Zero

by Claire Stevens

  Chapter Two

  The next morning, for want of anything better to do, like get an education, I went for a walk around the village. It took all of three minutes, so I stopped off at the village shop to get a can of Coke and a magazine.

  Trying not to look too much like a feckless youth, I perched on the back of the bench outside the shop and flipped idly through the magazine, reflecting on the unfairness of my situation. Not so much that I’d been kicked out of school - although that was pretty much Made of Suck - but more the fact that if I was to find myself at a loose end for the foreseeable future, it had to be in somewhere as deathly dull as Great Ormington.

  When Chec and I were babies, my parents packed their bags one day and decided to travel the world. Just like that. My dad’s an artist and we just flitted from one place to the next as the mood took us. By the time I was five, I’d been to thirty-eight countries, sometimes more than once. And then, in a fit of insanity that I’ve never really understood, they decided to move back to England to the tiniest, boringest village they could find and set up camp there for, like, the rest of their lives.

  A fine layer of cold drizzle blew against my cheek. The calendar said June but it felt like a great big cosmic lie. Pulling my hoodie up, I jumped off the bench, chucked my empty Coke can in the bin, and made my way back home. The sofa and a few episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter were beckoning.

  As I pushed open the front door, I caught a snatch of conversation coming from the Good Sitting Room. The Good Sitting Room was where we entertained guests that weren’t also friends. It was where we’d held the reception after my granddad’s funeral and it reminded me of wearing scratchy clothes and having to listen politely while extended family members told me how tall I was getting.

  I hovered outside the door. There was a male voice. Not my dad’s. I wondered who the visitor was that he warranted Good Sitting Room treatment.

  ‘Roanne!’ My mum caught sight of me through the open door as I sidled past. ‘Come in here. There’s someone to see you.’

  A man in his twenties wearing a grey suit and a sporting the blandest haircut I’d ever seen in my life got up out of his seat and held out his hand for me to shake.

  ‘Ro.’ There was a warning to be polite in my mum’s tone. ‘This is Adam Miller; he’s one of the solicitors from Bartlett and Young. He’s come to talk to you about the-’ She trailed off and made a flappy hand gesture that was apparently supposed to mean ‘massive predicament you’re in’.

  Sensing that today was probably not the finest day to be giving lip to my mum, I instead gave Boring Suit Man - Adam, whatever - the barest of nods and sat down on the sofa.

  ‘Where’s Mister Bartlett?’ I asked. As soon as my parents had sprung me from jail (and that sounds a lot cooler than it actually was), my dad had got on the phone to Nicholas Bartlett, an old friend of his who was a solicitor. He was nice. And he dressed better than this guy.

  ‘He’s unavailable today,’ Adam said smoothly. ‘So, ah, Roanne,’ he began. ‘The date for your court case has been set. The twentieth of August.’ Dry-mouthed, I nodded. ‘There have also been some developments,’ he went on. ‘The Crown Prosecution Service has released a photograph to us that indicates you were putting something in your pocket as you were walking past the jewellery concession.’ He slid a grainy photo out of an envelope and passed it over to me.

  I felt my mum’s glare start to burn an icy hole in the side of my head.

  ‘That’s BOLLOCKS!’ I squeaked. The hand holding the photograph shook with indignation and my mum’s glare cranked up a notch from Ice Queen to Medusa at my language. I looked carefully at the photo. ‘Look. Look! I’m scratching my BUM!’ Mum looked as if she didn’t know which was worse - shoplifting, or talking about bum-scratching in front of the man who stood between me and a criminal record whilst sitting in the Good Sitting Room. ‘I mean, not scratching my bum. It’s my hip. Look. I’m scratching the bit of hip at the top of my jeans.’ I thrust the photograph back to him.

  Adam Bad Suit looked again at the photograph and made a little down-turned smile, accompanying it with a small shrug, as if to say that while it could be construed as a bum-scratch, it was probably more likely that I was a nasty, sneaky thief.

  I started to panic. This was starting to feel a lot like living inside a Kafka novel. ‘I didn’t take anything from that stupid bloody shop!’ I was aware that my eyes were bulging slightly from their sockets and tried to rein my indignation in a bit. I swallowed and said more calmly, ‘You have to believe me - I’m not a thief. I wouldn’t do something like that, it’s illegal.’ I turned to my mum. ‘Seriously, this is wrong. They’re wrong. I didn’t do it, I swear.’ She rubbed my hand between hers and nodded, not quite looking at me.

  ‘Whether I believe you or not isn’t relevant, Roanne,’ Adam said, not unkindly. ‘The CPS believe they can prove you stole that jewellery and they want to bring the case to the magistrate’s court. So you have a choice now. You can either plead guilty and you will be sentenced accordingly-’

  ‘Er, no. Absolutely no freaking way!’

  ‘-Or if you decide to plead not guilty, we will need to come up with a good reason why you should not be found guilty.’

  ‘I assume you’re looking for a reason other than “Because I didn’t do it”,’ I said as acidly as I could whilst fighting back tears of frustration.

  He nodded slowly. A kind of Yeah, this is a total bummer, isn’t it? kind of nod. ‘If you decide to plead guilty... The magistrate would have discretion over your sentence, but the maximum penalty would be a fine and up to six months imprisonment in a youth offenders’ institute.’

  I tried to swallow, but my throat had almost closed up. Prison. Beside me, my mum gasped and clamped her hands to her mouth.

  This was bad. This was so bad. Well, I mean, duh, of course it was, but the consequences would go way beyond the time I would actually spend in prison. It would be on my record for ever. It would have to go on my university applications and every time I applied for a job. And anything that required a background check? Forget it. This would be hanging over my head for the rest of my life.

  ‘There must be something we can do,’ my mum said desperately. ‘What about- What about if Roanne offers to work for the shop for free to make up for the things that were taken? Would the shop be willing to do that?’

  ‘Again, I didn’t actually steal anything,’ I huffed.

  Boring Hair Adam crunched his nose up in confusion at my mum’s suggestion. ‘The shop management believe Roanne stole nearly ten thousand pounds worth of jewellery from them.’ Nine, actually, I thought to myself. ‘They’re unlikely to ever let Roanne through their front doors again; they certainly won’t let her work there.’

  ‘Well...’ Mum glanced at me and then back to Adam. ‘Her dad and I are in a...financial position that would enable us to pay this money back to the shop in exchange for them dropping the charges against her.’

  My mouth almost fell open in surprise. Seriously? They would be willing to fritter away nine grand on a crime I hadn’t committed?

  And then it hit me. Stupid Roanne. They did think I did it.

  ‘It’s not really that simple, Mrs Harper.’ Adam ran his hand over his chin ruefully. ‘The shop has the jewellery that was found in Roanne’s bag. Technically, they’re not out of pocket.’ He frowned, as if he was about give a lecture on quantum physics to a pair of chimps. ‘When teenagers shoplift, the most common items taken are low-value: make-up, clothing. The items found in Roanne’s bag were high-value. Taking them would have taken a lot of planning: information about staff schedules, stock lists, deliveries, that kind of thing.’

  The box of gold chains I’d been accused of taking had only just been delivered to the shop. The necklaces themselves were packaged separately in tiny plastic bags inside a larger plastic box, ready to be put out on pads in the glass display cabinet. It was a small, portable item, ideal for stealing, and very few people would have known of
its existence. The shop assistant who had left it lying on the shop counter was probably on her way to the job centre as we spoke. ‘They think there were other people involved, too, don’t they?’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘When a minor is arrested for shoplifting, the police call their parents to come and pick them up. If the parents seem suitably outraged, the police often only issue a caution for a first offence. It’s one less job for them if the parents are happy to mete out punishment. That’s if the shop bothers to involve the authorities at all. The reason the department store and the CPS are so keen to charge you is because they think you’re part of a shoplifting ring. They’re trying to put pressure on you to give up the other members.’

  Apparently I was doomed to keep repeating the same phrase until the day I died. ‘I didn’t steal the jewellery. There was no planning. There are no gang members. I didn’t steal anything!’

  An awkward silence followed.

  ‘Mrs Harper, could I impose on you for a cup of tea?’ Adam asked politely. He watched my mum leave the room and craned his head back to see how far she’d gone. He turned back to me. ‘Roanne, there is another option available to you.’ I looked up at him fearfully, and nodded. Maybe the CPS was going to offer me a reduced charge if I agreed to plead guilty. ‘I’ve been authorised to offer you an alternative to going to court.’

  Huh? ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I represent some people who are...influential, and are in a position to make the case against you disappear if you were to offer them your assistance in a certain matter.’

  My eyebrows rocketed up my forehead as I tried to process what he’d just said. Surely he didn’t mean- ‘You mean, disappear completely? As in, like, forever?’ He inclined his head slightly. ‘But how?’

  He shrugged slightly as if this was of no concern. ‘Leave the how to them. Are you interested?’

  Although a part of me wanted to steam in, shouting, ‘Yes! Yes! Anything!’ my calmer side prevailed. ‘It depends. Who are they? And what is it they want me to do?’ Not that it mattered. At that moment in time, I struggled to think of anything I wouldn’t do to get my life back to the way it had been before the weekend.

  ‘They prefer to remain anonymous for the time being. You can just think of them as: The People Who Can Make My Court Case Go Away. As for what they want you to do... A child has been kidnapped. They would like you to help them retrieve him.’

  Stunned, like someone had hit me over the back of the head with an invisible spade, all I could do for a moment was stare. ‘What? I just... What? How? Why don’t they just go to the police?’

  ‘The police are unable to assist in this matter, so the people I represent have assembled a team of professionals to re-acquire the child. You would be a part of this team.’ His head was still tilted down but when he snuck a look at me there was something in his expression akin to a cat looking at a mouse hole.

  All I could think of was the possibility that I might be able to make this totally fake charge go away. ‘But I’m not a professional. I’m an A-level student from Suffolk, not some kind of kidnapped-child-rescuer or, like, an ex-marine ninja with loads of survival skills and guns and stuff. I don’t have any skills that they’d need.’

  ‘We can discuss that in more depth once you agree to join us,’ he said, ‘but let’s just say some of your extra-curricular activities will come in very useful.’

  To make up for the fact that we were, apparently, Homeschool Freaks, my parents had sent Chec and me on a whole bunch of classes over the years. Karate, self-defence, archery, outward-bound skills, orienteering…

  Marksmanship.

  I stared. ‘No way. You’re saying I have to shoot people?’

  He shook his head. ‘Violence would only be necessary in self-defence and if everything goes to plan you won’t be in any danger.’ He rubbed his hand over his mouth and let out a rueful huff of a laugh. ‘I know you have no reason to believe me, but your safety really is of paramount importance.’

  A tiny part of my brain, the practical, sensible part, was shouting Run. Run for your life. This man’s a lunatic. But the larger part of my brain, the part that was busy remembering what it was like not to be thought of as a criminal, shushed it. I swallowed. ‘Do I have to do anything illegal?’

  ‘No, not at all.’ He glanced to the door. ‘Your mother is going to be back soon and I would prefer it if she didn’t walk in on this conversation. Do you have any other questions?’

  ‘What if we don’t manage to get this kid back? Do the charges against me stay dropped?’

  ‘You will get him back, but yes in the event of failure the charges would stay dropped.’

  I fiddled with my lip ring and thought as rapidly as I could. ‘Let me get this right. Rescue the kidnapped child. No more court case.’

  He spread his hands wide. ‘Think of it as community service. Freeing up police time so that they can go after the real criminals.’ He smirked slightly, knowing he’d got me on board.

  I didn’t even have to think twice. Prison or community service. Jail or freedom. I nodded shakily. ‘Fine. If you can make the charges against me go away, I’m in. As long as I don’t have to do anything illegal. Or hurt anyone. I don’t want to do that.’ The last thing I wanted was to end up in more trouble than I was already in.

  Adam grinned in relief and his whole demeanour relaxed. ‘Great. Great. It’s likely you will be away for a few weeks, so-’

  ‘A few WEEKS?’ I hooted. ‘I can’t! I’ve got school!’

  He raised an eyebrow at me. ‘I was given to understand that your schedule had recently been freed up in that respect.’

  My mouth popped open in horror, but he had a point. ‘Well, what will I tell everyone? How am I going to explain not being here for weeks on end?’

  He raised his eyes to the ceiling and steepled his hands under his chin. ‘Digging wells in Africa. Yes, that should work. Somewhere out of the way, with a poor communications network. Uganda, maybe. You can say it’s part of a youth rehabilitation scheme that the government are piloting. You’ll need to tell your family this evening; the induction centre you need to go to is in Exeter and you need to be there by tomorrow afternoon.’

  I glared at him. ‘How will I know the court case has been stopped? You could be lying and when I get back I could have a charge of breaking the conditions of my bail added to the list.’

  He shrugged. ‘The case has already been dropped.’

  ‘Already been dropped? How can it have already been dropped? I’ve only been talking to you for the last ten minutes.’

  ‘If you don’t believe me, feel free to contact the Crown Prosecution Service and check.’ He gestured towards the phone on the side of the table.

  I turned to the phone and glanced back at him. ‘No, it’s okay, I trust you,’ I said slowly and began to sit back down in my seat.

  A slow smile spread across his face until it became a grin with a slightly feral edge. It was like someone had turned up the lights; I felt dazzled and could feel my blood quickening again. ‘Excellent.’ He gave me a quick smile. ‘Now, let’s get down to business.’

  As Adam started to explain with the aid of a sketched map the best way to get to the induction location, I wondered if my week could possibly get any freakier.

  Turns out, it could.