He shrugs and ambles over to plug one of the laptops in at the wall. Taheera hasn’t been back into work and people are saying she’s off sick. Chloe keeps her mouth shut. The class has dwindled to her and Emma. There are soaps on the telly and anyway, the others say they know all this stuff.
Chloe’s heart is racing. She digs her hands deep into her pockets and clenches her jaw to keep her excitement from bubbling over. She has so many things to look up. Kath starts them on bus timetables, which suits Chloe fine, because she’s learnt something new in the last few days and it’s genius. She can have two windows open at once, one hidden and one showing.
‘Windows,’ she says to herself. ‘Get me! I’m using all the lingo now.’
Emma’s sitting opposite her tonight and shoots her a look. Chloe realises she’s spoken her thoughts out loud. She’s glad Emma can’t see her screen. She hasn’t dared put her old self into a search yet because there’s always someone watching, and even now, there’s one more thing she wants to look up before she lets herself take that risk and find out what’s been said about her. She waits until Kath is leaning over to help Emma and launches her second window, rapidly typing in a name. There are more answers in the list than she’s expecting, but as she scrolls down, a sharp stab of recognition causes her to catch her breath.
‘Everything all right?’ Kath says.
Back on the bus timetables, Chloe pretends to care about the Sunday service until Emma demands Kath’s attention again. That’s something she’s noticed about Emma, she’s never happier than when people are fussing around her. Chloe, on the other hand, is quite happy to be left to her own devices. She opens her search results and clicks. There it is. The report of a conviction for armed robbery. He’ll have been away almost as long as her. No mention of his family. The picture is old, but she’s sure it’s him, looking straight down the lens of the mugshot camera, straight at Chloe, like he can see her soul.
Kath is talking about recipes. She reads out the name of a site where they can type in cooking ingredients and it will tell them how to cook them. Some chance, Chloe thinks. In Meredith House all the meals are cooked for them, not that she ever gets back in time to eat any of it. She decides to humour Kath, and chooses random vegetables and meat, as her stomach twists and gurgles. She invents stews and pies and even a pasta dish that she’ll probably never make, but she still has more searches to do.
Chloe types in ‘Chasebridge, Doncaster’. Her fingers hover, she daren’t click ‘enter’, not yet. She wonders if she’ll find herself at the top of the list or whether she’ll be hidden further back. She dreads the words she saw in the paper, but she needs to know. Kath comes round to her side of the table and Chloe quickly goes back to the food site. Kath shows her how to add or remove ingredients from her list, tells her about the shopping list function, which links to an online delivery page. Emma catches Chloe eye and pulls a face. They’re both in agreement that Kath is from another planet: Planet Polenta.
Finally, Kath moves away and Chloe reopens her hidden search for Chasebridge. At the top of the list is the BBC Look North site, updated eight minutes ago. She clicks. The picture is astonishing and there’s a video too. She mutes the sound as her screen fills with flames.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Doncaster
Orange and red filled the evening sky, throwing everything else into shadow. People were rushing towards the source of the fire. Teenagers mostly, but Sean saw a man with a child holding his hand and another with a toddler on his shoulders. The small group he’d seen from his dad’s window had swollen to a crowd. As he ran down the hill, he heard the high quiver of a burglar alarm reaching him in waves. There were people shouting and sirens getting closer. An enormous bang punctured the air and a thick column of black smoke rose ahead of him. Then he was on Winston Grove and saw Khan getting out of a car.
‘Sir!’
Khan looked at him and took a moment to focus. Sean was out of breath and probably looked like shit. He had Jack’s coat covering his T-shirt and his painting jeans underneath. He felt for his badge and was comforted to find it still in his trouser pocket.
‘Nice outfit,’ Khan said.
He wore beige cotton trousers and a buttoned-down shirt under a bomber jacket, all of which screamed plain-clothes policeman. He nodded to Sean. ‘Come on, you can fill me in as we go.’
Ahead of them, a police van was already parked across the road and a young female officer was trying to wave people to safety behind it. Another officer was attaching incident tape to the side of the library building. Sean spotted Gavin and Carly positioned outside the old people’s flats. He looked for his nan, but he couldn’t see her. Opposite the shops, the fire engine crew was pumping water into the broken window of AK News, while beyond it a parked car was burning. Sean saw the outline of three men. Gary and the other two, who’d been painting over the graffiti, were pushing people back, allowing a second fire engine to get near the burning car. He couldn’t see Terry Starkey.
‘Let’s get a bit closer,’ Khan said.
They made their way through the crowd of onlookers. People stepped aside without Khan needing to show his badge. They reached the cordon and a female officer let them step inside. The windows of the newsagent’s shop had shattered. Shards of glass were spread across the pavement, glinting with the reflection of flames. Sean could feel the heat from thirty metres away. Torrents of water were being pumped in by the firefighters and clouds of smoke and steam rolled into the street. The fire hadn’t spread to the neighbouring buildings yet. Sean hoped they’d be able to save the library. Maureen would be lost without her Romance Readers’ Book Group.
‘Tell me about the burning property,’ Khan said. ‘Anything significant?’
‘AK News. It’s the Asafs’ shop. Saleem’s father and uncle own it. I assume the uncle is Mohammad’s dad.’
‘So someone’s targeting the whole family now. Have they got any known enemies locally?’
‘Not that I know of. But I understand there was a meeting, a community thing, and a torchlit march.’ He heard his own words as if someone else had spoken them. He’d made out he wasn’t actually there.
‘What was the meeting for?’
‘Something to do with a clean-up campaign, but I think it was just an excuse, sir, to stir up trouble. A bit extremist, if you know what I mean.’
‘You knew about this and you didn’t think to mention it?’ Khan’s tone was quiet but cold. ‘The purpose of gathering intelligence, Denton, is to pass it on.’
The burglar alarm stopped and the sound of rushing water and steam filled the silence. Khan walked away from him without speaking and repositioned himself by the police van, surveying the scene. Sean stood for a moment, wondering what to do. He turned away from the crowd and followed the police tape down the side of the library, where it was knotted round a drainpipe. He ducked underneath and looked up the narrow track, along the wall of the library building, to the service road behind the parade. It was dark here, and much cooler away from the fire.
At first he didn’t see the figure leaning against the wall, about twenty metres ahead of him, until it stood up straight and slipped away into the darkness. Sean quickened his pace and heard the footsteps ahead of him speed up too, until they were both running. Sean turned the corner but there was nobody on the service road. It was a dead end. Either the figure had entered the back of one of the other shops, or he’d scaled a six-foot wall, topped with the jagged lines of high-security razor wire.
Sean approached cautiously. The back doors of the library were covered with security shutters. The newsagent’s was the same. If anyone was in the shop when the fire started, he prayed they’d got out. The bookies looked similarly shuttered, which only left the last building in the block, the Health Centre. He spotted an open hopper window above a frosted pane of glass. It must be a toilet. If anyone had got in there, they must have tiny, narrow hips. He watched the window and instinctively felt for his radio, but he didn’t have one, only his phone.