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on the front of the shelves so everyone who borrowed a book would know where to put it back, while I had a quick clear-out of my desk.
    I hadn’t gleaned a great deal, only snippets of rather bland info; that this slight and pretty 12-year-old liked pink, enjoyed pop magazines and wearing make-up, that her mum didn’t like her dad so they got divorced when she was little, and that, mostly, she didn’t really have friends round the house because her mum didn’t like the place being messed up when she was out at work. There was nothing much, all told, to inflame the itch further, and perhaps, despite the hair-pulling, there wouldn’t be. Perhaps she was just a lonely-ish kind of kid, living a less than perfect childhood, with a mum who worked long hours, and who wasn’t getting enough sleep; she wouldn’t have been the first and she wouldn’t be the last, after all.
    I’d try to keep an eye on her, as far as I could, and I had shared my concerns. But I knew that, come tomorrow, I’d have three new demanding charges, all with problems needing interventions that would probably fill both my time and my head. ‘You want another orange juice, love?’ I asked her as I flicked the switch on the kettle. And when she didn’t answer, I immediately went over to the quiet corner, already knowing what I would probably find there.
    And I did. I put my head round the bookcases to find her curled up on a bean bag, fast asleep again and gently snoring. I stepped away again, made my coffee, finished clearing my desk, and only when it got to five minutes before the bell was due to buzz for home time did I return to the quiet corner and shake her gently awake.
    She woke up wide-eyed, disorientated, blinking.
    I smiled, hands on hips, as she rubbed her eyes and stood up. ‘You are definitely burning too much midnight oil, young lady,’ I told her. ‘Early night for you tonight and that’s an order.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I just sat down to do the labels on the bottom shelf and … well,’ she added sheepishly, ‘I must have drifted off.’
    ‘Tell me, Kiara,’ I said, driven by a sudden and very powerful instinct, ‘would you like to come back here tomorrow?’
    It would prove to be the best instinct I’d had in a long time. A life-saver, almost. A childhood-saver, definitely.
    ‘Yes, please,’ she said. And thank God she did.

Chapter 4
    I slammed the car door with my usual gusto as I got out of it on our drive. Not because I wanted to make any sort of statement, but because it was the only way to be sure of it actually shutting. My poor little Fiesta was 12 years old now, but despite its little ‘idiosyncracies’ (well, that was how I liked to think of them) I was still resistant to Mike’s endless tutting and head-shaking, and banging on about how I should really look for something newer.
    The noise brought Kieron to the door anyway. ‘Ah, Mum,’ he said, looking shifty, ‘just so you know, we got a half day today so I’ve brought Si home to work with me on some music. Which is important. Because it’s stuff we’re doing for college. So I don’t suppose you would put on some earmuffs or something, would you?’
    ‘ Earmuffs ?’ I asked him.
    ‘Yeah,’ he said, looking at me as if I was ridiculously slow on the uptake. ‘You know, so you can’t, like, hear us?’
    Lovely, I thought, wondering quite why Kieron thought I’d be able to whip up a pair of earmuffs out of nothing. As far as I could remember, I had never owned a pair of earmuffs in my life – a lack that wasn’t lost on me given that I’d spent most of the day lightly chilled, like the ready-meals in the local branch of Tesco.
    ‘It’s that bad, is it?’ I asked him, dropping my satchel onto the hall floor for the moment, to sit among the small gathering of abandoned trainers. It was certainly odds-on that it might be. Kieron was taking a media studies course at college and had recently developed an obsession with ‘mixing