Chapter Eight I Feel It In My Bones #2
“Santa, in that sense, isn’t just festive. He’s symbolic. He sees you when you’re sleeping. Decides who gets rewarded and who gets punished. To someone with a fractured moral compass, that imagery is a perfect mask.”
The class was silent now, fully focused.
“But remember, profiling isn’t prophecy. It’s a tool. A lens. And the most dangerous offenders are often the ones who know exactly what we’re looking for, and how to hide behind it.”
He turned back to the board and let the silence hold.
It was too close to the truth.
Too raw for a Monday morning.
But inside, something clicked.
He’d given the class a safe version of the theory. The bones of a case he was already watching unfold. And the pieces, however horrifying, were arranging themselves.
“Right. Turn to page sixty-one in your textbook. Let’s look at the Canter case and the development of investigative psychology in the UK.”
Chairs scraped. Pages turned.
But that question hung behind his thoughts like breath on a mirror.
They think they’re doing something good.
He’d heard that logic before. In hospital rooms. In prisons.
And in the notes and musings from Roisin Howell.
You will forever be my good boy…
Kenny finished the class without incident. The lecture on offender profiling had gone down as expected. Half the class pretended not to be interested, the other half pretended they weren’t scared. He’d finished scribbling some feedback on a coursework submission when the door opened.
“Dr Lyons?” In stepped Ms Harrow, the college principal, with an almost-too-friendly tone unique to educational management.
She wore a smart wool coat in deep navy, buttoned at the neck despite being indoors, her lanyard still swinging from one hand as though she’d come directly from a meeting she hadn’t wanted to be at.
Kenny smiled, wrapping his scarf around his neck. “Ms Harrow. What brings you all the way to the portacabin?”
“Margaret, please.” She stepped inside and let the door close behind her. “I won’t keep you long. I wanted to thank you again for stepping in this term. We thought we’d have to cancel the A Level Psychology entirely, and you’ve been an unexpected stroke of luck.”
“I like it here.” Kenny zipped up his satchel. “Younger minds. Easier to manipulate.”
He smiled at his own joke. She didn’t.
Ah. Right.
She looked around the classroom, eyes skimming the whiteboard and all the notes gathered on it, then the half-straight rows of chairs. “I don’t suppose you have a moment before you head out?”
Kenny checked his watch. “I’ve got a meeting over in Newport.”
“Right. Yes. I heard. With the police?”
“That’s right.”
“They did call on us, let’s say, with some insistence to pass over your details. And considering the circumstances…”
“It’s fine. They would have found me eventually, anyway.”
Ms Harrow nodded. “Poor lad. Seventeen, wasn’t he?” Her mouth pinched, as if the age alone was an indictment. “Something about it doesn’t sit right. Makes you wonder if he should have been one of ours.”
“One of ours?”
“A student, I mean. From one of the feeder schools.”
Kenny tilted his head. “Do you have reason to believe he should’ve been?”
“No. But… the age. The timing. He should have been in one of these classrooms, not—” She stopped herself, then gestured vaguely towards the window, where the wind rattled the glass. “Well. Not where they found him.”
“It would be insightful to know how he ended up there. On the streets. That kind of displacement isn’t sudden.”
“Some kids run away.” She shrugged. “Drift. Idle. Have no future plan.”
“Some kids don’t have a choice.”
She offered a polite smile, glossing over the uncomfortable part of the conversation. “And some make the wrong choices.”
Kenny said nothing. Because he’d seen it too many times.
Kids labelled as trouble, when all they’d done was try to survive in a system that had already failed them.
He didn’t believe any teenager chose to sleep rough, to beg, to trade safety for risk, unless the alternative felt worse. And more often than not, it did.
That was the thing about runaways, rough sleepers, those dismissed as NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training).
People were quick to blame their behaviour, their defiance, their ‘poor choices.’ But the truth was, most never had good ones to begin with.
Bad behaviour in young people was often pain in disguise.
Lashing out, shutting down, trying to be seen in a world that looked straight through them.
And Kenny had learned long ago: to understand a child, you didn’t start with what they did. You started with what they survived.
Like Aaron.
Ms Harrow tucked her lanyard into her coat pocket.
“Anyway. I won’t hold you up, but while I’ve got you…
” She cleared her throat, then adjusted the strap on her bag.
“When the police reached out, we took a moment to revisit your employment file. I’m afraid we may have been…
a little swept up in the novelty of having a former university lecturer on staff.
I can’t pretend we did our usual due diligence. ”
Kenny felt the shift, the conversation turning.
She gave a tight-lipped smile. “There are a few vague references to your departure from Ryston. Nothing official. Nothing detailed. But… whispers, I suppose.”
Kenny waited.
“Were you asked to leave because of an inappropriate relationship with a student?”
He drew a breath. “Not exactly.”
“But not entirely untrue?”
“I left Ryston voluntarily.”
“Did you have a relationship with a student?”
“Aaron is now my partner. We moved here together.”
Her eyebrows lifted faintly. “Aaron?”
“Yes.”
A pause settled between them. She looked down at her hands, then back at him. “I’m not here to pass judgment, Dr Lyons. But I’m responsible for safeguarding. For reputational risks. And for understanding the people I’ve welcomed into this school.”
“Of course.”
She looked him over, as if seeing him for the first time. Not as the calm, competent psychologist who’d stepped in last-minute to save a failing course, but as the man with shadows in his paperwork and a personal life that didn’t fit neatly into HR protocol.
She composed herself when she said, “I appreciate your honesty. And I hope, for all our sakes, that this police involvement doesn’t turn into anything too… visible.”
Kenny gave a small nod. “So do I.”
She turned to go, then paused at the door. “Dr Lyons?”
“Yes?”
“Let’s keep the thing with your partner between us, eh?”
Kenny nodded. She left, and he pinched the bridge of his nose.
He should have expected that. The whispers were never far away.
He’d left Ryston on his own terms. An agreement due to all the difficulties of keeping anything about Aaron out of the official record.
But gossip travelled. In academia. In education. Even this far onto the island.
But right now, he had something else to tackle.
So he left, got in his car and drove to Newport.
* * * *
Aaron buzzed into Pawsitive Futures Dog Shelter with his keycard and shoved through the centre’s front doors with the bag of coins in his coat pocket.
The place stood like a crooked postcard scene on the edge of nowhere. Wooden fencing, faded signage, and Christmas lights blinking with stubborn optimism. Frost clung to the corners of every surface. The scent of wet dog, hay, and cheap pine cleaner wrapped around him as he crossed the threshold.
Inside was warmer. Louder. Dogs barked from their pens.
Desperate, hopeful. The usual racket. Someone had gone full Christmas gremlin again with tinsel strangling the information boards, paper snowflakes fluttering from the ceiling as if they’d survived a blizzard.
Someone had even stuck a reindeer nose on the busted vacuum cleaner sulking in the hallway, complete with googly eyes and a tinsel bow.
It had more personality than half the staff.
“Aaron!” Tessa called from behind the front desk. “Welcome back, Sleeping Beauty. Thought you’d ghosted us for good.”
He didn’t have to look. Her voice carried like laughter in a crowded pub.
She was the main outreach coordinator and fundraiser.
Warm, loud, impossible to ignore. Her robin-covered cardigan stretched across generous curves with jingle bell earrings already clashing with the tinny Mariah Carey playing overhead.
She also had a pale pink birthmark splashed across her right cheek and over her temple, wine-stained, and in photos, the camera always caught it wrong, made it starker than it was.
Aaron dumped the collected cash on her desk. “Forty-eight pounds and seventy-three pence.” He unzipped his coat. “Bloody care home management couldn’t even round it up to fifty quid. So I did.”
“You are a sweetie.” She leaned over the reception counter, grinning with her usual unfiltered delight, mug in hand and steam rising. “Jonathon made coffee if you need something to warm up your cockles.”
Jonathon, volunteer dog handler, unofficial fixture, and part-time Christmas mascot, lifted his mug in a mock toast from the kitchen doorway
“My special blend’s a gift.”
Already deep in festive mode, Jonathon was the sort of person who put their tree up in October, having been wearing festive clothing every day since then.
Normally, Aaron wouldn’t have noticed. Or cared.
But today’s jumper was impossible to ignore—a hideous lime-green monstrosity with Merry Grinchmas stitched across the front in looping red thread.
Grinch. Christ. What a ridiculous choice for a safeword.
What was I thinking?