Head Start

by Judith Cutler

  ‘In that case,’ Wayne told me, ‘you’ll have to tell the kids not to take any sort of foodstuff into the classroom – no point in luring the rodents into a room and not dealing with them, is there? And rodents can’t tell crisps from bait, see?’

  I promised an absolute ban. I didn’t mention I’d have to impose it on staff too – if you had a pile of marking it was easier to do it at your desk at lunchtime, eating your sandwiches as you went. I’d done it many times myself.

  Bidding Wayne and his mates goodbye as they started loading their gear, I automatically went back to my office to print and laminate notices for each door forbidding any sort of food or sweets inside. I was busy texting all the parents to tell them about the classroom food rule and reminding them that their children must strictly observe the Out of Bounds signs, when there was a tap on the door.

  ‘Come in,’ I called absently. Foolishly. ‘Pat!’ I probably squeaked louder than when I’d seen last night’s rat. ‘What on earth are you doing here? On a Thursday! And how did you get in?’

  ‘Hey, Avo, calm down. Some workman let me in on his way out. I said I’d try and get down, didn’t I? And here I am. It’s not a fire drill or something, is it? Everyone seems to be outside.’

  ‘Rats,’ I said. Possibly ambiguously. ‘Coffee? Then when you’re sitting comfortably, I’ll explain …’

  ‘OK,’ he said, fifteen minutes later, ‘it’s clear that someone wants you out of the school.’

  ‘Either me personally or the school as a whole?’

  ‘That’s exactly what we need to know. Now, apart from the rat catchers’ targets, the school is empty. Right?’

  I pointed to an emptying playground. ‘They’re all traipsing over to the village hall for lunch as we speak.’

  ‘You’re looking a bit smart, but I’ve got police overalls for both of us. Don’t ask. Here.’ He dug in an anomalous executive briefcase. ‘Let’s deal with those stockrooms now. With luck, you’ll have another present for this guy Lloyd.’ It was the same old Pat. Wasn’t it?

  As we headed for the stockrooms, armed with keys A and B, of course, we attached No Food notices to every door, even the loos, lest someone like Prudence – was there anyone like Prudence? – found a clear loophole to exploit.

  The workmen had replaced the cones and Out of Bounds signs at the end of the stockroom corridor. The troublesome loo doors were ajar, however.

  ‘We’ve had two children reduced to incontinence by the fear of using them,’ I told Pat. ‘But no one can find anything wrong with them. Can you?’

  He peered into the pristine cubicles. ‘A quite refreshing lack of graffiti.’

  ‘These are for kids too young to read and write, aren’t they?’

  ‘Who knows what talent is in the bud? And these are the famous stockrooms.’

  ‘OK: you choose. Room A or Room B?’

  ‘Let’s try the one where you found the porn,’ he said. ‘Room A – right? I thought you said they were kept locked?’ There was a sudden edge to his voice, as if I were a junior officer found wanting.

  ‘The whole building should have been kept locked – but if a workman let you in, I suppose we can blame the same guy for this,’ I said as evenly as I could, despite a sudden surge of resentment: who was he to criticise me? If anyone knew how hard I was working to get and keep the school acceptable, it was he.

  Switching on the light, he stepped inside. ‘Avo, we’ve got a problem here. Call 999 – now! And we’ll need both police and ambulance. Dear God!’

  My mobile wouldn’t work till I got back into the hall. He was yelling, ‘Tell them absolute priority. A child – get it? Crush injuries. And not just a paramedic – it’ll have to be an ambulance.’

  Perhaps the call-handler heard his voice ride over mine. She promised an instant response. Did I need talking through first aid?

  ‘The man dealing with the patient’s a police officer. There’s a playing field if we need the air ambulance,’ I added.

  Pat was administering kiss of life, his body between me and his patient. My pupil. A girl? Although the legs were in trousers, the shoes looked too small and clean for a boy’s.

  He merely nodded when I told him that help was on its way.

  ‘I’ve got to call Melanie in the village hall, Pat, to make sure the kids are all kept together. No one must come over here – no excuse whatever. And I’ll get the class teachers to register their kids so we know …’ I could be cool and efficient but not that cool and efficient.

  ‘Good idea. Avo, you don’t tell them anything. Anything at all. Let them assume it’s to do with the rats. OK?’

  ‘Yes. It’ll be shock enough when they know, but I don’t want any panic now.’

  One thing I couldn’t do, of course, was prevent the kids hearing the sound of emergency vehicles. Several. I flagged them down, got them straight to Pat. But I wished they’d turn their lights off: wherever they parked, they’d reflect on the village hall windows and ceiling.

  Just as the second paramedic car pulled into the car park, Brian Dawes appeared.

  ‘Been playing ghosts, Jane?’ he called with a grin. Then his face straightened: ‘Good God, not more trouble at your door? Someone bitten by a rat? Heavens, more of them! God, these emergency people always overreact.’

  I didn’t dare speak. Running ahead to throw open the kitchen door, I left him standing where he was.

  There wasn’t much room in the corridor, less in the stockroom itself, of course. I was torn: I mustn’t get in the way, but I needed to be at hand.

  ‘Do you have a name?’ a paramedic demanded.

  ‘I’m Jane Cowan. The head teacher. I made the call. But I’ve not seen your patient, so I don’t know who it is. I’m trying to find out who’s missing. The whole school’s in the village hall today. Except—’ I didn’t need to finish.

  ‘OK. Try and find out.’

  I skidded back to the hall.

  Melanie intercepted me: ‘There’s something really bad going on, isn’t there?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll explain later. Just give me the names of any absentees, Melanie.’ Dry-mouthed, I repeated them after her. ‘Robert. Emma. Prudence. And they were all registered earlier? You’re sure? What about Sophia?’

  ‘Here – but she came back quite late after the session in the playground.’

  ‘Let me know the instant any of them comes back. And if they’re not back in five phone or text their parents. And me. OK?’

  There was only one child in Stockroom A, wasn’t there? Just the one crush victim. So where were the other missing children? Pat and I had actually looked in the loos, hadn’t we? For anything that might scare the little ones. So they couldn’t be in there. But there was Stockroom B. Could they be in there? And what could they be doing in there?

  ‘Can’t I see who it is? I asked a young Asian constable.

  She shook her head: ‘Not just now. That’d interrupt the medics, ma’am. They’re trying to resuscitate her.’

  ‘OK, I’ll get you a list of possible names. Would it help to have photos? Give me two minutes to get their files.’

  It seemed to take half an hour to make my shaking fingers dig them out of the old-fashioned cabinet, but the constable seemed to think I’d been quite quick.

  Crazily they said there was still no question of them letting me see the child. It was a matter of life and death, the constable said simply.

  At last Pat, still, like me, clad in white, joined me. ‘A girl. Multiple injuries. Didn’t dare try chest compression. A kid, Avo. A kid.’ He didn’t try to hide the tears in his eyes.

  ‘Will she make it?’

  ‘They say they’ve stabilised her. But they’re going to need that field of yours for the chopper.’

  ‘A girl. Long hair?’ My mouth wouldn’t ask the colour.

  ‘Long. Blonde. Like all the others I saw in the playground.’

  Definitely blonde? So it’s probably Emma. God, Pat, just let me see her long enough to ID her!’r />
  He shook his head. ‘I’m trying to protect you here, Avo. Look, they’ll be asking in a minute if you’ve any idea how this happened. I’m just warning you. It’s a good job you’ve got me to give you an alibi. And in the absence of a nice convenient adult assailant, they’ll probably want to know who you’d point the finger of suspicion at, given that playground business you were telling me about.’

  I brushed aside the sense he was talking. ‘I need to see her. Because someone has to call her parents. Me.’

  ‘They’ll have someone to deal with all that. Trained. But it makes sense.’ He called softly over his shoulder.

  ‘It’ll take ten seconds at most.’

  ‘But it may live with you for the rest of your life.’

  It might well. The poor broken doll was Emma.

  Pushing past the paramedics, I flung myself into the girls’ mini loo, and retched and retched. To my amazement someone held my forehead and kept back my hair. But it wasn’t that that had me staggering to my feet and screaming wildly. It was the snake’s eye that had so scared the children.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  It wasn’t a snake, of course. Just the one beady eye of a tiny lens.

  ‘Really, Jane, you’re totally overwrought, and why not?’ Brian Dawes said. So it was he who’d appeared from nowhere and was now passing me a wad of paper towel to wipe my face. ‘What did you see, anyway?’ he added less sympathetically, nonetheless helping me to my feet.

  Apart from a child so ill she might not survive? And if she did, in what state? Could she ever be bright, vital Emma again?

  I took a deep breath, one long enough for me to gather my thoughts. I dropped the towel in the bin, washed my hands, dropped another towel in the bin. ‘I thought there was another rat,’ I lied. ‘They say they come up through sewers, don’t they? I had a builder who insisted on keeping loo lids down ever since he’d found one surfacing in his bathroom.’ The more I gabbled the more he’d believe me. Maybe. Because one thing was certain: only Pat and his colleagues were going to know what exactly I’d found by getting down to child’s eye level. ‘I’m sorry to ask you for more help after your kindness – not many people would have done that! And now would you lend me your arm, Brian? I’m not as steady on my feet as I’d like.’

  My appeal to his chivalry worked. He eased our way through the paramedics until he found one plainly not doing a lot and handed me over to his care. He clearly meant to retrace his steps along the corridor, but a uniformed policeman stopped him. ‘The fewer people round here the better, sir. And can you give my colleague your contact details as you leave? Main door, please. Thank you.’ He folded his arms repressively as Brian resumed bluster mode before accepting the inevitable and doing as he was told. I couldn’t have intervened. I simply couldn’t speak: to me, giving contact details meant questions at the very least and probably eliminating DNA in a crime scene. Pat’s. Mine. The children’s? I could have thrown up again. Wouldn’t …

  A text came through. The missing kids were back in the village hall. But not Emma.

  Not Emma.

  Would Emma ever be in the village hall again?

  There was a commotion in the corridor: they were moving her now. Somehow I’d not even registered the arrival of the air ambulance, though the sound of its departure would have awakened the dead.

  To have used such a term at such a time – I pressed my hands to my face. But now, even as I realised that the use of the chopper meant that Emma must be alive, I found that I was to be on the receiving end of medical attention. It was the last thing I wanted. I wanted to talk to Pat and I wanted to talk to him now.

  A young woman at his elbow, he was only a few feet away, stripping off his white overalls, which, ominously, were being stowed in an evidence bag. When I started to peel mine, the same young woman officer headed my way. I gave up on the overalls. Pat was drifting away.

  ‘I really need to speak to Pat,’ I said. ‘Urgently. Can you bring him over, please?’

  She took in the attempts the paramedic was making to check my vital signs and nodded with grim amusement.

  Pat didn’t seem pleased as he was propelled in my direction.

  ‘Those baby loos,’ I said quietly, but leaving him in no doubt that I was serious. ‘Get them sealed officially. Just do it, Pat. I’ll explain later.’

  To say he looked taken aback – he’d always been the one to give peremptory orders – would be a masterpiece of understatement. But he toddled off to find one of his Kent colleagues who was apparently happy to do his bidding.

  After the paramedic having found nothing wrong with me that a stiff gin wouldn’t cure – or on school property a cup of tea – I decided it was time to exert a modicum of control: I was, after all, on my territory. I asked for, and got, the senior investigating officer, a blonde woman a couple of years older than me who was clearly a gym bunny.

  ‘DCI Mandy Carpenter,’ she said, unsmiling, but offering me her hand.

  ‘A DCI attending a simple accident?’ I asked unthinkingly. Those I’d met were desk-bound, not leaping around at the first 999 call.

  ‘I literally happened to be passing. But as to it being a simple accident … And you are?’ she prompted.

  ‘Sorry. I’m Jane Cowan. I’m the head teacher here. What do you need me to do?’

  She looked at me with cool amusement. ‘I rather got the impression that it was you that wanted us to do things for you.’

  ‘I did. I wanted you to preserve what I suspect is a quite important piece of evidence in a case you don’t even know you have yet.’ Did that make sense? She nodded slowly, but might have been humouring me. ‘But now you have done as I asked, I promise I’ll do anything, anything at all, to help you find who hurt one of my children so badly.’

  She stared. ‘Biologically yours?’

  Which of the hundred or so looked like me?

  ‘I’m in loco parentis to the lot of them.’ My eyes filled – but better that, I suppose, than more nausea. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘How do you expect to be able to help me?’

  ‘Apart from access to the children’s records? I could give you some background information that may well be germane to your enquiry. And I could tell you why I want the loos cordoned off. And locked, please. Because some of our older pupils – like the victim today – seem incapable of obeying direct instructions. Shall we go to my office? I might be more coherent there. And I can organise coffee for you and your team while I fill you in. I can’t do either as well as the school secretary who knows far more about the school than I do – I’m new in the post – but I’ll do my best. And there are probably pikelets just waiting to be toasted.’

  Her face softened and her accent shifted away from clipped received pronunciation. ‘Pikelets, our kid? What these soft southerners call crumpets? I didn’t think you were really from round here.’

  I set us in motion. ‘No more than Pat is. Wolverhampton. That’s where we met. I’ve moved around a bit since then. He’ll explain more tersely than I can. Unfortunately, one of your colleagues, PC Lloyd Davies, who’s dealt with several outbreaks of minor crime here and knows a lot about my past, has just gone on annual leave.’ At last, my hands clenched, I asked what I’d needed to ask for the last twenty minutes. ‘Emma? That child – that little girl – what’s the prognosis?’

  ‘We’ll leave that to the medics. What I want to know is how she came to be buried under a pile of cardboard boxes.’

  ‘Did they fall or were they pushed?’ If the question was good enough for Terry the oil delivery man, if worded slightly differently, it was good enough for me. But I wished it hadn’t sounded so commonplace.

  I thought for a moment she was going to fob me off. But at last she said, ‘That’s what the forensic teams and the medics should be able to sort out between them. And the other children when we bring a team in to talk to them. Tomorrow, I’d say.’

  There was no way Melanie’s supply of pikelets and butter would stretch to w
hat was rapidly resembling a small army, including men and women sporting white suits like the one I was still unaccountably wearing. DCI Carpenter was obviously treating the incident very seriously. But I did feel that Pat, occupation now gone, deserved to be invited along too. The bonus could be that he and Carpenter might talk shop, which would enable me to glean information I would not otherwise be privy to.

  It had been easier to get the suit on than it was to peel it off. Eventually, with a dry laugh, Pat gave me a hand. ‘I would think we can bin this – Jane never actually entered the stockroom,’ he told Carpenter.

  ‘What I’d like to know is why she was wearing it in the first place,’ she said reasonably.

  ‘Because I was wearing my best school clothes when Pat turned up, suggesting we try to get rid of some of the boxes in the stockrooms, which had been here since Noah sailed his boat up the cut.’ We exchanged a three-way smile at my use of the Black Country idiom. ‘At least, ever since my predecessor stopped using them as boys’ and girls’ changing rooms. For some reason I’ve not yet fathomed three or four children regularly insisted on trying to get in there, despite endless prohibitions and a row of cones, the ones now stacked in the corner of the hall, which I used to stop – to try to stop! – anyone using the corridor.’

  ‘Haven’t you questioned them?’

  ‘Don’t think we haven’t tried. Sadly schools aren’t allowed to use Abu Ghraib interrogation methods any more. Seriously, some parents want to sue if we so much as ask the kids to tie their shoelaces. So no, I’ve no idea what the fascination was, unless they’d found a further supply of porn mags so filthy I passed the ones we found to your PC Davies.’

  Another reasonable question: ‘Why not simply bin them? Not in a classroom bin, obviously, but in your big recycling one.’

  ‘They might not have stayed in the bin, however secure you’d think it might be. They might have been scattered to the four winds or pasted all over the school or sent to the media.’ Cue the story about the football shirts. ‘There were other problems with my house, which Lloyd Davies suspected were part of a campaign, which neither of us could provide a reason for. But now I really think I might be on to something. At one point this morning I had to throw up. As I knelt by the loo my eyes must have been roughly the level a small child’s would be. And I found myself looking into a camera lens. That’s why I wanted it cordoned off.’