by Alice Castle
‘Really?’ said York, head on one side, as if considering this new view of Beth as a determined teen rule-breaker.
Beth nodded. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to admit it to a policeman, but she’d always been the one who had to go into the off-licence to get the Saturday night supplies of cheap cider, while her friends milled around outside, giggling guiltily. She’d been pretty, in a tiny show-pony way, yes, but more importantly, she had always looked sensible. Shopkeepers gave her the benefit of the doubt. Until everyone else had grown so much taller than her, that is. Then she’d been pushed to the back of the queue – which suited her just fine. She wasn’t sure what happened nowadays, when people were hotter on ID, but there were bound to be ways. You could probably get fake cards online somewhere. There had always been techniques for weaving a merry slalom around the rules, and teenagers had the time, energy, and motivation to make sure they exploited every loophole they could find as they flirted, innocently, with what so often turned out to be not such innocent pleasures.
***
The rumours at the College School started to circulate at about midday.
Miss Troughton wasn’t surprised that the class was having trouble concentrating today. Year 9 was when they started tackling the tricky stuff. No more days of the week, je m’appelle, and quelle heure est-il? The nursery slopes of French were being left behind, and they were ready to tackle the slalom race that was sentence construction.
Mind you, Miss Troughton knew these were fine minds that she had before her. Standards may have slipped elsewhere in her twenty years of teaching, but the College School remained a fixed point; a centre of excellence, if one wanted to use the detestable jargon people tossed around with gay abandon these days. And that reminded her sourly that she couldn’t say gay any more, or not in that context. Tsk.
Anyway, her point was the entrance exam to the school was fearsome, the academic standards rigorous, and there was an unspoken understanding that any girl who didn’t make the grade one year, would mysteriously vanish from the school roll the next. Quite right, too, in Miss Troughton’s view. There were plenty of able girls queuing up to get a chance at this sort of education.
If this lot concentrated for a few minutes, they’d easily get the hang of what she was trying to impart. But this morning, they didn’t seem capable of focusing at all. 9C was not Miss Troughton’s favourite form – there were some ‘big characters’, as teachers euphemistically described bossy troublemakers – but the worst of them wasn’t even here today. That dreadful Jones-Creedy girl. Ridiculous narcissist. Spent her entire day in the loos, if she wasn’t kicked out, flicking her hair around and playing with her phone. It was a damned shame. She’d been a nice girl, then something had gone awry. Miss Troughton had no idea what, it wasn’t her business to pry. The girl had parents, didn’t she? They should be keeping her on the straight and narrow. Still, no time to worry about that now. At least it was making her job a little easier this morning, without Little Miss Jones-Creedy making a quip every two minutes that half the class would giggle at, bunch of sycophants. Absurd.
But despite the girl’s absence, every time she turned round from the board, everyone seemed to have their heads hanging down, drooping where they sat, like tulips deprived of water. She knew what this meant. They had their phones under their desks, just out of sight, and were squinting at them in the hope that she wouldn’t notice.
Well. Nothing made her crosser than the arrogance of youth. If they thought for one second they were pulling the wool over these experienced eyes… They weren’t even supposed to have the dratted phones on them in the classroom in the first place, on pain of suspension. In her view, the development of mobile phones was having a sadly deleterious effect on the children, or the students as she was now forced to call them. She could demand everyone’s phones and make them troop off to see the headmistress. But that was draconian, even for her – and, ultimately, pointless. She knew to her cost that parents complained furiously if their little dears were separated from their mobiles. Phones had now become replacement umbilical cords, with anxious mummies and daddies fondly imagining their kids were safe as long as they were getting a good signal.
In her view, there was no point in having this rule against the presence of phones if it was virtually unenforceable. As it was, she was having to connive with flagrant rule-breaking every day, and was unable to do anything about it. But, thank God, she wasn’t running the school. Just this blasted class, and that was bad enough.
Now, she turned to face the class again and asked, somewhat wearily, ‘How would you start a sentence with voulez-vous?’ She had taught this lesson many times before, and was braced either for sniggers, for those few who’d bothered to decode the words to that dratted raunchy Lady Marmalade song, or for a burst or two of ABBA, thanks to the popularity of the musical Mamma Mia in the West End. What she hadn’t expected was a volley of suppressed beeps from phones all round the room, followed by a collective shocked silence that was as deafening as the chorus of swooping ABBA ah-has that she was braced for.
She looked around the pale, set faces, and watched, aghast, as little Lily Courtauld burst into tears. It would be her, of course, the class wimp, who was the first to faint at the childbirth film, had to be excused from all rumbustious school trips, and was allergic to anything you could shake a gluten-free breadstick at. But something was definitely up, and Miss Troughton had had enough of this nonsense.
‘Girls? Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on?’
***
Beth unlocked the new archives HQ, now housed on the ground floor of the geography block. While hardly palatial, it was a million miles from the glorified shack she’d started work in not so long ago. Wyatt’s had rearranged its priorities, she was glad to say, and the archives had gone from being something dusty, pointless, and neglected, to something important, worthy – and shameful. She wasn’t sure if she totally approved of the way the English tended to wallow in their guilt. But since it had bought her a rather nice mahogany desk, lifted from some forgotten staffroom somewhere, not to mention a fleet of lovely matching mahogany bookshelves for her beloved records, she was willing to let it go. Best of all, she had an ergonomic office chair that was both comfy and did that swivelling thing, and she wasn’t above taking herself for a spin when things got stale.
Today, after the horror of the Gallery, followed by a rather grim time down at the police station making a full report, a spin would have been altogether too much excitement, and she really needed the strong cup of tea on the desk in front of her. Not to mention the packet of digestive biscuits she’d liberated from the staff room, which she was absent-mindedly nibbling. She’d square it with the wonderful school secretary, Janice, later. Janice would understand. These biscuits were strictly medicinal.
Part of Beth wanted to blot out the morning entirely, turn on her computer, and lose herself in work. She had lots to do, deadlines looming, reports to write, plenty to organise… but her thoughts kept turning irresistibly to that slight, cold form lying on the marble slab. That poor girl. Poor child, really. She’d looked so forlorn, so abandoned. A shocking, pitiful sight.
Now Beth did turn on her laptop – but only to Google Wyatt’s Picture Gallery. The usual site came up, with opening hours, highlights of the permanent collection, details on the latest exhibition. No links to any news items with mentions of girls left for dead.
Next, she tried ‘missing girl’. A depressing litany of familiar names jumped out at her, Shannon, Suzie, Millie… nothing recent. Nothing involving Dulwich.
Beth sat back, stumped. Surely the girl had been missing long enough – far too long – for someone not to have noticed? She knew how parents were in Dulwich. If a kid was late leaving Scouts, there were helicopters sweeping the area. This just didn’t make sense.
Much though she didn’t want to feel involved, Beth knew that she couldn’t escape her ties. She’d been the one who had found the girl. All right, Tricia ha
d actually seen her first, but the gallery assistant might as well have been made of marble herself for all the use she’d been. It was Beth who’d contacted York, got an investigation going. In a way, it made the whole matter her baby – and the girl most of all, as she was at the centre of it all. And it did really look as though the poor girl needed a mother. Beth drank the last of her tea, brushed the crumbs from her lap decisively, and settled down at her keyboard. She had a lot to do.
***
Harry York pushed a hand through coarse, dark blond hair that could have done with a cut. There wasn’t time; there wasn’t time for anything. He felt like a dog chasing its own tail most days. This case, in particular, made him feel as though he was drowning. It was the worst kind of thing to get wrapped up in. A closed community, full of secrets, shunning outsiders, refusing to talk to strangers. And that was just the teenagers. The adult residents of Dulwich were going to be worse still when this hit the papers. And hit the papers it would. He’d just put the phone down on the hospital. They weren’t holding out much hope.
‘Trouble is, we think she’s taken a shedload of different types of stuff. Usually, we can drag people back – if we know what on earth they’ve got inside them. Sometimes not. It depends which bits of them the toxins fry,’ the A&E Consultant at the hospital had explained wearily over the phone. ‘If they destroy the liver, you’ve basically had it. If you’ve just knackered your kidneys, then, on a good day, we might be able to do something. But we have to know. In this case, I take it, there was nothing at the scene? Nothing at all to indicate what she might have swallowed?’
The doctor sounded just as exhausted as York felt. King’s College Hospital was huge, and busy round the clock, as the TV show 24 Hours in A&E, filmed there for three years, had amply demonstrated. This girl was just one of many problems which had landed on the consultant’s shoulders since his shift had started, what probably seemed like a lifetime ago. Yet, despite the fatigue, York could hear compassion in the doctor’s voice, a wish to do the best for the girl, however bleak her prospects might appear.
‘There were no injection marks? It was definitely pills?’ York asked.
‘She was clean for punctures, but it could have been powder, pills, liquid, a spiked drink, something she smoked or sniffed, you name it. That’s why we need some sort of indication…’
‘Can’t help you there at the moment. There was nothing at all at the scene. Just the girl herself, no shoes, no phone, nothing. We’ve got people combing the grounds. If there’s anything there, we’ll find it.’
‘I really hope you do. Without any clues, well…’
York put the phone down. Already, he hated this case. There was nothing worse than seeing kids getting hurt. And he had a bad feeling that this poor girl in intensive care was just going to be the start of something very nasty. Someone, somewhere, was pulling strings, and he didn’t like it at all.
***
Miss Troughton didn’t usually run. In fact, she hadn’t really walked anywhere fast since her knee had started troubling her, oh, five years ago. But today she sprinted all the way to the headmistress’s office, bypassing the astonished secretary Leanne, who usually guarded the door like Cerberus with a particularly juicy bone.
‘Angela, I have to speak to you,’ said Miss Troughton, clinging onto the door frame to get her breath back. Her blouse had come adrift from her skirt and her face was most unbecomingly flushed. Her mighty bosom heaved with the effort of compensating for more physical effort in the space of five minutes than was usually required during a full year.
Angela Douglas, her spine perfectly straight as she sat in a chair that was, not by accident, rather like a throne, betrayed her surprise by an involuntary tightening of the nostrils. She briefly touched the double strand of lustrous, heavy pearls at her throat – the one sartorial frippery she allowed herself – then dropped her hand to her lap, sheathed in an expensively non-committal Eileen Fisher black dress. Those who didn’t know her would think she had remained entirely impassive. Bernie Troughton, who’d known her since their student days at St Andrews, realised she was shocked to the core.
‘It gets worse. Look at this!’
With a shaking hand, Miss Troughton held out an iPhone in a battered case that screamed ‘FAB’ in pink neon letters. Miss Douglas recoiled a little from this garish artefact, then leaned closer, curious despite herself. The two women stared, perplexed, at the darkened screen. Miss Troughton tsked crossly, poked the ‘home’ button, and the screen came to life. Out of the darkness emerged the pale limbs of the girl in the Gallery, looking so ethereal and insubstantial that she seemed to be floating above her maroon marble slab. It wasn’t a particularly good shot. Whoever had taken it had had scant regard for centering the image, and the whole thing looked rather blurry. Whatever its compositional defects, however, it certainly packed a punch. The two teachers looked at each other in dismay.
‘Good grief,’ said Angela Douglas, consternation cutting two deep horizontal lines into the smooth cream of her well made-up forehead.
‘Exactly,’ said Miss Troughton, nodding vigorously, her chins shaking emphatically with every movement.
‘Are you sure it’s her?’ said Miss Douglas, weakly.
Miss Troughton looked at her quickly. She’d never known her friend to be indecisive or to shy away from battle. And now was not the time to be developing new character traits, particularly unhelpful ones.
‘Of course, it’s her! I’d know that little… minx… anywhere. The question is, what is she doing there? Why isn’t she at school? Why is someone sending this picture to the rest of her class? What is going on?’
‘That’s four questions,’ said Miss Douglas crisply. While Miss Troughton could have hit her, she was also relieved. That was more like the Miss Douglas the school needed in a crisis. And this was most definitely shaping up to be a crisis. Most definitely.
‘So, she’s not at school, we’ve established that much. She’s probably just at home, recovering from… whatever that stunt is. I don’t suppose you know when the photo was taken?’
‘Last night. There’s a date on it.’
‘Right, well, maybe she’s having a late morning… won’t be the first time, will it? Such disciplined parents, and then they take their eye off the ball with the children. We’ve seen it so many times before, haven’t we?’
Miss Troughton nodded sadly. It was a tragedy. High-achieving parents, with little time to be present in their children’s lives, always seemed to feel the need to compensate their offspring with objects. It never worked. The children scented blood in the water. Weakness. Guilt. The parents, then faced with bad behaviour, failed to set boundaries – they didn’t want to spoil what scant time they had with the children by laying down the law. Little did they know, thought Miss Troughton, that there was nothing these kids liked better than a few rules and someone willing to put in the effort to enforce them. Before you knew it, a very unhelpful pattern had emerged, with the children getting the upper hand and the parents constantly on the back foot – too many limbs, by anyone’s reckoning. And the result was almost always an unpleasant mess. Parenting was so much easier when you didn’t actually have children, she reflected.
‘Do you think it is a stunt, then? Whatever that photo is about? Because her class is very upset. They’re all crying.’
Miss Douglas pressed the home button again and the picture materialised in all its ghastly pallor. She zoomed in on the girl’s impassive face.
‘It’s very chilling. She looks…’
Miss Troughton looked up anxiously. ‘You don’t think she’s…’
‘Absurd! Whatever else that girl may be, she is not an idiot. And whatever “issues” she may be incubating,’ Miss Troughton smiled faintly at her friend’s scathing inverted commas, ‘she does not have a death wish. No, I would say this is an elaborate prank, designed to throw us all off course and make us worry about the little… madam. Now. First things first. We need to put a call in to
the parents, establish the child’s whereabouts. Everything else devolves from that, wouldn’t you agree?’
Miss Troughton, deeply relieved that the normal order had been restored and she was being bossed about, nodded fervently. ‘So, you want me to ring?’
‘Voulez-vous?’ said her friend, with a small smile.
Miss Troughton didn’t quite walk backwards out of the headmistress’s room, but she did close the door softly and return to the staff room at her usual ambling velocity. As always, there was nothing like a quick chat with Angela to set her mind at rest.
Alone in her room again, Miss Douglas slipped her hands down to the heavy arms of her chair. Her face, if Miss Troughton could have seen it, wore a ferocious expression, and the two lines were back, cruelly bisecting her snowy forehead.
Chapter Three
Harry York strode quickly down the pale green corridors, head low, deliberately pushing all hospital-type thoughts out of his head. Though he was used to big institutions – hell, he worked in one – he absolutely hated hospitals. Whether it was the smell, the thought of the suffering being endured, or whether (and he realised this was not great) it was all the actual sick people hanging around, they were his least favourite places. Kings wasn’t the worst, by any means, but like all London hospitals, it had to keep growing to keep pace with the population it served.
He’d spent a botched weekend with a girlfriend in Paris a year or so ago and, while the romance hadn’t lasted, her history lesson about the strategic rebuild of the city in the nineteenth century had stuck. Paris had emerged chic, but London had never had a makeover. Like a patched suit, it was stuck making do and mending, and the result was not pretty. Buildings at Kings had been tacked on haphazardly as need demanded, and the result was a maze of corridors, like this one, leading with no logic to unexpected dead-ends and banks of apparently unused lifts.