Silent Night

by Nell Pattison

  As I watched, Courtney and Bradley came past, signing furiously to each other, but I didn’t watch too closely – when you understand sign language, it’s easy to find yourself eavesdropping on people’s conversations without even realising it, and I didn’t want to intrude on the teenagers’ privacy. They passed Samira going in the opposite direction and didn’t acknowledge her, but immediately stopped signing until they were past. Samira paused in the middle of the corridor and fished around in her bag for a moment until she found her phone. Frowning at the screen, she held it up as if making a video call, but it appeared the person she was calling didn’t answer. After trying another couple of times, she shoved the phone back into her bag and carried on to her next lesson.

  I garnered a few curious glances from students on their way past, but mostly they seemed preoccupied with their own thoughts, on edge due to recent events. Within a few minutes, the corridor was empty again, but I found myself curious to see more of the school. To my left was a cloakroom, and at the end of the corridor I could see the school hall. To my right, classrooms and what looked like the library. Wondering if I was even allowed to be down here, I set off towards the classrooms.

  These appeared to be for the secondary students, and I passed an English room and one for the humanities. At the end was an open door, and I poked my head round it out of curiosity, only to be met by the sight of five students looking back at me over the tops of their PC monitors, including Bradley and Courtney.

  ‘Can I help you?’ I jumped at the voice, and stepped back again as Saul Achembe came into view around a computer. He was smiling at me, but I apologised anyway.

  ‘Ah, don’t worry, it’s fine. This lot are working on personal projects, come in.’

  I followed him into the classroom and perched where he indicated, on a stool next to his desk.

  ‘Having a break? Or doing some snooping for the cops?’ He asked the second question in a cheesy American accent and made me laugh.

  ‘No, they don’t need me at the moment, so I thought I’d have a wander. My sister came to this school, but I never really got to see it properly myself.’

  ‘You have a deaf sister?’

  ‘Whole family,’ I replied. ‘I’m the odd one out.’

  ‘My big brother is deaf,’ Saul told me. ‘My parents learnt to sign when he was a baby, so when I was born three years later we all used it at home. He has hearing aids and he learnt to speak pretty well, so our parents gradually stopped the signing, but Isaac and I kept it up. We had a secret language that nobody else knew, it was amazing.’ He grinned at me. ‘I think it was only natural that I’d end up teaching deaf students.’

  ‘Do you just teach IT?’ I asked. ‘Or do you have another subject as well?’

  ‘No, just IT, but I also manage the network, handle all the hardware and software, and so on. When I’m not teaching, I’m checking the tablets are updated, or sorting out the projector for an interactive whiteboard, or more often than not resetting a password when someone’s forgotten it.’

  ‘Sounds busy.’

  ‘I can’t complain, really. I enjoy it. The only problem is the lack of money for new equipment, so I have to make sure we keep everything in good working order.’

  As Saul and I chatted, I watched some of the students interacting. The three students I didn’t know were all sitting together, with Bradley and Courtney next to each other on the opposite side of the room. Whenever I looked up, they were signing to each other under the table, but as soon as they saw me looking in their direction they stopped. Under the desk, I could see Courtney’s foot hooked around Bradley’s ankle.

  ‘It’s a bad business, this with Leon and Steve,’ Saul muttered. ‘I’m worried about how the kids are taking it.’

  I was about to ask another question when the door opened and Liz Marcek walked in. All the students sat up a little straighter, but she was more interested in my presence.

  Paige. Is there something wrong? Her lips were pursed in irritation, presumably that I’d been wandering around the school without her knowledge.

  No, I was just talking to Saul about the school, I replied.

  The police don’t need her at the moment, so I said she could observe my class, get to know the school a bit better, Saul chipped in, and I flashed him a quick smile.

  Well, if you’re interested in a tour, I’m happy to oblige, Liz replied, holding open the door and giving me a wide smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. Recognising that I’d been dismissed, I walked out into the corridor and she followed me.

  This was your sister’s school, I believe. Have you never looked round?

  No, I’d only been in the main hall before this week, I replied, wondering who had told her about Anna.

  Then follow me. She marched off, her back ramrod straight and her nose in the air.

  We spent the next twenty minutes looking around the school, from the nursery, which took hearing children from the local area as well as deaf children, right up to the secondary. I was given the spiel about their new science lab, as well as shown all of the assistive technology they had for the students.

  All the students wear radio aids as well as their hearing aids or cochlear implants. This allows them to hear the teacher more clearly. All our students use BSL, but some of them also use spoken English, so the teachers use both.

  Is it usually Sign-Supported English? I asked, referring to when someone would sign and speak at the same time, using BSL signs but in English word order. Liz looked mildly impressed that I knew what I was talking about, and I wanted to give her a gentle reminder that I’d spent my life in the Deaf community and my adulthood working with deaf clients.

  That depends on the class. If a teacher has two students who prefer BSL, that’s what they’ll use. If the class prefers a mixture of communication modes, it’s spoken English and SSE. All our teachers are highly experienced and use their own judgement.

  We found ourselves walking down towards the hall as the bell went for lunchtime. Flashing lights were set up in each classroom and along the corridor to alert students to the change in lessons. Teenagers started to hurry past us to the hall, which was set up as a canteen. We stood back against the wall to let them past.

  I need to supervise students at lunchtime, Liz told me, nodding at the corridor that led back to the meeting room and the entrance hall. Can you find your own way back?

  I told her I could, then watched her stride down the corridor, stopping to tell a student off for not wearing his uniform correctly. After a few minutes, I followed her.

  Having been to the local state school myself, it felt strange to be in such a small group of students. All twenty-three students could have lunch at the same time and they’d barely fill three of the tables that crowded the dining hall in my old school. I hovered in the doorway to the hall, watching Liz Marcek keeping the line in order. She chatted to every student as she stood there, asking some how their mornings had been, encouraging others to take a piece of fruit with their lunch. That was surely the value in having an environment like this, where the staff could get to know every single pupil and make them feel like an important part of the school community.

  Glancing over to the other side of the room, I saw Cassie, Courtney and Bradley sitting at a table together. Kian joined them a moment later. Another boy tried to follow Kian, but the four residential students stared at him until he backed off and chose a seat elsewhere. A shiver ran down my spine at the way they coordinated their response to a perceived intruder into their little pack.

  As I watched, Kian turned to Bradley.

  Do you really think he did it?

  Bradley shrugged. I don’t know.

  Shouldn’t we have told the police?

  No. Stop going on about it.

  We need to try and get in touch with Joe, ask him what happened, Kian insisted, his eyes wide.

  Why? We can’t trust him. We can’t trust anyone.

  Courtney looked up and saw me watching, nudged Bradle
y and nodded in my direction. The four students turned to look at me, and I backed away. What had they been talking about? Who was Joe? And what were the four of them hiding?

  Chapter 11

  Who had the kids been talking about? Was this Joe involved in Steve’s murder? I’d found myself getting distracted during the two interviews after lunch, wondering what the five of them were hiding. In the end, I didn’t tell Singh about it, because really, what was there to tell? A group of students were talking about someone else. It wasn’t evidence, and that was the only thing DI Forest would be interested in.

  Before we left for the day, Singh turned to me and spoke quietly.

  ‘I’ll drop the DI back at the station, then do you want to meet for a coffee?’

  My heart had a little flutter of excitement and I agreed, wondering why he didn’t want Forest to hear his invitation. He named a coffee shop we’d been to before, then got in the car and left.

  Approaching my car, I paused. The snow had stopped, leaving a smooth blanket around the other vehicles in the car park. Next to my car, however, there was a trail of footprints, leading from the path to the driver’s door, then around to the passenger side. A shiver ran down my spine and I looked around me, suddenly feeling as if I were being watched. Was it the same person who’d been peering in my car earlier? All the windows that overlooked the car park were empty, however.

  Before I got in, I checked the back seat and the boot, as well as my tyres, but there was nothing to indicate why someone had been looking at my car. I hadn’t imagined it yesterday, and today it was even clearer. As I pulled out of the gates I checked around me again, just in case someone was watching me leave, but there was no one.

  My drive home was dull but easy, a straight run up the A15, freshly gritted and clear of snow, so I could let my mind wander a bit. I wondered how the search party was getting on at Normanby Hall. Surely Leon would be a long way away from there by now? If he left the grounds with a purpose and hadn’t been found yet, either it was because he’d been successful and made his way away from there without being recognised, or else something far more sinister had happened to him.

  A forty-five-minute drive later I drove up Ashby High Street in Scunthorpe, looking for a parking space. In the end I turned down a side street and parked on the road, then walked back to the cafe Singh had chosen. I was the first to arrive, and I chose a table in the window. Only two other tables were occupied, one by a couple of young mums with pushchairs and another by an elderly man who had three different newspapers on the table in front of him.

  I ordered two coffees and a scone, as I hadn’t had the chance to have any lunch. Not knowing what Singh might want to eat, I figured I’d let him order his own. As I sat back at the window, I saw him standing outside with his phone to his ear, his other hand in his pocket and a look of concentration on his face.

  A few minutes later, he pushed open the door to the cafe and sat down opposite me.

  ‘What was that about?’

  ‘The tech team have been going through Leon’s school account. It looks like he’d been accessing a lot of chat rooms and a couple of dating sites after hours.’

  ‘How could he get onto those on the school system?’ I asked. I thought schools were supposed to have safety settings to prevent students accessing inappropriate material.

  ‘That’s one of the things I asked them. Apparently they can’t figure that out without access to the system itself, so I’ve left a message for Saul Achembe to get back to me. Hopefully he can work that out. The other relevant thing, however, is that there are some messages that Leon saved. They’re very flirtatious, and there are a couple of mentions of meeting up, but then nothing more after that. The techs say they’re all from one account, but they think it’s most likely that some have been deleted.’

  ‘Who were they from?’ I asked quietly, conscious that there were other people who could quite easily overhear us if they tried.

  Singh glanced over his shoulder. ‘They don’t know. There’s just a screen name. They tracked it back to a website, and the profile is claiming to be a sixteen-year-old boy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.’

  ‘Is that why you asked Samira about Leon meeting someone?’

  Singh nodded and took a big gulp of his coffee.

  I shook my head slowly. ‘You think this person might have persuaded him to run away?’

  ‘That’s a big leap right now, but it’s certainly something we’ll look into.’

  We sat in silence for a moment, while Singh looked enviously at my scone. He went to order his own, and I waited until he had sat down and was settled before continuing.

  ‘What about his social media?’

  ‘Without his phone we can’t track every network he was using. We know he was on Facebook and Snapchat, and we’re trying to get access to his messages and WhatsApp.’

  ‘Have you tried some of the video-based networks? OoVoo was a popular one with a lot of deaf people, but it shut down last year. There’ll be others, though. Can you get his call records? He might be more likely to video chat with people rather than text them, depending on the situation.’

  ‘We’ll get all of that checked, thanks.’

  Finally taking a swig of his coffee, Singh sat back and rubbed his face. ‘I had really hoped for a slightly less complicated case for my first one as DS.’

  I nodded sympathetically, but I couldn’t help wondering why he’d asked me here for coffee, so I put the question to him.

  ‘Why are we here, Rav? I know it’s not just so you can tell me about what Leon’s been doing online.’

  He sighed. ‘I wanted to ask you about Mike Lowther, and I got the feeling it wasn’t something you’d want to talk about while we were still at the school.’

  I felt like someone had poured a bucket of ice water over my head. Looking down at my lap, I examined my hands for a moment, before forcing a smile. ‘Of course. What do you want to know?’

  Singh spread his hands. ‘Well, how do you know him? What’s the source of this animosity I can sense between you?’

  ‘Did you ask him?’ I asked, looking down at my drink, scared of the answer.

  ‘What? Of course not. It wasn’t appropriate.’

  I let out a sigh of relief. If I was going to have this conversation with Singh, I wanted to be the one to get my side in first, just to make sure he believed me. But I didn’t really want to go into detail.

  ‘He’s my ex,’ I replied. ‘We were together for about five years, and we split up three years ago.’

  Singh waited for me to continue but I resisted. ‘I assume it wasn’t a particularly amicable break-up?’ he asked eventually.

  I smiled ruefully. ‘Not exactly. In fact, the whole relationship was pretty awful, to be honest. But it’s all water under the bridge. I just wasn’t expecting to see him on Saturday, and it wasn’t a nice surprise.’

  He gave me a long look, before his gaze dropped to my left arm, where I’d pulled my sleeve up in the warmth of the cafe. A jagged scar ran from the back of my wrist to my elbow.

  ‘I’ve only seen your scar once before, when you were in hospital,’ he said, too bloody clever for his own good. He wasn’t changing the subject, he knew that. He was trying to tease information out of me like he would a witness, and I wasn’t going to put up with that.

  I folded my arms. ‘I haven’t seen you since February. I’ve always been wearing long sleeves.’

  We sat like that for a moment, before he shrugged and admitted defeat. ‘Paige, you know if there’s ever anything you want to talk to me about, anything you want to report, I’ll be here for you.’ He reached out to touch my arm protectively, but then seemed to think better of it and pulled away, looking embarrassed.

  My face softened. ‘I know that, thank you.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I looked at my watch. ‘I’d better get going.’ I needed to leave before I found myself getting too emotional.

  He nodded, and stared in
to his coffee, brooding, as I put my coat on and left. Once I was outside I glanced at him through the window and he gave me a small smile before pulling out his phone.

  Before I went home, however, I turned off towards Brigg, a small town near Scunthorpe, and, more importantly, where Max lived. I hadn’t seen very much of him in the last couple of weeks, and it was about time I remedied that. My confusion over my feelings for Singh and the sudden appearance of Mike back into my life made me realise that I needed to look at what was right in front of me.

  I pulled up outside his flat at the same time he did, and we met at the front door. When he pulled away from our kiss, he raised an eyebrow at me, his blue eyes glinting with mischief.

  I don’t know what I did, but it must have been good.

  I grinned at him, flooded with warmth by the way he looked at me. I just wanted to see you.

  Good, he replied, and I followed him into the flat.

  How was your day? I asked him as he busied himself with the kettle.

  He shrugged. Same old, same old. Too much work, not enough people to do it. Yours?

  Busy, I replied, with a matching shrug. Lots of people to interview in a school for the deaf.

  I hope you’re being careful, he told me with a stern look. Not like last time.

  Max and I had met when Lexi was killed. He knew full well how deeply I’d involved myself in that investigation, and he’d seen first-hand the level of danger I’d put myself in.

  I promise, I signed, drawing a cross over my heart. Still, it’s a nasty situation. I hope they find the boy soon.

  There aren’t too many places a teenager can hide in this sort of weather. Max nodded towards the window, through which I could see it had started to snow again. If he’s out there on his own, he’ll be found soon.