“Thanks.” I toed my shoes off and headed for the stairs, falling back on manners. “That’s very kind of you.”
“Yeah, kindness. That’s the word.” He was still staring at me, and I suddenly realised how transparent the rain had turned my white shirt and how closely my wet trousers were clinging. I wasn’t quite indecent, but I was definitely not fit to be seen in public.
I scurried up the stairs with more speed than grace, my heart pounding again.
Five minutes in the small, slope-ceilinged bathroom gave me some breathing space. I stripped my wet clothes off, dried myself, then sat on the edge of the bathtub, clutching the still-warm towel.
Holy fuck. What was I supposed to do now?
Kasia’s voice whispered in my memory, “…shag someone inappropriate and marry some bloke who adores you.” Well, Niall was inappropriate enough, if I listened to my professional judgement. If this were to become my school, having a wild affair with the nearest neighbour would not be the most professional start to my career as a head teacher. I didn’t even dare imagine how that conversation with the governors would go.
If that kiss was anything to go by, though, the affair itself would be spectacular while it lasted.
No. Bad idea. Very bad idea.
Beyond pure professionalism, we’d both faced a difficult and upsetting day. Neither of us was likely to be making sensible emotional decisions after the morning we’d had, and the ominous threat of the album hanging over us was probably putting us both on edge. If we did act on this sudden attraction, it had all the makings of the world’s most awkward morning after.
Or maybe we’d wake up in another of his tight embraces, stay in bed long past our alarms, bodies coming together again as the rain thrummed against the window, separating us from the rest of the world.
I groaned, burying my face in the plush folds of the towel. I was an idiot.
A soft knock on the door and Niall said, “There’s clothes outside. I’m going to change too, but the kettle’s on. Feel free to put stuff in the airing cupboard.”
“Thanks. I’ll get the tea started if I get down first.”
“Appreciated.” His voice was still a little husky, and I closed my eyes and tried not to sigh too loudly as I heard him walk away down the corridor. The casual domesticity of it was very appealing.
Oh no. Even worse idea, Leon.
I opened the door warily. There was no sign of Niall, but there was a little pile of folded clothes. I grabbed them and changed quickly. The tracksuit bottoms were too big, but I pulled the drawstring as tight it would go to keep them up. The T-shirt swamped me too, and I ventured out barefoot, feeling like a child playing at dressing up. It put a small dent in my vanity—I was a little taller than average and in good shape but had nothing approaching Niall’s broad shoulders.
As I well knew, now I’d had my hands on them. I wondered what they would look like naked. Then I groaned, slapped myself lightly on the forehead, and went to stow my wet stuff in the airing cupboard (where, I saw immediately, Niall had already put both our shoes, stuffed with newspaper).
In the small kitchen, the kettle was huffing its way towards boiling, and a couple of mugs sat on the side. A quick rummage found a box of teabags, sugar, and milk in the fridge. I got the tea brewing, then turned as I heard Niall’s steps. “Hey, how do you like your tea?”
“Sweet,” he said and came across the room towards me. He looked both more relaxed than I had ever seen and, at the very same time, happily predatory. He pushed the milk and sugar away from my hands and keep going, walking me back across the kitchen until my back hit the counter under the window.
Logically, I should have been talking sense into him. In fact, I was an eager participant, hitching myself up against the counter so I could rise to meet him. I wound my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist and kissed him as eagerly as he kissed me, both of us falling back into it as if the intervening five minutes had never happened.
Except this kiss was not as rushed as the first but slower, more confident, almost leisurely. It was the kind of kiss that made my heart beat and my head spin, and I was dimly aware that by leaning into it I was making an invitation—no, a promise—I didn’t even know if I could fulfil.
When we pulled apart, he said, voice thick with laughter, “That one was less unexpected.”
“Oh, are you complaining?”
“Not at all. Surprises are good, but there’s something to be said for exactly what I like best.”
I blushed. Damn him. Where had he been hiding charm like that?
Then, the git, he grinned and added, “A gorgeous man, barefoot in my kitchen—”
“Oy!”
He was laughing as he nuzzled a kiss behind my ear. “Wearing my clothes.”
“Oh, is that what’s got you going?” I was breathless again as he pressed kisses down the side of my neck. “Niall.”
He slid a hand under my T-shirt. “Would you prefer not wearing my clothes?”
“Stop teasing and kiss me,” I demanded, surprising myself. I’d never felt comfortable taking control in the bedroom, but I wanted his mouth on mine again badly enough that I wasn’t self-conscious.
He did as he was told, and I sank into it, losing awareness of everything but his kiss, his hands holding me up, and the slow shift of his hips against mine. Another storm could have broken over us, Vainguard could have collapsed in on itself, the ghost of Martyn Armstrong could have walked in—I wouldn’t have noticed.
I did feel him loosen the ties of my trousers, though. My first instinct was to make a noise of appreciation and arch my hips. After that, sadly, a cold stab of common sense struck hard. I pulled out of the kiss and marshalled enough words to say, “We shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
There were so many reasons and most of them were complicated, so I went with the simple one. I waved vaguely over my shoulder and managed to say, “Kitchen window. Anyone could see us from the road.”
He rolled his eyes, locked one arm around my waist to hold me in place, and reached past me with his free hand to jerk at the string of the blind. It came rolling down, and he said, with immense satisfaction, “Not a problem anymore.”
But my head had cleared enough to remember what I had been worried about earlier. “It’s not just that—look, we both know this is a terrible idea.”
He jerked back as if I’d shot him. His brows drew together, and he growled, “Do we?”
“Yes,” I snapped back. Now there was some space between us, I noticed the way the edge of the counter was pressing against my legs and how the clothes were twisted uncomfortably around my limbs. “Look, we’ve both had a difficult day and need a distraction, but I don’t have a particularly healthy record when it comes to fucking my feelings out.”
“Oh, is that what we were about to do?”
“I’m pretty sure it was, yeah.” I held up my hand. “I’m not saying stop completely, but nothing in our current situation gets any better if we wake up tomorrow wondering if we both lost our minds.”
“Who says we have to wait for tomorrow,” he muttered but stepped right away, turning to switch the kettle on again.
I ignored that. “And we’ve still got to tackle that album, however much we’d rather be fucking.”
He shot a hot, incredulous glare my way. “You think this was just procrastination?”
“No! Well, yes, partly.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Agreed.”
The look that got was more startled than hostile.
I shrugged. “I’m an idiot with a very long history of making poor choices when I’m emotionally overwhelmed—choices that hurt me and those around me. I don’t want you to be the next person I—”
He sighed again, quick and impatient, but said, “Fine. But what if I’m not a poor choice?”
I closed my eyes, imagining it, and said, “Then I hope you’ll forgive me enough that we can take our time rather than making do wit
h a quick shag against a worktop.”
Just saying it made me shudder, and he gasped.
But when I opened my eyes, he was looking at me with that steady, slightly puzzled gaze I’d seen from him in the past. He said, his voice mild, “Fair play. You still want that cup of tea?”
Chapter Fifteen
THE ALBUM was waiting on the coffee table in the sitting room. It looked very innocuous—an inch-thick, leather-covered volume with flaking edges.
Yet neither of us reached to open it. I cradled my cup of tea in my hands, needing the warmth of the mug against my palms. Niall fussed with the coasters.
Eventually I put my tea down with a sigh and reached for his hand. I lifted it up, cradling it in mine, and he went still beside me.
It was a strong hand, bigger than mine, with calluses on the fingertips and rough knuckles.
“Who taught you to laugh at storms?” I asked.
“My grandpa.” He sounded wary, but I could hear the affection in his voice too. “This was his cottage after he retired. I used to stay here, and the storms were bad even then.”
“You didn’t like them?”
“Scared stiff,” he admitted. “Well, until he taught me to laugh at them.”
“He sounds great.”
“Yeah. He’d also tell me to get off my arse and get on with this.” He turned to look at me. “So, if you’re done with my hand?”
“Not quite,” I said and dropped a kiss on his knuckles. “For luck.”
He stared at me and self-consciousness rushed over me. That had been overdone, and he must think I—
He slid his hand around the back of my neck and said, “I reckon we’ll need more luck than that.” Then he pulled me forward into a quick kiss.
It was over almost before it began, but my heart still leapt. Drawing back he said, “Begin at the beginning?”
I nodded, and he flipped open the album.
I’d seen the first few pages before, but he hadn’t. A little of the grim determination faded from his face and he said, “God, they were young.”
“Older than some we took in back then,” I said.
“We?”
“Another generation, but it’s the same organisation. That’s still what we do at heart. Take in children with nowhere else to go.”
He looked troubled but turned the page without comment.
The next page held a newspaper clipping announcing the closure of the “ill-fated” Vainguard Orphanage and the reopening of the rebuilt Eilbeck House Newcastle.
“The Newcastle home was destroyed in the bombing. They patched it up, but it was eventually demolished during the redevelopment in the sixties and never replaced. Provision was shifting more and more towards foster placements by then, and it wasn’t thought there was a need.”
He gave me a look. “Most people can’t recite the history of their workplace.”
“Felix is writing a book,” I explained. “Stand still near him long enough in the holidays and you’re going to get educated. If he ever writes the thing, I’ll probably get nobbled to proofread it too.”
“Your Felix is on to a good thing there,” he muttered.
“I don’t mind. I wonder what was ill-fated about the place?”
“Wee Francis died here.”
“Yes,” I said and braced myself, “but in those days—we’re pre-NHS and in the middle of a war. His death would have been devastating for his brother—clearly was—but probably wouldn’t have attracted much note outside of the orphanage.”
“Because kids died too easily back then.” His mouth turned down.
“It’s not right or fair,” I said, touching his knee. “We do better now, but then….”
He shrugged. “I get it. And these were poor kids without family. No one would have cared.”
“If it helps, I’ve seen letters from orphanage staff who were absolutely heartbroken to lose one of their charges. Outside, everyone overlooked these kids, but that didn’t mean no one cared at all.”
“You’ve got a lot of faith in these places.”
It was my turn to shrug. “They weren’t perfect, but they tried their best, even if it was just to give the kids a roof over their heads, a warm bed, and proper meals. Some of them wouldn’t have had that much without us—we were always there to pick up the pieces when other people let those kids down. That’s what we’re for.”
“Aye. Off-topic now, though.”
“Yeah. Let’s see if he left us any other clues.”
He had, though it did not help much. The next page held a handwritten letter, its ink faded to gold over time. The lines of its folds were deep, and I wondered how many times Armstrong had read and refolded it.
It opened by hoping the writer found him well and went on to explain, in stilted, awkward sentences, that the investigation into the deaths of Francis Armstrong, James Adams, Ronald Parfitt, and Albert Billings was being closed. The tone changed in the second paragraph, where ink splattered the page on which the writer’s pen had caught on a vigorous stroke.
My dear boy, I wish there was more I could do. I believe you absolutely, but there is simply not enough evidence to prove your case in a court of law, and I fear with the closing of that accursed place, nothing more will be forthcoming from our investigation. My only hope is that, as time passes and the fear of the life to come bears its inevitable pressure, someone’s conscience may compel them to finally tell the truth. I am sorry to have failed you, but there is nothing more which is possible to do.
Indeed, I have reached the point where my faith in human nature has so declined that I no longer feel capable of fulfilling my duty to this village. With so many young, capable men coming back from the war in need of work, it only seems right for me to retire and pass the flame on to someone young and keen and far less ready to give up on the hope of human decency.
In automatic teacher mode, I had been reading it aloud even as my heart sank, but now Niall interjected, “Hope? In a war veteran? After that war?”
“I’m not sure how much people at home knew about the worst horrors of it.”
“Even so, what the hell happened here to make him react like this?”
“I don’t know.” I leaned over it again and continued reading, as much to put off the rest of the conversation as anything else. There wasn’t much more—the writer’s new address, should Martyn wish to contact him, and his name, Constable Arthur Crozier.
“Well,” Niall said.
I kept staring at the letter, but panic clutched in my gut.
Francis Armstrong.
James Adams.
Ronald Parfitt.
Albert Billings.
One dead orphan was tragic bad luck. Four? At once? That was more than chance. Together with the comments in the letter, I had a pretty good idea what this was, and I wished I didn’t. We’d never had a problem with it at Becky’s, and nothing had ever been rumoured about any of the charity’s earlier incarnations. We were there to help. I believed that.
“So it wasn’t just Francis?” Niall mused. More sharply, he added, “What’s wrong with you? You look like you’re about to faint.”
I did feel sick. How the hell was I going to tell Felix? How was Felix going to tell the trustees? And if this got out, there would be the press, the inevitable sneers and stain to the reputation of a charity that had previously only been associated with good.
“Tea on an empty stomach,” I said quickly. “Am I okay to get a glass of water?”
“I’ll get you one.”
He moved away, and I closed my eyes, trying to will down my panic. It might not be what I feared.
This is the thing no one tells you until after you start working with kids—though once you’ve heard it for the first time it feels like something you should have worked out for yourself. Every criminal record check you went through, every compulsory interview question about child safety, every whistleblowing procedure—they’re all so very new. It was only in the late nineties that the most
stringent procedures were passed into law and the less rigorous system that predated it barely covered the length of my childhood.
But there have always been people who like hurting children.
Go back beyond my generation and every children’s charity, every volunteer group, every residential home or school was a magnet for abusers. We’ve watched giants fall over the last few years as the evidence of everything from extreme cruelty and physical abuse to systematic sexual abuse has bubbled up from under the surface. For every celebrity like Jimmy Saville or Rolf Harris who is exposed, there are countless housemasters who like to patrol the dorms too much at bedtime, nuns who love to use the cane, teachers with little secrets shared with certain kids they know will never tell. Then there are the kids themselves. Kids can prey on one another in all the worst ways adults do and often with even less restraint.
Nowhere is immune. From the best prep schools in the country to foster homes to music schools to special-needs schools, scandal after scandal has risen to the surface over the last few years. Some of those institutions—those who turned a blind eye in the here and now when we’re all taught to look—deserved what they got.
But you can’t apply safeguards retrospectively, and we’re all aware we might be the next tabloid headline.
Becky’s had been safe so far, and I’d hoped we’d stay that way—that there was at least one place left in the world where children had always been safe. Surely it wasn’t impossibly naive to hope that everyone who had worked for us in the past was as well meaning and committed as my colleagues today?
But whatever I secretly hoped, here were four names of dead children and dark implications in a carefully preserved letter.
I could just burn it.
But no. That wasn’t right. We had planned for this in one of the most disheartening meetings I’d ever sat in. We had agreed that if it happened, we could not cover it up. Such things never stayed secret, and any potential victims deserved their voice. But we still needed to protect the children in our care today from the worst sort of media shitstorm.
The first priority in our plan was to control the flow of information.
Something Wicked This Way Comes Page 12