‘Has something happened?’ he said, as his car turned the corner into the driveway. It was snowing ever so lightly now. ‘Is it your brother?’
A huge invisible fist clenched around my ribcage. ‘I just need to get back, that’s all. I told you. Matron gets really funny if we’re late for dinner.’
He wasn’t buying it. He swung the car round and pulled up with the handbrake on, the engine still running. ‘Have you changed your mind about us, or something? Is that it?’
‘No, not at all, don’t be silly,’ I said, opening the door.
‘Is it something I’ve said? Did I do something?’
‘No, no.’ I felt the first droplets of snow hit my ears and cheeks. ‘I had a lovely day. And thank you for lunch and my necklace and everything.’
The passenger window buzzed down. ‘Did I do something?’ he asked, a desperate fire in his eyes.
‘I’m sorry, Charlie. Thank you again.’ I sounded like I was thanking my driving instructor. I cringed. His face as he yanked down the handbrake and roared off back down the driveway told me everything I needed to know.
But when I got into the hall, I didn’t have time to give my news. I had a welcoming committee waiting for me. They all stood there: Maggie, Clarice, Regan, Dianna and a stricken-looking Matron.
‘Natasha, thank goodness you’re back. Have you got Tabby with you?’
‘What? No, I haven’t. Why?’
Matron took a huge breath and carried on buttoning up her coat. ‘She’s gone missing. We have to search the whole school.’
‘What? How long has she been gone for?’
They all looked at each other. Matron answered. ‘About an hour.’
‘She’ll be hiding,’ I said. ‘She does this. She’s the smallest Pup, so she can get into the tiniest holes. She’ll be playing a game, that’s all.’
‘She’s not playing this time,’ said Matron.
I turned on Maggie. ‘You said you’d look after her.’
‘I did look after her! I had to go and put the stupid laundry on, didn’t I? I left her with Matron for five minutes—’
‘And I had to take a phone call from Mrs Saul-Hudson,’ Matron interrupted. ‘She was checking in, making sure everything was all right. I was only out of the room for moments.’
I looked straight at Clarice. Her face was a Mona Lisa smile of non-committal, the only one of us who didn’t look worried at all. I walked across the paisley carpet and got right up in her face.
‘Where is she, Clarice?’
‘Nash, for heaven’s sake!’ cried Dianna.
‘What have I got to do with it?’ Clarice laughed. She backed into the sideboard, making the tennis trophies rattle and clang. ‘God, this is … this is victimisation. She’s really got it in for me.’
‘Just the sort of thing you’d do, isn’t it?’ said Maggie.
‘Where is she?’ I repeated, staring her down.
‘I don’t know, do I? I’ve been cleaning the kitchen for the last hour. God’s sake.’
Matron, unbelievably, gave her the benefit of the doubt.
‘Natasha, come along, this isn’t helping.’
‘It’s helping me,’ I raged.
‘I don’t think Clarice has anything to do with it,’ said Matron. ‘She’s just wandered off somewhere, I’m sure.’
‘Yeah,’ said Regan. ‘Maybe she’s in the common room, watching a DVD?’
It was no good. I couldn’t prove Clarice knew where Tabby was.
Main House was turned practically upside down. Dorms. Classrooms. Music room. Science lab. Art room. CDT room. Old dormitories in the fourth-floor attic space, which were only used to store old costumes now. The Hidey Holes we knew about, which ran between the two libraries and up to the first floor dorms, the Laundry room to the Sickbay and the Science lab all the way to the trap door at the back of the stage in the gym. We found absolutely nothing.
With every minute that passed, my chest grew a little more tight. We called for her. Bargained with her. Berated her. Anything to get her to poke her head out, admit she was hiding, but of course she didn’t. She just wasn’t anywhere.
One thing we did find in our classroom excavations was Babbitt, Tabby’s toy. Maggie brought it to me as I was just turning out the light in the changing rooms.
‘One down,’ she said.
‘Oh, good,’ I said, slightly cheered by the sight of it. ‘Where was it?’
‘Stuffed into the corner by the lockers.’
‘Bloody Clarice,’ I seethed. ‘Psycho.’
‘All right, all right. Here.’ She handed Babbitt to me and I held him close to my chest. He smelled of biscuits and marker pens, just like Tabby. ‘I feel sick,’ I said.
‘You’re really worried about the little tyke, aren’t you?’ said Maggie as we walked back along the corridor. ‘She can’t have gone far, Nash.’
‘How the hell would you know?’ I cried. ‘You were supposed to be looking after her, Maggie! Why can’t you take responsibility for anything?’
‘Excuse me, I said I’d keep an eye, not become her foster mum like you are.’
‘What if she’s gone outside, into the woods or something? It’s dark.’
‘She wouldn’t have gone out there,’ Maggie said. ‘Not with Regan’s friend about.’
‘Not by choice, no,’ I said.
We came to the PE cupboard, and I unlocked it, using the key Matron had given me. The door opened and a pong of new rubber and old socks wafted out to us. But except for large nets of basketballs and netballs, a bundle of javelins, a cluster of rounders posts, knots of skipping ropes and tubes of tennis balls, the cupboard was bare. I locked it back up again.
‘I’m sorry. You’re right, she’s not your responsibility.’
‘Yeah. Well, I do feel guilty about leaving her. Let’s just find her, eh?’
Footsteps down the corridor heralded the arrival of Regan.
‘Matron thinks we ought to form a search party and try the grounds. Doesn’t look like she’s in the school.’
‘Cool,’ said Maggie.
‘She wants everyone in the Hall in cold-weather gear in five minutes with torches.’
‘Fine,’ I sighed. The three of us began walking back towards the stairs, down to Main Hall and the cloakrooms where our coats and wellies were.
‘I hope we’re not too late,’ said Regan.
‘What?’
She looked at me. ‘What if the Beast is out tonight? It’s a full moon, you know.’
I could feel myself losing control. ‘Oh, so it’s a werewolf now, is it?’
‘I don’t know what it is—no one does. I just hope it’s not got her scent.’
‘And what if it has, Regan? What then?’
Regan shrugged.
‘No bright ideas, huh? What exactly are you going to do if there is some kind of monster out there and it’s ripped Tabby to pieces? What will you do then about your precious Beast?’
‘Take it easy, Nash,’ said Maggie, stepping in between me and Regan on the stairs.
‘No. I’m sick to death of all this talk about the Beast of Bathory. There are other things out there, real things that we need to worry about. Freezing cold weather for one. Strange men for another. And the fact that a senior Bathory girl is sadistically picking on Tabby for no apparent reason. There are your Beasts. There are your monsters.’
I was boiling like a geyser, ready to blow at any moment. I marched to the back of the cloakrooms and sat down in the dark on the bench, between two pegs laden with navy coats. My hands were shaking—I could just about see them in the moonlight beaming in through a top window. Then I heard voices outside, low and urgent.
Maggie appeared in the doorway a few moments later. ‘Nash?’
‘Yeah, I’m here,’ I said, swallowing a lump.
‘Why did you mention strange men?’
I shrugged. ‘She’s a kid, isn’t she? A kid—on her own. We’ve got to find her, we’ve just got to. I won’t rest until we do.’
She plucked my coat from its peg and pulled my folded-up wellies from the pigeonhole under the bench, then handed them both to me. ‘Then neither will I. Come on.’
It was nearly seven o’clock by the time we’d congregated on the swirly red carpet in the main hall. Tabby, the expert hider, had been missing for over three hours.
‘Right then, all of you,’ said Matron, as Maggie and I walked in. ‘Dianna, you and Regan search the formal gardens, tennis courts and Orangery. Clarice, you and Margaret, the Pups’ classrooms, Portakabins, barns and sheds. It’s snowing, so we don’t have much time.’
‘I’m not searching with her,’ said Maggie, clutching a white banister. ‘There’s only two people I trust here. One of them’s me. The other’s not her.’
‘Go with Clarice I said, Margaret,’ said Matron, her voice shaking by this point. She handed each pair a fire whistle and a torch. We all saw her swallow the sob. ‘Natasha, you and I will search the upper landscape and the woods with Brody. If she’s out there we have to find her ASAP. There’s more snow forecast for the early hours. Temperature’s dropping by the hour.’
It was Dianna’s turn to protest, as I knew she would.
‘Matron, I could come with you to search the Landscape Gardens. Regan can handle the formal gardens by herself, I’m sure.’
Matron turned on her heel, grabbed Brody’s lead from the coat hooks and attached it to his collar. ‘Don’t argue. And stay together at all times. We need to find her, girls. Please.’
We followed our breaths along the pathway, up the flint steps to the right of the drive and into the Landscape Gardens, all the while calling out Tabby’s name. We could barely see the trees for the lines of snow falling silently upon us. The air had grown considerably colder since I’d gone out with Charlie, and I tucked my scarf right up around my mouth to breathe some warm into the wool. The winter moon was full and blurry with black clouds gliding past it. Moving, always moving. Time was moving on. We walked along the path by Edward’s Pond and Matron shone our torch over the still surface of the water. It was frozen solid.
‘Tab-beeeeeee!’ she called out. I called out too. Our voices echoed in the valley, then disappeared on the night breeze. I think we were both holding our breaths.
‘What do I say?’ asked Matron to nobody. ‘What do I say to her parents? They’re in the Middle East, for God’s sake. She’s supposed to be the one who’s safe and looked after.’
Did she expect me to answer her? It felt rude not to.
‘Matron, we’ll find her.’
‘I shouldn’t have let this happen.’
‘You didn’t let it happen, it’s just one of those things. We’ll find her.’ I didn’t sound sure, because I wasn’t sure. If she wasn’t in the grounds then there was no telling where she was. Someone must have taken her. I didn’t dare think about who that might be any more.
‘There’s still hope, Matron. You’ve got to have faith that we’ll find her.’
‘I don’t know what to do, Natasha,’ she said. She was crying by this point. ‘I really don’t know what to do.’ We made our way up the snaking path towards the Wendy House. I had to take charge—Matron was losing the plot, fast. I took the torch from her and opened the door, shining it inside.
‘Tabby?’ I called. Nothing.
I came back out and shook my head. Matron’s face disappeared through a white cloud of exhaled breath.
‘Let’s go along to the Temple.’
As we were walking along the uneven path, I looked out and down into the valley. A shape caught my eye in the trees ahead—I shone the torch over it, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. The path sloped down and we went with it. Matron’s sobs had become more woeful.
‘It’s so cold,’ she said, trying to rub some warmth into the fingers of her torch hand.
‘We’d better pick up the pace,’ I replied.
The Temple was as still and quiet as the Wendy House. There was nothing there, and no sign that anyone had been. The same for the path down to Grace’s Lake and the Birdcage at the far end. The wire door creaked open and I shone the torch around. Just a carpet of brown leaves and the golden bars shone back at us.
‘This is hopeless,’ Matron complained, as we crossed the wooden bridge over the lake to the opposite side of the valley where the tree house was. Chief Brody sniffed the ground eagerly. I wondered what he could smell. He had the scent of something.
Then I saw something in the trees again.
‘What was that?’ I said, my torch hand shaking as I shone the light behind us.
‘What? What did you see?’
I couldn’t call out. I was too afraid to disturb whatever it had been. ‘I don’t know,’ I whispered. ‘I thought I saw something moving in the trees.’
I didn’t think. I knew. Brody barked. He knew too.
‘Tabbeee?’ Matron called. ‘Tabbeee, if that’s you, then come out here this instant!’
But, again, nothing but silence.
Matron slapped her hands by her sides. ‘Well, that’s it, isn’t it? I’m going to have to call the police. We’ve looked everywhere.’
‘No, we haven’t, Matron. We haven’t got as far as the Chapel yet.’
‘She won’t be in there, I know she won’t,’ Matron shouted. ‘I’ve lost her, haven’t I?’ She was nearly hysterical by this point, sobbing and panicking, completely uncontrollable.
‘Matron, please stop—this isn’t helping Tabby,’ I said, holding her forearms like it was going to help. ‘Please stop.’
‘We can’t help her. What if it’s taken her? What if we find something?’
‘What? What if what’s taken her?’
‘The Beast,’ she said.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I muttered, exhaling. ‘There is no such thing as the Beast of Bathory.’
Matron sniffed up a line of clear snot from her top lip. ‘I’ve seen it, Natasha.’
‘What? When?’
‘A few years ago.’ We walked along the path towards the waterfall. ‘It was this time of year. I’d come back from chaperoning Year Eights on a trip to London. I was on the drive, clearing out the minibus. Night was as quiet as a church. I heard a noise, coming from the flint steps. I can only describe it as a … grunt.’
I felt alarm in every bone. Should I tell her I’d seen it too? No. She was already in a state of panic. Stress makes you stupid, I thought, another favourite saying of Seb’s. Think calm and you’ll be calm. Panicking helps no one.
‘Once my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I saw its eyes, shining in the moonlight. Then I made out its head, and then its body. It just stood there, at the top of the steps, looking at me. It was enormous.’
The wind whipped up around us, filtering through all my layers to my skin. Brody strained at the leash. ‘Okay, well, let’s keep looking.’
‘I just froze. Couldn’t even bring myself to call out.’ She stared into the distance. ‘In seconds, it had gone, but I never forgot it. I knew I wasn’t dreaming or seeing things.’
‘I believe you,’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s try the Chapel.’
Matron stopped at the end of the path, leaving me to walk up to the building and try the door handle. It was locked. I turned to her and shone the torch down the path.
‘She won’t be in there,’ said Matron, completely without hope.
‘We should try it, at least,’ I said, gesturing for her to give me the key.
Inside the building, the usual smell of must and sweet wood hit me and I shone the torch over the pews and altar. It felt colder than it was outside. Everything was still. I walked down the aisle, shining it down both wings and calling for her again.
Nothing. As with every other folly, the place was empty and silent. I looked back at Matron. ‘I think we should call the police now, Matron.’
She looked at me and nodded.
‘Let’s go back to Main House. It’s even chillier in here.’
Suddenly a bell rang inside my head. I grasped Matron’s arm. ‘I know where she is,’ I said.
‘Where?’
‘The Chiller. I mean, the laundry room. We didn’t look in the basement at all. It’s the only place we haven’t tried. Oh God, why didn’t we think?’
‘But why would she go down there?’
‘I don’t know. What if Clarice locked her down there? Come on.’
‘No,’ said Matron, fumbling with her key bunch for the basement key, ‘you run on, you’re faster.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Should I take the torch with me or leave it for you?’
‘Just take it and run. I’ll be behind you. I’ve got the dog—I’ll be okay,’ said Matron.
I bolted down the valley path and back along the pond until I got to the side of the school and the steps down to the basement where the window with the broken catch was—the quickest way in and down to the laundry room. It opened easily and I shone the torch inside. Back up in the woods, I could hear the dog barking constantly.
‘Tabby?’ I called out. The torchlight was fading. I shook it to get the beam back and shone it along the unpainted stone corridors of the basement. Jumping down onto the concrete, I ran along the corridor to the main room where the junk was stored.
‘Tabb-eee?’ I called out, the scents of clean laundry and mouldy stone in my nostrils.
Nothing.
I climbed over broken chairs and old gym equipment stuffed down there after inspections, pianos with flat keys, towards the archway beyond which was a narrow passageway and the Chiller itself.
There was a light coming beyond the archway. The light bulb outside the Chiller door was on. Someone had been down here.
‘Tabb-eeee?’ I called again.
And, this time, a little voice answered. ‘Nash?’
I barged through the rest of the chairs and sprinted down the passageway towards the room. The door was locked, but I could see her through the little round window, bundled in a ball, tears streaking her dusty little face.
‘Oh thank God, thank you God, thank you God.’ I exhaled, almost crying myself by the time I’d pushed hard enough on the door to get it unwedged where it had become stuck on a little rock. ‘You’re okay now, it’s okay.’ I didn’t know if I was saying it to Tabby or myself.
The door released and Tabby flew into my arms like a ball into a baseball mitt. I cuddled her into me. ‘Oh, thank goodness you’re safe. We were so worried about you. What happened? Did Clarice lock you in?’
‘I was looking for Babbitt,’ she huffed. ‘And the door shut and I got locked in.’
‘Tabby, are you sure Clarice didn’t lock you down here?’ She shook her head. ‘You’re sure?’ She nodded. ‘It’s all right, you’re safe now, okay?’ I hugged her again, a sob stuck in my throat, and tried not to think about the apology I would now have to make to Clarice.
I switched the light off outside the Chiller and carried Tabby down the passageway and across the junk to ground level, wrapping her inside my warm coat when we got outside.
‘Found her!’ I called out into the night air and, within moments, quick footsteps came running up the path. ‘I’ve found her!’ I blew my fire whistle and we waited on the path by Edward’s Pond until we heard more footsteps coming from behind us.
It was Regan. She’d run all the way from the tennis courts. And she was by herself.
‘Oh, thank goodness!’ she cried, wheezing for air but smiling with relief. She looked quite pretty when she smiled.
‘Where’s Dianna?’ I asked her.
Regan guppied her mouth open and shut. ‘I don’t know … She went to the toilet. That was about twenty minutes ago now though.’
Maggie came running up from the direction of the barns, followed by Clarice, who wasn’t running but walking, her arms folded and looking smug about something.
‘Thank God for that!’ heaved Maggie. ‘Where was the little squirt?’
‘The Chiller,’ I said. ‘The door got wedged and she couldn’t get out. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.’ I couldn’t look at Clarice. ‘I’m sorry I accused you.’ Tabby cuddled into Babbitt on my chest. ‘I was wrong.’
‘I should think so too,’ she huffed. ‘I’m not as bad as you seem to think.’
I wanted to say, Oh but you so are, but I held it in.
‘Where’s Matron?’ asked Maggie.
‘She was up at the Chapel,’ I said. ‘She said she was right behind me.’
We all looked up into the dark, featureless valley. Maggie called out for Matron.
‘We’ve foooooooounnd herrrrrrrrrr,’ she yelled again. But nothing came back. We could see the Chapel. I put Tabby down and shone my torch beam up towards it, sweeping it over the scene. There was a shape in the darkness. A shape and a tinkling sound. It was coming along the path, towards the pond. A big, black, loping shape.
Maggie stepped back, right into me, then stepped aside. Clarice got behind me too. Tabby cuddled into my leg. Regan stayed where she was.
I shone the torch directly on the thing.
It was the dog, Brody. He was on his own, his lead dragging on the path, paws leaving dirty paw prints as he walked.
‘Oh my God, Brody!’ Regan cried.
I shone my torchlight onto the Newfie as he came to a stop in front of us.
‘Brody! What’s happened? Where’s Matron, eh, boy?’ cried Regan as she skittered over and crouched down beside him.
‘Is he all right?’ said Maggie, going over to inspect him too.
I shone my torch over the paw prints he’d left all along the path. They were red.