At first he heard nothing but static as the green glow of the mobile isolated him in the dimness. When it spoke, the voice was barely distinguishable from the mass of thin sound, and he had to strain to grasp the words. “Give it back.”
“That’ll be Jane, will it?”
“Give it back.”
The shrill voice was so unsteady it seemed close to dissolving into the static. “You need to tell me where you are,” he said.
“Don’t.”
“How else would you suggest I do as you asked?”
“Give it back.”
“You may collect it this afternoon if you wish,” Sharpe said and quelled the call.
He stayed offstage until Mr Thorn said “Use the day wisely” as usual. The folding seats and then their occupants produced sounds that might have accompanied the collapse of the roof. As Sharpe appended himself to the parade of teachers, the headmaster beckoned him. “Important calls, Kenneth?”
“I think the police may be interested.”
Mr Thorn’s bland chubby face twitched and underscored its receding hairline. “The more that can be resolved internally the better. We don’t want to gain a reputation as a school that has to keep calling the police.”
“It isn’t any of the boys this time. I’ve a strong suspicion this belongs to somebody we’d want to keep away from them.”
“By all means do so at your earliest convenience.”
“I intend to,” Sharpe said and applied some dignity to descending from the stage. He thought of entrusting die phone to Mr Thorn or the school secretary until lunchtime, but suppose either of them answered it and sent the owner into hiding? He hadn’t time to explain the situation when his class was bound for the classroom. He strode in pursuit so fiercely that some of the boys in the corridor lowered their voices or even made way for him.
Too many of his pupils strewn about the classroom looked ready to be amused by him. It was clear that Lomax spoke for them all by enquiring “Did the woman you was chasing want you, sir?”
“Sit down. Sit down. Sit down now.” Once a similar formula quietened them at last Sharpe said “She wants her phone. Who can tell me how to switch it off?”
No other question he had ever asked had brought a fraction of the enthusiasm. When he succeeded in hushing the uproar he gave the mobile to Latham, since the boy and his associate were on the front row. “It’s off, sir,” Latham said, fingering a button.
“Well done, Latham. Let’s see if you can do as well with algebra.”
Apparently the comment sounded like a joke. Sharpe returned the unlit mobile to his pocket and talked through the equations he’d chalked on the board after yesterday’s last class so that he didn’t have to turn his back.
The virtually uniform blankness that confronted him only stiffened when he asked if there was anything that anybody hadn’t understood. “Heads down, then,” he said wearily and watched them duck to their exercise books like cattle to sparse parched grass.
How could they fail to enjoy mathematics? It enshrined truths that had lasted and would last as long as the universe. It gave shape and stability to life, and everything depended on it. If they couldn’t appreciate its beauty, how could they resist its excitement? It was the universal language and a system of belief immune to change. Rather than grow depressed by the sluggish ruminations or the pretence of them all around him, he strolled to look over the shoulder of one of die few budding algebraists. He was watching the solution to an equation appear on the page under small inky fingers—he thought life had no greater satisfaction to offer him—when an insect larger than it had any right to be came to life.
It buzzed silently as it writhed against his chest until he dragged it out to wriggle on his palm. “What have you done to this, Latham?”
“Means someone’s trying to get you,” Latham said over the general laughter.
“They may continue trying,” Sharpe declared and shut the phone inside the teachers’ desk, where it struggled on its back before growing dormant. In his hand it had felt unnaturally vigorous, desperate to move, and the possibility that it might recommence crawling about in the desk distracted him more than the other outbursts of restlessness he had to subdue. If the desk had locked he might have left the mobile there instead of taking it to the staffroom.
“That’s not like you, Kenneth,” the English master said with a flutter of his eyelids. “Expecting a date?”
“Most emphatically not,” Sharpe said and covered the phone on the staffroom table with a teaching journal. The mobile had to accompany him to his other morning classes, however. In the last one it seemed to wriggle for an instant in his hand as though unwilling to be abandoned to the desk. He shut the lid and wished he could have nailed it down.
For once he was nearly as eager as his pupils for the lunchtime bell. He buried the mobile in an outer pocket, only to have to rest a hand on it in case any of the pickpockets tried to filch it as he hurried through the school. More boys than he suspected had permission were swaggering or sneaking out of the gates, but he hadn’t time to interrogate them. Could Jane—he felt uncomfortable being on first-name terms with her—have trailed him to wait until he left the school? More than once he seemed to glimpse a tattered scrawny form pacing him more or less on all fours behind the houses on the way to the police station. It must be a dog draped in some of the trash it had scavenged.
The police station was at the far end of the street from the railway. Beyond the glass doors of the low concrete block, youths lounged against the enquiries counter while an old couple sat on straight chairs and looked nervously out of place. Two trills of the bell on the counter were required to bring a constable out of the office. “Can you wait a few minutes, sir?” she barely asked Sharpe.
“A lady dropped this.”
“I’ll get a lost property form,” the policewoman said with visible relief, and reappeared with a clipboard. “Your name, sir?”
“Sharpe. Kenneth Sharpe, but I ought to say I think this may belong to one of our local drug dealers. I believe I was called by one of her customers earlier.”
The policewoman let the clipboard fall. “Do you wish to make a formal complaint?”
“I don’t think I’ve die evidence to do that. I couldn’t identify the caller. I just thought you should be aware what kind of person may be reclaiming the phone.”
“You think it’s likely they’d come here for it if they’re what you say.”
One of the youths sniggered, and Sharpe recognised him from years ago: Latham’s older and even less virtuous brother. “Not if you told them to come here,” Sharpe confined himself to saying. “I thought if they rang, someone might arrange to meet them in plain clothes.”
“Have you done much investigating yourself?”
“I’m a teacher,” Sharpe said, meaning yes.
“You’ll have checked the last number that called you, then.”
“I must confess I haven’t.”
She tapped keys too swiftly for him to follow and raised the mobile to her face. “No last number. It might as well have been nobody.”
“The boy I asked to switch it off for me must have done that.” Sharpe restrained himself from glaring at Latham’s brother and said “Can you really not learn anything?”
“Best if you keep it, sir. You can let us know if something significant comes up. You’re at the school down the road, are you? We can always find you there if the lady gets in touch.”
Did the policewoman think his find too negligible, or might she even disbelieve him? As he stalked out of the building he heard another snigger and almost swung around in case he caught her sharing the derision. She hadn’t called him sir as often as she could have and, besides, he knew that many of the boys used the word as a gibe. Perhaps she had. He strode angrily back to the school, failing to overtake or identify a group of boys emitting smoke that he was almost sure wasn’t tobacco, and left the mobile in the office.