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‘But not a good one by the sounds of it,’ says Zuri, cheerful as ever. ‘Sorry to wake you, boss, but we’ve got a body.’
Jennie’s head is banging and her throat’s so dry it feels like sandpaper. ‘Where?’
‘White Cross Academy. The old site, not the new one,’ says Zuri. ‘Over on Chalkton Road.’
‘The Academy?’ Jennie’s voice is a croak. Her brain feels scrambled. As she sits up, she winces at how much her body aches after falling asleep on the sofa.
‘Any more details?’ Jennie asks, biting back the other questions flooding her mind.
‘Not much, just that the body was found by the contractors working on the demolition and, from the description, sounds like it’s been there a long time. They’ve paused all work for now. Shall I meet you there?’
‘Yeah,’ says Jennie, unsure whether the sick feeling in her stomach is due to last night’s overindulgence or the thought of returning to her old school. ‘Give me half an hour.’
Twenty-four minutes later, Jennie arrives at the old White Cross Academy site. Getting off her bike, she wheels it along the pavement towards the entrance. The once pristine black paint has flaked from the iron railings, which are now riddled with rust. The high arched entry gates, with the school’s initials set into the iron, have been removed from their hinges and dumped in the dirt just inside the entrance.
Builders in hard hats and high-vis tabards are milling around the no man’s land between the railings and an eight-foot-high wooden fence that’s been erected to stop locals rubbernecking at what’s going on in the buildings behind.
Pushing her bike through the open gateway, Jennie heads along the weed-lined pathway towards what looks like a gate in the new fence. The high-vis guys look over. A couple of them start walking towards her.
‘You more police?’ asks a well-tanned contractor.
‘I’m DI Whitmore,’ says Jennie. ‘Has my colleague DS Otueome arrived?’
‘Yeah, she went over to the main building, to the basement, with the doctor bloke and the others in the paper suits.’
Jennie smiles. ‘Thanks.’
The contractor nods but doesn’t return the smile. ‘Any idea when we’ll be able to get back to work?’
‘Sorry, not yet,’ says Jennie. ‘We’ll be able to give you a timescale once we’ve had a look, but it’s unlikely to be today, and probably not tomorrow.’
The contractor swears under his breath. ‘The boss isn’t going to like that.’
‘Like I said, we’ll give you a timescale once we’ve assessed the situation.’
Leaving the contractor shaking his head, Jennie continues to the wooden fence and lets herself through the gate. Leaving her bike propped up against the fence, Jennie ducks under the tape. She looks across the yellowing lawn, past the uniformed officer standing at the bottom of the steps to the portico door, and up at the main school building.
The Victorian frontage is still as imposing as ever, but it’s clearly been neglected. The grey stone is crumbling and the windows have been boarded up. Nature has started to take back the space; moss covers most of the black slate roof, and ivy has twisted itself around the once-white columns either side of the grand portico. Jennie supposes the decay was inevitable. After the school moved to a new purpose-built campus almost fifteen years ago, the old buildings were sold off to developers. Since then, they’ve stood empty and uncared for as the new owners tried and failed to get planning permission. Over the years, there’s been trouble with squatters and with kids setting fires in the building. Maybe the body is a homeless person or junkie who sought shelter and died while they were here.
It can’t be Hannah, can it? The police said she’d run away.
Behind the school, the woodland stretching up into the Chiltern Hills looks dense and foreboding. The early morning ground mist hasn’t yet been fully burned away by the sun, its ghostly veil partially shrouding both the trees and the school building. It’s almost impossible to see the huge chalk cross that dominates the hillside above.
As she walks towards the building, Jennie’s stomach lurches. She’s not looking forward to going down into the basement again after all these years.
As her footsteps echo off the stone floor, she repeats the mantra over and over in time with them, as if wishing something can make it true.
It can’t be Hannah. It can’t be Hannah.
With the boarded-up windows blocking any external light, and what’s still working of the fluorescent strip lighting flickering overhead, the corridor seems far longer and much spookier than Jennie remembers. The last time she was here – the day she sat her last A level paper – this corridor was a bustling hive of activity. The football team had won the County Championship final the evening before, and Johnny Mackenzie, who’d scored all three of the winning goals, was carried on the shoulders of his teammates through the corridors, accompanied by frenzied cheering. Only the twins, Daisy and Carl Winkleman, didn’t cheer. They were frantically speed-reading the English paper set text, as if it would make a difference to cram information into their brains up to the very last second before the exam.
Mind you, it wasn’t as if Jennie could talk. Following Hannah’s disappearance Jennie gave up any pretence of revision and the A and two Bs she’d been predicted ended up being a C and two Ds. Considering she’d felt discombobulated and shell-shocked, and had very little memory of sitting the exams, she was amazed the grades were that high. Hannah’s boyfriend, Simon Ackhurst, was captain of the school football team but he missed the championship match and failed to show up for any of his A level exams. Of their friendship group, Simon was the only person other than Jennie who truly fell apart in the vacuum left by Hannah’s disappearance.
It can’t be Hannah.
Jennie steps around a large pile of mouldy debris where the ceiling has caved in and continues on past the rows of grey metal lockers that line this section of the corridor. She stops beside number thirty-seven – her old locker – and can’t resist opening it. The handle squeaks as she turns it, but the metal door swings open easily enough. The locker is empty, but it still bears the remnants of those who occupied it, with their stickers adorning the sides. Jennie looks at the pictures; the least faded are newer artists – Muse, Beyoncé, Foo Fighters – but beneath them, partially covered and their colours long-faded, Jennie sees Madonna, Jim Morrison, and Soundgarden. She smiles, and feels a warm hug of nostalgia: these are her stickers. On the inside of the door, remarkably intact even after all these years, is the Give Peace A Chance sticker her dad had put in her Christmas stocking a few months before he died. She wishes she could peel it off and take it with her. She has so few mementoes from her dad.
Closing the door, Jennie glances along the lockers towards forty-one and forty-two. The nostalgic feeling fades. Those were once Lorraine Chester and Becky Mead’s lockers. Jennie remembers her first day at the school and shudders. She’d spent hours that morning putting together her outfit, opting for a smart calf-length skirt, a blue blouse and school blazer. Jennie was taking her packed lunch out of her briefcase to put into her locker when she first heard the laughing. Looking around she saw Lorraine and Becky, standing there in their mini-kilt skirts, Mary Jane shoes and tight vest tops. They called her a whole bunch of names that time, but it didn’t take long for their bullying to become violent.
