Ninepins (19 page)

Dumbly, Laura sat down on the fourth chair. There was a smell of perspiration.

‘This is Sergeant Peverill, as I mentioned on the phone.'

Laura glanced at the police officer, who was no longer smiling.

‘I shall leave it to her to explain why we are here.'

As the sergeant began to speak, Laura looked not at her but at Beth. She appeared small and shrunken sitting next to Mr Burdett. There was mud on her shoes.

‘… received a call at around twenty to nine this morning from Mr French who runs the newsagent in the High Street here in Elswell …'

Must they have the heating on so high? How did Mrs Leighton work in this oppressive heat? Or maybe it was all the bodies in the room.

‘… shop has a policy of notifying the police of every instance of shoplifting.'

The immediate feeling was of detachment, almost of dislocation. It was as if she could both be here and yet at the same time also miles from here, when all this was in the past; it was as if she had absorbed and understood it all in a moment, and already put it behind her.
I know
, she could almost have said.
I know it all; I've known all along
. But then she saw Beth, the top of her bowed head, and the present rushed back up at her, putting her in a fury to deny the charge. She wanted to pull her daughter close and shout at them that they were wrong.
Not Beth
. She couldn't, she wouldn't; it's not her, not my Beth.

‘… items of relatively low value,' the policewoman was saying. She picked up a padded envelope and tipped its contents on to Mrs Leighton's desk. Two KitKat Chunkies, a Dairy Milk and a small box of matches.

Not my Beth. Not unless … unless they …

‘Beth has admitted to taking the things. She told the truth straight away, and apologised to Mr French, and that has helped matters immensely. Her frankness and co-operation in this respect is greatly in her favour. Mrs Leighton tells me that Beth has never been in any trouble at school for taking other people's things, or for dishonesty.'

‘No.' Laura's throat was so constricted that speaking pained her physically. But she had to; she had to speak, for Beth. ‘She's never been in any trouble, not here, and not at primary school either. Believe me, this is completely out of character for her. She has always been completely trustworthy.'

Beth still wouldn't look up at her, so she turned her eyes to Mr Burdett for support. He looked uncomfortable, but at least he was able to meet her gaze.

‘Yes. Er, quite. It's true, I've never known Beth to be dishonest. In fact – ' he cleared his throat ‘ – she is normally a very responsible girl, and a valued member of the class.'

‘Indeed,' said Mrs Leighton. ‘There have been no problems at all. Until now.'

Laura thought of the choir and the cigarettes and offered silent thanks to Miss Chapman.

‘In these circumstances,' said Sergeant Peverill, ‘with a first offence, and in view of Beth's young age and her previous good record of behaviour, we shall be taking the incident no further.'

At this, for the first time, Beth's head came up; Laura glimpsed her face, flushed scarlet, for just a moment before it was buried again.

‘This is not, therefore, an official police caution. Nothing will be formally recorded on any file. However, I hope that you understand the seriousness of what you have done, Beth, and that you can give us your assurance now that it won't happen again.'

Beneath the crown of the bent head, Laura saw her daughter's throat working, saw what it cost her to produce the words. ‘Y-yes. I mean, no. I promise.'

Their formal parts played out, there was relief but at the same time more awkwardness. Sergeant Peverill went back to smiling; she couldn't be more than twenty-two or -three. Mrs Leighton smuggled a glance at her wall clock. Mr Burdett was the first to rise, just a little too eagerly.

‘Come on, then, Beth. Back to lessons. It will still be double science – let's get you to Mrs Farrell in the biology lab.'

Mother and daughter exchanged no word but they moved close together as they passed through the door; Beth slipped her hand briefly into Laura's, and Laura gave it a squeeze.

 

When she reached the end of the school drive, Laura did something normally unthinkable. Instead of swinging the car left towards Cambridge and her office, she turned right and headed home.

She needed space, and there was plenty of it at Ninepins. She needed to get out and walk. In her bedroom, she swapped her work shoes for outdoor boots and pulled on a fleece over her blouse. Changing her clothes would take too long; she burned with impatience to be out of doors.

Work had begun on the pumphouse, but she was relieved to see that the builders' van was not in evidence today; she couldn't have faced a conversation about studwork and draught sealing. For once she walked in neither direction along the lode but took a third footpath, which struck off at an angle from near the garden gate, across the fields to the north-west. Most winters, this path would have been prohibitively muddy, but not this year, or at least not in the past few weeks. The snow that came in January had not stayed long, dispatched by a day of wintry rain. But the thaw had been brief and although no new snow had fallen, they'd had night after night of hard, penetrating frost, day after day when temperatures stuttered barely above zero. The soil was churned to clods but Laura's boots made scarcely an indentation on the ridged and rutted surface. In all the small drains and ditches, water stood solid.

For more than two hours she strode along without caring where she went, eventually finding herself on a farm track which took her to the edge of Elswell village, and thence back home along the lode. But if she'd thought by walking to clear her mind and bring some measure of calm to her spirit before she had to face her daughter, the plan was not a success. Stooping to unlace her boots by the back door, she felt her blood pumping from the exertion, and with it the same hammering, half-formed thoughts that had chased round her head all morning.

After a sandwich – most of which she threw away uneaten – she went upstairs and tried to do some reading. She turned the pages; she moved her eyes assiduously over the words, but the ideas refused to take hold. By three o'clock, when it was time to collect Beth, she was strung to a worse pitch than if she'd been at work.

Beth's whispered ‘I'm sorry, Mum' as she fumbled with her seatbelt eased things slightly, but the car was still tight with tension all the way home. In the kitchen, Laura played for more time, putting on the kettle, finding mugs. But then it could be put off no longer. She took one chair and pulled out another for Beth.

‘Tell me,' she said.

Any hopes that it might be easy dissolved at once. The answer came quickly. Too quickly. ‘Tell you what?'

Quietly, she insisted. ‘Tell me what happened.'

‘I took the stuff. Like I told them – like I told you.
I
took it.'

If she'd been less adamant, if she hadn't inflected that final pronoun, Laura might have remained in doubt. But she knew her daughter. She knew Beth.
She knew
.

‘Who made you do it?'

‘What d'you mean? Nobody did. I just took the stuff. It was me.'

‘Three chocolate bars? Was it all for you? Or were you going to give it to somebody?'

‘I – I dunno. Might have given some to people. Everyone shares round their sweets.'

Three chocolate bars. Three. Very gently, she asked, ‘And Rianna and Caitlin? Have they given you a lot of sweets?'

She waited for the outburst, the defensive assault. The wounded loyalty: leave my friends alone. When it didn't come, Laura's certainty wavered. But she plugged on anyway.

‘Did you feel you owed them, maybe? If they're always giving you things and you have nothing to give back? Because you know, I could always let you have chocolate to take in and share.'

Beth was fiddling with the ends of her scarf, which she hadn't taken off. Nor her fleece, either; she looked bunched, lumpy, miserable. She said nothing.

‘Was it their idea? Did they tell you what to take?'

Still there was no angry reaction, no vehement denial.

‘Were they there with you, in the shop?'

Then, quite suddenly, her mind spun off at a lurching tangent. The matches.

‘Or was it Willow? Did Willow ask you to steal the things?'

Finally, to this there was a response. Beth looked up at her, aghast. ‘No!'

‘All right.' Laura drew a breath and held it. ‘So, then,' she said gently, ‘tell me.'

Head down again, mouth half muffled in her scarf, Beth began to talk. ‘The matches were for Caitlin. She wanted cigarettes, she said. But they were behind the counter and I didn't dare.'

Closing her eyes, Laura breathed out slowly.

‘Mr French was over by the newspapers. They said they'd keep a lookout. The cigarettes were too hard but the matches were on the corner, near the sweets. I just put them in my pocket.'

There was a pause. Laura kept very still, waiting.

‘I'm sorry,' whispered Beth, and the end of the word was lost in the first sob.

It all became simpler, then. Laura pulled her chair up close to her daughter's and put an arm around her, shielding her, letting her cry.

‘Baby,' she murmured, hardly knowing what words she chose. ‘Sweet love. My baby girl.'

And after that, after the weeping had stopped, it was easy to ask the rest of her questions.

‘What about the chocolate bars?'

Beth gulped wetly. ‘They said it'd be no problem.' Laura wondered if there were more tears to come, but Beth swallowed again and her voice came out steady, if flat. ‘The sweets are just there on the counter. They said it's easy, they do it all the time. Rianna went along the row of magazines and sort of messed them up, opening them and not putting them back properly, you know, so Mr French had to go and straighten them. Rianna went out of the shop when she'd done the magazines, but Caitlin stayed inside to signal when.'

Laura nodded, but Beth was gathered to her chest and couldn't see.

‘I got them in my pocket OK. He hadn't seen, I know he hadn't, he was still looking down at the magazines. Caitlin ran for it but he came over and, oh, I don't know, maybe 'cos I had my hand in my pocket, or he saw there weren't as many KitKats left or something, but he looked at me and just said ‘Empty your pockets, please' and it was horrible.'

‘And they just left you there.'

Beth grunted her assent. Then her shoulders jerked and she was sobbing again, forcing out words between the gulps. ‘But they … didn't mean … not their fault …'

Say nothing else, Laura warned herself. Say nothing for now, at least. She tugged Beth closer against her and crushed her hard, contenting herself with that. But of one thing she was now absolutely certain. If Rianna or Caitlin crossed her path any time soon, so help her, she would kill them with her bare hands.

 

‘I don't suppose it's the start of a life of crime.' Vince took a sip of beer and sat back comfortably in his chair.

Laura looked at him with some ambivalence. On the one hand, this was exactly what she wanted to be told, and actually the reason she had asked him to join her for this second evening in the pub. Vince, in his professional capacity, must have seen it all before, and ten times worse besides. She needed his broader and calmer perspective. On the other hand, he might have shown just a little more concern.

‘Half the kids I knew at school tried shoplifting.'

He sounded like Beth.
Everyone tries cigarettes.

‘Charlie Leadbetter used to nick chewing gum – and he's in the police force now. Gareth Fraine: he runs a road haulage firm in Slough. Ed Howell's a geography teacher.'

This was meant to mean something. He was being kind.

‘Really, with Beth I don't think you need to worry. She'll have had her warning, I'm sure. She's much too sensible not to heed it.'

‘Hmm.' She raised her gin and lemon, wet her lips abstractedly and put it down again.

He was studying her more seriously now. ‘You're not convinced?'

‘Oh, I don't know. Maybe. You're right about Beth, I suppose. She's a good girl.'

‘But?'

She tried, but failed, to muster a smile. ‘As you say – but.'

Vince was waiting, placid, unhurried. She could see how he'd be good at his job.

‘It's the others,' she said eventually. ‘These girls she's got herself in with, Rianna and Caitlin, the ones who put her up to it. I suppose I'm scared they'll do it again. Put pressure on her to shoplift, or other things – worse things.'

‘You don't think Beth can stand up to them?'

She hesitated. ‘I'm not sure. They're … well, they're pretty intimidating.' This time she managed the smile. ‘They certainly intimidate me.'

He smiled back and sat passive for a while, allowing her thoughts to settle. Then, quietly, he said, ‘Don't underestimate your daughter.'

The words were spoken without any note of reproof, but she felt their cut nonetheless.

‘It's easy to underestimate the people closest to us. We want to protect them, we're afraid for them, it's only natural. So we see their vulnerabilities and not their strengths.'

She examined his face and willed herself to believe him. It was so beguiling: to believe in her daughter's toughness and resilience. But dare she trust to it? Beth still seemed to her so unprepared to deal with a world of Riannas and Caitlins.

An oblique idea occurred to her. ‘Did he get caught? Your friend the policeman. And the other two, the teacher and the haulier. Did they ever get caught?'

Vince narrowed his eyes, temporising. ‘We all knew.'

‘But none of them was actually caught by the authorities, right?' Because that was the difference, wasn't it? That was Beth's true vulnerability. It was the same with the cigarettes, the night of the carol concert: it might not have been her smoking, but she was the one left holding the goods. Her sweetness, her honesty, her naïveté, this was where it was going to land her: being the one who took the rap.