Val put the phone back on her desk and started pecking at her keyboard with both index fingers. A ping stopped her, and she looked at Natalie wide-eyed as she picked up her mobile.
‘It’s Raph. He says pepperoni.’
‘How come he’s not in a lesson?’ Natalie asked as her colleague’s phone pinged again.
‘He says he might be home early. The whole school’s been evacuated. He’s in the theatre. They’re just waiting for an announcement from the teacher in charge. Bugger, I’ll have to sort out a lift for him if they don’t go back. He’s…’
Natalie tuned her out as she contemplated the implications of Raph’s response. The school could have been evacuated for all sorts of reasons. It could be a gas leak or a flood. Maybe one of the kids had set the science labs on fire and they were worried about an explosion. Or maybe the Twitter message was real.
Natalie considered her options. She could pass the information on to one of the baby reporters who might be able to find out what was going on but there were only two of them and neither was in the office. She could give the information to the editor, Morgan Stannard, and see what she made of it. But Natalie had been on the receiving end of Morgan’s wrath twice in the past few months for pushing stories that ‘weren’t in keeping with the ethos of the group’ and she didn’t want to risk another disappointment.
Her final choice was to do some digging of her own. If armed gunmen were on the school site and the school had been evacuated then the police would already have been informed – hence the evacuation. She had two friends who were serving police officers and one owed her a favour. It was time to call it in.
‘Cassie,’ she said as soon as her former schoolmate answered the phone. ‘You okay?’
The noncommittal noise from the other end of the line suggested that either Cassie couldn’t talk freely, or she was suspicious of Natalie’s motives for calling.
‘I’ve heard that there’s an incident at Fellbeck School. Can you get me any information?’
The response was disappointing. Cassie hadn’t heard anything and was about to go into a training meeting but would be free in a couple of hours. Natalie would have to wait.
A dead end. Still no answer when she rang the school. Now what?
She leaned towards Harry, working at the desk next to hers.
‘I’m off out for a bit. Personal. If anybody asks, I’ve got a dentist’s appointment.’
Harry didn’t bother looking away from his screen, he just nodded and continued typing. Natalie grabbed her bag from under her desk and shrugged into her down jacket, zipping it up to her chin in anticipation of the icy December weather. Five minutes later she was pulling out of the car park.
The drive to Fellbeck Academy reminded Natalie of everything she hated about west Cumbria. She’d managed to get tangled in Sellafield traffic and had slowed to a crawl round Whitehaven before finally hitting the speed limit near Maryport. Then a series of road closures forced her back towards the coast before she could finally get back on track. Just as she thought she was over the worst of the obstacles to her journey, she flicked on the wipers to clear the thin coating of grime that had accumulated on her windscreen from the filthy roads only to hear a desultory whine – the reservoir was empty.
‘Fuck!’ Natalie yelled, bashing her hand against the steering wheel.
Her view was dangerously impeded, leaving her no choice but to pull into the side of the road and use the bottle of water in her bag to clear the mess.
As she was scrubbing the glass with a dried-up piece of chamois leather which might as well have been plastic coated for all the water it retained, she stepped into an icy puddle of filthy water.
‘I hate this county!’ she screamed, hopping on one foot and shaking the other. A van driver honked his horn as he passed dangerously close and she gave him a vigorous one-fingered salute before slipping into the driver’s seat and easing back onto the road.
Ten minutes later she pulled up at the entrance to the school car park, the metal barrier halting her progress. There was an intercom speaker on a post to her right, so she wound down her window and pressed the button next to the speaker. She heard a buzzing sound and then nothing. Two more presses later, Natalie realised that there was nobody on reception. The car park was full of staff cars but all the lights in the main building were off and there was no movement on the site at all.
Something was seriously wrong.
Before
Cam scanned the accident report again. The details were as painful as a series of stabs or slaps – he felt every word and punctuation mark as a physical assault. Possible mechanical failure. Over-compensate. Oncoming traffic. The dry technical language was intended to spare the reader the true horrors of death in a car accident, but Cam couldn’t stop the images created by each part of the description. Chrissie’s car had been travelling at speed, she’d braked on a bend and the power steering had failed, making the car veer into the opposite lane. The driver of the supermarket delivery lorry hadn’t seen her until it was too late for him to take evasive action. It wasn’t his fault. The police had been extremely careful to stress that point to Cam. The driver had done nothing wrong – he’d been the one to call the emergency services. He’d been the one to hold Chrissie’s hand as she died trapped in the mangled wreckage of her car.
The report was clear, and it all made sense.
Except for one thing.
Chrissie had told Cam that she was meeting Laura, an
