Wednesday's Child by Shane Dunphy Read Free Book Online Page B

of the morning, and I was visiting the McCoys, the family Andi had kindly passed on to me, in the afternoon. Hoping it would be quieter than the previous day, I got in my car and headed for town.
     
    The offices of the Social Work Department were the busiest I had yet seen them. The full complement of staff, twenty people in all, were in for the meeting. I made my way up to my office. No Melanie this time, but a load of papers and files that were obviously hers were strewn across the desk. I knew that I would not last the week without having a showdown with her over this, and pulled up a chair.
     
    I reached over to my file cabinet and took out the O’Gorman file. To say that it was huge would be an understatement. I was not even going to begin to try and read it then. I planned to take home some of my bigger case files to read in my own time (this was frowned upon by management as a security risk, but it was fairly common practice) and for now just riffled through the paperwork, looking for something specific. Five minutes later I found what I was lookingfor. Four coloured Polaroid photographs of Gillian were among the reports and letters. They had obviously been taken while she was on a trip with a group of other children – possibly even when she was in residential care. They showed her horse-riding; at a table in a restaurant with an enormous pizza in front of her; hugging another girl as they stood outside a cinema, both of them grinning and making antennae with their fingers behind each others’ heads; pulling on a bowling shoe and looking irritated at being photographed. The photos were similar to any you would see of a normal, happy teenage girl. What was jarring about them, and what had caused Andi to advise me to look them over, was the obvious change in Gillian. In these photos she was certainly slim, but she looked healthy and full-faced and pretty. The spindly, hollow-eyed creature I had met the day before was almost unrecognisable as the child in these photographs. I looked at them for a long time.
     
    Photographs do not always tell the truth. People perform for the camera when they know it’s on them, putting up a façade and hiding who they really are. The best photos are those taken when the subject is unaware. The photo I kept coming back to was the one of Gillian on horseback. In it she was hunched over the pony’s neck, a riding helmet that was much too big for her head was pushed back on her forehead and she was looking to the side nervously. In the other three photographs you could mistake Gillian for a well-adjusted girl, full of fun. Not in this one.That pain I had seen was present here in those brown eyes. She was looking at something off on the horizon line, something that seemed to be moving away from her, something she could not quite make out. I wondered if she had ever managed to capture it, whatever it was.
     
    ‘Shane?’
     
    The voice startled me. A tall woman, maybe thirty-five years old, with long, black hair stood at the door. She was dressed in a long, black dress and black, high-heeled boots with a white, crocheted cardigan loose over the outfit.
     
    ‘Hi,’ I said, realising that I had made my way through the assembled group without saying ‘hello’ to anyone and had come straight to my desk. I suddenly felt very rude and anti-social.
     
    ‘I’m Josephine, Team Leader.’
     
    She extended a hand, smiling. Yesterday she had been out sick.
     
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I began, standing up. ‘I just wanted to check the file. I had no time yesterday and I had to go into a couple of cases fairly cold. I didn’t mean to ignore everyone.’
     
    She laughed, brushing away the apology. She was full of abundant good humour, shaking my hand vigorously and placing her other hand on my shoulder.
     
    ‘Oh, don’t worry, I understand. I heard that you had some fun yesterday morning all right. Baptism of fire, or what? You must think that we are the worstcrowd going! I feel awful. I