Burning Secrets

by Clare Chambers

  Outside there was a yard where you could kick a ball around. It was surrounded by a high wall – not so much to stop you getting out, Alan explained, as to stop people staring in. There was a basketball hoop fixed to the wall, so I asked if there was a ball. Alan didn’t think so – Roach had kicked the last one out of the compound. But after tea – the last meal of the day, dished up at five o’clock, so you were starving again by nine – Alan said he’d found one in the office.

  The others were crowding around the PlayStation arguing, so I went outside to shoot a few baskets. The ball had been over-pumped and had a sky-high bounce, and the net had been torn off the hoop, but practising shots took my mind off the caged-in feeling that had built up all day. When I looked at my watch ten minutes had passed – ten minutes of my stretch. Done.

  Then Roach came out. He had a whole bunch of twitches and tics, like all his muscles were jumping. Even if Tyler-or-Taylor hadn’t warned me I could see he was someone to avoid. He was the sort of person you’d imagine torturing animals for fun.

  But avoiding people isn’t an option in a unit of eight. He came and stood against the wall right under the basket, directly in my line of vision.

  “Do you want a go?” I said and threw him the ball.

  He spun it on his finger, then carefully and deliberately tossed the ball into the air and kicked it as hard and high as he could, so it sailed out of the compound. He smiled and went back indoors.

  I shut my eyes and waited for my fists to unclench while red lights flashed behind my eyelids. I began to count down in thirteens from 1000: 987, 974, 961 . . .

  I’d sworn to myself: while I was here I wouldn’t let anything get to me. No matter what, I wouldn’t retaliate or show any emotion. I’d just get through each day 119 times and then it would be over. If I felt myself losing it or welling up, I’d just do hard maths – it’s impossible to concentrate on two things at once if one of them is maths.

  Back inside everything was quiet: everyone banished to their rooms. Alan was in the rec room sweeping up glass. The argument had escalated – Warren had thrown a snooker ball through the TV screen. The wrecked TV was covered in a blanket, like a parrot’s cage.

  The night warden had a very deep posh voice. He called out goodnight before locking me in. As the key turned I felt a sudden wave of panic – it was the first time I really understood what I’d done. I had to take deep breaths to stop myself from battering at the door, yelling to be let out. The only way I could stand it was to tell myself the lock was there to keep the other nutters out. But I never got used to it. Not really.

  I lay on the bed, listening to the swish of traffic on the bypass. I’d always assumed places like Lissmore would be miles from anywhere, like Dartmoor or Salisbury Plain. But it was slap in the middle of town just off a main road, surrounded by houses, shops, offices. Normal life was carrying on all around us.

  I switched on my torch and combed the walls, picking out the photo of Chet as a puppy. My throat burned. 118 days to go.

  Chapter 14

  WREN COTTAGE WAS in a Victorian terrace of school housing just beyond the playing fields on the road to Filey. Daniel had passed them on one of his first explorations of Stape, and been struck by the fact that all of the cottages were named after birds.

  There was no car outside and no light on; the dark windows had a blank dead-eyed look. Daniel hardly needed to knock to confirm there was no one home, but did anyway, just to be sure. At this pressure the door swung open on the latch. Islanders never locked their doors, but this was taking things to extremes – besides, Helen Swift was a Londoner, and a paranoid one at that.

  “Hello,” he called uncertainly into the hallway. “Helen?”

  Silence.

  Stepping into the front garden Daniel peered through the bay window into the room beyond. It was furnished simply, and immaculately tidy. No, not just tidy, Daniel thought, empty. Even his room at Lissmore hadn’t been that bare. No pictures on the walls, no ornaments or books on shelves, no possessions, no clutter. Either Helen Swift lived like a monk, or she didn’t live here.

  Daniel hesitated on the doorstep with a sense of uneasiness, before sheer curiosity forced him inside.

  He moved from room to room, tense and fearful, bracing himself for a shock. At the back of his mind lurked the morbid fear prompted by half-remembered films that he was going to stumble across Helen’s body, bludgeoned to death or hanging from a rafter. But the house revealed no horrors, only signs of abandonment. In the upstairs bedroom the wardrobe stood open and empty, the bed stripped of sheets. There were balled-up tissues in the bin and cotton-wool pads smeared with make-up. On the back of the door hung a silver tasselled scarf which Daniel remembered Helen had been wearing in the music room at their first meeting. There were no personal belongings in the bathroom, but there was water in the shower tray and dried blobs of toothpaste in the washbasin.

  Downstairs in the kitchen were more signs of recent habitation – a sink full of unwashed dishes, half a bottle of milk and a withered lettuce in the fridge. His anxiety had passed, but now he was left with questions unanswered, and no real idea what to do next.

  He had to pass by the school on his way home, so he decided to try the music room, just in case he’d misunderstood Helen’s instructions. He slipped in through the unmanned reception area, and made his way down the quiet corridors. The room was much tidier than last time, the tables cleared and books and instruments stacked in the cupboards. Through the windows he could see a hockey game taking place on the floodlit all-weather pitch. Dark clouds were rolling in from the west and a few raindrops streaked the glass. He’d not been there more than a minute when he heard brisk female footsteps approaching. At last, he thought, standing up – he wasn’t leaving without a full explanation.

  Mrs Ivory put her head around the door and gave a start of surprise to see Daniel. “Oh,” she said. “You made me jump.”

  “Sorry,” said Daniel. “I was . . . just waiting for Miss Swift. For a piano lesson,” he added.

  “Oh?” Mrs Ivory raised a neat eyebrow. “When was that arranged?”

  “Last week?” said Daniel.

  “Ah. Well, you’re not the only one looking for her. But unfortunately she seems to have gone in rather a hurry.”

  “Gone?”

  “Left the island. She was on the lunchtime ferry.”

  “Oh,” said Daniel, frowning. “Is she coming back?”

  “Apparently not. We’ve been left in the lurch, as they say.” Mrs Ivory gave him a palms-up shrug. “She didn’t mention anything to you about leaving?” she asked as an afterthought.

  “No,” Daniel replied. For a moment he considered telling Mrs Ivory what Helen had told him about not really being a teacher. Mrs Ivory had been kind to Louie, and seemed altogether more rational and reliable than Helen. Yet for some reason he kept quiet. If Helen had done something criminal, he’d have to come clean eventually, but for now he preferred to keep his secrets to himself.

  “Well, I’ll have to start looking for another music teacher. What a pity. I thought she was a real find.” At the door she turned. “How’s your lovely sister, by the way? She seemed such a troubled soul.”

  “Oh, she’s OK,” Daniel mumbled. He wasn’t going to start blabbing about Louie’s problems to Mrs Ivory.

  “There must be something we can do for her. It’s a pity she doesn’t come over to the school sometimes.”

  Daniel shrugged, refusing to be drawn into a discussion about their lack of schooling.

  “Is there something she particularly misses from home?”

  Daniel shook his head and then remembered. “Diet Coke,” he said with a grin. “She misses her Diet Coke.”

  Mrs Ivory wrinkled her nose. “Well, it wouldn’t be my choice, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  She left him puzzling over the mysterious departure of Helen Swift. Surely she could have left some kind of message? He had been in all morning: she could have called at The Brow o
n her way to the ferry – it was a bit of a detour, but she owed him that at least.

  Outside the rain had stopped and there was a break in the clouds before the next storm came across. If he ran all the way home he might just avoid a soaking. At the door he gave a last backward glance at the empty music room, and stopped as something caught his eye. On the piano a piece of new sheet music had been left out on the stand. It was the Rachmaninov prelude Helen had heard him trying to play from memory the first time they had met. Perhaps she’d left it out for him. It wouldn’t be much use to her if she’d really gone for good, he reasoned, so he might as well take it. As he picked it up something slipped from between the pages and on to the floor. A piece of cardboard about the size of a biscuit, roughly torn from a box – the same piece, Daniel was sure, that Helen had taken from the wheelie bin. On one side was a handwritten mobile phone number, on the other, a printed logo. It had been too dark that night to see the logo properly but now he recognised it: a crooked smile. Just like the one on the blue drawstring bag.

  Chapter 15

  IT DIDN’T TAKE long for news of Helen Swift’s hasty departure to spread. Islanders seemed to feel that it was their duty to pass on any piece of fresh gossip to as many people as possible. Once a rumour was in circulation it was impossible to halt its progress. Only Louie and Mum, isolated at The Brow, remained cut off from this network.

  There was no shortage of theories: she had assaulted a student and been suspended; she was an illegal immigrant working without a permit; she’d had a nervous breakdown; she was an outsider, and outsiders never last.

  All these suggestions were the subject of discussion at the Arkins’ dinner table.

  “Perhaps she’s got a boyfriend back home in London and she’s missing him,” said Ramsay, twirling spaghetti round her fork. It was two days since the fireworks and Daniel still hadn’t called round. She’d waited in all day Sunday, not daring to go out in case she missed him, and had come rushing home from school today. But Fay, who had been playing hockey, said she thought she’d seen him in the music block. So he’d been in the neighbourhood and hadn’t bothered to call. It was almost enough to put Ramsay off her dinner, if only spaghetti carbonara wasn’t her favourite meal and she wasn’t starving.

  “Well, I don’t think she’s done anything illegal. I thought she was really nice,” said Fay, “even if she was a bit mean about our singing.”

  “I wonder what will happen about the Christmas concert?” said Ramsay.

  “Oh, I expect someone will step in,” said her mum, grating parmesan over her pasta. “The problem is, there aren’t enough of us islanders with qualifications to do all the jobs, so they bring these outsiders over and they don’t fit in.”

  “I don’t think outsiders are that different from us, really,” said Ramsay, yet at a deeper instinctive level she doubted it. Daniel, for instance. The way he lived was so impulsive and free. And Louie, with her manic tears, self-harming and God knows what else was like no one you’d ever meet on Wragge.

  “Speaking of outsiders,” said Mr Arkin, who had not contributed to the previous debate, “I found out something about those new people at The Brow today, which makes you wonder whether the residency office does even the most basic checks before handing out permits.”

  Everyone looked up from their plates, Ramsay a little more quickly than the rest.

  “You learn all sorts of interesting things reading old court reports,” Mr Arkin went on, helping himself to salad with a pair of tongs like giant tweezers.

  “Wasn’t it the boy from The Brow who took you to the fireworks?” Mrs Arkin asked Ramsay.

  “He didn’t take me. I just met him there. With a load of other people,” Ramsay replied, a little defensively.

  “You’re not seeing him, are you?” asked her father, chasing a slippery tomato around the salad bowl with the tongs.

  “I don’t know. No, I’m not seeing him,” Ramsay said, hoping that Daniel wouldn’t choose this particular moment to call round. “He’s actually really nice.”

  “And his sister’s nice too. When she’s not freaking out,” Fay added, not particularly helpfully.

  “Did he tell you anything about his past? What he did before he came here?” Mr Arkin enquired.

  “Yes,” said Ramsay instinctively, feeling that he must have done. But now she’d come to think about it she couldn’t remember a thing he’d told her about himself, except that he’d stood outside their house at two in the morning. She could hardly admit that. “Um, no.”

  “This really nice boy didn’t mention that he’d spent four months in a secure unit for young offenders?”

  Ramsay shook her head in denial. She wished she could think of some evidence to disprove it, but she knew it was true. She recalled those little snippets of conversation that she’d forgotten – that he’d missed too much school last year to take exams; that he couldn’t bear to be cooped up inside any more.

  “What’s he supposed to have done?”

  “Set fire to a building,” said Mr Arkin. “Burned a man to death.”

  “HOW MANY FIRES have you started?” Alan asked me. “Roughly?”

  “None. I mean apart from the shed.”

  “Interesting,” said Alan, turning the pages of my file. “Because it says in the transcript of the trial: Prosecution: Why did you set fire to the shed?

  Defendant: I didn’t set fire to the shed. I lit a little bonfire behind the shed, and the shed caught fire by accident.

  Prosecutor: Why did you light ‘a little bonfire’?

  Defendant – that’s you – Because I like lighting fires.” Alan looked up. “You like lighting fires, but until this point you’d never actually lit any fires. So how did you know you liked it?”

  “I don’t remember saying that.”

  “It’s down here in black and white.”

  “I must’ve said it then. They ask so many questions that are almost the same – after a while you can’t remember what you said.”

  “Does the name Sidney Robsart mean anything to you?”

  I wasn’t expecting that. Blood rushed to my face. “I know who he is. Was.” Even when I’m ninety and so senile I can’t remember my own name I won’t be able to forget Sidney Robsart. It’s always at night when I’m dropping off to sleep that I think about him. I can hear his fists on the wooden door and his dog howling.

  The old woman who came to do the allotment had brought a new padlock with her that day – she was fed up with kids using her shed as a shelter, leaving fag ends and takeaway cartons all over the floor. It never crossed her mind that a tramp might have crept inside out of the wind to curl up with his dog and a bottle of cider and fallen asleep.

  The weird thing is, in my dream I’m always the one inside the shed. Trying to get out, throwing myself against the locked door, while the smoke and flames rise up and choke me.

  Chapter 16

  DANIEL SAT IN the doctor’s waiting room at Darrow, reading the health notices on the opposite wall: Incontinent? Don’t suffer in silence. Meningitis: Know the Signs. Smoking: We Can Help You Quit. His mum warned him never to touch the magazines at a GP’s surgery as they were riddled with germs from the unwashed hands of diseased patients. He wasn’t convinced there was much science behind this – surely doctors of all people would be aware of this potential hazard under their noses. Not that there was much to tempt him amongst the decades-old copies of The Countryman and Women’s Realm.

  He had woken up with a raging sore throat, as if he’d swallowed acid, and when Mum had peered into his mouth using a pen torch and a ruler to hold his tongue flat he’d nearly gagged. She decided that he needed antibiotics and had made him an appointment for that afternoon. She’d even gone as far as giving him a lift to the surgery, though her tender care didn’t extend to waiting around for the return trip.

  Several times during the morning Daniel had picked up the mysterious fragment of cardboard and wondered if Helen had left it for him deliberately, and i
f so why. He’d shown the logo to Louie without explaining its origin, and she had recognised it as the one on his drawstring bag, but didn’t know what it stood for. It was pointless asking Mum; she wouldn’t know the difference between a BMW badge and a hot cross bun.

  The waiting room was starting to fill up with mums and babies, arriving for a weighing clinic. They all seemed to know each other and Daniel’s head was ringing with the babble of female voices, all talking at once above a background of wailing babies. Suddenly he felt grateful he was male.

  The doctor was a jowly-faced man with a bald head but plenty of hair emerging from ears and nostrils by way of compensation. His breath, when he leant towards Daniel to examine his throat, smelled of coffee – stale and foul.

  “Any earache?” the doctor asked, producing a magnifying torch and forcing the funnel-shaped point into Daniel’s ear.

  “Ow. No.”

  “Any fever?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Not allergic to penicillin, are you?”

  “No.”

  The doctor turned back to his computer terminal and pecked at the keyboard with one finger. A moment later a green prescription sheet rolled from the printer. “Take one tablet four times a day on an empty stomach,” he said as there was a tap at the door and the receptionist appeared, carrying a mug of coffee.

  I don’t have an empty stomach four times a day, thought Daniel, and then his attention was caught by something that drove all other thoughts out of his head. The mug, which the receptionist had carefully put down on the desk, had a symbol of a crooked smile on the side next to the word: Narveng.

  “There we are,” said the doctor, handing over the prescription. “Make sure you complete the course, even if you feel better.” He was too polite to start drinking his coffee in front of a patient, but his hand crept towards the cup in anticipation.

  Daniel stood up, hesitating.

  “Anything else?” asked the doctor, with a regretful glance at his coffee.