It was the morning of Thomma’s escape from Bartholomew Manor and they were arranging who should go to Suffolk to interview him. In normal circumstances, it would have been Peggy, as it was she who had interviewed Miss Girling and given her the number that Thomma had rung for help. Liz had only met Miss Girling when she had shown Liz around the school. But Peggy was up for promotion and the board was meeting that afternoon. Liz had strongly recommended Peggy and was anxious that she should not miss her chance.
Silence fell. Peggy looked downcast.
‘Come on, Peggy,’ said Liz gently. ‘It’s my reputation on the line as well as yours. If you don’t turn up, they’ll think I got it wrong. I’ve written you up in a big way, you know. I’ll cope with Thomma. Your account of your interview with Miss Girling is very clear, and I’ll read it again before I go. Also, I need to look again at your note about the call from the Berlin Station telling us about Irma and Dieter Nimitz’s deaths. Let me have the file of photographs, and make sure it includes everyone involved, right from the start of all this. I have a feeling there are links here that we haven’t yet made. And why don’t you spend this morning at Grosvenor, briefing Miles Brookhaven on recent developments? Then go to the Promotion Board this afternoon and sock it to them.’
Peggy’s face brightened and she smiled. ‘All right. I’ll go to the beastly board and do my best,’ she said, standing up to go.
‘Of course you will. And you’ll wow them. You’ll see. I just hope I’ll do as well in Suffolk.’
As she emerged from Ipswich station Liz was not surprised to see a police car waiting for her. She was surprised, however, to see the Chief Constable sitting in the back seat.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘I was expecting Inspector Singh.’
‘When I heard you were coming I thought I’d come myself,’ Pearson replied with a smile. ‘I hope that isn’t a disappointment.’
‘I’ll get over it,’ Liz said teasingly. ‘And actually I’m delighted to see you, because I think this case is beginning to look more complicated than we initially thought.’ She spent the hour of the drive explaining what had been going on in Germany and trying to make the connections with Suffolk. She found it helped her to go over it, but it clearly left Richard Pearson pretty confused, and neither of them knew quite what to expect from the young man they were on their way to interview.
The desk sergeant was expecting them, and it was obvious that someone had recently cleaned and tidied up the reception area of the small police station in the housing estate on the edge of Southwold. The floors were sparkling and there were flowers in a vase on the reception counter.
‘Good morning, sergeant,’ said Pearson. ‘Where’s the young man then?’
‘I’ll show you along, sir. Good morning, ma’am,’ he said with a nod to Liz. ‘He’s in an interview room down the hall. One of our young family officers is looking after him.’
‘Excellent,’ replied Pearson. ‘Let’s go.’
The sergeant unlocked a door and led them down a corridor to a room that looked like the sitting room of a small house, containing a couple of armchairs, a sofa and a table at which a teenage boy and a young woman PC in uniform were sitting looking at a laptop and laughing. The boy was small and thin and Middle Eastern in appearance. He was dressed in jeans and a grey hoodie that was too big for him, and looked like countless boys seen every day on the streets of London and other English cities. But he had none of their bravado. As he looked up from the screen when Pearson and Liz came into the room, his face grew tense and he looked frightened.
‘This is PC Norton,’ said the desk sergeant, ‘and young Thomma.’
‘Good morning, sir, ma’am,’ said the young woman, jumping to her feet. ‘We were just playing a game on the computer.’
‘Great,’ said Pearson warmly. ‘I expect you were better than Miss Norton at that,’ he said, addressing Thomma.
Thomma seemed too frightened to reply, but PC Norton said with a smile, ‘Yes, sir. He was beating me hands down.’
As the desk sergeant and PC Norton left the room, Liz said, ‘Come and sit down over here, Thomma,’ motioning to the sofa. She sat down next to the boy and Pearson took one of the armchairs opposite them.
Pearson said, ‘First, the most important thing is: did they give you some breakfast and, as it’s nearly lunchtime, are you hungry now?’
The boy smiled hesitantly and replied, ‘No, thank you, sir. I had bread rolls and jam for breakfast and I have just had a sandwich and a coke for lunch.’
‘That’s good,’ said Liz. ‘Now perhaps you could tell us why you ran away from the school.’
The boy thought for a moment. ‘I was scared.’
‘What frightened you?’
‘It was when I heard the other boys talking. About Miss Girling.’
‘What were they saying about Miss Girling?’
‘They said she was dead. She was going to take me to church with her. But she didn’t leave a note, so I thought she had forgotten.’ The boy bit his lip and frowned, then said, almost angrily, ‘I know she is dead, but the other boys said she killed herself. I don’t believe that. Something bad happened to her.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because she wanted me to phone her if I didn’t hear from her. Why would she say that if she was going to kill herself?’ He explained how she had first found him when he’d been upset because the other boys laughed at him for being Christian; how she had comforted him, then offered to take him to the local church service.
‘Who would have harmed her, do you think?’ asked Liz.
‘Cicero,’ he said without hesitation. ‘He came looking for me when I left this morning. I think he would have harmed me, too.’
Pearson interjected, ‘You mustn’t worry about that. We’re not going to let anyone come anywhere near you.’
Thomma nodded. He no longer seemed the fragile boy of a few minutes before. Seeing his confidence rise, Liz asked, ‘Can you tell us a bit more about the school at Bartholomew Manor? What were you studying there?’
‘Computers, miss.’
‘Yes. But was it just computing in general?’
‘Oh no, we’ve all had the basic training before. This is specialised.’
‘Let’s start at the beginning. Where did you originally come from and how did you get here?’
‘And,’ added Pearson, ‘how do you come to speak such excellent English?’
So Thomma told a story which he had probably recounted many times before – how he had been born and brought up in Aleppo in Syria. His father had been an English professor at the university and had taught his children to speak English. They were Christians. When the fighting started, his father had decided they must leave but he couldn’t find a country that would take them. So the family, his parents and his two sisters and Thomma, travelled to the coast. His father paid people smugglers to ferry them to Italy. They paid a lot of money, said Thomma, to get a better boat than the unsafe inflatables. But when the boat came it was old and rickety and had no life rafts. When they were in sight of the Italian coast a storm blew up and the boat capsized. In the chaos that followed he lost sight of the rest of his family. He swam for as long as he could and was eventually washed up on the shore all alone.
He had managed to evade the government officials who would have put him in a refugee camp and joined a group who were walking across Europe. It took him about two months to reach Germany, where they were very kind and found him temporary foster parents. He had to take some tests to decide which school he should go to, and he got very high marks. So he was put in a school outside Hamburg that specialised in maths and computing. During his third year he had been chosen to join a group of boys going to England for specialised training.