Hunter said, trying not to show how pleased he was, trying to sound as if it were a chore he could do without. “Yeah. All right.”After Hunter had gone Ramsay sat in the incident room and took out the file he was compiling on Faye Cooper. In a corner a DC was stabbing inexpertly at a typewriter. Otherwise the room was empty and still. Ramsay re-read all the information and tried to form a picture of the girl. He wished he had a photograph. Beside the original police report into the accident at Juniper Hall and the coroner’s statement, he had obtained records from her high school. What occurred to him most was that she had been abandoned by all the adults who had been responsible for her. It was clear that there had been no contact with her parents once she left home, and the staff at the college seemed to have been unconcerned about the way she lived. Perhaps they did not know. Or did not care. Val McDougal would have cared, he thought. She would have had the girl back to her home for meals, kept an eye on her.
