The Horse Dancer (21 page)

‘Mrs Macauley, have you anything to add?’ the judge asked.

She wasn’t on top of this. She felt her normal focus dissolving. ‘No, your honor. That’s all.’

‘I thought you were going to bring up the psychiatrist’s report,’ Ben whispered.

Damn.
She stood up abruptly. ‘Actually, with apologies, your honour, there is one further item I would like to draw to your attention . . .’

Mac was at the kitchen table when she arrived home. She threw her case down by the fridge and unwound her scarf from her neck. ‘Still nothing?’ she said.

‘Not since you left work, no.’

‘It’s getting dark. How long do you think we should leave it before we ring someone?’ A tight knot of anxiety had settled in her stomach during his first telephone call and had grown into an oversized, weighted ball. She had played through the conversation with the social worker several times. The authorities would think they were stupid or, worse, careless. The one thing they had asked them to do was make sure she went to school. The case workers would talk. They might call into question Natasha’s professional ability. And underneath these concerns, the terrifying voice at the back of her head, the voice she attempted to drown with reason, practicality, another phone call to Mac.
What if, this time, something really has happened? I’ve had no practice at this. Real parents have years in which to get used to this level of anxiety.

‘We’ll give her another half an hour,’ Mac said. ‘That takes it to six o’clock. By then we’ll have given her enough chances.’

She sat down opposite him, and accepted the glass of wine he had poured for her. He was not smiling now. His relaxed air of earlier had disappeared, replaced by silence, tension. ‘Did you get to your other job okay?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘I thought I should go to the school gates for chucking-out time. Just in case she turned up.’ He sighed and sipped his wine. ‘Besides, my head wasn’t in it. It’s fine. They let me reschedule for tomorrow.’

Their eyes met briefly.
As long as she’s here by tomorrow
.

‘I was useless in court,’ she offered. ‘Couldn’t keep my mind on the job at all. I was surprised at myself.’

‘Not like you.’

‘No,’ she said. She had lost the case. Ben’s expression as she left the High Court had told her she was the reason why.

‘Kids, eh?’ Mac said mirthlessly.

They jumped as they heard the doorbell. ‘I’ll go,’ he said, pushing himself back from the table.

She sat there and sipped her wine, listening to him open the front door. He muttered something she couldn’t hear, and then his footsteps were returning down the hallway. Behind him, her face half obscured by her scarf, the chill evening air still radiating from her clothes, stood Sarah.

‘Welcome back,’ Mac said, turning to her. ‘We weren’t sure whether you’d booked into another hotel.’

Her eyes were just visible and darted between them as she tried to gauge how much trouble she was in.

‘Care to tell us where you’ve been?’ Mac’s voice was light, but Natasha could detect frustration in it.

Sarah pulled down the scarf a fraction. ‘Went out with a friend.’

‘Not this evening,’ Mac said. ‘I meant all day. When you were supposed to be at school.’

She kicked at something invisible on the floor. ‘I wasn’t feeling well.’

‘So . . .’

‘So I went for a walk. To clear my head.’

Natasha could bear it no longer. ‘For nine hours? You went for a nine-hour walk to clear your head? Do you have the slightest idea how much trouble you’ve caused?’

‘Natasha—’

‘No!’ She brushed aside Mac’s warning. ‘I lost a case today because I was so busy worrying about where you were. The school has been on at us every hour. Mac had to cancel an important job. The least you can do is tell us where you’ve been.’

The scarf was pulled up again. Sarah stared at the floor.

‘You are here as our responsibility, Sarah. That means we’re legally responsible for you. We have to make sure you get to school, and that you come home again. As a matter of law. Do you understand?’

She nodded.

‘So, where were you?’

There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Finally the girl shrugged.

‘Do you want to end up in secure accommodation? Because this is the fourth time you’ve disappeared in ten days. If you do this again, and the school notifies your social worker first, instead of us, you will end up in secure accommodation. Do you know what that is?’ Natasha’s voice had lifted now. ‘It means you’ll be locked up.’

‘Tash . . .’

‘It won’t be up to us, Mac. They’ll just decide we’re incapable of taking care of her, and if they think she’s at risk of disappearing, they’ll apply for court proceedings to put her in secure.’

The girl’s eyes were wide over the scarf.

‘Is that what you want?’

Sarah shook her head slowly.

‘Come on,’ said Mac. ‘Let’s calm down. Sarah, we just want you to stick to the rules, okay? We need to know where you are.’

‘I’m fourteen.’ Her voice was quiet but defiant.

‘And you’re in our care,’ said Natasha. ‘You asked to come here, Sarah. The least you can do is play by our rules.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

She didn’t look sorry, Natasha thought. ‘Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘Mac will be taking you in before registration and handing you over to your teacher. And one of us will be at the school gates when you come out. Until you prove to us that we can trust you to be where you say you are.’

Mac stood up, went to the cupboard and pulled out a bag of dried pasta. ‘Okay, we’ll leave it there and trust that this won’t happen again. Sarah, take your coat off and sit down. You must be hungry. I’ll make us some food.’

But Sarah turned on her heel and walked out of the kitchen. They heard her tread heavily up the stairs and the door of her bedroom close emphatically behind her.

There was a short silence.

‘That went well.’

Mac sighed. ‘Give her a chance. She’s having a tough time.’ Natasha swallowed some wine, let out a long breath, then looked at him. ‘Does this mean it isn’t the time to tell you that money has been disappearing from the jar in my room?’ She wasn’t sure he’d heard her. ‘Quite a lot. I just noticed that the level has dipped. And I remember tipping four pound coins into the top of it the other night. Yesterday they were gone.’

He carried on pouring pasta on to the scales.

‘Oh . . . no . . .’ she said.

‘I didn’t want to say anything,’ he said, ‘but I remember dropping a fiver out of my jeans pockets on to the coffee-table the other night, and making a note to myself that I’d pick it up in the morning. When I came down it was gone.’ He went to the kitchen door and shut it silently. ‘You think it’s drugs?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. I’ve never suspected her of being high.’

‘No . . . she doesn’t seem . . .’

‘It’s not clothes,’ she said. It was one of the things Natasha had found almost endearing. Sarah seemed uninterested in fashion and celebrity magazines, spent no more than ten minutes in the bathroom each morning. ‘She doesn’t have a phone, to my knowledge. And she doesn’t smell of cigarettes.’

‘Something’s up.’

Natasha stared at her wine glass. ‘Mac,’ she said, ‘I have to tell you something. When I first met her, she was being held for shoplifting.’

He stopped what he was doing.

‘It was just a packet of fish-fingers. I bumped into her in a supermarket. She swore she was going to pay for it.’
I’ve been fooled again. I thought I was doing a good thing. Stupid, guilty, middle-class liberal. I’m totally out of my depth
. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said. ‘I should have told you.’

He shook his head. She realised, with gratitude, that he wasn’t going to make a big deal of it. ‘Do you think . . .’ she said, tentatively ‘. . . that we have—’

But Mac interrupted her. ‘I can’t do it tomorrow,’ he said, finally tipping the pasta into the boiling water. ‘But give me a day or two and I’ll follow her. See what she’s up to. We’ll get to the bottom of this.’

 

 

 

For two days Sarah was a model of obedience. She allowed Mac to accompany her to the classroom, albeit bristling with resentment, and was there, scuffing her shoes, at the school gates when he arrived to pick her up. But the beauty of teenagers, thought Mac, was that they always assumed they were cleverer than everyone else. And Sarah was no exception.

On day three, as he dropped her at school, he told her he didn’t have time to run inside with her, and would she be okay going in by herself? He saw the brief glint in her eye, quickly suppressed, then he waved, accelerated away as if he was in a hurry and drove around the block. He pulled up by some garages, counted to twenty, then drove round slowly and back on to the high street past the school. Pupils were still streaming in through the gates, bags slung low over their shoulders, shouting at each other or gathered in huddles round mobile phones. And, sure enough, there was Sarah, heading in the opposite direction, half walking, half running up the road towards the bus stop.

Mac prayed she wouldn’t turn around, but she was already too focused on where she was going. Damn it, Sarah, he told her silently. Why are you so determined to sabotage your own future? He watched as she leapt on to a bus, registering the number and its destination. The wrong direction for the hospital, he noted. The social worker had taken her to see her grandfather the previous week and had mentioned its location. Mac had promised to take her this weekend, and had written down the address. So where was she headed?

He sat in his car behind the bus, no longer able to see her, but trusting he would catch sight of her when she jumped off again. He allowed two cars to cut in front of him, to make himself less conspicuous, but the rush-hour traffic ensured that cars and bus made little headway.

Please let it be a boy, he willed, fiddling with his radio. If it was, they could invite him round, talk to them both. A boy would be manageable. Timetabled. But not drugs. Please don’t let it be drugs.

For twenty minutes the car crept across London and on to the City. He drew fierce protest from white vans, shouting at him for failing to go faster, and rude gestures from smart women who might have known better. When it got bad, he pulled in for a few seconds and let people pass, wondering at the number of tickets he was going to get for repeatedly edging into the bus lane. He had come so far now that he couldn’t afford to lose her. It started to rain as he reached the edges of the Square Mile, and he strained to catch sight of her dark uniform among the suited City workers with umbrellas who jumped on and off the bus at each stop. Here, where the population grew denser, it was increasingly hard to tell. Several times he wondered if he had already missed her, if he was on some wild-goose chase, but he stayed where he was.

Finally, where the glass towers of the financial district began to morph into the grimier buildings, residential blocks of flats, he caught sight of her. She skipped off the bus, ran around the rear of it, and leapt on to the island in the middle of the road. Mac held his breath, knowing that if she glanced to the right she would see him. But her attention was on the traffic going the other way. She let go of the railing and ran across. Before Mac realised he was now facing the wrong way, she was off down a side-street.

‘Shit,’ he said aloud. ‘
Shit, shit, shit.
’ He wrenched the car out from behind the bus, throwing up a hand of apology as the vehicle behind him screeched to a halt, and shot through an amber light on the crossing, so that a woman pedestrian thumped the side of his car in protest. ‘
Sorry, sorry, sorry,
’ he muttered, accelerating as fast as he could towards the roundabout. He skidded around it and back on to the main road facing the opposite way, peering through the windscreen as he tried to spot her. He drove until he saw the little side-street she had disappeared down, then realised, as he began to indicate, that it was one-way. The wrong way.

Mac hesitated for just a moment. Then he accelerated down it, praying he could get to the next street before anyone came the other way. ‘I know . . . I know . . .’ he shouted at the moped, who careered towards him, its rider shouting obscenities from under his helmet.

And then, at the crossroads, there was nothing. He could see no cars and no people, just a row of lead-stained Victorian buildings, the entrance to a car park, a block of flats. On his left he could make out the high street, a café and an Indian takeaway briefly obscured by a bus. On impulse, he turned right, driving slowly now on the cobbles, glancing down each street he came to in search of a girl in school uniform. Nothing. It was as if she had disappeared into thin air.

Mac pulled on to the lane, and into a parking space. He sat there for a moment, cursing himself. Cursing her.
What the hell am I doing? I’m chasing a schoolgirl I hardly know across London, and for what?
In a few weeks she would be gone anyway. If she wanted to wreck her life with stupid boyfriends or drugs, was that really his problem? Her grandfather would get better, he would straighten her out, and they would all get on with their lives.

His phone was ringing. He reached down into the passenger footwell, discovering that his erratic driving had sent his belongings flying out of his pockets and on to the floor. It took him a couple of minutes to locate it.

‘Mac?’

Maria.

‘Hey,’ he said.

‘Don’t say it, you wanted to ring me but you’re trapped under large piece of furniture.’ Her voice was bruised with hurt. He didn’t take it personally – she used that tone if her tea was the wrong colour. ‘You were going to ring me about lunch.’