A Voss and Pike Casefile
Section 42: Family Values
"Imogen Fairweather," you said, and the room drew in a breath.
Imogen didn't flinch. She looked at you steadily, and at the forty photographs on the screen behind her, and the raffle tickets, and the timestamps, and then at Rook, who wasn't looking at you any more.
"I was on stage," she said quietly. "In front of six hundred people."
It took Rook four minutes to confirm it. The public inquiry into your conduct took four months. Imogen filed a complaint against you, and then, more devastatingly, didn't press it. "I thought you might understand," she said when the letter arrived. "Families teach you everything, don't they? How to love. How to lie. How to be a suspect."
Jonah returned to school that autumn to finish a resit. He told the class about the case, without names. "We forgot," he said, "that the people closest to us are the ones we understand least."
Sociological note: primary socialisation shapes identity powerfully, but the family is not always the source of the crime. Sociological insight is not the same as suspicion of the nearest role.