by SJI Holliday
Polly decided to head back along to the fourth years’ area. She’d asked Diane’s teacher to send her down, but either the message hadn’t been passed on or the girl just wasn’t coming. Either way, Polly was sick of waiting. She only had thirty-minute slots and she had another student lined up for the one straight after Diane. If she didn’t go and find her now, she was barely going to have time to come in and sit down before it was time for her to leave. She stands, checks her desk to make sure there’s nothing on it that she needs to drop into the drawer before she leaves the room. The kids at her last school seemed to have a special knack of knowing exactly when her office was empty and exactly where to find anything that might be of value. In the end there’d been CCTV cameras all over the school. Polly wasn’t against security, but the place had turned into a prison. She couldn’t stay in a place like that. Still, old habits and all that. She opens the drawer and drops her phone and her engraved silver Parker pen inside. A present from her parents when she’d graduated from uni. Hardly cool enough for a student to nick, but you never know.
As she slides the drawer shut, there’s a soft double rap on the door.
At last!
‘Come in, then. Better late than never,’ she calls to the closed door, employing her best teachery tone.
The door opens. Polly sits down, picks up a pile of papers on her desk and straightens them. She’s looking down at the desk. Squaring off the edges. She doesn’t see who comes in.
‘Take a seat,’ she says.
A cough.
Finally, Polly looks up. She flinches, feels heat rising up her neck, colouring her cheeks. ‘Oh gosh, sorry. You must think I’m so rude! I was expecting a student . . .’ She lets her sentence trail off.
The man sitting in the seat in front of her shakes his head. Makes a ‘no problem’ gesture with his hands.
‘Lucas Crisp,’ he says. ‘Biology.’
‘Of course. I remember you from my interview. I was hoping to have a chat with you in the staff room at lunchtime. Sorry about that. Anyway. What can I do for you, Lucas? I’m sure you don’t need any counselling.’ Her tone is light, but she sees a dark shadow cross his eyes.
‘Perhaps not, Ms McAllister . . . Polly . . . but. Well, there is something I’d like to discuss with you. I’ve been expecting the police to come and find me. Imagined someone would’ve said something to them already. But then again, it’s early days. It’s only been a few hours, hasn’t it? None of us actually knows what happened, do we? I mean . . .’ He pauses. Sighs. Takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabs at his forehead. Under his eyes.
Polly takes him in. Crazy hair. Old-fashioned clothes, but given his age he’s going for the hipster look rather than the eccentric. Good-looking, but geeky. Something that looks like a ketchup stain on his tie, or maybe it’s the design. Hard to tell. He has no wrinkles. She can’t put an age on him, but she knows he’s young. Much younger than her.
He coughs, clears his throat. ‘I mean – she is dead, isn’t she? Christ, I can’t believe I’m even saying this. Katie is . . . Katie was a special girl, she . . .’
Polly zones out. She doesn’t hear the rest of his sentence. Special girl? What does he mean? He is visibly upset. Why?
‘Polly? Did you hear what I said? I said, Katie and me, well, we were friends . . .’
‘Hang on. What do you mean, you were friends? You’re her teacher, Lucas—’
‘Yes, yes. I know,’ he interrupts. ‘Katie is one of . . . Katie was one of my best students. Not only was she incredibly intelligent, good at all her subjects – especially science – you know she won the fifth-year science prize last year, don’t you? I mean . . . God, I’m sorry, why would you? You’ve only just arrived . . . What I mean is, she was gifted. Brilliant. She was going to study microbiology. She was going to go on to a PhD, I know it. She had such an interest in things. It wasn’t just about doing her school work and passing her exams, she . . .’
He lets the sentence trail off and takes his handkerchief out of his pocket again. Carefully, he wipes his eyes, then blows his nose.
Polly takes a deep breath.
‘What are you saying, Lucas?’ she says. Her voice is careful, measured. She is trying to hide the feeling of shock. The creeping dread that is sweeping across her body. That sudden rush of fireside heat when you’ve just come in from the cold. ‘What do you mean, you were friends?’ She needs to hear it in his words. Not her own. She is already forming scenarios inside her head.
‘We had . . . I don’t know. I’m sorry. This is so difficult. We had a relationship. I suppose that’s what you’d call it . . .’
He is stopped from saying more by a thump on the door. Polly jumps.
‘Who’s that?’ He spins around in the seat, but Polly is already on her feet. She yanks the door open, looks up and down the corridor.
‘Hello?’ she says. Her heart is thumping now. The heat rash has vanished, leaving an icy chill. ‘Did someone just knock on my door?’
‘Who was it?’ Lucas says, his voice cracking with the pain. Fear. ‘Do you think they . . .’
Polly steps back inside the office and closes the door with a quiet click.
‘I’m sorry, Lucas,’ she says. ‘Whoever it was, there’s a good chance they heard our conversation. And whoever it was, they’re not there now.’
12
Louise
‘We’re going down to talk to Katie’s mother.’
She nods at Davie. ‘Sure. I’d like a few more minutes up here, if that’s OK? I just want to have a look around.’
‘Mind and not disturb anything then, there are people here doing their jobs.’ Malkie’s voice is dripping with sarcasm. He has a thinly veiled disdain for the CSI technicians and their meticulous nature. Louise knows that Malkie’s been told off one too many times for buggering up a crime scene through his impatience. He might be a good detective, but he’s a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to modern procedure. Which makes Davie all the more interesting – because the men are the same age, and Davie has only been a detective for a few months. When she’d first found out he was moving across from uniform, she was expecting a slightly less competent Malkie clone – someone set in their ways with no desire to change. She was pleasantly surprised to find that he had a keen eye and a willingness to learn. His years in local policing were serving him in good stead for the new role he’d taken on.
She wasn’t sure exactly when it was that she had started to fall in love with him.
After Malkie and Davie leave, the room becomes quieter still. Mary follows the men down the stairs, whispering to the GP as they leave the room. She gestures to Louise – a flickering of her fingers behind her – that Louise knows means see you later, I’ll fill you in, call me. They know each other well enough to know how to interpret hand signals like this. The usual one, normally spotted in the corridors of the station at about 5 p.m., was a cupped hand lifted towards the mouth, twice, quickly. It meant quick drink, but it usually ended up being two bottles and a morning with a battering headache.
‘OK if I have a look around?’
‘Aye. If you can manage to keep your hands in your pockets. You lot are all the same.’ She doesn’t recognise the man who says this, but she recognises the tone – he’s obviously encountered Malkie before.
‘I’ll try to be good,’ Louise says. She turns slowly, surveying the room.
‘Seriously, though – we’re just about finished,’ the tech says. ‘Feel free.’
She smiles. Nods a ‘thanks’. They’re zipping up a couple of plastic bags, noting things down in their log. She walks over to the other side of the room towards the dressing table, and the desk that sits next to it. There’s only one chair – a red fabric office chair on wheels, with armrests and a decent-looking back support. It looks expensive, and Louise takes this to mean that Katie was someone who took her studying seriously. Someone who knew she had to sit for long periods of time and was astute enough to know that this wasn’t healthy
.
It’s funny, all these things people do now that would never have crossed her mind when Louise was young. People are always complaining now that kids don’t do enough exercise. Louise can’t remember a time when she wasn’t outside as a kid, playing games, running around. Some of these kids today don’t even walk to school – stranger danger has become an obsession; parents are convinced that paedophiles are lurking on every corner – so they drive their kids to school and nanny them through life until they leave school and don’t know what the hell to do with themselves. Louise was cooking, washing and ironing when she was thirteen.
What about Katie? Was she someone who was self-sufficient?
Louise takes in the bottles and cans on the dressing table. Mixed in among the cosmetics is a distinctive leaf-patterned water bottle. She recognises the Orla Kiely design. Again – something nice, something expensive. Water. No one drank water when Louise was at school. You had a cup of tea at breakfast, maybe a juice at playtime and again at lunch, then nothing until you got home at half-past three. Bottled water was only for holidays in France and Spain when people were paranoid that cleaning their teeth with the tap water would give them the scoots.
She sits down on Katie’s chair. Rolls across towards the desk. A sudden wave of sadness hits her, imagining Katie doing this. Imagining Katie making plans for the future. The final exams were only a couple of months away. She must’ve had plans. The thought of this young life being snuffed out too soon makes her both tearful and angry.
‘Someone did this to you, Katie. I’m sorry that they did. But I’m going to do what I can to find them, OK? But I need your help. What am I looking for? Who would’ve wanted to hurt you, Katie?’
There is a small sound, like a tiny piece of metal hitting another piece of metal. Louise flinches in the seat. She is easily spooked, and the quiet of the room means that everything is magnified. Something has been disturbed. She glances across at the window, where the mournful tree is swaying. She’d thought it sounded like maybe a window key falling down, but she can’t see anything out of place.
She turns back to the desk, looks around, across to the dressing table. There is a string of coloured paperclips hanging over the mirror. She hadn’t noticed them at first, had thought they were all necklaces. She moves a few of the bits and pieces, expecting to find a stray paperclip that has dropped off the chain, but there are none. She frowns. Not that then.
Her eyes scan the rest of the desk, back to the dressing table. Nothing. She’s not sure why, but the sound has caused an alert to trigger somewhere inside her. There is a clue here. Something she needs to find. What the hell is it?
‘Lou, you coming down here? Kettle’s on . . .’ Davie’s voice comes up the stairs, breaking the silence, breaking her concentration.
‘Two minutes,’ she calls back, trying to keep the annoyance from her voice.
She scans the surfaces again. Looks around the pencil sharpener pen holder. Nothing. Her eyes go up.
It’s obvious, really. She doesn’t know why she hasn’t seen it before.
There is a framed photograph hanging on the wall above her head. It’s a collage – lots of smiling faces. Lots of smiling Katies. She stands up, lifts it down. There are specks of something beige that have dried onto the glass. She knows what they are. Make-up. Foundation. Spattered on when she’d squeezed it from the tube and left there to dry out like freckles.
This is stuff only a female would spot.
The make-up is on the frame, because the photo collage is normally standing on the dressing table, in the gap between the cans and bottles and the smaller make-up that sits in front of it. She runs her hand across the dressing table. It’s covered with fingerprint powder, so she can’t be sure. But they will have photographed it. There will be a gap, where this photo collage frame is meant to sit.
On the empty expanse of wall, there is a rectangular space, defined by the slight discoloration you get when something has been hanging there for a long time. If she was to lift any of the other things off the wall, the lighter colour would be behind them, and the space would fit what it was she lifted off. The photo collage is too small for the lighter-coloured rectangle on the wall. Someone has taken something off the wall and put this photo in its place.
She stares at the photo. Katie with her arms around a teenage boy who has a scowl on his face but a smile in his eyes. Katie with a little boy on her knee – her little brother, Brett? There are none of anyone who looks like she might be Katie’s sister. There’s another one of Katie, her arms wrapped around a slightly younger-looking girl with flame-coloured hair and pink shiny lip-gloss.
Louise flips out the little stand on the back of the frame and stands the collage back on the dressing table.
She leans over to the wall, runs her hand over the pale rectangle. What was here?
Where is it?
The other things on this section of wall are framed nature posters. One has a selection of butterflies, a huge one in the centre that Louise recognises as a red admiral – it’s the only one she knows. It’s an unusual print. Reminds her of something but she can’t think what. One of the others is of a clear, still pond surrounded by beautifully coloured trees and bushes. Hazy pinks and bright oranges. All shades of green. ‘Exbury Gardens’ it says. New Forest National Park. Somewhere that Katie had visited? Had hoped to visit? The other poster is the periodic table, except instead of the elements it’s got horror movies categorised into ‘slashers’, ‘creepy kids’, ‘psychopaths’ and so on. ‘Ex’ for The Exorcist, ‘Om’ for The Omen. So Katie loved nature, science and horror movies – but she had a sense of humour too. And good friends, according to the photo.
On a whim, Louise hunkers down and looks on the floor behind the desk. There’s a radiator there. She touches it and finds it cool, despite the heat of the room. Some houses are just warm like that. But it’s unusual, as Louise usually finds herself freezing at scenes like this. She still feels a chill going through her, but there’s a warmth. It reminds her of that game when you have to guess where something is, and as you get closer, your friends shout ‘getting warmer, warmer, hot’ and when you’re way off target it’s ‘cooler, colder, cold’.
She crawls under the desk towards the radiator. Although it hadn’t felt too hot to the touch, she suddenly feels like she’s about to roast. Like being in a sauna when someone’s tipped a bucket of water over the coals.
Warmer . . . warmer . . . hot . . . HOT.
It’s under the radiator. She was right about the noise. A small piece of metal hitting metal. It’s a long metal pin. Like a haberdashery pin, but longer, thinner maybe. She wouldn’t have seen it if it hadn’t been for what it was attached to.
A bright turquoise so delicate it looks like it would crumble if you touched it. An insect of some sort, with a pin stuck through the body. She crawls closer.
Two larger wings, two smaller. She reaches out, longing to touch it. What is it? Why has it got a pin through its body?
She slides back out. Sits down, cross-legged, as she pulls an evidence bag out of her coat pocket. Frowns, wondering if she’s going to be able to pick this thing up without damaging it. She closes her eyes. Opens them. And she is drawn back to the print of the butterflies. She knows what it reminds her of now . . .
‘You weren’t the average seventeen-year-old, were you, Katie?’ Louise says to the empty room. There is no one there to reply. Nothing left in the room now but a heavy mist of sadness.
13
Polly
The bell rings for lunch, but both Polly and Lucas ignore it. He’s crying now. Sobbing into his handkerchief. She wants to comfort him, but first she needs to know all the facts.
‘Lucas, I know this is difficult, but I need to know everything. Everything about you and Katie. Maybe I should make us some tea? It always helps.’ She smiles, but he doesn’t look up.
There is a kettle and some cups on top of the filing cabinet. She hasn’t had a chance to use it yet, but presumab
ly it’s all in working order. She had filled it up with water from the bathroom down the hall when she’d arrived that morning, but before she’d even switched it on she’d become engrossed in the student lists, then she’d popped out to the post office.
And then all hell had broken loose.
‘I’ve got some herbal, if you don’t drink normal tea. What do you drink? Would you like some?’ She starts fumbling in her oversized handbag for the box of mixed fruit infusions she’d thrown in there this morning. Simon always berated her for buying it and never drinking it. She could buy what she wanted now. Throw it all straight in the bin if she felt like it. Bringing it to school was supposed to be a way for her to reduce her caffeine intake and be a bit more healthy. It wasn’t just herself she had to think about now.
She’s babbling. Stalling. Too scared to let Lucas speak.
‘Whatever you’re having is fine.’ His voice is thick, muffled behind the handkerchief. Polly hasn’t seen anyone use a cotton handkerchief since her grandad died. She’s always thought there was something vaguely revolting about having to boil-wash your own mucus. She stands up and flicks on the kettle, drops two raspberry zingers into pale blue mugs. They wait in silence, the sound of the boiling kettle filling the air.
‘It’s not what you think,’ he says, eventually.
She hands him a mug and sits back down. The smell coming from the tea is fruity and warming, but it’s far too hot to drink.
‘Go on.’
‘I suppose maybe relationship was the wrong word. It was a friendship. Nothing more.’
‘So you saw her outside of school?’
‘Yes. Not at first. At first it was about extra study. Stuff that wasn’t on the curriculum. Like I said – she was a bright girl. Very bright. And that’s despite the family life she has . . . had. I don’t know if you know much about that yet? I realise this is all new to you. You’ve been thrown right in at the deep end, as it were.’