Free The Darkness and the Deep by Aline Templeton Page B

fig leaf to cover up some pretty basic human instincts – and certainly Ritchie satisfied most of those, where she was concerned.
    Tonight they were actually risking meeting for a drink in a pub about three miles away; he was, she could tell, going to ask her point-blank if she would leave Lewis. She’d be interested, in an abstract sort of way, to see if he would be offering marriage. Probably, since he had a penchant for respectability and one’s place in the community.
    So what was she going to say? Even if this was where he’d grown up, he’d have to agree to find another community to be respectable in, since Ashley could hardly go on working afterwards in the Knockhaven practice where Lewis had more or less created his own personal fiefdom. Ritchie had said to her there wasn’t the demand for more than another one or at most two developments in this area anyway; he’d started checking out the coast of Ireland, only an hour from Stranraer, where he had contacts and there were good prospects. So he could run his business just as easily from Glasgow where Ashley could get a hospital job again and where there were theatres and galleries and shops and easy access to airports for the sort of exotic holidays Lewis had never found time for them to take. She’d always appreciated the good things of life and having serious wealth would be a delicious new experience.
    She would miss the lifeboat, of course: there was something in her that responded viscerally to the raw, elemental struggle between feeble man and the unbounded force of the sea, where it was only the skill to keep a cockleshell above the waves instead of below, the mastery of amazing technology and the courage to defy the terrifying gods of wind and water that could work, in combination, to snatch from them the victims of their anger. Oh God, yes, she would miss that.
    Still, there would be many compensations. Apart from anything else, Ritchie’s mother was dead. She’d checked.
    There really wasn’t any doubt. Her answer had to be yes.
    Luke Smith, his head pounding, his heart racing, dived into the staffroom and shut the door. It was mercifully empty, non-pupil-contact-modules (free periods, as they used to be called) having all but disappeared from teachers’ timetables.
    He collapsed into a chair and buried his face in his hands. He felt as if he had been flayed, very slowly, strip by strip, until he was standing in front of the class containing Nat Rettie and his friends not merely naked but without any skin to cover his shrinking, bleeding flesh.
    What on earth had possessed him to confront them? He should know his place by now, know that the titular authority being a teacher gave him carried no clout in the bear-pit of the Year 12 classroom. You could only govern by consent unless you could dominate by the force of your personality, which he couldn’t – oh God, he couldn’t even begin! And what they had all consented to today was Nat’s flouting of Luke’s every instruction, baying him on, bolstering his defiance with their raucous laughter. Until the end.
    That was when Nat, taking advantage of a break in the laughter, flung at Luke the word ‘paedophile’.
    There was immediate, stunned silence. Among all the obscenities, all the crude, offensive language which was their daily currency, this was the one word left with the power to shock. The air became electric with tension.
    Luke’s mouth went dry so that he had to lick his lips before he could speak. ‘What – what did you say?’ he stammered foolishly, as if he hadn’t heard the word which was now branded into his mind for ever.
    ‘Paedophile. Don’t act stupid – my girlfriend’s speaking to the Child Protection Officer this afternoon.’
    Luke could barely frame the words. ‘Your girlfriend – who is she?’
    ‘You mean there’s others you’ve touched up as well?’
    The response to that was totally unnerving, a sort of growling, hissing swell of anger from the class. Nat