CHAPTER 98: The Virgin’s Summer, Part 38

“… You gave me ways of helping myself, and then, later, after I knew I’d fallen in love, somehow... there was never the chance, the right moment... Michael…?”

“Mmm?”

“Did you pay? Was it both of you?”

“No. James made the purchase. But I joined in. I’m not feeling proud of myself.”

He looks pensive, drawing invisible doodles on the table surface with his finger.

“Charlotte, have you never had someone to talk to? To confide in?”

“When I was at the farm, there was a teacher at the school, Mr Kalkowski. He was wonderful. He taught me so much... He let me use the school library, then he gave me the run of his own library. He let me use his telescope, showed me how to use it, taught me the constellations. And when I wanted to know more about it, he said he could only teach me so much, that I needed to go to college for more...”

Michael is listening intently, with a silence that swallows my words.

“... He told me about his past life. He wasn’t young. I think he was supposed to have retired years ago, but they didn’t have anyone to replace him, that far out from the City. But.… he told me how he’d escaped his old country when things got bad and made a new life for himself. And I realised that, if he’d done it, so could I. He showed me that education is freedom, and if I wanted to make my own way in the world, I needed to learn as much as I could.”

“He sounds a good man.”

“Yes, he was...” My voice breaks up... “At Christmas, I went back there to see him again, to tell him that I’d made it to university. I wanted... I wanted him to be proud of me.… but he was so old... when I got there, they told me he’d died.”

My eyes flood.

“Oh, Charlotte.” Michael shakes his head. “Oh God, I’m so sorry.” He hugs me, kissing the top of my head. “Jeez… what are we going to do?”

I wake to the smell of coffee. My Master is there, sitting on the end of the bed with Michael, talking quietly with him. I don’t move, trying to pick out the words, but their voices are a low murmur, and I can’t hear what they are saying.

I stir, and they both turn to look at me, Michael smiling at me, my Master sombre.

“Good morning, Charlotte. How are you now?” says my Master.

My stomach churning, “What’s happening?”

He chews his lip for a moment. “I’m not going to tell you exactly until we have some final information come in, but I will say, that Haswell has worked tirelessly on your behalf, over the last day or so and... it’s going to be alright for you.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.” The words sound as though he should be pleased, but his expression, his body language, says otherwise.

Michael: “Coffee?”

“Mmm, yes, please.”

“Breakfast?”

“Um, no. Don’t think I could hold it down.”

My Master again, “Take your time. Have your coffee, take a bath, whatever. Then come down to the study. I’ll be in there.”

I’m baffled. “How…”

“Charlotte, please trust me. Just this once. We’re waiting for some documents to come in, for final confirmation, then we’ll tell you.” He snorts a laugh, but there is no humour in it. “You chose the right place to finally make your confession. Haswell is the kind of man who can pull a lot of strings, very quickly, when he wants to.”

“We’re going to his office?”

“No, he’s here, downstairs.”

Bathed and dressed, I go down to Richard’s study, Michael holding my hand. It smells a little musty in here. Of course, the room has not been used all summer.

As we enter, my Master, seated in an armchair, stares out of the window.

Richard is speaking on the phone, but seeing me, he smiles and points to a chair. Amazingly, he winks at me.

?

“Yes, that’s just what I need,” he is saying. “Yes, yes, that too. Can you scan them and send them straight across to me… Oh, you have? Hang on a minute.”

He taps at his keyboard. “Yes, it’s coming in now.” He peers at the screen. “Yes, that’s just what I need. If you find anything else, please send it across, but this will do for now. Thanks, Will. I owe you one.” And he hangs up.

“Sit down, Charlotte.”

I don’t. On tenterhooks, I dance from one foot to the other, unable to settle. Irritably, he waves me again to the chair, by his desk, “Please, sit down, before you fall down.”

Glancing across at me, he jabs keys on his laptop, then spins it, so I can see the screen. There is an old photo, the image of a face; a face I recognise. Even across the years, and knowing he is dead, my stomach churns.

“That him?”

I nod.

He taps at more keys and a printer whirrs into life, spitting out documents at high speed. He catches them as they emerge.

“You might be interested to know that you made the papers at the time. Even if no-one told you about it, you were briefly famous. It probably saved your life. The publicity meant that they couldn’t simply... lose you. You were fostered out instead, well away from the City.”

He pushes papers at me. “You didn’t kill him...

I stutter. “But... I stabbed him. They told me he was dead…”

“He died, yes, but not of a stab wound. He was chasing you, and it sounds as though you gave him a good run for his money. He followed you halfway across town, over the old river bridge, and died nearly two miles away. He chased you through the traffic and went under the wheels of a truck, a twenty-wheeler. It dragged him some distance before the driver managed to stop the vehicle.”

I stare at the papers being pushed at me: old headlines. “By the time they’d pulled out what was left of him, a stab wound inflicted by a fourteen-year-old girl would have been the least of his injuries. Certainly, it didn’t show up in the autopsy report.”

I digest that. He continues, “Witnesses at the time reported him, apparently giving chase to a young girl, a redhead. There was a search for you.” He holds up another sheet. I stare out at myself from a much younger face, ginger, freckled and gawky.

He looks at the photo. “I have to say, Charlotte, that you have bloomed since then...” Then he looks at me over his glasses, critically, “Although you need to eat. You’ve lost weight in the last couple of days... What happened to the knife?”

“I threw it over the bridge into the river.”