23

EVI WAS LOOKING AT GILLIAN ROYLE’S MEDICAL RECORDS. When she’d accepted Gillian as a patient, they had been forwarded to her, following normal procedure. Luckily, the GP’s surgery Gillian attended had been one of the first to become fully computerized. Even the old paper-based records from the girl’s childhood had, at some time, been inputted on to the system.

She’d read them already, of course, before her first appointment with the girl. Was there anything she’d missed?

‘He’s a cheating bastard,’ Gillian had said. ‘My stepdad was the same’ More than once now, Gillian had become edgy on the subject of the men in her life. Several aspects of the girl’s character – her cynicism about men and sex, her sense of being a victim, a sort of unspoken belief that the world owed her something – were all making Evi suspect there was some history of abuse in Gillian’s past.

Evi scrolled back to the early records, when Gillian had been a child. She’d had the usual immunizations, chickenpox as a three-year-old. She’d visited her GP shortly after her father’s accidental death, but no medication or follow-up treatment had been prescribed.

At the age of nine, Gillian had started to attend a different surgery in Blackburn. The change probably coincided with her mother’s remarriage and the family’s moving away from Heptonclough. Gillian’s visits to the GP at that time had increased in frequency. She’d complained often of unspecified tummy aches, causing her to miss several days of school, but investigations had found nothing wrong. There had also been a series of minor injuries a broken wrist, bruising, etc. It could indicate abuse. Or it could just suggest a lively, accident-prone child.

When Gillian was thirteen, she and her mother had moved back to Heptonclough. Gillian had been prescribed the contraceptive pill at a very early age – a couple of months short of her fifteenth birthday – and had had a pregnancy terminated at the age of seventeen. Not an ideal scenario, but neither was it untypical for a modern teenager.

Oh, for heaven’s sake, she had plenty of other patients. Evi stood up again. She glanced towards the bathroom. The door was open and she could see the cabinet.

It was completely dark outside. Would there be dancing up in Heptonclough right now? Evi hadn’t danced in three years. Probably never would again.