“Who else indeed.”
Mary squirmed around in her seat for a moment and then did her best to change the subject.
“You said you came here to talk about that blonde girl.”
“That was one of my reasons, yes.”
“Well, what about her, then?”.
“Well,” replied Packard, calmly. “You see, as much as I abhor the idea of the school sending someone down here to interfere in our affairs, the fact of the matter is the girl is here, and from what I’ve seen, she seems to be quite keen to find out what happened. My only interest now is to get the school’s beak out of Radcliff, not that the girl will bother us for a little while.”
“What do you mean?”
“A little bird told me she’s gone for the moment; something more pressing to do up near the school.”
“Well, there you go then, maybe she’s already finished and she won’t come back.”
“No, she’ll return, I’m sure of it. She’s still not even been to visit old Caroline. What’s more, I could see in her eyes that she was eager to discover the truth about the boy’s attack. Who knows what will happen when she gets back, she’ll probably start poking around once again and give us all a headache.”
Packard watched as a momentary expression of concern flashed across the woman’s face; he had to suppress a smile. To prevent Mary noticing this, he took a moment to take in the unpleasant sight of the nicotine stained bamboo patterned wallpaper that hung in the room. What a horrible place to live, he thought.
“Then what do you suppose we should do?”
“Ah, I’m glad you asked me, I knew I could count on you. It’s my opinion that if our girl needs to find something to satisfy her desire for answers, then we should give her a little help. As you suggested before, it wasn’t me or you; we all know that Jacob’s, I mean Johann’s, odd ways exclude him from the picture, and I highly doubt it was old Caroline. So, as we know this, why not just push things along a little and enable the girl get over her problem, and in the process help ourselves to restore our privacy. I suggest we need to provide her with the opportunities to come to recognise that a shadow walker passed through and committed the crime.”
“But how?”
“Don’t worry about that just yet, I’ll be in touch. All I want to know now is whether I can count on your assistance in all this.”
“Well, as you say, if it’s just helping the girl to see what’s right, I see no harm.”
“My thoughts exactly. So what do you say?”
“I’ll see. I mean, it depends on what it is.”
“Of course, I understand,” said Packard before getting up from the armchair. He then removed an envelope from the inside of his jacket and placed it on the mantelpiece. “Don’t open this just yet, maybe wait until I’ve gone. It’s just a little thing for you to do to start things off; you’ll see that it’s nothing really. I’ll get back to you with the rest of the plan as soon as I can, that is if you want me to. You don’t have to make up your mind just yet. But I would ask if you would be discreet. I’ve not told anyone else that I even have an idea of a plan, not that there’s really many to tell. Nevertheless, thought it would be best just to keep it between you and me.”
Mary rubbed the nicotine stains on her fingers once more and - after staring at a point somewhere in the middle of the brown carpet between her feet – replied with a bursts of nods to show that she would keep the plan a secret. With his task complete, Packard excused himself by telling Mary he had some business still to do that day. She followed him to the end of the driveway, still in her dressing gown and slippers, and watched as he disappeared behind the overgrown hedge that hid the turn from Balfour Lane onto Lloyd George Avenue. Following a habit she had developed over more than thirty years, she drew a cigarette from the pack she had in her pocket and - with as much care as she could to pretend she was doing otherwise - scanned the windows of the semi-detached homes of her neighbours to see if anyone was watching.
***
With her hands curled around her warming white coffee mug, Amanda watched the people of Caldborough pass by the Caffé Nero she had found herself in after more than an hour of useless searching in the rain. Of course, as soon as she had settled in for a break, the drizzling had stopped. But that did not matter to her now. She sipped gently at the still hot Caffé Mocha, the smell of it bringing back memories of her Saturday meetings with the sister she had not seen in years. Behind her, an old married couple were slowly eating chocolate fudge cake as well as talking about an episode of ‘Gardeners’ World’ they had watched the night before and how well Monty Don had done since his recovery; a young woman with a stroller was concentrating hard on one level of Candy Crush that she seemed to have been playing since Amanda entered the café; and the two young baristas behind the dark wood panelled bar were engaged in a disjointed conversation that was mainly held together with hormones and flirtation. She listened to the gentle noises of the café and enjoyed for a time the sense that despite what had been done to her, she could still just be another person idling her time away with a coffee.
And then,
