IT IS LATE. The curtains, what curtains the Mill possesses, anyway, are drawn. Liz went home hours ago, picked up by her dad, and after she left Kate bolted the door of the Mill for the first time I could remember, and I told them about the conversation with Jess Hamilton.
‘How do they know?’ Fatima asks desperately. We are huddled together on the sofa, Freya in my arms. Thea is smoking cigarette after cigarette, lighting one from the butt of the other, breathing the smoke out across us all, but I can’t bring myself to tell her to stop.
‘The usual way, I’d imagine,’ she says shortly. Her feet, curled next to my hip, feel cold as ice.
‘But,’ Fatima persists, ‘I thought the whole point of us agreeing to leave mid-term was so that it wouldn’t get out. Wasn’t that the point?’
‘I don’t know,’ Kate says wearily. ‘But you know what the school gossip circuit is like – perhaps an old teacher told an old girl … or one of the parents found out.’
‘What happened to the drawings?’ Thea asks.
‘The ones the school found? I’m pretty sure they were destroyed. I can’t imagine Miss Armitage wanted them found any more than we did.’
‘And the others?’ I ask. ‘The ones Ambrose had here?’
‘I burnt them.’ Kate says it with finality, but there’s something about her eyes, the way her gaze flickers when she says it, I’m not absolutely certain she’s telling the truth.
It was Kate who salvaged the situation – as far as it could be salvaged – back at school. When she turned up on Sunday afternoon, pale but composed, Miss Weatherby was waiting, and Kate was marched straight into the headmistress’s study, and didn’t come out for a long time.
When she emerged, we flocked around her, our questions beating at her like wings, but she only shook her head, and nodded towards the tower. Wait, her nod said. Wait until we’re alone.
And then, at last, when we finally were alone, she told us, while she packed her trunk for the last time.
She had said that the drawings were hers.
I have no idea, even today, whether Miss Armitage believed her, or whether she decided, in the absence of concrete proof to the contrary, to accept a fiction that would create the least fallout. They were Ambrose’s sketches, anyone with an eye for art could have told that. Kate’s style – her natural style at any rate – was completely different – loose, fluid, with none of Ambrose’s fineness of detail.
But when she wanted, Kate could imitate her father’s style to perfection, and perhaps she showed them something that convinced them – made a facsimile of a sketch in the office, maybe. I don’t know. I never asked. They believed her, or said they did, and that was enough.
We had to go – there was no question of that. The breaking out of bounds, the alcohol and cigarettes in our room, all of that was explosive enough – grounds for expulsion, certainly. But the pictures, even with Kate’s confession, the pictures added a dose of nuclear uncertainty to the whole thing.
At last, the unspoken pact was arrived at. Go silently, without expulsion, was the message, and pretend the whole affair never happened. For all our sakes.
And we did.
We had finished our exams, and it was only a few weeks until the summer vac started, but Miss Armitage wouldn’t wait for that. It was all over astonishingly fast – within twenty-four hours, before the end of the weekend, we were gone, all of us, first Kate, packing her belongings into a taxi with white-faced stoicism, then Fatima, pale and tearful in the back of her aunt and uncle’s car. Then Thea’s father, excruciatingly loud and jovial, and finally mine, sad and drawn beyond all recognition almost.
He said nothing. But his silence, on the long, long drive back to London was almost the hardest to bear.
We were scattered, like birds – Fatima got her wish, at last, and went out to Pakistan where her parents were finishing up their placement. Thea was sent to Switzerland, to an establishment halfway between a finishing school and a remand home, a place with high walls and bars on the windows and a policy against ‘personal technology’ of any kind. I was packed off to Scotland, to a boarding school so remote it had once had its own railway station, before Beeching closed it down.
Only Kate stayed in Salten, and now, it seems to me, her home was as much a prison as Thea’s finishing school, except that the bars on the window were of our own making.
We wrote, weekly in my case, but she answered only sporadic-ally, short, weary notes that spoke of an endless struggle to make ends meet, and of her loneliness without us. She sold her father’s paintings, and when she ran out she began to forge them. I saw a print in a gallery in London that I know for a fact was not one of Ambrose’s.
All I knew of Luc was that he had gone back to France – and that Kate lived alone, counting down the weeks until she turned sixteen, fending off the endless questions about where her father had gone, what he had done, and realising that slowly, slowly his very absence was turning the vague suspicions of wrongdoing into hardened certainty of his guilt.
We wrote, on her sixteenth birthday, each of us, sending our love, and this time at least she wrote back.
‘I am sixteen,’ she wrote in her letter to me. ‘And you know what I thought, when I woke up this morning? It wasn’t presents, or cards, because I didn’t have any of those. It was that I can finally tell the police he’s gone.’