The Red Road (30 page)

“I don’t think it’s one of the
teachers,” Carson said, ignoring the question.

“They still had access to the
junior school, though,” I said, largely to myself.

One of the other
boys? Were any boys in the school charged with keys or anything, as
part of wider duties or security that I wasn’t aware of? Despite
what Carson said, I couldn’t see it being anyone
but
one of
the teachers.

We sat there for a moment in
silence, each trying to figure it out.

“This is really weird,” Sam
said. “I mean, how did they get the boys out of bed? It’s a
dormitory, so I don’t see how they could have done it all without
waking someone up?”

“To be fair, at that age you sleep
pretty soundly,” I said. “I barely even woke up during that
hurricane we had in 1987.”

“Really?” Carson asked. “It
didn’t wake you up?”

“No,” I said. “I was ten. They
gave us lights out at nine p.m. at that age. I’d sleep through
almost anything.”

“Perhaps he’s drugging all of
them?” Sam said. “Putting something in their hot chocolate, so
they sleep through it?”

“This is getting stupid now,”
Rory said.

“How would you do it? If you were
the killer, I mean?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t take them out of the
dorm directly,” Carson said, after considering it. “I’d entice
them to meet me somewhere.”

“That would work for the first
one,” Rory admitted. “If it was someone they trusted, and it was
the first time away from home, then they could have been lured out of
their dorm for some reason.”

“Which means, again, that it’s
one of the staff. Or maybe one of the monks,” I said. “Not Ms
Walker, though.”

“I’d still finger her,” Sam
said.

We all snorted at that. Luckily we
had finished our coffees or Carson’s desk would have been sprayed a
light brown.

“Your fingers stink after you’ve
done that, apparently,” Rory said.

“Really?” we all looked at him.

“Yeah, it’s pretty gross I’ve
heard.”

“It depends on the girl,” Sam
said. “Whether they smoke and what they eat can make a difference.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I’ve heard Cody talking about
it with some of his army friends when they were home one time. He
didn’t want me listening to what they were saying, though, so I
only caught a bit.”

“Right, anyway,” Carson said,
pulling out a pad of paper and a pen, “let’s get this written
down. They would need to get access to the school, which means they
would need keys—”

“Ah, not true,” I said. “There
are two teachers’ bedrooms in there, remember? So they could
already have been inside.”

“What about the matron?”

“Too old,” I said. “She’d
never be able to carry the body or ... oh crap, I forgot that the
first one was all the way down the Red Road.”

“How did you forget
that
?”
Rory asked, a little incredulously. “
You
were the one who
found them.”

“Well, no, I remember finding
them. But I just never really thought about it like that. The
distance, I mean. They must have put the body in a car and driven
them down there.”

“But how?” Sam asked. “The
school gates are locked.”

“They weren’t back in September.
They’ve only just started doing that after Craig Priest was killed.
So, whoever did it could have driven around the school grounds
without any problems.”

“Risky, though. Someone could have
seen them,” Rory said.

“Unless you were one of the staff
and were therefore above suspicion.”

“Like Quasimodo, for example,” I
said.

“We’re going in circles here,”
Carson said.

“Maybe it was the Headless
Highwayman?” I laughed.

“The what?” both Carson and Sam
looked at me.

“The Headless Highwayman, from the
junior school,” I reiterated, looking at both of them. “Oh,
sorry, neither of you went to the junior school. It’s haunted.” I
was trying, and failing, not to grin as I said it.

“Haunted? By a ghost?” Carson
scowled.

“Yep. Part of the junior school
used to be an inn or something like that back in the eighteen hundreds, and the
landlord and landlady hanged a highwayman there after he kept robbing
them. They got away with it due to something about him being wanted
dead or alive, etc.”

“But his ghost is still there?”
Sam said.

“Yep,” I nodded vigorously,
still trying not to grin. Rory was smirking uncontrollably. “It
floats about the corridors at night, looking for its head.”

“Oh, fuck off, Crotty,” Carson
said.

“It does!” I repeated, laughing.
“There have been loads of sightings. Rory saw it twice while we
were there – once in the library and another time in the changing
rooms. You’re too scared to go to the toilets in the middle of the
night, in case you walk into it on the way there. Or it comes up
behind you and grabs you while you’re peeing.”

“He’s lying,” Rory said.

“See,” Carson said to me. “Even
Rory doesn’t believe you.”

“No, I mean he’s not actually
headless,” Rory said. “The rope broke his neck in such a way that
his head isn’t upright any more, but hangs down over one of his
shoulders.”

Rory and I both started chuckling.

“Whatever,” Carson said.

“So, there
is
a ghost there?”
Sam wanted to know.

“No, there isn’t,” I said,
admitting that the joke had already gone on long enough. “It scares
the hell out of the first years telling them that, though. Some of
them actually believe it, too. You should see the panic when you
punish them with having to go to the library on their own at night.
Well ... at least I don’t think the school is haunted. Quite a lot
of old buildings actually are.”

“So anyway, what have we got?”
Rory said, looking at Carson and nodding to the paper he had been
writing on.

Carson looked at the paper, already
with several ideas and proposals crossed out. “Ah, I don’t know,”
he said, giving in, crushing up the paper and tossing it into the bin
next to him. “As long as they don’t get me before I can get out
of here and get to university, I don’t care.”

“Where are you going to go?” I
asked. “Any more ideas?”

“Durham,” he said with the
certainty of telling me that two plus two was four.

“Isn’t that where you want to
go, Sam?” I asked him.

“No, I’ve changed my mind.”

“Why?”

“Probably because Durham’s
bloody hard to get in to,” Rory said. “It’s where all the
rejects from Oxford and Cambridge go, apparently.”

“What about UCL?” Sam said to
Carson.

“UCL?” Carson asked.

“University College London. That
would probably be ideal. It’s near the City and Canary Wharf.”

“Canary Wharf?” I asked, trying
to place the name.

“It’s now the tallest building
in Britain,” Sam said. “You can see it from Hampstead Heath.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Dave told me when I was staying
at his. He thinks he’s going to go to UCL, and I think I might join
him. It’s right in the middle of London, so it would get you loads
of work contacts. Dave’s dad said that networking is really
important to get ahead in your career.”

I nodded. Sam raised a good point.
It would be ideal for me, too. It would fit in well with my plans and
give me a chance to get to know London before I embarked on a career
there. I had found the city somewhat overwhelming when I had arrived
there for the weekend, and knew that was an issue I would need to
address as soon as possible.

“I think
I’ll stick to the City,” Carson said. “Canary Wharf’s not going anywhere just
yet. No one’s really moving there from what I’ve read. Maybe in a
few years, but not right now.”

There came a rap at the door; it
sounded like a teacher’s knock.

“They always know where to find
us, don’t they?” I commented.

“Come in,” Carson said.

The door opened, and in swept Father
Thomas. Was the man stalking me? I wondered. Did the monk
stand outside Carson’s door looking at his watch and waiting for us
to be late to evening prayers or something?
The tall man looked around briefly
and opened his mouth to speak, before his eyes settled on Sam.

“Ah,
I was about to ask if any of you had seen Sam, but here you are.
Would you come with me, please? The headmaster would like to speak to
you.”

Sam glanced uneasily to the rest of
us. “Is something wrong, Father?” he asked.

“No, don’t worry, you’re not
in trouble,” the monk said, raising a hand to calm everyone down.
“But Father Benedict needs a word. It’s private, so he will tell
you himself in his office.”

Sam stole another glance at us,
before getting up and making his way to the door in silence.

“Boys, could you all please be
back in your houses by nine thirty, for evening prayers? It’s nine
twenty now, so you should think about getting there soon,” Father
Thomas added, before departing with Sam, drifting out the door
without any glimpse of shoes or feet beneath his cassock.

“What was that all about?” I
asked.

“No idea,” Carson said.

“I doubt he’s in trouble,”
Rory said. “Sounds like something’s happened at home.”

“Isn’t his brother in Iraq right
now?” I said.

“Shit, that’s true,” Carson
said. “Christ, I hope not.”

So did I. Sam was one of my best
friends, and I would hate anything terrible to happen to him or his
family.

~ ~ ~

“Joe? Joe? Can you hear me?”

Huh?

“Hey, Joe?”

Who said that?

“Joe? Are you okay?”

I opened my eyes. I was in Butcher’s
third year dormitory. The lights were on. I looked around, seeing the
others all staring at me. Simmons, Smith, the other Smith, and
Silverman were still in their beds. Sam and Baz were standing not too
far from me.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I think you were sleepwalking,”
Simmons said. “I woke up and you were just standing there, over my
bed, staring down at me. I woke Seb up, and he turned on the light,
and you walked away. I thought you were mucking around, but you only
just woke up now.” He sounded quite unsettled. The ribbing I had
suffered from the last time I had been walking about at night was
nowhere to be seen this time.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Twenty past one,” Baz said.

I had barely been asleep for a
couple of hours.

“Are you okay, Joe?” Sam asked,
sounding quite concerned.

Why had I been sleepwalking again?
What was wrong with me? How often did I do it? I couldn’t be sure
that I actually woke up each time.

“I think you should go back to
bed, Joe,” Baz suggested when I didn’t answer.

“Right, okay,” I said, turning
around and lurching back to my own bed. I felt a little lightheaded.
“Sorry,” I added to everyone as I lay down and pulled the duvet
back over me.

The others said nothing, and the
lights soon clicked back off.

“Are you okay, Joe? Baz whispered
to me.

I don’t know
, I thought to
myself. I didn’t answer him.

Chapter Twenty

T
he
next day, I had a free afternoon and used the time to go and talk to
the school nurse, to arrange a meeting with Steve Martin, the
psychologist I had met when the headmaster and the police had wanted
to talk to me about Scott Parker’s body.

I didn’t expect him to be coming
in any time soon and was prepared to have to talk to him in a week or
two. As it turned out, Martin was coming in to talk to one of the
other boys about a ‘delicate subject’, as the nurse said. I
didn’t seek to find out what that might be and waited for the man
to become available. I was hesitant to speak to him; I didn’t want
anyone at the school to think that I was crazy. I hoped there would
be a perfectly reasonable explanation for my behaviour.

“So, what’s bothering you, Joe?”
Martin said after we had exchanged some pleasantries and he had
fetched me some water. “Is it to do with the murders at all?”

“No, actually,” I said. “I was
wondering if you knew anything about sleepwalking? The causes of it
and that. I’ve been doing it a lot lately, as well as having some
bad dreams, and so I thought I’d see if you knew anything about
it.”

“Hmm,” the man said, screwing up
his face a bit. “How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” I said.

“Sleepwalking isn’t a common
thing, but it’s not all that unusual around your age, either,”
Martin said after considering things for a while. “It can often be
related to puberty. As you will know, your body is going through a
number of changes, and they can be psychological as well as physical.
Have you been experiencing anything else at the same time?”

“Nightmares,” I told him.

“What do they involve? Is there
any consistency between them?”

“They usually involve ‘goblins’,”
I said, finding myself laughing a little at the absurdity of the
term. “They’re these small white creatures, with long bony
fingers. They’re usually waving spears and things about. They chase
me around the school and try to kill me. They succeed a lot of the
time, too.”

“Do you watch a lot of horror
films or read anything of that nature?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve actually
been having the nightmares since I was about twelve, so this isn’t a
new thing.”

Martin nodded, thinking some more.
“The ‘goblins’ are obviously a product of your imagination, but
are likely representative of things in your life that are causing you
distress. They could stand for your schoolwork or the older boys that
might bully you. Nightmares are extremely common during adolescence,
though most teenagers don’t like to talk about it. They’re afraid
of admitting what has woken them up at night and that it might make
them a subject of ridicule amongst their peers. Were you bullied a
lot when you were younger?”