by Alice Castle
Today, this was serving York well, as his mystery girl had been filed away, far from prying eyes, in a room with a door. These were far and few between in London hospitals, where the rule was now mixed wards with only a flimsy curtain between patients. Finally, York found the right place, thanks to the PC slumped on a hard, plastic chair outside. He’d been sitting, peacefully zoned out, vaguely listening to the burble of his police radio, for a couple of hours now, but snapped to attention as he registered York’s purposeful form bearing down on him.
‘All right, sir? All quiet here.’
‘No-one hanging around?’
‘Not seen a soul. Apart from nurses.’
‘No visitors?’
‘Not one, sir.’
Of course not, thought York, as he opened the door gingerly. After all, who knew the girl was even here? As far as he was aware, no-one had yet been reported missing. He didn’t mind admitting that it surprised him. In a place like Dulwich, he was pretty sure that parents were all over their children. Ok, he didn’t actually know many Dulwich parents to speak to – Beth Haldane was one of the few he’d met in the flesh, and she seemed fine, concerned about her kid of course, but this side of insanely over protective. But during his previous Dulwich case, he had had his ear bent by some very odd parents who’d thought that, just because he was investigating a death at their sons’ school, he needed to explain his every move to their mums and dads. Well, he’d put them straight, of course. But he’d definitely got a certain impression about the way these parents liked to throw their weight around. Although he wanted this poor girl to receive all the support from her family that she could get – she’d need it, according to the doctor – he wasn’t looking forward to having to deal with parents who were going to be over-privileged and pretty sure of their exalted status, as well as anxious and probably vengeful. He sighed, and pushed the door open.
Stepping inside the room, he was aware of the heavy silence, punctuated only by regular electronic beeps. He had no idea what all the various tubes and monitors attached to the figure in the bed were doing. He registered only that the monotonous sounds were proof of continued life, and therefore comforting. Steeling himself, he stepped forward.
The girl was tiny, her outline barely disturbing the standard, NHS-issue, cotton blanket, a faded blue from multiple boil washes. The blanket had been smoothed across the girl’s slight chest, and lay as peaceful and tidy as the covers a little girl would tuck over her doll. It was clear that she hadn’t moved at all since she had been hooked up to the machines. The little face was waxen pale, blank as a fresh page of his notebook. She had no lines. It was tempting to think that was because she’d had no experience, yet, but York knew that probably wasn’t so.
She might be an English rose, if there had been any animation in her face, any flush of life. There wasn’t. York had seen the photos from the Gallery and noticed that the crude make-up had been washed away, maybe while they’d been pumping her stomach or doing whatever it was they’d had to do to keep her alive thus far. He had previously thought she must be fourteen or fifteen, in her sophisticated party frock, though it was always difficult to guess a teenager’s age. Now, stripped back to the essentials, she could easily pass for a ten-year-old.
It didn’t seem right that she should lie here, alone, so close to death. Where were the people who loved her? And who had done this to her? York, against his own will, felt a vow rising. He didn’t want to do this, he didn’t even need to, but nevertheless – he swore he would find the people who’d put her here. Because, if he was sure of anything, it was this. The girl lying here was just a pawn. There was something else going on. And he wanted – needed – to know what it was.
He turned to face the window, and looked out. The view from this floor was uninspiring, to put it mildly. The backs of various buildings, a couple of high, wire-sided wheeled trolleys filled with used blankets identical to the one here, abandoned on their way to the laundry. An exit, surrounded by a throng of die-hard smokers – in all ways. One was wheeling a drip attached to his arm and, York could see from here, doubling over into a hacking cough; there were a couple of white-coated doctors, who should surely know better; a nurse in maroon scrubs; a patient in a thin, NHS-issue dressing gown; and an admin worker. They shared the uneasy camaraderie of addicts. As he watched, one of the medics ground out his stub and went back into the building.
Beyond the black railings, the traffic of Camberwell rushed by, on its way to the Elephant and Castle or down to Dulwich, its roar not quite reaching York through the dusty double glazing, but so well known to him that it felt like part of his being.
As he watched, he heard a double beep back in the room. It was a misstep, a breaking of ranks from the machines surrounding the girl. Something was off. He swung back, but there was no discernible change – she lay still, the blanket perfectly shrouding the tiny hillocks of her breasts. Only an added flashing light from the bank of monitors signalled distress from somewhere within that small body. He rushed to the door.
‘Get someone. Something’s happening,’ he said urgently to the PC, who shot out of his seat and bolted down the corridor, hefty shoes squeaking frantically on the lino.
***
Bernie Troughton sidled from one rubber-soled brogue to the other, outside Miss Douglas’s door. She didn’t usually hover – she didn’t have the build for it – but today it was clear she was anxious. Very anxious. Watched by the cool dark eyes of Leanne, the headmistress’s secretary, Miss Troughton’s restless swaying reminded Leanne irresistibly of the time one of the oak trees had come down on Peckham Rye in a storm. People had seen it moving from side to side, and not paid it much mind. But once it had really got going, there’d been no stopping the momentum.
Leanne fiddled idly with one of her giant, gold hoop earrings. She needed to pop to the shops in her lunch break, but she didn’t want to miss the moment when the Old Trout (as poor Miss Troughton was fondly known to everyone except the headmistress) finally toppled and hit the deck. They’d feel the reverberations in Brixton, for sure.
Before Miss Troughton finally made up her mind to knock, the door suddenly swung back, and Angela Douglas appeared. ‘Oh, you’re here, good, good, come in. Leanne?’
Leanne uncoiled herself from her seat and loped over with two covered platters. This emergency lunch meeting was her chance to escape, and she was going to seize it. ‘I’m off now, yeh?’
Miss Douglas waved a distracted hand. ‘Yes, yes, fine.’
Leanne mentally expanded her shopping trip to cover making hair and nail appointments down Norwood High Street, as well as dropping her party shoes in at the menders. Clearly, no-one was going to be watching the clock today. She grabbed her jacket and was off before the headmistress’s door had shut.
Miss Troughton and Miss Douglas faced each other in the large, quiet room. It wasn’t as grand as the headmaster’s room at Wyatt’s, much to Miss Douglas’s chagrin. Though her job was every bit as important to the reputation of the paired Endowment Schools, her own establishment was a Johnny – or should that be Jill? – come-lately affair, founded some two hundred and fifty years after the original school, when someone had belatedly realised that girls might just be worth educating, too. Wyatt’s itself was a baroque redbrick palace to knowledge, complete with a cupola atop the Grand Hall, stained glass left, right, and centre, and acres of manicured greensward sprawling louchely beside the snarling traffic of the South Circular. Meanwhile, her own beloved College was a standard-issue, nineteenth-century school building, tucked unpretentiously into a residential street, and with a rash of higgledy-piggledy outbuildings clustered around it like the dreariest suburban shanty town, struggling to contain the school’s constant expansion.
The headmistress’s room was of a piece with the main school building, in that it was solid, workmanlike, and without architectural frills. Angela Douglas had chosen to emphasise this lack of fussiness in her own style of dress, but there were days when she yearned
to be looking out onto something even approaching the billiard-table perfection of Wyatt’s lawns. Instead, her view was a sea of bog-standard black tarmac, plain iron railings, and a couple of measly tubs of late tulips standing to attention by the sign saying The College School, like the afterthoughts they very much were.
Sometimes there was a comfort in grandeur, and today she felt as though she could do with all she could get. Even the high-backed chair behind her desk was restrained. It was a little throne-like, yes, but in an austere, medieval way, definitely more Edward the Confessor than Elizabeth I. She sighed a tiny sigh. Having exceptionally good taste could be an utter pain. Today, she would have liked an enormous ruff, and a massive fuck-off gown studded with seed pearls. Even a couple of handsome courtiers wearing golden hoops in their ears and rakish smiles on their faces would have cheered her up.
She looked over at Miss Troughton crossly. She loved her friend dearly, but the stress of the day had left the woman red-faced and rumpled, her choices of man-made, easy-care fibres being revealed as seriously flawed on many grounds.
‘Let’s sit,’ she said to Miss Troughton, indicating the round table at the end of the room, more suitable for brainstorming sessions than the seat from which she handed down polite but unmistakable reprimands and diktats to recalcitrant girls – and their parents.
Miss Troughton whipped the covers off the plates and dived straight into the serried ranks of sandwiches, beautifully cut into equilateral triangles and arrayed points uppermost. Once she had an egg mayonnaise in one hand and a ham-and-pickle in the other, with bites missing from the apex of each, she took a breath and relaxed. Miss Douglas averted her gaze a little from her friend’s feast – she had always been quite the trencherwoman – and shook out her linen napkin. She took a smoked salmon triangle and nibbled the edge, then put it to one side. The tang of lemon juice was a little astringent for her taste.
‘The question is, how are we going to approach this mess?’ she asked, the horizontal lines on her forehead now deeply scored.
Miss Troughton, moving on now to cheddar versus tuna, munched silently. Her shoulders rose up a couple of inches, but she remained focussed on chewing. Miss Douglas threw down her napkin crossly and stood up, striding to the window. Much to her annoyance, she caught the eye of the postman, who’d been strolling up to the school entrance with his little red trolley. He grinned cheerily, and she withdrew from sight, hoping she hadn’t given him quite as fearsome a grimace as he deserved.
So much of this job was about appearances. Don’t frighten the postman. Don’t alarm the parents. Always show the best possible side of the school in public. Never let on that there were any problems rumbling beneath the surface. Never lie, but don’t ever quite let any cats out of the bag either. And there lay the essence of her dilemma today.
Sophia Jones-Creedy might have been the envy of her peers for her tiny build and highly photogenic features, but her latest escapade was still going to represent a huge and very ugly moggy indeed being let out of the College School bag. Not that Miss Douglas didn’t have compassion for the girl, and her family. Of course, she did. If ill had befallen her – and it very much looked as though it had – her heart went out to them all. But she had to think about her other charges, too, and the effect all this would have on the school.
The College was bigger than one silly schoolgirl. Always had been and, if she had anything to do with it, always would be. But reputation was everything. And the exam results! This summer’s GCSEs and A levels were looming. The last thing she needed was the entire exam cohort going off the boil because some wayward child had got herself… What, exactly? That was what they needed to know.
‘Any response from the parents?’
Miss Troughton chewed vigorously, swallowed and spoke. ‘Father’s in surgery until they don’t know when. Mother’s flying back from Dubai, she doesn’t land until this evening. I’ve spoken to the au pair, but she knows nothing. Didn’t see Sophia this morning, but that’s nothing new. Can’t tell whether her bed’s been slept in; room’s such a mess. Doesn’t want to search the place for her phone – terrified of the girl. Well, she has a temper on her, as we know. Didn’t see her last night, but that’s nothing unusual either, and frankly it sounds like the less this au pair sees of the girl, the better pleased she is.’
‘What a situation. A fourteen-year-old girl, and her family has absolutely no idea where she is or what’s she’s up to. How can this happen? And with one of our families, too?’
‘Angela. You know it happens. It’s not good but it’s the modern way. Remember last year?’
The women exchanged stricken glances. An eleven-year-old had been teased by her classmates because she smelled. They’d discovered, eventually, that the reason was her mother, newly divorced, had taken a month-long work assignment in Paris, leaving her daughter to cope alone with a stack of ready meals, a fork, a microwave, and a nightly FaceTime chat. The calls sufficed to reassure the mother that everything was ticking along. They did not, however, replace parental injunctions to shower, clean teeth, brush hair, and wash clothes. Getting to school on time and coping with her huge homework load had taken all the girl’s organisational skills. There had been nothing left for the domestic front.
The mother returned to find her charming three-bedroomed terrace reduced to a byre, while her little girl was half-feral and wholly stinky. She had been overwhelmed by guilt. But she insisted she had had no choice. Facing swingeing cuts to her income when her husband ran off with the statutory younger woman, she had needed to take the work in order to pay the school fees.
That had been another moral nightmare, thought Miss Douglas. She had wrestled over whether to contact social services, or whether even the police should be involved – child abandonment could be a matter for the courts, with the threat of criminal charges, if it could be shown to have caused unnecessary suffering or injury to health. In the end, despite her conviction that a month’s worth of solitude and processed food had probably stunted the girl’s growth, if not worse, Miss Douglas decided to be merciful.
The problem had been solved with a bursary, though the child was still ostracised – there was a streak of cruelty running through most schoolgirls, as vivid and unmistakable as the lettering in Brighton rock. They could smell an outsider – this time, quite literally – and they shunned her accordingly. Running with the pack was so important; no-one could afford to court the unpopularity that would be caused by showing this poor child a bit of friendship.
Miss Douglas sighed, though she told herself firmly her job was not to change the essential nature of humankind. It was just to turn out girls with excellent results that fitted them for life in a sharp-elbowed world. This time, though, it looked as though things were much more serious. There was no avoiding the obvious course of action.
Miss Troughton, still munching, looked questioningly at the headmistress. Miss Douglas inclined her head.
‘It’s got to be the police. I can’t see another way. Though what the publicity will do to us, I shudder to think.’
Miss Troughton chewed frantically again. ‘Wyatt’s have managed, though. When you think about it. A murder, and that whole slavery business. And their stats are up!’
Miss Douglas looked sourly down at her salmon sandwich. ‘Don’t remind me. If they had Jack the Ripper as an Old Boy, their waiting list couldn’t be any longer. They just can’t seem to put a foot wrong. But, as usual, it’s different for girls.’
It was the mantra they had both been fighting for a lifetime. Why was it the case that Wyatt’s, and its personification, Dr Grover, had been able to shimmy around their recent scandal like the most shameless of pole dancers? Double standards. A man behaving badly got public sympathy, or not-so-sneaking admiration. A woman behaving badly had always been, and always would be, a harlot. And a teenage girl acting up was days on end of headlines for the red top papers, a gaggle of journalists posted outside her gates, plummeting applications, even some removals from t
he register, not to mention so-called think pieces on modern morals popping up on Radio 4 and a thousand blog posts from sanctimonious parents pointing out the school’s failings.
‘I’ll ring them now. There doesn’t seem any alternative,’ said Miss Douglas, sitting up a little straighter, and brushing imaginary crumbs from her superbly tailored dress. Its strict lines and her set face made her look, thought Miss Troughton admiringly, like a slightly more mature Joan of Arc ready for her hot – very hot – date with the stake.
‘It’s the right thing to do,’ said Miss Troughton sadly. The sandwiches were finished, but she would stay and offer whatever support she could. She snaked out a pudgy hand and laid it on her friend’s slender arm. ‘Might as well get on with it.’
***
That was it, thought Beth. She’d had enough of crouching at her desk, peering into her laptop as though it were a crystal ball. She could still find no trace of any official report of a missing teenager on the internet, but at least her hours spent on Facebook had borne some fruit.
And what bitter fruit they were. Though she kept telling herself that she had no reason to worry about Ben yet, it was the yet that loomed large. She felt a little like someone who had innocently gone searching for heffalumps in the woods, and got caught in her own trap.
Parents of kids Ben’s age were protective, there was no doubt of that. There was a perception that danger lurked on every street corner, and that children were safer closeted at home with their parents. But this stifling world where no child played outside at any time – let alone after dark, unless they were under full parental supervision – led to both sides escaping the claustrophobic lock-down with their phones, laptops, iPads, or whatever they had that possessed the golden charm of connectivity.
No parent, however dedicated, could play Uno all night long, or Minecraft, or the Sims, or whatever else their child loved to do. She already knew that after a bout of playing Scrabble or Cluedo or Pandemic with Ben, she loved to curl up gratefully with her phone for some peaceful, mindless surfing, and he did the same. All their kids were learning, by example, that what you did for a bit of peace and quiet was disappear off to your own world online. You might be physically sharing the same space, in the same sitting room, but all members of the family could be in entirely different zones – and not all of them good ones.
