Free The Detective's Daughter by Lesley Thomson

twitching.
    He had developed a sniff accompanied by a flick of his fringe to distract attention from the tic that had begun after he started at boarding school. He also gnawed at the skin around his thumbnail. Simon called him ‘the Vampire’, which made no sense to Justin as he did not suck blood. Some of the younger boys called him this out of windows or from around corners.
    ‘There’s nowhere for the passengers to get out.’
    Simon was right; he had not built a station. The tunnel had been complicated: he had worked out the strength of the roof, the width of the tunnel – half as much as its length – drawing and revising diagrams in his notebook after prep but had forgotten about alighting and disembarking.
    Had there been other boys, he would have explained how he’d embedded struts made from ice-lolly sticks in the walls. He fixed them with roofing felt made from folded toilet paper layered with leaves and twigs and overlaid with a mortar of earth and some sand he had found by the shed.
    I added water from the tap that I carried in this paint tin.
    Mortar, he would inform them, dries as hard as concrete. He would run a road over the tunnel or perhaps lay a park with a statue, but Simon must be got rid of first.
    Simon had warned that if he told on him Justin would be in trouble for messing up the vegetable patch and trespassing. He explained it was for this bad behaviour that Justin had been sent away.
    ‘I will kill you and bury your body so that no one will ever find you and then your flesh will be eaten and your bones will crumble.’ Simon stuck the hand with the half-finger inside Justin’s shorts. ‘I’ll say you escaped again.’ At first he was gentle, but then he squeezed and Justin felt sick. Simon’s fist struggled like an animal beneath the school regulation material.
    ‘Message understood?’ Simon pulled away.
    Justin blinked back tears.
    Simon never spoke of his random attacks and afterwards they both behaved as if nothing had happened. Justin had an oblique idea that Simon’s behaviour was sanctioned by a higher authority so did not believe he could stop it.
    A storm roared about his ears, whipping soil and stones into the air that stung his cheeks. He dashed water from his face, ducking from the paint tin, and clasped his hands over his head. He opened his eyes. Simon had reduced his tunnel to clumps of earth, wads of discoloured paper stuck with splinters of wood and scattered with onions, carrots and wild garlic.
    The small boy remained on the raised vegetable bed, a statue save for jerks of his head. He wore an expression of quiet despair.
    At last he retrieved the engine from the far side of the bed and wiped sand and soil from the funnel and cylinder with toilet paper. He pushed a loose wheel into place and cleared slathers of wet earth from the carriage windows; the smiling people were gone. He peered in: passengers were sprawled on the floor, or wedged between seats.
    Justin’s face was wet; Simon liked it when he cried. He looked around and saw he was alone, which made him uneasy.
    He imagined writing to his mummy, putting the case for her to fetch him; she would not think he was a coward – except maybe she would. Perhaps he was.
    The boy trailed up the path, past the greenhouse, to the gate to a bridle path that led to the road. He knew this because he had tried to escape. So much freedom just beyond his grasp.
    To the little boy, the walled kitchen garden had a quiet of its own, its once richly planted beds now populated by rabbits, only one corner tended on occasional visits by an elderly gardener.
    He heard an irregular clinking, persistent and distinct like a Morse code message. A dog lead hung from a washing-line post, the frayed strap weathered to a soft pink. In the breeze the clasp, oscillating like a pendulum, tapped out Jonathan Justin Rokesmith’s plot of revenge on the parched and knotted wood.

8
    Tuesday, 11 January 2011
    The light flickered and the lamp-post