He got lines on his first day for being late.
His teacher was called Miss Pringle and she reminded him of the butterfly. She wore a pale blue jumper and had blonde hair that hung below her shoulder blades. Her tight jeans had a rose embroidered on the pocket. She was the youngest teacher he had ever had.
‘Would you like to sit at the blue table, Daniel?’ Miss Pringle said, bending over a little to talk to him with her palms pressed together between her knees.
He nodded and sat down at the table which was beside her desk. There were two other boys and two girls on the table. There was a piece of blue paper taped to the middle of the table. Daniel sat with his hands under the table, looking at a space on the floor beside Miss Pringle’s desk.
‘Girls and boys, we’re happy to welcome Daniel to the class. Would you like to say welcome to our class?’
Welcome to our class, Daniel.
He felt his shoulders hunch, feeling their eyes on him.
‘Daniel moved here from Newcastle. We all like Newcastle, don’t we?’
There was a sputter of comment and a scraping of chairs. Daniel glanced up at his teacher. She seemed about to ask him a question, but then decided against it. He was grateful.
All through the morning, Miss Pringle kept rubbing his back then hunkering down beside him to find out if everything was all right. He wasn’t doing the work that she had asked them to do, and she thought he didn’t understand.
The lads on his table were called Gordon and Brian. Gordon said that he liked Daniel’s motorbike pencil case, which Minnie had bought for him. Daniel leaned across the table and whispered to Gordon that if he touched it, he would stab him. Daniel told him he had a knife. The girls at the table laughed and he promised to show them.
The girls were Sylvia and Beth.
‘Me mam told me you’re the new Flynn foster kid,’ said Sylvia.
Daniel slumped down into the desk, over the jotter which he had covered in pictures of guns, although Miss Pringle had asked them to write about their favourite hobby.
Beth leaned over and pulled Daniel’s jotter away from him.
‘Give it back,’ he told her.
‘How long have you lived here then?’ Beth asked, her eyes wide with glee, holding his jotter beyond his grasp.
‘Four days. Give me back my jotter or I’ll pull your hair.’
‘If you touch me, I’ll kick you in the balls. Me dad showed me how. You know Old Flynn’s an Irish witch, don’t you? Have you seen her broomstick yet?’
Daniel pulled Beth’s hair, but not so hard that she would cry out. He reached across the table and snatched back his jotter.
‘You should be careful. She makes all the kids into stew. She ate her own daughter and then she killed her husband with a poker from the fire. Left him bleeding in the back garden, with the blood pouring all over the grass …’
‘What’s going on here?’ Miss Pringle was standing with her hands on her hips.
‘Daniel pulled my hair, miss.’
‘We don’t tell tales, Beth.’
Outside in the playground at lunchtime, Daniel ate the cheese and pickle sandwiches that Minnie had prepared, watching the lads play football. He sat on the wall to watch, sniffing in the wind, trying to catch someone’s eye. When he’d finished his lunch he tossed the bag on to the ground. The wind caught it and swept it to the gutters of the pitch, near the wire fence. He put his hands in his pockets and hunched over. It was cold, but he had nowhere else to go until it was time to go back. He liked watching them play.
‘Wanna game, man? One down, like.’
The lad who asked him was short, like Daniel, with red hair and mud splattered down his grey trousers. He wiped his nose with his sleeve as he waited for Daniel to reply.
Daniel jumped off the wall and walked towards him, hands in his pockets.
‘Wae’aye, man.’
‘Can you play, like?’
‘Aye.’
The game made him feel good. He had had a dark, heavy feeling in his stomach since the fight with Minnie over the necklace and he felt it lift for a moment as he ran the length of the muddy pitch. He wanted to score, to prove himself, but there wasn’t achance. He played hard and was out of breath when the bell rang.
The boy who had asked him to play came up at the end. He walked beside Daniel, with the ball hooked under his arm.
‘You play all right. You can play again tomorrow, if Kev isn’t back.’
‘Aye.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Danny.’
‘I’m Derek. Are you the new lad?’
‘Aye.’
A boy with black hair tried to punch the ball out of Derek’s hands.
‘Give over. It’s mine. This is Danny.’
‘I know,’ said the boy with the black hair. ‘You’re the new foster kid at Flynn Farm, aren’t you? We’re the next farm down. Me mam told me that Minnie the Witch had a new one, like.’
‘Why d’you call her a witch?’
‘ ’Cause she is one,’ said Derek. ‘You better watch, like. She killed her daughter and then killed her husband on the grass outside the house. Everybody knows.’
No secrets, Daniel remembered. Everyone knows your measure.
‘Me mam saw her husband dying and called the ambulance, but it was too late,’ said the boy with the black hair. He was grinning at Daniel and showing the gaps between his teeth.
‘Why’s she ’ave to be a witch? She might just be a murderer?’
‘Why she never get charged then? Me dad says you only ’ave to look at her to see she’s not right. You could end up like her last one.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘She was only at Minnie’s for about a month. Nob’dy at school even knew her name. Right quiet lass. She went into this mad fit in the playground and died.’
The boy with the black hair dropped to the ground in imitation of the fitting child. He lay with his legs open and sent his arms flailing, palsied and electrified.
Daniel watched. He felt an urge to kick him suddenly, but did not. He shrugged his shoulders and followed them back to the school.
5
Daniel felt cold after his run. He appreciated the rare chill, knowing that the Tube would be stifling on a day like this. Fixing his tie, he viewed the room behind him in the mirror, early sun streaming through the bedroom window. He had to be at the police station by eight thirty so that questioning could begin again, but took time, as he always did, to get the knot just right. He bit down on a yawn.
Last night, with a beer after midnight, he had checked the number for City General Hospital in Carlisle. He had decided not to call, but had taken note of the number anyway. If Minnie really was sick, he knew she would have been taken there. Just the thought of her being ill and dying brought a pain to his breastbone, causing him to take a deep breath. Then it would be replaced with the burn of his anger for her, dry in his gullet – still there after all this time. He would not call her. She had been dead to him for years anyway.
Back in the interview room, Daniel inhaled the stale air of yesterday’s questions as he waited for Sebastian. Sergeant Turner’s eyes were bleary. The older man pulled gently at his collar and straightened his cuffs. Daniel knew that the police had been given a verbal report from forensics confirming blood on Sebastian’s clothes, which had been positively identified as belonging to Ben Stokes. The CCTV film had been scrutinised by police who had yet to confirm a sighting of the boys.