‘Yes, that’s fine. Yes.’
‘Right, well, why don’t we have a look around the garden and we can talk about what you’ve done before and I can see what’s what? That would be the best way, I reckon.’
‘OK.’ She’s still holding the letter, not sure how to do this if they’re walking about outside. ‘I have to give you this,’ she says. ‘In case, well if you were to offer me the job, I have to— I mean, you have to read it.’
He nods towards the sealed envelope with a grunt and puts it in his pocket.
‘Aye. I know the score. You’re not the first from the Probation, so don’t worry about that. I’ll pass it on to the boss.’
She silently prays that he’ll keep it safe and deliver it to Giles, or whoever’s in charge. It’s her disclosure letter, explaining about her criminal record. She pictures him pulling out a hanky and the letter flying free, blowing along the paths between the clipped edges of the lawns, being picked up by a visitor and opened. That person would get straight on the phone to the tabloids and then the whole pack would appear.
‘If you’re lucky,’ Taheera said to her in the car, ‘people won’t remember.’
Chloe hopes she’s right. She’s sure she looks quite different. Her hair’s lighter and longer and she’ll never go back to where it happened; she’s not allowed to anyway. But the law says she has to tell her employer and, even though it’s supposed to be confidential, she knows that confidential isn’t a wall or a fence that keeps you safe. It’s just a word, and it’s not a word that Chloe sets much store by.
An hour later, William Coldacre (call me Bill) says they’ll let her know and wishes her a safe journey. He didn’t ask her much, except some plant names and about what tools she’d used before. She walks back down the drive. There’s a monkey-puzzle tree, its geometric branches standing out among the softer shapes of beech and ash. She stands still and listens to the birds. She can’t quite believe she’s here and she hopes, she prays, she’ll get the job and she’ll soon be coming back.
At the bus stop she doesn’t have to wait long before she’s on a little single-decker, winding through a succession of old pit villages towards the station. When she gets off there are no proper station buildings, only a shelter on each side of the track and a narrow footbridge over it. The sign says: ‘Trains to Goole, Hull and York: Platform 1’ and ‘Trains to Doncaster: Platform 2’. She stares at the sign. She can’t understand how she missed it on the way here in the car, how she’s got this close without realising. She wonders how many miles it is to Doncaster. She looks around her, like a child who’s wandered into a room where she’s been forbidden to go, then hurries towards Platform 1.
A woman with a sticky toddler in a buggy is fanning herself with a free paper. Chloe shrinks back into the shadow of the metal fence. When she was released from prison, her licence clearly stated that she must not go within ten miles of where it happened. She waits for the York train, willing it to hurry up, while she imagines what she’ll say to Darren back at the hostel. If she’s breached her licence, she’ll go straight back to prison and she won’t see Taheera or Halsworth Grange again.
The road map is on the table between them. Darren purses his lips and traces his finger along the road that leads from Doncaster to Halsworth Grange.
‘It looks OK to me,’ he says and shrugs.
Darren mostly shrugs. Chloe reckons he comes to work half-stoned. She wishes Taheera was here, but she’s still on leave.
‘Mr Coldacre says I can start on Monday, but I’m not going down there just to be pulled by the police and end up back in jail for breaching my licence.’
It comes out in one breath and Chloe hears her voice leap up to a high-pitched whine. Control. Get it under control. Darren doesn’t notice. He twists his fingers into his hair and plucks a long, greying strand.
‘Here.’
He tightens the hair between his fingers and lays it on the map, curving it round each bend in the road. It straightens on a stretch of the A1(M), and bends off again into the town.
‘Not the centre,’ Chloe says. She points to a mass of dark shapes towards the M18. ‘There.’
Darren stretches the hair to where Chloe’s pointing and lifts it carefully, keeping the measurement precise. He lays it along the scale rule in the corner of the map and folds it back on itself three times.
‘Fifteen miles,’ he looks up at Chloe and smiles. ‘Your licence says you must stay ten miles outside the location of your offence, so you’re fine. Just make sure you don’t get on the wrong train home.’
‘No chance.’
Chloe sits back and lets herself relax. Her stomach’s been so tight it aches to let go. She thinks of the lawns at Halsworth Grange and the monkey-puzzle tree zigzagging across the view. Soon she’ll be going there every day.
‘Does Taheera know you’ve got the job?’
Chloe shakes her head.
‘Phone her from here if you like. She’ll be pleased.’
He dials from the office phone, hands her the receiver and soon Taheera’s voice is whooping in her ear, congratulating her.
‘Amazing! Oh my God, I love that place. I knew you’d get it.’
Chloe holds the phone a little distance away to protect her eardrum.
‘The trees are lovely in the spring. We used to go for picnics when we were kids.’
‘Oh,’ Chloe manages. ‘That’s nice.’
Of course it’s a place that means something to someone else. It hasn’t been magicked up just for her benefit, and it’s cool that Taheera loves it too.
‘If you’re starting Monday, then maybe I could pick you up and give you a lift back to York on your first day,’ Taheera says. ‘I’m back at work on Tuesday.’
‘If you’re sure it’s not out of your way,’ Chloe says.
‘Not at all. I go past the door and it’ll my make my mum happy if I stay on another night. She wants to cook a family meal on Sunday night and my sister’s coming over with my baby nephew, he’s so sweet!’
Chloe pictures Taheera’s family as a mass of colour, with a mum in a bright pink and gold sari, their home like a Bollywood film set, everyone dancing and laughing. She hands the phone back to Darren and beyond the soundtrack in her head, she hears him telling Taheera that everything’s fine at the hostel, there are no problems and she should enjoy her time off.
‘Stay safe, Miss T,’ he says and puts the phone down.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Doncaster
Sean worked for three solid hours. The kitchen floor was two shades lighter and Jack was standing by the door, jingling his keys. It was time to go to the Clean up Chasebridge meeting. Sean pulled his father’s baseball hat low over his eyes. Its greasy band felt cool on his forehead and he tried not to think about how seldom Jack washed his hair. He folded his arms over a grey-green anorak he’d found hanging on the back of the front door. The zip was broken and he didn’t dare put his hands in the pockets, but it was a good disguise. Even his dad agreed.
‘I wouldn’t know you in that lot,’ Jack Denton peered through his cigarette smoke. ‘Ah, I get it. You fancy yourself as an undercover spy, now you’ve given up policing.’
‘Eh?’
‘Aye, you said, yesterday. You’d soon be out of a job, you said. Her Majesty’s Secret Service is it now? Eh? Nice one, lad!’
Sean shook his head. Let Jack have his mad fantasy; he wasn’t going to admit that staying unnoticed was deliberate. The estate had been on Sean’s beat when he was a PCSO and it was impossible to be off-duty where people still remembered you.
They set off in the stinking lift to the ground floor and left the building. The low sun cast a glow over the estate and a bank of dark clouds was stacking up in the east. It was one of those pent-up summer evenings when something is bound to break. Sean noticed several people heading towards the community centre. Groups of middle-aged men, whole families, one or two couples and an elderly pair making slow progress with their wheeled walking frames. It could have been a summer fête, except no one was smiling. Sean pulled the peak of the cap lower.