Boom. The door clattered open and Alf appeared from the mortuary, shoving a big metal gurney in front of him. Beep, beep: mind your backs. The door swung shut again. Got a client to collect from Oncology. He stopped for a moment, banging one wheel of the trolley up and down on the concrete floor. Bloody thing never goes in a straight line He peered down the corridor. That you, Lisa?
The Rat Catcher stared back, clutching the dead rodent against her chest.
Alf smiled. How you doing? Everything good? Yeah, perfect with me too. Keeping busy, you know?
Blink.
Well, better get back to it, right? No rest for the wicked.
She stood, opened the cage mounted into her trolley and placed the rat s body inside. Her Oldcastle accent was thick and gravelly. Keeping busy.
That s the spirit.
Lisa the Rat Catcher hunched over her trolley and scuffed away through the on-and-off patchwork of light and shadow.
Dr McDonald shuffled her feet. She s very Erm
Nah. Alf gave his gurney s wheel another couple of dunts. Don t worry about Lisa, been working here longer than I have. Not the sharpest hamster in the cage, but she s all right. You OK to see yourselves out?
The school day finished a quarter of an hour ago, Mr Henderson. The headmistress stood with her back to the room, looking out of the office window at the dirty rectangular blocks that made up Johnston Academy, classroom lights glowing in the darkness. Surveying her domain.
Her office wasn t like the ones on the telly no wooden panelling and large teak desk with matching trophy case. Instead it was crammed with filing cabinets, in-trays and piles of paperwork. Cracked magnolia walls and a scrawl-covered whiteboard, a corkboard littered with pinned-up notes.
Two chairs sat in front of the desk. A balding man perched in one of them, wearing a corduroy jacket and a frown, hands knotting and unknotting themselves in his lap.
I sank into the other seat. No point waiting to be asked: headmasters were like detective chief inspectors you couldn t let them get above themselves. You do understand what I do for a living, don t you, Mrs There was a wooden plinth in the middle of the cluttered desk with a brass nameplate on it. Elrick. We are rather busy trying to catch a killer.
Her back stiffened. I see. Yes well. We need to talk about Katie.
Captain Corduroy shifted in his chair, hands working overtime.
Yes, we definitely do, it s simply not acceptable.
Your daughter is a disruptive influence, Mr Henderson. I m afraid I have no option but to request that you make alternative arrangements for Katie s education.
It s simply not acceptable
I stared at him and he closed his mouth with an audible click.
She s a bright kid: she s bored having to go at the slower kids pace, if you lot
Please, Mr Henderson, spare us the delusional parental ramble
She s a bright kid.
No, she isn t: that s the problem. A long sigh. Mr Henderson, your daughter isn t acting out because she s not being challenged intellectually. The headmistress shook her head still staring out of the window with her back to me, as if she couldn t be arsed going through the motions again. Sometimes that s the case, but Katie s academic track record simply doesn t support that. She underperforms in nearly every subject. Perhaps you should look on this as an opportunity to move her somewhere she can get more individual attention.
Corduroy nodded. And it s not as if we haven t tried: we ve been incredibly patient with her behaviour, given her family situation, but it s simply not
What family situation?
He flinched. It coming from a broken home, her sister going missing, you being a police officer.
That was it, I was going to knock the wee shite s teeth down his throat. You listen up, you jumped-up
Mr Henderson, we re not talking about a little backtalk, or running in the corridors. In the last six weeks Katie has been in my office twenty times. And given her attendance is appalling, that s something of a record. Quite frankly
So she s a little high-spirited
The headmistress kept staring out of the bloody window, as if I was a badly behaved child.
I stood. Are you actually going to have the common courtesy to look at me when I m talking to you?
Mrs Elrick turned around. She was older than she d seemed from the back: a used-looking face lined with creases, a long nose, her hair thinning at the front. A bruise stretched its way across her left cheekbone, half an inch higher and it would ve been a black eye. Scratches marred her neck four parallel lines, red against the pale skin. For the last three years we have put up with your daughter s lying, and cheating, and coming in reeking of alcohol when she bothers to come in at all the fighting and the stealing, because we know she s been struggling to cope with her sister s disappearance and your divorce. But today I found out she s been bullying the other children. Not just her peer group: the first years too.
That isn t true, the other kids are lying. Katie wouldn t
