Chapter Thirty-Three
‘Where have you looked?’
Rory hadn’t wanted to call John for help, but Charlie was more important than her pride. Belle was with her dad tonight and Rory couldn’t get hold of her. Sheila wasn’t answering her phone either. Who else was there?
‘Everywhere I can think of. I’ve walked the school route, been to the park, called the hospital. No one knows where he is.’ She was trying to stay calm, but her heart was beating right out of her chest. When she’d got home from school she had popped up to Charlie’s bedroom to ask how his day had gone. That’s when she’d seen that all his clothes were missing from his room. What had happened to make him leave?
John was calm and practical as always. ‘Have you spoken to his mum? She might know where he is likely to have gone.’
Rory shook her head; her face was pale. ‘I don’t want to worry her until I have to. That poor woman is in constant pain and extra stress just makes it worse.’ She put her hands to her forehead and pulled them down her face. ‘She trusted me to look after him, John.’
John put an arm around her shoulder. ‘I can understand how you feel, but she would want to know. I think we have to speak to her.’
It had already been a tense day. Rory and Penny had agreed a plan to discover whether Rory’s suspicions about Nathan were correct, and he’d been surprisingly easy to flatter into action. Mind you, Rory had laid it on pretty thick.
‘If I’m going to take on this new role, I’d really appreciate your experience in lesson observation. If we can observe Penny together, it would give me a clear baseline from which to begin.’ She’d been particularly proud of her use of the word ‘baseline’. Nathan loved a bit of data terminology.
They were sitting in the back of Penny’s classroom watching her deliver the beginning of her lesson – a PowerPoint presentation no less – when Penny was struck down with a mysterious stomach pain and had to leave the room immediately.
Rory stood and turned to Nathan. ‘You’ll have to take over. I’ll go and check she’s okay.’
He jumped to his feet. ‘No! You take over. You’re the one coaching her.’
Rory frowned. ‘And you’re going to follow her into the Ladies’ toilet?’
A film of sweat appeared on Nathan’s top lip. ‘Be quick. Very quick.’
Of course, she wasn’t quick. She met Penny in the staff toilet. Stood and chatted with her for about fifteen minutes – allaying her fears that they were both about to get fired – and then took the long route, via the football pitch, back to Penny’s classroom.
When she got back, the entire class were in silence, copying from a set of old text books which Nathan must have found at the back of the classroom. Nathan nodded at her curtly as he stalked out of the room and left her to finish up.
Rory followed him into the corridor, keeping an eye on the class through the window in the door. ‘Why didn’t you carry on with Penny’s PowerPoint?’
Nathan turned and looked at her. He was barely keeping his anger under control. ‘It’s not my subject. I wasn’t prepared.’
Rory feigned surprise. ‘But it’s only RE. Surely you could have just…’ She trailed off at the look on Nathan’s face.
‘We will speak about this at a later date. In private.’
She was right. He couldn’t teach. Now she just needed to work out how they could use this information to their advantage.
When Rory went to see her, Charlie’s mum drew a blank about where her son could be. She wanted to check herself out of the hospital straight away and come and look for him, but Rory promised her that they would find him soon and that she would call her every fifteen minutes with an update. She managed to persuade her she needed to stay there in case he turned up at the hospital. Rory prayed that he would.
Rory called Belle for the third time that evening. Why wasn’t she picking up her phone? She had tried Scott’s house phone and mobile several times, and he wasn’t answering either. What were they doing over there? She sent Belle a text with a brief explanation of what had happened and then returned to John outside the hospital, where he was waiting for her in the van.
She shook her head. ‘His mum doesn’t know where he might be. Let’s go to Harry’s house. I’ll be able to tell if he’s telling me the truth if I see him face to face.’
On the way to Harry’s house, Rory tried calling her mum again. It was a very long shot that Charlie would have gone there – and Sheila would surely have called her if he had – but at least her mum could go to the house in case he came home.
Sheila also sounded desperate. ‘Aurora! Thank goodness. I’m so pleased you’ve called me back so quickly. I’m just so upset. Sorry for the long message I left on your machine. It probably didn’t make any sense.’
It was this conversation that wasn’t making any sense. ‘Mum, what are you talking about?’
‘Olive. She died, Aurora. She’s gone.’
Rory’s heart, already in her stomach, plummeted further. This was awful, but she really didn’t have time to talk about it now. They would be at Harry’s house in about three minutes.
‘Oh Mum, I’m so sorry. What happened?’
Sheila was crying, so it was quite difficult to make out what she was saying. There was no way Rory could tell her that Charlie was missing too.
It seemed that Olive had died a couple of days before and Sheila had only found out because Barb had told her. Sheila had then called Olive’s daughter, Karen, to say how sorry she was. ‘She was in their flat so she came up to see me. Olive seemed to be getting better but then she started to get very vague. She didn’t even know who they were. It’s so terribly sad. It was a stroke in the end. To think you and I were having a conversation about her dying and she was already…’
Two minutes away. ‘Mum. You couldn’t have known that. Don’t feel bad. How is George?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him. Flo offered to take some meals into him but he’s been staying with Karen. What should I do, Rory? He made it quite clear that it wasn’t a good idea for me to visit any more. I really want to see him because he must be so upset. But maybe he won’t want to see me? I couldn’t ask Karen because the poor dear has enough to think about. She promised to let me know about the funeral.’ She started to cry again.
Rory wanted nothing more than to go straight to her mum and have a good cry with her. Every bereavement brings back old feelings of the people you’ve lost before. Sheila wasn’t just crying for George and Olive. She was crying for Frank, too.
But right now, Rory needed to find Charlie. ‘Mum, just hold on for a bit. I’m in the car. I’ll call you back really soon, I promise.’
Harry’s house was on one of the rougher estates in town. Rory had only been around here a couple of times and seeing it served as a reminder that some kids had it pretty tough. Harry’s mum was a nice woman, but there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of time in her life for Harry. When they got to the house and knocked, Rory was ready with an apology for turning up unannounced. But it was Harry who opened the door and let them in.
Once Harry had gotten over the shock of opening the door to his English teacher at 8 p.m., he was quite open. ‘I haven’t seen him since school. He said that you wanted him at home. I was taking the mick about him being a good little boy and going home to do his homework and he stuck two fingers up at me as he went in.’
‘You saw him go in the front door? So he went home? To my house?’
‘Yeah. He went in and I rode off home. You can ask my mum, I got in at ten past four.’
They hadn’t seen any sign of Harry’s mum since they arrived, so they couldn’t ask her to corroborate his evidence, but he did look like he was telling the truth.
‘So where could he have gone after that?’ Rory was trying to piece everything together in her head. She hadn’t really spoken to Charlie last night because, when she’d gone upstairs to check on him, he’d told her he was tired and was just going to ‘crash’. He’d only come back downstairs to grab some food out of the fridge. Mornings were always manic, so she hadn’t spoken to him properly this morning either. She could have kicked herself. Offering to go to bed early was clearly a sign of something being up. Idiot.
Harry shrugged. ‘I’m really sorry, Miss, but I haven't got a clue.’
When they were back in the van, John and Rory tried to work out where to go next. John tapped the steering wheel. ‘Did something happen last night? Did you have an argument about anything?’
‘No. I barely saw him. To be honest, I was preoccupied with Mum. We were having a heart to heart. I was asking her what she thinks will happen when Olive dies, and she said…’ Rory trailed off and an expression of horror came over her face. ‘Oh John, he can’t have overheard and thought I was talking about his mum?’