Crestfallen, I head back outside with the one thousand pounds in my pocket and climb back into the driver’s seat of my car.
‘How much did you get?’ Jessica asks.
‘They’d only give me a grand. Some shit about money-laundering regulations.’
‘Fuck. I thought they might try pulling that one. We can’t do anything with a grand,’ she says.
‘Well, there’s not much else I can do, is there? This is stupid. We should just go to the police, tell them what happened.’
‘Are you mad? Tell them what? “Hello, officer. My wife, who’s meant to be seventy miles away, is lying dead in my hotel room. Yeah, I know it looks like I killed her, and I know I did a runner and tried to clear my bank account straight after, but it wasn’t me, honest.” That’ll work a treat, that.’
‘Do you have any better ideas?’ I say, trying to keep my cool.
‘Yeah, I do. Do you use PayPal?’
‘For eBay and stuff, yeah,’ I reply.
‘Right. Is it linked to your Lloyds account?’
‘Yeah, I’ve only got one bank account. Why?’
‘Go to the PayPal site on my phone,’ she says, handing it to me. ‘Then send a PayPal payment to my account and make sure it takes the money from your Lloyds account. Then I can transfer the money to my HSBC account and withdraw it myself. If you do it quickly enough, we can get it out before the banks shut for the day.’
My head’s spinning, but I do as she says. ‘Won’t this implicate you, though?’ I say, watching the progress bar fill as the browser loads the website. ‘If my money is transferred to you, they’ll be looking for you, too. How are you going to explain that one?’
‘I don’t need to explain anything to anyone,’ she says. ‘I’m already implicated, aren’t I? Besides which, I’ve got plenty to be getting away from myself. I’m not exactly panicking at the idea of leaving the country.’
It makes me feel slightly sad that a woman of her age feels the need to get away from things. She should be having the time of her life. But then I don’t know what her life up until now has been like.
‘Will you tell me about it? One day, I mean.’
‘One day,’ she says. ‘One day.’
8
When he’s outside, Daniel feels like a free spirit. Most young boys do, the wind in their hair, their imaginations running wild. One minute they’re a pirate, then a footballer, then they’re a soldier. Right now, the game is much simpler. Daniel doesn’t know where the frisbee came from. All he knows is that there’s no way the Mother Superior would allow them to play with it. If she knew. It would be ungodly, he’s sure of that. Most things are.
He thinks it probably came over the wall from outside. Lots of things come in that way. Usually toys – footballs, bags of marbles, now a frisbee. He’s never seen any of it come over, but he knows it happens. The other boys tell him. Besides which, there’s no other way it could get in here. There are never any visitors, apart from Mr Duggan. Laurence Nelson reckons the toys come over the wall from people who used to live here. People who know what it’s like. Teddy Tomlin calls Laurence Nelson a shit-stirrer.
Around this side of the building, they can play without getting told off. There aren’t enough nuns to keep an eye on every boy in every part of the grounds. If they’re found – when they’re found – they’ll be marched back inside and given a dressing-down, but it’ll be worth the half an hour of fun and forgetting about everything else. It’s a regular routine, and it’s one they actually quite enjoy.
One of the boys throws the frisbee too far, and it clatters against a tree before falling to the ground. Daniel chases after it, laughing and grinning as he runs, the oxygen burning his lungs in the happiest way imaginable. When he finally reaches the tree, he bends down and picks up the frisbee, the plastic warming in the late-morning sun. He knows he’ll not be able to throw it as far as the others from here, so he closes the distance with a run-up before releasing the frisbee at a perfect angle, the disc continuing to rise upwards on its cushion of air.
He realises it’s going to overshoot the rest of the boys at about the same time as he sees it’s heading towards the window of the morning prayer room. The first thing that goes through his mind is how stupid a place that is to put a window – not only eight feet up in the air so no-one can actually see out of it but also right in the path of a flying frisbee.
His thoughts are punctuated by the shattering of the glass pane and the deathly silence that follows it. None of the boys say a word, but they all look at each other and then at Daniel. He knows he’ll be in trouble, but he doesn’t know how much. This is unprecedented.
The silence is broken by the all-too-familiar call of the Mother Superior. It helps that the boys are all stood stock-still, looking guilty as sin, but Daniel will bet she already knew who it was before she even left the building. She seems to have eyes and ears in all places.
She doesn’t even look at the other boys; just marches straight up to Daniel and tugs at his arm, pulling him back towards the house – which now looks five times its usual size – and his impending fate.
The Mother Superior’s office is a place he’s been seeing far more of recently. He’s already over the hump and on the home run, and he’s beginning to get antsy. Seven years, one month and twenty-two days to go. There’s an atmosphere around Pendleton House, too, like something’s about to change. Transformation is in the air, and Daniel can tell that the Mother Superior has picked up on it as well, and she isn’t all that happy about it.
She sits him down on a cold, hard plastic seat before taking her own rest in her plush leather armchair.
‘Do you care to explain yourself?’ she says after a few moments of silence, her eyes looking at him in her trademark neutral manner that had all of the emotion and anger hidden far behind, out of sight.
Daniel doesn’t know what to say.
‘Do you know when you were first brought into this office for disciplinary purposes?’ the Mother Superior asks, her warm Irish lilt belying the menace of her intentions. Daniel shakes his head. He does know, but he knows he’s not meant to. ‘The twelfth of February this year. And do you know how many times you have been here since?’ Again, Daniel shakes his head. This time, he really doesn’t know the answer. ‘Nine,’ the Mother Superior tells him. ‘Nine times this year, after a previously unblemished record.’
Daniel says nothing. He just continues looking at a dent on the top of her desk, studying its every angle and line. He wishes it could grow, open up and envelop him. He wants to be anywhere but here.