Chapter 24 Jacob #2
‘They’re all teachers here, lad. All except me. And out of the lot of them, I’m the only one who could find my way out of a paper bag without help.’
‘Oh, right.’
She sighed, and hauled herself up out of the chair as though she had been glued down. After the incident with the chewing gum and the bus shelter, Jacob could sympathise.
‘Hang on a minute, I’ll see if she’s still here.’
Jacob waited while she went through an adjoining door. He caught a brief glimpse of a cluttered staffroom before the door closed.
A couple of minutes later, the woman reappeared, with an elderly man in tow, whose face looked set into a permanent scowl.
‘You’re looking for Ms. Harding, is that right? She was expecting you, wasn’t she?’
‘Yes, she was.’
The man nodded. One side of his mouth twitched, as though he were trying to smile, but the other half wouldn’t allow it. ‘So, she knew you were coming?’
‘Ah … yes. I’m trying to get in contact with Billy Toad’s mother.’
‘Oh, right. Is that all?’ The man looked at the woman. ‘Well, I’m afraid we can’t give out personal information to strangers, but if you’re quick, the lad just finished afterschool club, so he should be about to head home. He’s the one with the … ah … dodgy shoes.’
‘Right.’
‘And is about this high.’ The man held a hand up to his chest.
‘Oliver Twist,’ the woman said, to which the man appeared to give a snort of laughter through his only working nostril. ‘He goes through the hand-me-downs box like a squirrel looking for nuts.’
‘Right,’ Jacob said. ‘At least I know what to look for.’
Feeling a little sorry for the boy while wishing a Krampus visit on the unkind headmaster and his secretary, Jacob hurried back outside.
Several children were walking across the playground to the car park, and Jacob scanned them one by one, looking for one that resembled a diminutive Dickensian hero.
None that he saw fitted the description he had been given, however, so he reached the edge of the playground feeling downhearted, sure he had missed the boy.
He had also missed Charlotte, but if he could at least find Billy Toad, then the day wouldn’t be wasted, and the crushed ruin of his broken heart might yet be able to make a few flittering beats.
Spotting a small group walking up the street opposite, he hurried across the car park, dodging between mounds of shovelled snow and cars awkwardly parked in the spaces in between.
Some pupils had built a huge snowman right in the middle of the road so that it blocked one way out of the car park, and there were signs that someone—perhaps a frustrated teacher—had attacked it with a shovel.
The defiant snowman, however, still stood, although leaning somewhat precariously to one side like a toll booth worker, one twisted twig arm reaching for change.
As he reached the other side, soaking one foot in a slushy pothole in the process, he saw a boy walking alone behind another group, the back of one shoe flapping up and down with each step. The laces were untied, and the back of his jacket had a line of homemade stitches up the back.
‘Billy?’ he called. ‘Billy Toad?’
The kid turned, took one look at him, then ran off.
‘Wait!’ Jacob shouted, then immediately started chasing him, wondering as he stumbled through the snow, slipping and skidding like a drunken skater on every patch of hidden ice, how the boy managed to run in such tattered footwear without falling over.
Up ahead, he saw the boy take a left turn. Jacob shouted his name again as he went after him, skidding to a halt at the junction, looking up an empty suburban street.
The boy had gone.
He paused, catching his breath, stooping to brush snow off his trousers.
Gone. He had lost Billy already. The street was one of the nicer areas, so it seemed unlikely one of these houses belonged to the boy. And the street was fairly straight, arcing right at the far end, but that was a long way off, no way the boy could have run that far so quickly—
A blur of motion a couple of doors up, and Billy Toad broke from the cover of the gateway where he had been hiding, bolting across the street and into an alley between two houses.
Jacob hollered ‘Stop!’ as he charged in pursuit, slipped on an ice patch and came down hard, then scrambled back to his feet, aware he’d cut one of his palms through the glove.
He pulled it off, looked at the kind of scrape his mother might have once had to disinfect after a playground scuffle, and narrowed his eyes.
The boy couldn’t get away. He was too close.
Shouting Billy’s name, he raced across the street and into the alley. He caught a glimpse of the boy at the far end, but by the time he had emerged onto another suburban street, the boy had vanished again.
Defeated, Jacob bent to his knees as he gasped for breath, then looked up in dismay to see a police car, lights flashing, turn into the street. It gave a brief blare of its siren, then pulled up alongside him.
The passenger window was wound down.
‘Oh, hello there, Jacob,’ P.C. Mark Bobbins said. ‘I had a report of someone chasing a kid. Did you see anything?’
Jacob took a deep breath. ‘It was me,’ he said.
‘Oh well, I suppose you’d better get into the car.’
‘I need to talk to his mother,’ Jacob said, still struggling to breathe. ‘My aunt wants to offer her a job.’
‘This wouldn’t be Clarice Toad, by any chance?’
Jacob grimaced. ‘That’s right.’
‘Well jump in, and we’ll drive over there together.’
Jacob opened the door and climbed into the passenger seat. Further up the street, a group of kids were watching, pointing at the police car. He recognised a couple of them from the children’s home.
‘That looks nasty,’ Mark said, nodding at Jacob’s palm. ‘I’ve got some Germolene in the glovebox here if you want some.’