘crisis’ – for want of a better word. I still felt unable to find the right one, since it was still unconfirmed – would it all too soon become Bella’s stepfather’s killing?

Whatever the future held, the past had clearly been a very unhappy place, and though she hadn’t apparently been on the receiving end of physical violence, emotionally it must have scarred her quite profoundly. To witness violence and aggression on such a regular basis can’t have made for a very happy life at all. And judging from the comments by the neighbour, Mrs Murphy, it was a crisis that was always going to happen.

The porridge made, I went back into the living room, to find the screen filled not with homework, but with flowers. Or homework on flowers, which was possible. And then I realised.

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