Running Girl

by Simon Mason

  Alex didn’t say anything. Turning heavily in his bag, he faced the rotting wall.

  19

  ONE OF THE problems with Marsh Academy was the way it looked. It looked like a cross between a prison and a rehab centre: three securitized blocks of bile-coloured brick and smeary glass set randomly along a sprawl of asphalt yard marked out in coloured paint for infants’ games. It was inconvenient too. On the one hand, everywhere was a surprisingly long way from everywhere else. Getting from one lesson to the next frequently involved a lengthy trek along scuffed corridors, up and down dimly lit stairs and in and out of desolate, echoing halls. On the other hand, some places were far too close to each other. The Year Eleven lockers, for instance, were in the corridor right outside Tech 2, where the police interviews were still taking place, with people going in and out all the time. Worse, Tech 1, Garvie’s form room, was just round the corner. Worse than both these things, at the end of the lockers was the door to C Block 8, where, in period three, Garvie Smith was meant to be having further maths.

  But it couldn’t be helped.

  Chloe Dow’s locker was third in from the end on the top row. Like the others, it was fifty centimetres or so tall and thirty wide, and it opened and shut like the lockers at swimming baths, with a key on an orange plastic fob. Even when it was locked, it wouldn’t be hard to break in with a bit of force but – as Garvie had discovered – there was no sign of any force on the door of Chloe’s locker: no scraping, no scratches, no buckling. The metal door was straight and clean.

  Garvie stood there for a moment considering this. Then he retreated from the lockers – taking care to slip quickly past the door of C Block 8 – and went back down the stairs.

  He found the caretaker in his room. He was a young man with strong, stooped shoulders and a watchful, sullen attitude. His name was Naylor and he was known to be mentally defective. Although he was often seen stomping around the school with his toolbox or wheelbarrow, fixing things or sweeping up, he rarely spoke and never made eye-contact. He was considered good-looking, however. Silent and rough round the edges. Girls noticed him.

  He didn’t seem to understand what Garvie wanted. This was because Garvie was being deliberately obscure. Five minutes later, sullenly grumbling, he accompanied Garvie across the yard to C Block, up the stairs and along the corridor to the lockers outside Tech 2.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re after,’ he said again. ‘You need to see a teacher. I’m busy. I got no time for this. Bloody kids,’ he muttered under his breath.

  ‘Won’t take long,’ Garvie replied. He went up to Chloe’s locker and tried to open it with his key. ‘See? My key’s not working. And I really need to get my stuff.’

  Naylor said scornfully, ‘That ain’t even your—’ and stopped, as if astonished at himself.

  Garvie looked at him curiously. ‘Not my what? Not my locker?’

  Naylor didn’t reply. When Garvie met his eyes he immediately looked away and began to chew his lip. ‘I ain’t got time for this,’ he said again. He gave a nervous twitch.

  ‘Oh wait,’ Garvie said. ‘You’re right. It’s that girl’s. The one who got ... Funny how you knew it was hers.’

  Clenching his fists, Naylor began to take deep, scratchy breaths.

  ‘Why don’t you open it anyway?’ Garvie said.

  Naylor became oddly still. He lifted his head and looked at Garvie, his face rigid, his eyes cold, as if calculating how to deal with him.

  Garvie took no notice. ‘I mean, with your pass key,’ he went on. He paused. ‘No need to break in and risk leaving telltale scratches, is there?’ he added quietly.

  A look of fury flashed across Naylor’s face. Glancing quickly down the empty corridor, he took a step forward and pushed his face into Garvie’s.

  Backed up against the lockers, Garvie raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Why can’t you bastards ever leave me alone?’ the man hissed.

  Then a voice came from behind them, a voice with just the right amount of threat in it.

  ‘Hey, you.’

  Alex Robinson was striding down the corridor. Naylor turned and, after a moment’s hesitation and a last, twisted look at Garvie, flung himself away and went off in the other direction with that peculiar stomping walk of his.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, man,’ Alex said. ‘So long since I been here, couldn’t remember where the lockers were.’

  ‘Perfect timing. Just thought I’d like you here in case he kicked off.’

  ‘Is that what he was doing?’

  Garvie considered this. ‘Don’t know. Probably he’s harmless. But odd. Very odd.’

  Together they watched Naylor disappear.

  ‘What was he doing here, anyway?’

  ‘Trying not to tell me what I already knew.’

  ‘What was that?’

  But before Garvie could reply there was a sudden clipping footstep in the corridor behind them, and a familiar sarcastic voice said, ‘Well, well. Two birds with one stone.’

  They turned.

  Miss Perkins – Queen Bitch and Garvie’s maths teacher – stood in the doorway of C Block 8 fixing them with one of her celebrated stares.

  ‘Alex Robinson, report to the head. Garvie Smith, welcome back to planet Earth. I’ve just been talking to your mother on the phone.’

  20

  IT WAS THE end of another seven-hour morning. Singh sat in his office with Shan and Nolan, discussing the new development. A cab driver had come forward to tell them about a young woman he’d picked up on Thursday evening.

  ‘He wouldn’t swear to it. In fact, at first he insisted it wasn’t Chloe. I’m not even sure why he came in – he’s a confused sort of guy. Foreign gent. The woman he picked up didn’t sound a bit like Chloe to begin with. She had black hair for a start. But when I showed him Chloe’s photograph he started to change his mind. The thing is, the woman was that heavily made up it was hard to recognize her at first. False eyelashes, hair extensions, the works. And guess where he picked her up?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Aphrodite’s beauty salon.’

  ‘Aphrodite’s? That’s near the Academy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Just round the corner. He picked her up at six.’

  ‘She could have gone there straight from the school track.’

  ‘Making herself look different,’ Nolan said. ‘Black wig. Lots of make-up. Making herself look older.’

  Shan nodded. ‘That’s it. The cabbie said she did look older than Chloe – at least twenty, he thought. But she acted young. When he dropped her off she had no idea how much to tip him. She gave him way too much. He gave it back, he said.’

  ‘I bet he did,’ Mal Nolan said. ‘They’re like saints, those cabbies.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Anyway,’ Shan said. ‘The beautician at Aphrodite’s confirmed it. It’s solid. It was definitely Chloe.’

  There was a pause. Singh said quietly, almost to himself, ‘She was just a kid. That’s what her stepfather said. He was right. She dressed herself up to look older, she pretended she was sophisticated, but she didn’t even know how to tip a cab driver.’ He sat in silence for a moment. ‘What did she get herself into?’ he murmured.

  He looked up at Shan. ‘But the obvious immediate question is, where did the cabbie take her?’

  ‘You can guess it. Market Square.’

  They sat in silence for a moment absorbing this information.

  ‘We need an artist’s impression, Lawrence.’

  ‘Already onto it. Should be ready in a couple of hours.’

  ‘Mal, I want you to go down to the Dows’ and see if you can find the blue dress and white jacket. We were right to be looking at Market Square. But we were looking for the wrong person. I’ll get on to Darren. He needs to re-run the CCTV, re-interview the Market Square crowd. We’re not looking for a blonde schoolgirl, we’re looking for an older black-haired woman in a blue dress and white jacket.’ He reflected. ‘She might have met someone in a plac
e there – or she might have been picked up and driven somewhere else.’ He paused. ‘In a black Porsche, perhaps.’

  He looked up, and Nolan met his eyes and shook her head. ‘Still no sightings at Pike Pond and we’ve interviewed nearly everyone now. There’s just a couple of guys left, both abroad and not returning our calls – one in the Australian outback, one, I think, in Botswana. Anyway, so far the only vehicle seen up there Friday night was a van. I put it in my report this morning.’

  Singh nodded. ‘I saw. Ten o’clock. White van. It’s Mr Dow’s. He already told us he drove up there looking for Chloe.’ He went on: ‘All right. Lawrence? What’s the news from the school? What about MacArthur?’

  ‘Well, we re-interviewed him.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I think his interest in Chloe was unprofessional. He’s showing a lot of strain. But I don’t think he did anything, let alone killed her. Anyway, it turns out he has an alibi. He did say something interesting, though.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’ve been asking the kids if Chloe had changed in any way recently. Most of them haven’t a clue. I get the impression they’d pretty much stopped paying attention to what she told them about her modelling contracts and celebrity parties and so on. But MacArthur said something. Wait, I’ve got it here.’ He flipped through his notebook. ‘He’d been “teasing” her – his own word – about her glittering future, and she said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” ’

  He closed the notebook. ‘It stuck in his mind. He couldn’t remember Chloe ever passing up an opportunity to talk about herself. Maybe she was just tired or in a bad mood. But all her life she can’t stop talking about what she’s going to do, then suddenly she won’t talk about it at all?’

  Singh got up and walked to the window and looked out. ‘Chloe’s turning out to be a girl with a secret,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t like it. Was she just making herself look older on Thursday? Or was she putting on a disguise? And what was she doing on Friday afternoon before she went for her run?’ He turned and looked fiercely at the operational chart behind him, still blank for Friday afternoon. He thought for a moment and came back to his desk. ‘Anything else? What about that caretaker? Does his alibi stand up?’

  Mal Nolan nodded. ‘I interviewed him. He was drinking with a friend in a pub called the Jolly Boatman down by the canal. It checks out. But there’s something that doesn’t. I went back through his file and his past employment records are missing. The school’s chasing them up. Again, it’s probably nothing. But I agree with Lawrence. He’s an oddball. Unstable, somehow.’

  ‘Get Archives to double-check the records on the database.’

  She nodded again.

  ‘And I’ll talk to Bob about the Porsche. He’s moving too slowly.’

  After they left Singh sat at his desk, immobile, staring at the opposite wall.

  Chloe Dow, a girl with a secret.

  He went out of his office and spoke to his PA. There were seventeen demands for statements from various news outlets, ten requests for interviews and three messages from the chief.

  Singh sighed. ‘I’ll call him now. Did the pathologist ring? I left him a couple of messages about the new autopsy report.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Keep trying to get hold of him. It’s important I speak to him. Anytime for the rest of the day. This evening if necessary.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Then he went back into his room and prepared to call the chief.

  21

  GARVIE SMITH WAS in trouble. He’d been in trouble half his life, in fact, and gradually he’d grown used to it, even come to like it in a funny sort of way. But this time the trouble was more serious: he’d just been put through a three-way conversation with his mother and Queen Bitch on the speaker phone in the teacher’s office.

  It was hard to know why adults were so uptight, why they endlessly nagged about unimportant details, why they couldn’t see the futility of their self-defeating cycles of threats. It was so boring. The school would start to obsess about something, they’d get heavy with him, he’d make the promises they wanted to hear, the school would back off, huffing and puffing a bit, and everything would return to normal until the next time, when it would start up all over again.

  What was the point? Really, it would have been beneath his notice if this time they hadn’t got his mother involved.

  He thought briefly, uneasily, of his mother.

  There was that job offer of hers from Barbados. He was used to her planning changes that never happened, but this felt different. She’d mentioned it again on the phone, and the tone of her voice made him think she had news to tell him.

  Then there was the other thing, the usual thing. He didn’t actually want to piss her off. Yes, he could argue with her. Yes, she was unfair, dictatorial, unforgiving, endlessly on his case. But piss her off? She’d had enough of being pissed off in her life. Now she’d scheduled a ‘serious talk’ with him before they went out to have tea with Uncle Len and Aunt Maxie – and he knew what that meant.

  It was the interrogations he didn’t need.

  So he walked up Bulwarks Lane, thinking. He’d got as far as the shops when his phone rang. He looked at it and sighed before he spoke.

  ‘Jess.’

  ‘Hey, bad boy. Want to come over?’

  ‘Nothing would please me more. But I have an appointment with a firing squad.’

  ‘What, like the army?’

  ‘No, Jess. Like my mother.’

  ‘You’re funny, Garv.’

  ‘Yes, I’m hilarious. Though in approximately fifteen minutes I’m also going to be dead.’

  ‘Don’t you want to come over instead?’

  ‘Jess. We seem to be stuck in a time loop. Nothing would please me more, but, et cetera, et cetera.’

  ‘Got something to tell you.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Garv?’

  ‘Go on, then. I’m waiting. Tell me.’

  ‘Tell you when you get here, bad boy.’

  ‘Tell me tomorrow, Jess. Or next week. Or can it keep till this time next year?’

  ‘It’s about Chloe.’

  Garvie stopped walking. He sat down on the bench outside Jamal’s. ‘What about Chloe?’

  ‘Something you don’t know, Sherlock.’

  Garvie thought about this. He looked at his watch. ‘I bet I do.’

  ‘Not this. No one knows this.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper so hissy Garvie could almost feel wetness on his phone. ‘Not even Mr Police Turban.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  She giggled. ‘I wouldn’t lie to you, Garv. I’m not a bad girl. I’m not always a bad girl.’

  Garvie looked at his watch, considered the situation. ‘I’ll be there in ten,’ he said, and hung up.

  Jessica Walker’s house was in one of the narrow streets at the edge of East Field, a brick semi in a row of brick semis behind worn patches of earth and spasmodic hedges. All the parked cars were builders’ vans or taxis.

  It was right next to the school. Garvie considered this while he waited at the door.

  Jessica let him in. ‘Mum’s not back yet,’ she said. ‘So we’re all alone,’ she added. ‘Hope you’re not scared.’

  ‘I am, a bit,’ Garvie said. ‘And I really haven’t got much time.’

  He followed her into a front room decorated entirely in purple. Purple shag-pile carpet, two-tone purple wallpaper, dark purple woodwork. The sofa was purple, the lampshades were purple and the furniture was off-purple. Jessica’s grey cat Barbecue was almost the only non-purple thing in the room; he lay fatly on the warm ledge in the bay window where the afternoon sun shone strongest.

  ‘Want a drink?’ Jessica said. ‘Get you a beer if you want one.’

  ‘You haven’t got anything to shield my eyes from all this purple, have you?’

  She just stared at him. She’d changed out of her uniform into a tight T-shirt and denim shorts. All she had on her feet was
nail polish (purple), very bright and badly scuffed.

  ‘Thanks, but no beer,’ he said. ‘No time. You said you knew something about Chloe.’

  ‘Something you don’t know.’ She patted the purple sofa. ‘Come over here and I’ll tell you.’

  As soon as he sat down she swung her legs across his lap. Garvie removed them.

  ‘Look, Jess. I haven’t got time. And I really doubt you know anything about Chloe that I don’t.’

  ‘Do too.’

  Garvie stared at her for a moment. Then he said, ‘If you’re going to tell me that Mr Police Turban’s been here interviewing you, don’t bother, I already knew that.’

  Jessica said defensively, ‘It was a special interview, ’cause I knew her so well.’

  Garvie went on. ‘And if you’re going to tell me you told him Alex was stalking Chloe, don’t bother – I already know that too.’

  Jessica flushed. ‘I never,’ she said. ‘Not like that. I just—’

  ‘And don’t bother telling me that Singh asked if you stole Chloe’s running shoes, because I know he did. And don’t tell me you said you didn’t, because I know that too. Though, by the way, we both know you stole a lot of her other stuff.’

  ‘Oh ...’ Jessica said, and fell silent.

  ‘Well?’ Garvie said. ‘Can I go now?’

  Jessica found her voice. ‘No. There’s something else.’

  Garvie looked at her for several seconds. ‘Is it about Naylor?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The caretaker at school.’

  Jessica flushed again, across her throat this time, and down her chest above the neckline of her T-shirt. ‘Well, no. But ...’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Now you mention it, there was something odd about him and Chloe. He was always staring at her.’

  ‘Everyone stared at Chloe. You know that.’

  ‘No, but ... She liked it.’

  Garvie considered this. ‘She liked him?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. But she ... encouraged him. You know, the way she stood and stuff. She liked him looking. I think it was pervy. And he’s a bit, you know, strange.’