Rachel receives a late phone call from the duty officer asking her to collect Ellie at 10pm. She’s told there’s been a delay on the forensics report, but that she will most likely be required to attend the station again the next morning. ‘Don’t go skipping the country,’ says the officer, only half joking.
It’s a relief to see Ellie, just a short time later, being ushered through the swing doors into the station’s waiting area. ‘Come on,’ says Rachel, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, ‘let’s get you out of here.’
They drive home in near silence. Rachel doesn’t want to press Ellie about her experience. They are both too tired and Ellie’s face remains fixed on the passenger window, only stirring when her phone pings in her lap. She angles the screen away, but Rachel can see the colour rising in her cheeks as she reads the message. ‘Your friends checking up on you?’
‘Something like that,’ she mutters.
Turning through the school gates, Rachel lets out a gasp and hits the brakes. A pale figure looms ahead on the drive, tall and thin, his face bleached white in the car headlights. He steps up onto the verge, allowing them past with a wave of his hand. Malcolm Crowe, out on one of his evening walks. ‘Weirdo,’ Ellie mutters under her breath.
‘Ellie!’
‘What? He is weird, creeping around the campus at night.’
‘He’s exercising. Taking in the night air.’ Rachel tries to sound reassuring, but when she glances in the mirror, she sees Malcolm hasn’t moved. He stands sentry-like at the gates, his face a ghostly smudge in her rear-view mirror as he watches them go. ‘You don’t have any other reason to think he’s weird, do you?’
Ellie shrugs.
‘Ellie?’
‘It’s nothing.’
A prickle of apprehension rises in Rachel’s mind. It does seem a little odd for Malcolm to be prowling around in the dark after such awful events, especially on a twisted ankle. Even if he has taken it upon himself to act as some sort of self-appointed school security guard, it’s hardly the sort of behaviour that’s going to put a campus full of jumpy students and teachers at ease. Since Monday’s assembly, the bonfire of fear and mistrust has only seemed to grow across campus. No one, it seems, is free from suspicion, not even lumbering Malcolm. ‘Well then. How about a little kindness? He’s an old man, doing his best for the school.’ She says it, she realises, to convince herself as much as Ellie.
They’re almost at the cottage when Ellie speaks next. ‘Do you think people are inherently good or bad?’ she asks, her face still fixed to the window.
Rachel frowns. She is thinking less about what her answer might be, and more about what might have prompted such a philosophical question from her daughter. Were they still talking about Malcolm? ‘I’m not sure, Ellie. What do you think?’
Ellie shrugs.
Rachel kicks herself. It isn’t the time for a professional counselling approach. Ellie is asking for something from her. Openness. Honesty. She tries again. ‘I don’t think I do believe that, no. I believe we’re shaped by our experiences. Our families, our friendships, the things that happen to us… those are the things that mould us. Human beings are complicated. Nothing’s ever black and white.’
‘So, you believe in nurture over nature?’
Rachel’s still unsure where Ellie is heading with her questions. ‘I think it’s probably a combination of the two. But I don’t like to think that anyone is born evil. I can’t imagine that. Can you?’
Ellie doesn’t answer and for a moment they are both silent, listening to the gravel crunching beneath the tyres. ‘I think some people have a streak of bad running through them. Like an apple with a rotten core. You can’t always tell it’s there, but it is, waiting to be revealed.’
‘Ellie, you don’t think you’ve got a rotten core, do you?’
Ellie glances up at her, and Rachel sees something in her daughter’s eyes, something hot and bright, which makes her feel a little afraid.
‘Because I don’t see that in you,’ Rachel adds. ‘Not at all. I see a loving, compassionate girl. A girl who feels things deeply. There are some difficult, sad things happening right now. This terrible business with Sarah. And I know you’ve had a hard time accepting your dad’s and my separation. There’s Chrissie’s baby, too. It’s a lot right now, but I promise you, it will settle down.’
Ellie releases a fierce sigh. ‘God, Mum. For a trained therapist, you really can be clueless sometimes.’
‘So tell me, then. What am I missing?’
Ellie shakes her head. ‘This thing with Sarah. It’s terrible. I really wish she hadn’t died. That she was OK. But everyone’s talking about her now like she’s some sort of saint. She’ll be forever remembered as this golden girl. I guess that’s not the person I knew, that’s all.’
Rachel falls silent, thinking. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t understand how hard it’s been for you, transitioning to this school. I’m sorry I missed that you were having a tough time.’
She is sorry. Rachel’s always thought the benefits of working at the school, of being in such close proximity to Ellie, would outweigh any negatives, but perhaps Ellie was at a disadvantage having her mother on the school faculty. All the other students had access to her as a counsellor. But for Ellie, she’d always just be ‘Mum’. Who else did Ellie have to talk to?
‘I know you might not want to open up to me – or your dad. But if you’d like to speak to someone, in confidence, I could arrange it. Someone neutral. Someone private. It doesn’t have to be a therapist. Your tutor, Edward Morgan, you like him, don’t you? Perhaps we could ask if he might—’
‘Drop it, Mum. I don’t need anyone.’ Ellie draws her shutter down.
Rachel, chastised, parks outside the cottage and they sit for a moment, both of them staring out at the small stone building and the wooded hillside rising up steeply behind, cast in moonlight. Somewhere out in the darkness a fox screams, its cry high and unsettling.
Rachel steals a glance at Ellie, noting the familiar slope of her nose, the mirror image of Ben’s; those scattered freckles, the new, dark shadows beneath her eyes, the proud tilt of her chin. She wishes she could see inside her, understand her daughter’s anger and pain.
Ellie turns to meet her gaze. ‘What?’ Instead of waiting, she sighs and slips from the car, slamming the door behind her.
‘Nothing,’ Rachel replies to the empty seat.
She can’t shake it. The fear is still there. Every bone in her body screams that something is up with Ellie, that she might still be in trouble. But what can she do? She can’t hover over her every minute. She can’t pepper her with more questions – it will only push her further away.
Inside the cottage, she finds Ellie standing in the kitchen surveying their ransacked belongings. The police had moved through the premises like a well-oiled machine, but it had already taken Rachel several hours to start putting things back into order. ‘They didn’t find anything,’ Rachel says, reaching out to squeeze Ellie’s shoulder.
Ellie shrugs her off. ‘I could’ve told you that.’
She slinks away upstairs and Rachel lets her go, returning more of their scattered items to drawers, replacing books on shelves and adjusting the cushions on the sofa. After a while she gives up, looking for somewhere to settle, something else to occupy her. She is far too wired to sleep.
If she could, she would work. God knows recent events have meant she’s slipped behind. There is the statement she needs to draft for the governors’ report, notes from a student assessment to write up, reassurances to parents’ worried emails. All tasks that have slid in priority over a horrible few days. But the papers she needs for those jobs are still sitting on her office desk, right next to her laptop, exactly where she’d left everything in her hurry to get to Ellie’s interview.
She goes to the window and glances out at the night sky. Thin cloud shifts like drifting smoke over a crescent moon. It’s hardly an appealing prospect to head out into the dark again, but if she goes now, she could scoop up her belongings and be back again in twenty minutes, with everything she’ll need to work from home tomorrow – or worse, should she be summoned back to the police station with Ellie.
Calling up to Ellie that she’s popping out and won’t be long, she pulls on her coat and slips out the front door.
The temperature outside seems to have plummeted as she sets off across campus and there’s nothing for company but the sound of her boots on the winding gravel path and the ghostly call of an owl somewhere out in the trees. She shivers. Quick as she can. In and out. Then home.
In the recent past, the splendour of the school grounds has always given Rachel a thrill, a sort of chest-swelling pride at being a small part of something so historic, so prestigious. But what had once appeared as a safe haven, nestled into the shoulder of the valley, now seems sinister and oppressive. The looming trees, no longer standing like benevolent, silent guardians, now feel somehow threatening, as if they’ve closed ranks, hiding a multitude of dark secrets. There’s a pressing claustrophobia. And something else, too – something she recognises from the too-fast thud of her heart. Fear. It’s as if the school is shrouded not just in darkness, but in a strange new terror. It’s become a place of dread. A place where something terrible has happened. Where something terrible might still happen.
The hairs raise at the nape of her neck. Just the cold, she tells herself, but she quickens her pace, grateful when she’s finally standing outside the administration building, putting her key to the door and sliding into the unlit entrance hall.
Given the lateness of the hour, the whole building is silent and empty, just as she’s expected. Just as she’s hoped. No awkward questions about Ellie’s visit to the police station. No nosy colleagues to navigate. She scurries down the dark wood-panelled corridor, her path tripping a series of security lights, stern eyes boring down at her from the dour portraits of former head teachers lining the walls. When she reaches her office, Rachel stops.
It’s a surprise to see a narrow band of light shining at the gap beneath the door. She frowns. Had she, in her hurry to get to Ellie, left her office lamps on?
Standing there trying to remember, she is plunged into sudden darkness. She stifles a gasp. The security lights in the corridor have timed out, but behind the office door she can hear a soft shuffling noise. Like footsteps moving across floorboards, or papers shifting on a desk.
Someone’s in there.
It’s the middle of the night, and someone is inside her office.
Steeling herself, Rachel opens the door.