by Julia Jones
Adult voices. He looked out. Ms Spinks was marching down the path with a small man in a suit. And Toxic, in an acid-green coat and high-heeled shoes with red soles!
He’d bump straight into them if he left now.
The two doors through to the textile rooms and the main corridor were closed. Almost certainly locked. Donny couldn’t risk moving right across to check. He mustn’t be caught near the project cupboard either. Toxic knew that he was Anna’s friend. Mustn’t do anything to get her in more trouble.
There was another DT storage cupboard, much smaller. Books and stationery. No need for anyone to look in there. Donny pulled the door shut. There wasn’t a handle on the inside, so he grabbed a thick bit of card and slipped it over the latch. That way it stuck out both sides and held the door closed, but not fastened.
“I thought my colleague said she’d left a student here.” He recognised the deputy head’s irritating accent from assemblies. “I do apologise, Ms Tune. It was probably the parent to blame. They’re always in such a rush.”
Donny heard Toxic sneer something about lack of Professionalism.
“What a place to leave shoes!” Ms Spinks tutted. Then she read one of Granny’s neat labels. “John Walker. I don’t know him. I’ll put them in Lost Property – though whether they’ll ever be claimed. Some of these children behave as if they were made of money!”
Toxic probably leered and nodded but she didn’t answer. Surprising because she would have known this was his form-room. She issued a few technical-sounding instructions and then the two women went away.
No shoes! All the way home in his socks. Unless he could get back to his locker and find some plimsolls.
How soon could he come out? That small bloke must be the IT expert. Once he was working he surely wouldn’t be that bothered by some unknown boy slipping past? The latch on the cupboard door wouldn’t click because he’d got that card tucked over it.
Donny needed to be starting home. Skye would soon be looking out for him. It was about all that she did in the day – except sleep at odd times and keep folding their few clothes. She hadn’t even made any dream-catchers.
He blamed the happy pills.
The new doctor didn’t understand sign language so Donny had to interpret for Skye when she went for her appointments. People kept telling him that he must be sure to include everything his mother said. No editing. So when Skye had asked the doctor if he could give her any of the brave sleep drink, Donny had done his best to explain what she’d meant. He told the doctor that he thought Skye was finding it hard to settle and needed help with her bad dreams but all he’d got was disapproval and lots more notes in the file.
He knew she’d begin worrying. He’d got to go. Even if he was risking an awkward conversation with the small man in the suit. He couldn’t hear any movement outside the cupboard door. Most of the computers were at the other end of the room. The expert must be busy by now. There was no point looking at what he was doing or trying to ask an intelligent question because he wouldn’t understand the answer.
Donny wriggled his rucksack onto his back so it didn’t swing about. Then he began inching his fingers round the edge of the door to muffle any possible noise.
The attacker moved with an expert’s speed. The moment that the door began to shift, it was grabbed by its external handle and heaved open.
Donny tumbled out. The attacker kicked him hard between the legs then dived forward, both hands to Donny’s chest and sent him reeling in again.
The cupboard was shallow. Donny hit the back of his head on a shelf and slumped down.
The door slammed shut.
As this was a DT room, the attacker had no problem finding some quick-setting glue to squirt into the latch. He didn’t waste time checking any of the computers. Simply wiped the hard drive of the network server and left.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Don’t Joke with the Tiger
Thursday 5 October
He couldn’t tell how long he’d been unconscious. His right shoulder was stuck under one of the bottom shelves, while his left shoulder and head were crammed between the corner of the wall and the door.
It took him some time to work this out as it was pitch-black inside the cupboard. It didn’t help that the throbbing pain in the back of his head was having an ouch-factor competition with the pounding ache in his balls.
When he had finally discovered which way up he was, and had levered his head away from the cold surface of the wall, he accidentally shifted his weight onto his bum. The pain that cascaded upwards was so intense he almost passed out again. He started to shake and wanted to be sick. So for a while he just lay there panting quietly in the darkness.
Then he pushed the door. It wouldn’t budge. He began to wonder how much oxygen there was in an average school stationery cupboard? The atmosphere felt thick and oppressive. He had dreamt of drowning: of fighting for survival beneath tons of crushing, suffocating seawater. But there was no surface here. No blessed air to swim for. Donny’s lungs heaved. He opened his mouth to shout.
Shut it again quick.
To shout might bring back the attacker. He’d got to think. Not shout.
He wasn’t underwater. He hadn’t been torpedoed. Wouldn’t drown. There was a school DT department on the other side of that door and he surely had enough oxygen for a long time yet. There might even be a ventilator.
You’re not going to die, he told himself. Not here anyway. Not now.
Donny forced himself to count to ten. Slowly. As if he was coming up in some sort of decompression chamber. Then he got carefully to his feet.
Silently, shakily, he felt around the different surfaces until he was certain he’d identified the door. He ran his fingers round its frame then put his ear against it.
He couldn’t tell whether it was light or dark in the room outside. He didn’t know whether there was anyone still waiting there.
But. There would be NO MORE PANIC.
His rucksack was still on his back. Inside, underneath the homework folders and the cycle helmet, the waterproof jacket, puncture repair kit and ridiculous trouser clips, were his few best things. Not the books but his map, a small torch from Xanthe and a knife from Joshua Ribiero’s bosun’s bag. Donny knew that there’d be a huge row if this was ever found in school but he kept it anyway.
Silent movement by silent movement, Donny shrugged the bag off his back, undid the straps, and extracted the knife and the torch. He prised the flat blade underneath the latch but discovered that he couldn’t shift it.
Didn’t understand why. Had to stop for a moment to gulp back the fear.
Used the torch to investigate the hinges inside the cupboard door. Another big disappointment – there was nothing that could be unscrewed.
If his knife couldn’t be a tool, it might have to be a weapon. Donny put his rucksack back on; switched off the torch to save the battery and waited in the darkness clutching his knife in one hand and trying to ignore the bits of him that hurt. If the air didn’t last until school reopened in the morning he’d try kicking a hole in the door. And if there was someone waiting out there, he’d be ready for them.
Donny leaned himself against the hard edges of the shelves. Constant vigilance. That’s what was needed.
The cleaner, whose duties this evening included letting Donny out, had been delivered to the school at eight p.m. She had been provided with a suitable industrial solvent to remove the glue in the latch and told to leave the opening of the cupboard until the end of her three-hour shift. If freed boy didn’t run, he could be collected and dumped when the van came back.
She didn’t do as she’d been ordered. She knew what it felt like to be sealed in dark places and this was a child. She hurried to him straight away. She hoped he’d have a mother waiting.
Donny had been in the cupboard almost four hours. He was still standing but
he wasn’t quite awake. He’d lost track of time. When he heard her first quiet movements he fumbled to flick his torch on.
The light of the DT room made him blink. Instead of the attacker he saw an unknown woman whose soft face was creased with concern. He didn’t even try to rush her.
She knew she mustn’t speak but he looked so pale, and moved so sore. Her son back in Fujian province would be about this age. She brushed his soft cheek with the backs of her fingers. “Go home quick,” she said. “You’re too young to joke with the Tiger.”
Donny left without saying anything. His bike was the only one in the sheds. He undid the lock and began pushing it back towards Pin Mill. His blistered feet weren’t bothering him any more but the saddle really hurt and when he first tried to ride he felt so wobbly it was dangerous.
After a while he began to feel better and he cycled some of the last bit of the journey.
His mother was asleep in the bus shelter with an empty bottle beside her. It wasn’t Rev. Wendy’s raffle wine and it wasn’t even the ship’s brandy. One last colourless drop came trickling out and dripped to the concrete like a tear.
This wasn’t water: it was vodka.
And there was Inspector Jake Flint, blue, white and orange lights flashing on his big black car. He’d arrived just a couple of hours after the time Donny would normally get home. Skye hadn’t totally passed out then. She was wandering, desperate, incoherent. She wouldn’t go back to Strong Winds. She wanted her child. She kept asking people, especially any young ones, but they didn’t understand. Or said they didn’t.
Flint had acted like all his birthdays had come at once. He whipped out a camera and a breathalyser kit and made note after note on his palm pad. He showed no interest at all in helping search for Donny or even putting through a call to the school or local accident services. Didn’t even take the bottle away. He simply asked Gold Dragon loud, repetitive, questions about Skye’s drinking. At one point he accused her of keeping alcohol on board Strong Winds deliberately to control her disabled niece. If he provoked her into attacking him he could arrest her for breach of the peace.
Flint couldn’t really do subtle. Gold Dragon ground her teeth and held her hook behind her back and concentrated on her worries, not her rage.
The fat policeman’s only other disappointment came when Donny showed up with properly working front and back bicycle lights of the correct luminescence as well as a kite-marked helmet and industrial quality fluorescent strips. There were no regulations to forbid cycling in socks and Donny was able to confirm that he’d passed his proficiency test when he was at primary school in Leeds.
But by that time Flint had a list of Community Representative Action Points and was reading them out to the world in his most pompous tones. His points were mostly to do with finding any trouble in the area and trying to pin it on Skye. Plus advising the local pub to hire extra security and alerting neighbourhood watch groups to the Hazard in their Midst. All stuff to make them really welcome in their new home.
“How could she have bought vodka?” Donny asked Gold Dragon, once they’d finally managed to lug his wasted mother back on board.
“Ask the fishes. Of course I’ve seen the way she’s been behaving but I’d put most of it down to those pills.”
“Her happy pills ...?”
His great-aunt snorted. “Happy pills! If she were under my command I’d sink the lot of ’em. Her life’s hard enough without the sawbones messing up her head.”
“You don’t think her head’s messed up already?”
“No.” She didn’t hesitate for a moment. “No, I most definitely do not. She’s Eirene and Henry’s daughter and she’s steering to a different star. I haven’t got a fix on her yet but I will. If those blithering bureau-rats stop taking my wind.”
Donny loved her for this but he knew more about the ways of the welfare than she did. “They will, though. They’ll be round all the time doing assessments.”
“Then we may yet have to take the tide out of here.” Gold Dragon sounded grim. “And what in tarnation happened to you?”
Donny told her that he’d lost his shoes and had an accident. He said he’d been knocked out but not that he’d been locked up. He sort of slid past explaining the computer stuff. That was Anna’s business. He did tell his great-aunt about Mr Mac not being at school and Anna thinking that he was probably being persecuted because he’d stuck up for them at the SS meeting.
“That’s a smudge on the horizon,” she agreed. “Now take a piece of pie and some hot chocolate and cut along to your bunk. Dizzy or sick? Not any more? Good. Help yourself to some painkillers if you want ’em. I’m going to watch the stars a while. I’ll put my head round your door before I turn in.”
A whiff of tobacco rolled down through the hatchway as Donny clambered exhaustedly into his sleeping bag. It was a good smell. It meant that Gold Dragon was sitting in the cockpit of her ship, thinking over the happenings of the day and puffing meditatively on her short black pipe.
Friday 6 October
The bike ride next morning was a real struggle and Donny was late for registration. That earned them a Visit from Toxic in the afternoon. At first Donny thought it was quite funny to see the Welfare Officer picking her way distastefully to the beginning of the Hard in her fancy footwear but after that it was as infuriating and humiliating as usual.
She had two big Year Tens with her – on work experience she said. Donny recognised them from the bus. And other places.
She also had a trainee SS worker who she sent to check Strong Winds for Suitability. The worker was ultra-picky and quite nervous and didn’t know anything about boats so it took a long time. One of the boys accompanied the trainee and the other stood sniggering as Toxic sneered at Donny.
Gold Dragon had walked to the village to buy bread and Skye was asleep in her cabin. Donny was therefore unsupervised. More evidence of Neglect.
Things weren’t going well for Anna either. The blank hard drive in the IT department caused outrage – and panic among the students whose exam coursework had been deleted. Anna was a handy target for everyone’s anger even when it was discovered that Mr Mac had a full set of back-up files at home. Which, however, he was only prepared to reinstall once he was back in school teaching and running his clubs as usual – with a full public apology for unfair suspicion.
Maggi managed pretty well protecting Anna from most of the other students but Gerald and Wendy were predictably horrified to discover that she hadn’t been using her old computer to write essays. The ingenuity of her system for linking to the Internet failed to impress them and the single word ‘chatroom’ sent shivers through their souls.
It wasn’t totally their fault. Toxic’s Research Findings would have convinced even the calmest foster-carer that ‘social network’ and ‘den of iniquity’ were twenty-first-century synonyms. Anna, naturally, refused to explain what she had been doing or apologise for plugging into their phone system so Rev. Wendy withdrew her right to use the diocesan laptop.
When the foster-carers came into school to meet with Ms Spinks she supported their action by blocking Anna’s password and taking away her library user card. Anna was denied all unsupervised access to the school IT network for the rest of term.
“What about my homework? All the teachers assume we can look stuff up whenever they tell us to.”
“Books?” suggested Gerald.
“Were quite good enough in my day,” snapped Wendy, whose experiment with trust seemed to have skidded to an emergency stop.
“You may request all printed material via the librarian and I’ll put a note on the staff bulletin board alerting all teachers to the fact you have no Internet access for the rest of term. I will also explain why. While I’m naturally relieved that my colleague has been discovered not to have acted improperly, I’m afraid that your conduct represents an abuse of his goodwill. And of your guardi
ans’ hospitality.” Ms Spinks looked smug. Then she remembered her responsibility to be caring as well. “The web can be a dangerous place, Anna, and we all have a responsibility to ensure your safety.”
“Too right,” said Xanthe, when Anna reported back to the Allies. “I’m definitely gonna approach nerds with a lot more respect. Look at the way that computer geek took out Donny! He must spend all his free time playing Jackie Chan games.”
“It felt more like Mortal Kombat than Jackie Chan,” Donny muttered. But he didn’t really want Xanthe to know how scared he’d been as he’d waited there in the dark, clutching a folding penknife and wondering whether the person who’d locked him in truly intended him to suffocate.
“Any ideas about the identity of this ‘Tiger’?”
“Small, dark hair, Asian, wore a suit, carried a briefcase. Either paranoid or psychopathic. Might possibly have been at that SS meeting? Definitely not someone I’m planning to add to my Christmas card list. Let’s forget him. I think we ought to concentrate on helping Anna get back on-line. None of us like the sound of this Oboe character but it seems he’s the only lead she’s got.”
“You’ll have to come round ours, Anna,” suggested Maggi. “One time soon when we can say we need the net for homework. You can tell them we have books as well.”
“Stacked thicker than the gold in Ben Gunn’s cave,” agreed Xanthe.
“Thanks.”
Although the sisters were eager to help, their parents seemed preoccupied. June and Joshua agreed that they’d be delighted for Anna to visit after school or at weekends, but they kept putting off ringing the vicarage to arrange a date. There’d been a outbreak of infection at the hospital that appeared to come from poor hygiene standards in Joshua Ribiero’s department. He’d been plummeted into a round of emergency meetings with the hospital authorities, as well as trying to rearrange his normal work and run a full investigation so patients could honestly be reassured that they were not at any additional risk.