The door closes. Jan locks up behind her and looks at the clock. Twenty past ten. There isn’t a sound inside the Dell.
He goes into the staffroom and makes up the narrow sofa bed, then he has a sandwich in the kitchen before brushing his teeth.
But these are just the routine tasks he’s supposed to carry out; the problem is that he doesn’t feel the least bit tired. What else can he do? What does he want to do?
Check on the children.
Quietly he pushes open the door of the children’s bedroom, and listens to their soft breathing in the darkness. Matilda, Leo and Mira are fast asleep in their beds. Even Leo is lying completely still. According to Marie-Louise, none of the children normally wakes until it’s time to get them up in the morning.
Normally. But when is anything ever normal?
Jan leaves the door ajar and goes into the dining room at the back of the school. He stands by the window looking out, without switching on the light.
St Psycho’s is also virtually in darkness. Floodlights illuminate the fence, but the complex beyond is full of shadows. Grey shadows on the grass, black shadows beneath the fir trees. No one is outside smoking tonight.
The hospital itself looms up some forty or fifty metres away, and there are lights in only four of the windows up at the top of the building. It looks as if the light is coming from white strip-lighting in a corridor — just like the ones down in the basement.
The basement. The way into the hospital — although it isn’t really, because there are locked doors down there too. And the door to the basement is also locked, of course.
Jan thinks about that door for a while. And the underground corridor, and the sally port. Then he goes back into the kitchen and opens one of the drawers. There they are, the magnetic cards. He picks one of them up.
Can he remember the code? Of course he can, it was Marie-Louise’s birthday. He has delivered or collected a child on a dozen occasions and keyed in the code at least twenty times since he arrived at the pre-school. He taps it in again and swipes the card, and the lock clicks.
Open. So it works at night too.
The steep staircase looks like a precipice, or the mouth of a cave leading straight down into the underworld. It is dark down there, but not pitch black; a faint light is just visible along the corridor.
The light from the lift up to the hospital.
Jan hesitates and looks around furtively. The cloakroom is empty, of course — he locked the outside door when Marie-Louise went home.
He leans forward, reaches out and presses the switch. The strip-lights flicker and hum into life down below in the corridor. He can see the steep staircase clearly now, with the carpet leading towards the lift like a welcome mat. He can’t see the actual door of the lift, but if he just went down four or five steps he would probably be able to see it in the distance.
Rami, are you there?
He moves down two steps in silence, then stops with his hand clutching the rail. He listens. There isn’t a sound to be heard, neither in front of him nor behind him.
He moves down another step, then three more in quick succession. He can see the door of the lift now. The light in the little window tells him that the lift is down in the basement. It is standing there waiting for him.
One more step.
But he is finding it more and more difficult to move his legs. There is a mental barrier. He is thinking too much about the children, about Leo, Matilda and Mira; they are fast asleep in their bedroom and he is responsible for them, just as he was responsible for William nine years ago.
He can’t do this. He glances at the sally port leading to the hospital one last time, then turns and goes back up the stairs.
When he reaches the cloakroom he closes the door behind him and checks to make sure it’s locked. Then he turns off all the lights except for the nightlight in the hallway, and goes to bed. He shuts his eyes in the darkness and lets out a long breath.
But it is difficult to get to sleep. Impossible. Now it’s dark it seems to Jan that the pre-school is full of sounds. Clicking, tiptoeing, whispering... Someone is lying there in the hospital just yearning, someone who wants him to come.
Alice Rami.
Jan closes his eyes, but she is gazing at him, her eyes glowing. Come here, Jan. I want to look at you.
He’s not aware that he has fallen asleep until the alarm clock starts buzzing beside him. The display shows 06.15. It is still dark outside, but it is morning. He sees bare walls around him and realizes that he is in the little staffroom at the Dell.
Almost time to wake Leo, Matilda and Mira.
His first night shift is over, but there are many more to come, and as he gets out of bed he suddenly gets an idea about how he can go down into the basement at night without worrying about the children.
Baby monitors.
It was Wednesday afternoon, and time for the outing from the nursery. When Jan and Sigrid set off with seventeen children, the time was twenty-five past one. That meant there were at least four hours left until sunset, which left a good safety margin. The group would be back by four at the latest.
The temperature outdoors was eleven degrees today, cloudy but with no wind. As they gathered outside the gate Jan noted that Sigrid had nine children from Brown Bear with her. Little William was one of the group; he was wearing a warm, dark-blue jacket with white reflective stripes, and a bright-yellow woolly hat.
Jan had brought eight children from Lynx. The whole group was made up of nine boys and eight girls, and it was quite difficult to count them when they were all together; as usual the children got excited as soon as they left the playground, and once they moved off the path and in among the trees they became even noisier. They kept on surging back and forth between the trees, screaming and jumping and leaping on top of one another. It felt as if they might just race off in all directions at any moment.
The children should have been walking in a crocodile, holding hands, but Sigrid was busy tapping away on her mobile phone, and didn’t seem to notice how unruly the group was. Jan could see that she had received a text message with lots of exclamation marks, from a friend perhaps.
He made no real attempt to impose any order on the children. He simply shouted, ‘Come along, everyone!’ and increased his pace.
The children kept up with him, and in less than quarter of an hour they had climbed the slope and were deep in the forest. The fir trees were more tightly packed here, and the path was narrowing.
‘Do you know where we are, Jan?’ Sigrid had switched off her phone and seemed to be looking around for the first time.
‘Of course.’ He smiled at her. ‘I know my way around here pretty well. If we carry on we’ll come to a clearing soon, and we can stop for our snack.’
And he was quite right; the fir trees gave way to a large, circular glade. Once they were back in the light, the children calmed down.
Their picnic consisted of cinnamon buns and strawberry juice. The children were quite tired by this stage, and it was comparatively easy to get them to sit down and eat together. But once the food was gone they all got a fresh burst of energy, racing around in the undergrowth, pushing and shoving and shouting at one another.
Jan looked at his watch: twenty past three. He caught Sigrid’s eye and felt his heart pounding faster as he asked her, seemingly in all innocence, ‘Shall we play for a little while longer before we head back?’