Monster (19 page)

A
fter a lengthy interrogation, we had only established one thing—it was Regan making the ‘luring’ noises in the night. So desperate was she to find and kill the Beast, just to stand out and be counted at Bathory, she’d been going outside, night after night, after we’d all gone to sleep, trying to catch it. Luring it with tidbits and stolen meat from the school freezers. The thing I didn’t get though was the dead sheep. I believed her when she said she hadn’t killed it and put it there. And she’d said it wasn’t there when she’d first gone out. So who
had
put it there? Was she right; was it trying to teach us in some way? Or was it trying to threaten us? And if so, what would it put there next?

I had a dream in the night that the phone was working. I dreamed I heard it ringing and its ring echoed all the way
up Long Corridor. At first light, I was up and washed and dressed and rushing down Main Stairs to check it.

But it was still dead.

Then I heard a noise in the kitchens, a knocking noise. I went to investigate, but everything was still—no one about and everything was as it should be. Leftover cakes and crisps under cling-filmed paper plates on the big metal table, Brody lying down in one of the utility rooms. He looked up at me and his tail started wagging, knocking against the side of his big red plastic bed.

‘That was you, was it?’ I said to him, crouching down beside to ruffle his head. ‘You’re a pretty useless guard dog.’

Brody got up, stretched out both his back legs and shook himself awake. He walked over to the back door and sat down, looking up at the handle. I rolled up the blind and looked out. There was white as far as the eye could see, right across the formal garden and the tennis courts and fields beyond. An eerie, glacial world, clear of any moving signs of malice. I still didn’t want to open the door.

‘Can’t you cross your legs or something?’ I looked at his brown china water bowl—it was completely empty. ‘Evidently not. Okay, go on then,’ I said, pulling both bolts across on the back door. I watched Brody walk across the Great Plat, the sunken garden area reserved for bedding plants, walkways and rills. He left his footprints behind him, sniffed around, cocked his leg. Unconcerned. Good enough for me.

I refilled his bowls, then hotfooted it back upstairs to the Saul-Hudsons’ apartment, where Dianna was sitting up on the bed next to Leon.

‘Hi,’ I said quietly, poking my head around the door.

The TV flickered quietly in the corner. ‘Hi,’ she said. She didn’t look as though she had slept a wink.

‘Any news?’ I said, creeping in to stand at the foot of the bed. I watched Leon’s chest, going up, going down. His breathing seemed more settled than it had been yesterday.

‘Worst snowstorm yet in the South-west expected tonight,’ she said, switching it off with the remote. ‘Planes still grounded at all the airports. A couple of them have reopened in Scotland and the North-east, but traffic is still bad on the motorways and motorists are being advised only to make journeys if they’re absolutely essential.’ She was saying it like a newsreader. She must have been watching the hourly forecasts all night long.

‘I meant Leon, actually, but that’s good to know too.’

‘Oh,’ she said, looking at him. ‘I don’t know. He doesn’t seem as pale.’

‘It’s cold in here,’ I said. ‘Didn’t the radiators come on at six?’

She shook her head, cuddling herself for warmth. ‘Maybe the boiler’s packed up now as well as the phone?’

‘We’ll have to get the plug-in radiators out of the storeroom if it has. Did you sleep?’

She scrunched her nose. ‘Fits and starts. Is Regan up yet?’

‘I don’t know and I don’t give a toss,’ I said. ‘Maggie was ready to throw her out the dorm window when we got back upstairs last night.’

‘Can’t believe she thought she could catch it.’

‘Tell me about it.’

Dianna edged herself off the bed. ‘I’m going to get him some toast for when he wakes up. Do you want anything?’

‘No thanks,’ I said, sitting down in her place as she left
the room. I’d just opened Mrs Saul-Hudson’s bedside drawer to have a cheeky nose about when I heard a voice behind me.

‘There’s no Viagra. I’ve looked.’

Leon’s eyes were open and his head was turned to me, but still lolling heavy on the pillow.

‘I wasn’t looking for Viagra,’ I said, my cheeks heating up. ‘Anyway, that’s in their bathroom cabinet, top shelf.’

‘What are you, their resident spy?’

‘More like a slave. Did you sleep okay?’

‘Ish,’ he croaked, with a cough. He manoeuvred himself up to more of a sitting position. ‘What day is it? Christ my head’s thumping.’

Clearly, he had a hangover. ‘The twenty-third. Happy Christmas Eve Eve,’ I said.

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Dianna had given him one of Mr Saul-Hudson’s clean shirts to wear, the buttons open right to the waist. I started unpeeling the night bandage from his ankle. His wound had started to scab over. ‘I need to change this, okay?’

He nodded and sat up, easing himself back to sit against the headboard, his shirt opening a little more. I went and got the one remaining bandage out of the first aid box.

‘You’re good at this,’ he told me. ‘You should be a nurse.’

I squinted at the wound on his ankle. ‘It looks better today.’

‘Doesn’t feel it. Ahh!’ he said, as his wound was once again exposed to the air.

‘It’s stopped bleeding. Clotting nicely.’

‘Cool. Is the phone back on yet?’

‘No,’ I said, winding the new bandage around his foot. ‘We’re just waiting for someone to come. We daren’t go out there with the You-Know-What about.’

‘‘Course, yeah.’

‘Do you want the TV on?’

‘Yeah, in a bit,’ he said, staring at the blank white wall ahead. ‘When the phone does come back on, you’ll call the police, won’t you?’

I tucked in the end of the bandage so it was neat and tidy. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You’ll have to. I can’t stop you. If I’d known what escaping had in store for me, I’d have stayed in the clink.’ I smiled. ‘You’re cracking-looking, you know.’

I felt myself blush and quickly set to work tidying away the first aid box. He watched me.

‘There’s no need to blush. Accept it. You’re gorgeous.’

‘All done,’ I announced firmly, scooping up the dirty bandages and dumping them in the wicker basket at the side of the bed. Then I scurried to the en suite to wash my hands.

When I came back, he had settled back down onto his pillow and his eyes were closing.

‘I’ll come back later and see how you’re doing.’

‘No, stay here,’ he said, his eyes closing. ‘Talk to me.’

‘About what?’

‘Anything you like. Tell me what Di gets up to when I’m not around.’

I couldn’t stop looking at his face. His bare chest. He looked wonderful in bed, like a jaguar reclining on a thick branch at the zoo. ‘I shouldn’t gossip about her.’

‘Yeah, you should.’

I went back to the bed and sat down on the edge. ‘How come she has a different accent to you? You’re Northern and she talks like—’

‘Royalty?’

‘Yes.’

‘Cos she puts it on,’ he said. ‘She’s from Manchester, same as me. We’ve never been alike. Mum sent her here to get her away from me. From my influence.’ He rolled his eyes.

Every chance I got to look at his body when he wasn’t looking at me, I took it. I couldn’t help it. He was like a scab I couldn’t stop picking. I knew it wouldn’t do me any good and would probably cause me pain in the long run but I just had to. Then he caught me looking. I snapped my eyes away, as though I’d just seen something incredibly interesting in Mrs Saul-Hudson’s chintzy print curtains.

He reached for his glass of water on the side table and took a swig.

‘So … Clarice?’ I said, pulling at a feather in the eiderdown bedspread.

He sighed. ‘Don’t remind me.’

I laughed. ‘I don’t need to ask what you saw in her.’

‘Gimme a break. I’ve been banged up for two years. If something like that’s on a plate, you don’t stop to ask who the chef is.’

‘Gross.’

‘Wish it’d been you,’ he said.

This time I went bright red. I could almost hear my blood pumping, so hot had he made me for him, without any effort at all.

‘But I get the impression you’d be a harder fish to fry, wouldn’t you? You’d make me work for it. I like that in a girl.’

Just the sight of him, lying there, half naked, injured, was enough to make me giddy. It hadn’t been this strong with Charlie, but then maybe it was the bad boy should-have-been-a-rock-star thing he had going on. I’d never believed
it before, but maybe there
was
something about a guy who was the polar opposite of you. Like a painful tooth you have to keep prodding to see how much it hurts. It’s irresistible.

A thought occurred. I wasn’t sure whether it was Maggie’s constant paranoia that Leon was a bad lot or my own subconscious, but maybe he was flirting with me for a reason. Maybe he wanted something from me. Once a con, always a con. But what was he after?

‘Read me a story,’ he said. ‘Or just … whassit … paraphrase. Summarise. Something you memorised once. Just to get me off to sleep again.’

The only book I knew off by heart was
The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.
Seb always read it to me at this time of year when we were younger. I’d like to have said it was a biblical tract or some Pablo Neruda poetry or something equally meaningful or literary, but it wasn’t any of those things. But it meant the world to me and I wanted to share it. Jailbird or not, he was in too much of a weakened state to try anything at the moment.

So I began. He seemed to enjoy it. His eyes were closed, but he smiled, like I used to smile. ‘Keep going.’ His eyelids began to flutter, and pretty soon he was snoring. I’d just got to the bit where the Grinch was ‘grinchishly humming’ when I heard footsteps out on the landing.

Dianna came in with a plate piled high with buttered toast and jam.

‘That’s the last of the bread. I couldn’t find any more in the freezer,’ she announced, placing it beside her brother on the nightstand. She looked at him. ‘Is he still asleep?’

‘Yeah. He was pretty knackered.’

Apropos of nothing, she started to cry again.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so tired. Every time I closed my
eyes I see that … thing. What if it gets in here, Nash? What if it’s got Regan’s scent now?’

‘It won’t get in here.’

‘You don’t know that. I’m scared.’

‘I know.’

‘Leon could die!’

‘He won’t. He just needs a couple of days to get his strength back. Look, he’s breathing evenly,’ I said, going round to Leon’s side of the bed and feeling his neck. ‘And I changed his bandage. It looks better today.’

‘Does it?’ she said eagerly. ‘Really?’

‘Yes. His pulse is fairly strong too. Why don’t you go and grab some sleep? They’ll all be awake now so you can have the dorm to yourself. You’ll feel much better.’

She shook her head. ‘I really used to resent you,’ she said, sitting next to me on the edge of the bed. ‘You’re always winning medals and prizes at Speech Day and stuff. Always in with the Saul-Hudsons. You have so much power and influence in this school. And look at me. Just a wannabe. I just wanted something for my mum to be proud of … I feel awful.’

‘Let’s forget it, shall we?’

‘No, I can’t forget it. I’m a useless Head Girl. I’m a useless sister. I’ve done nothing to help this situation at all, nothing.’

‘Yeah, you are pretty useless,’ I said, smiling.

She looked at me. She sort of smiled, sort of didn’t.

‘Look, stop beating yourself up, Dianna. I wanted to be powerful too. That’s why I wanted Head Girl. To feel powerful. To feel like I’d done something here. We’re all in the same boat.’

Her voice dropped. ‘I’m going to turn him in,’ she said quietly.

‘What?’

‘As soon as the phones come back on. At least in prison he’ll be safe. I don’t want my brother to die.’ She sniffed. ‘I know I said some bad things about him to you, but I do love him really.’

‘I think that’s the right thing to do,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how much longer we can hold out here. I mean, his ankle looks okay, but I don’t know about his appendix wound. If he was in hospital when he escaped, he probably should be back there.’

‘And the food’s going down at a rate of knots. We’re going to have to start rationing.’

‘Yeah, that’s a good idea,’ I said. ‘See? Now you’re thinking practically.’ I never thought me and Dianna would be having a conversation like this. I’d resented her for so long for trying to piggyback onto my role at Bathory, but here we were. Civil. Friendly. Understanding. No frills. No pretence. No problems. It was quite out of the ordinary.

Then Dianna’s face suddenly creased up.

‘Oh, Nash, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was just so jealous of you.’ More tears dripped down her face in quick succession. ‘And you were siding with Maggie over everything and I just … I don’t know why I did it. I’m sorry, I took it. I don’t think you’ll ever forgive me.’

‘Took what?’

‘I was there when it came. It was a few days ago—the last time we saw the postman.’

‘What do you mean? What did you take?’ I snapped back from her like she’d electrocuted me. ‘What, Dianna?’

She reached underneath the pillow behind her and pulled
out a crumpled, creased and folded envelope. Addressed to me.

In Seb’s handwriting.

I could hear them all in the bedroom as I sat on the third step up on Main Stairs. They were tearing into Dianna, all chipping in, even Regan, who never normally said anything unless she had to. Clearly, she was glad someone else was taking the heat.

‘You’re a freak. An actual freak. There was no good reason in the world for you taking that letter, Dianna!’ That was Maggie.

‘I know, I know.’ More sobbing.

‘It’s well weird. Why did you do it?’ Clarice.

In between sobs, I gleaned that she’d taken it so that she could have it for herself—something else I couldn’t have. It was her job to give out the post, but no one ever thanked her for it. So she took a little something for herself. My letter.