Lesley Thomson - The Detective's Daughter

Jonathan turned his ankle on the wet cobbles; his new shoes cut into his shins and rubbed the back of his heels. He longed to break free from Simon’s grip. An oblong of dry stones lay where his daddy’s car had been.

‘We eat here.’ Simon waved his other hand at a hall with a fireplace the size of a doorway. A table stretched away and high above were rafters.

‘I won’t be here,’ Jonathan informed him confidently.

‘Yes you will.’

Half of Simon’s finger was missing. Jonathan wrenched his hand away, revolted by what was not there, but Simon recaptured him and held him fast.

‘Don’t do that again.’

He concentrated instead on the ceiling beams. His daddy had told him about the principle of the Action of Forces. Fact: builders put a short distance between each beam to keep the load to a minimum. Jonathan would tell the boys this. He was startled by a clacking like bullets and saw the lady who had been nice when they arrived behind the counter. She was busy with her typing and did not see him this time.

The boys barged through a green baize door that closed by itself.

They clattered along a tiled passage with a vaulted ceiling, their voices deafening him. One boy exclaimed in disgust at the greasy cooking smell, the others imitated him until the teacher silenced them. There was no daylight and Jonathan pretended they were in a dungeon, the walls hung with chains. It was not hard.

The cloakroom smelled of cheese and the coats hung like roosting birds from giant hooks. Simon led him to one labelled ‘Justin’. Jonathan said nothing because he recognized his own coat.

They were on a stretch of grey asphalt with a gravel path around it and on one side a sloping grassy bank with a beech hedge with leaves of burnt umber: Jonathan’s favourite colour.

The Daisy teacher was chatting to a lady with a chin like the moon and Jonathan wondered if they were talking about him because suddenly they looked at him. He smiled but they did not smile back, and he took heart from this: perhaps his wish had come true and he was invisible.

Simon let him go and ran off to join in a game of football. Beyond the hedge, Jonathan saw hills speckled with frost and splodged with dark patches for woods. He trailed around the pitch gravitating towards a female blackbird hopping along the hedge with a stick the same length as herself in her beak. His mummy had called him Pig Wig for eating too much cake and he said that Pig Wig was a girl and the cake was his. The blackbird flew away over the hills. Pigling Bland and Pig Wig escaped from Thomas Piperson. Jonathan could be Pigling Bland and Pig Wig; that way he would not be alone. He wished for wings, but nothing happened because he had run out of wishes.

A football slammed into his chest. Jonathan kept upright and pretended he was fine, tripping over the ball at his feet. The boys were waiting for him to kick it back into the game but he could not breathe and his inaction decided even the kinder ones that the new pupil was after all an enemy:

‘Sissy.’

‘Four-eyes.’

He snatched at his spectacles but Simon threw them into the air. Eventually he discovered them in the grass. Mummy did not know about his new spectacles. He escaped up the slope to a flower bed with no flowers. He identified rosemary, lavender and rhododendron bushes and then found a gate in the hedge and, beyond, a muddy path with brambles that twisted out of sight. He gripped the top and fitted his foot into a space in the metal but then stopped. He would be quickly captured; now was not the time.

Jonathan returned to the flower bed where he found a spider completing a web strung between a seeding thistle, fluffy like sheep’s wool, and a tall cane. He counted the threads that connected the spans. There were ten on one segment, nineteen on another and twelve on a third. The number would relate to the stress on each section between its points of suspension. He nudged the thistle with his sore hand and the web trembled, making the spider stop its work. His daddy told him that spiders were natural engineers; their intricate structures of viscous material were wind- and water-resistant so that although the web oscillates in difficult conditions it remains intact. If there were boys here, he could explain: ‘You let out a thread until it floats and finds a petal or a wall or this wood. It is sticky so it will catch and hold, then you run along the line giving out more thread to make it strong. Once you have your baseline, it’s easy.’

He had lots of facts, he promised his audience: his birthday is on 15 March and he once had a hedgehog cake with lolly sticks for spikes. He has a train set with signals and a tunnel and his daddy builds bridges. His daddy was here but he has gone. This was not, Jonathan considered, strictly speaking a fact.

Then he thought that perhaps it was.

He scraped at the soil with a stick. A beetle made its way over the crinkly terrain of a leaf; tumbling, it tipped over, righted itself and scurried on. Jonathan captured it.

‘A spider can eat its own weight in food. This beetle is, as you see, nearly the size of the spider so will last it a long time. Fact: spiders can survive up to a year without eating.’

He held the beetle in his loosely clenched fist. Some children could not bear this, girls especially, he informed the boys. They thought him particularly brave when he told them that the six beetle legs tickled inside his hand but he did not care. He flicked the beetle at the web. It was heavy and fell short. Jonathan had not expected this and the flow of his lecture faltered. He tried again, bringing it closer and watched with satisfaction when the black casing opened and the whirring wings caught on the last span. The beetle tried to break free and only became more entangled. Jonathan, hugged his knees and breathing deeply, commented: ‘If it had not panicked it might be alive. This behaviour is common in humans.’

The spider moved inexorably towards its prey along the threads, landings and staircases, up-down-along-up-down-across. Jonathan’s new trousers were tight over his legs and made his skin prickle. His hand hurt only when he pressed the marks. The spider began work on the insect and soon its beetle-shape was lost in a silken bag like a well-disguised present. The spider crouched on top of the lump.

‘It’s sucking out the blood.’ Jonathan remarked airily.

‘He’s a nutcase, now he’s talking to himself.’

Jonathan pitched face forward on to the soil. His glasses ground into his eye sockets and he was pulled over on to his back. Simon bounced on his stomach, thrashing the air with the thistle stalk as if he was a riding a horse. Strands of cobweb floated around them. The beetle lay amongst the mulch of rotting leaves. The spider was dead.

Jonathan heard the whistle but did not obey the rule about being a statue; instead he limped away over the grass. The second whistle shrieked and he dreamed of flying over the hills and far away.

‘You are my prisoner.’

Simon tied his arms behind the goalpost. Jonathan interlocked his fingers and thought of his mummy.

‘Hold tight. Look right and left and right again.’

‘You are going to burn to death on the stake. Stay there while I get matches.’ Simon banged Jonathan’s head against the post.

‘We have to go in,’ Jonathan gasped.

‘You will die.’

A fact.

A cold weather front was heading in from the English Channel and the sky darkened, colours muted to greys and greens. In the silence of the empty playground the little boy listened for his father’s car, positive he would know it because of what his father called the dodgy exhaust.

Miss Thoroughgood was on the cusp of retirement. She had little appetite for exercising authority and had not counted in her charges, so she failed to see that the new boy was missing.