Read A Place of Safety for Free Online

here you would enjoy, and you haven’t had full value for your ticket. If you bring it with you when you next come, Jo will let you in again.’
    ‘How kind! I’ll see you again, then.’
    Trish hurried out of the building, already pressing in the code for the school. The secretary answered before she’d reached the street and she was through to Hester More, the head teacher, a moment later.
    ‘Is he hurt?’ she said, without any kind of greeting.
    ‘David is no more than bruised,’ Mrs More said with her usual careful formality, which always sounded as though she was reproaching the rest of the world for its sloppy speech.
    ‘How did it happen?’ Trish couldn’t believe the gentle, cooperative child she knew could have got into a fight with anyone.
    ‘Neither of the adversaries is prepared to tell me, and it seems that no one else saw the fight start. I have, therefore, no alternative but to keep David in for a detention this afternoon.’
    ‘Only David? That doesn’t sound quite fair.’ Trish knew how hard he worked to stay out of trouble, and how much he would hate this. ‘What about the other boy?’
    ‘Unfortunately he has had to go to casualty.’
    Shock made Trish stop moving. ‘David hurt him that badly? I don’t believe it.’
    ‘I am afraid you must. He’s had to have two stitches just above his left eye. It could have been very nasty indeed if David had caught the eye itself.’
    ‘But he didn’t.’ Trish had enough real worries without letting anyone implant this kind of retrospective anxiety in her mind. She walked on with the phone clamped against her ear. ‘And two stitches doesn’t sound too bad.’
    ‘That is a matter of opinion, Ms Maguire. It is extremely important that we all make David see how lucky he is that he did nothing worse, and so I hope you will cooperate. The detention will keep him here until four-thirty today. I think it would be a good thing if you were to collect him then yourself, so that you can talk to him while the incident is still fresh in his mind.’
    ‘All right,’ Trish said, pulling her diary out of her bag and fighting the wind that tried to turn the pages to the end of the year. Oh, shit! she thought. I’d forgotten Tamara O’Connor.
    ‘I have to be in court in the early part of the afternoon, but I’ll do my best to get back in time. If I can’t make it, Nicky will fetch him and I’ll talk to him later. Unless—Look, why don’t I come in to see him now, just in case I am held up this afternoon?’
    ‘I’m afraid that would be most undesirable. I do not wish to have his day interrupted any further.’
    Trish was paying the woman a fortune to oversee her brother’s education. It would be mad to undermine her now, but she couldn’t leave it here. ‘Who was the other boy? Has there been any trouble between them before?’
    ‘No. His name is Stephen Johnson and he is two years senior to David. I’ll expect you this afternoon. If you cannot come yourself, please telephone my secretary to make an appointment to talk later in the week. Goodbye.’
    Trish clicked the phone shut. It sounded to her as though this Stephen must have started the fight. He was older, after all. And even the anxious social worker assigned to David’s case after his mother’s death had told Trish he was unlikely to be violent.
    ‘Obviously he will have some behavioural problems,’ she’d said when she was trying to make sure Trish knew what she was taking on. ‘You may be lucky and face nothing worse than underachievement at school, with a bit of lying or truancy thrown in. But stealing is a distinct possibility, and arson could
be a problem later. Fourteen is the prime age for that. But with luck you’ll have got him straightened out by then. D’you think you’ll be able to cope?’
    Trish had thought she would. She still thought so, but it would have been a lot easier if David had been prepared to talk about himself. Sometimes she thought that even tantrums