Crushworthy Page 18

  Her thoughts were interrupted when Liberty’s voice took on a suddenly surprised, questioning tone, and Jinx sat up and listened. Even though they’d been chatting pretty amicably for the last ten minutes about Liberty’s forthcoming exams and the terrible weather Jinx hoped Amir hadn’t phoned to impart bad news of any kind and was only now deciding to impart it.

  “What do you mean you think it’s Stagmount?” Liberty asked, frowning as she doodled on the cover of the notebook on her lap. “Oh. Well,” she continued after a long pause during which Amir talked nonstop, she nodded thoughtfully and Jinx realized thanks to the doodling that nothing much was wrong anyway. “I don’t know anything about it, Dad.”

  Liberty wiggled her fingers at Jinx to indicate Amir was banging on about something or other at length and rolled her eyes at Jinx. Well, thought the latter, even though she’d not heard a word about the fallout yet, at least they seemed to be getting on as well as they used to. She was sure Amir loved his daughter, she just hadn’t ever been sure he knew how to show her he did—or not properly anyway. Designer clothes, flash handbags, and bundles of cash were one thing, of course, but honesty, trust, and respect were another entirely.

  “Okay Dad,” said Liberty, winking at Jinx. “Thanks for calling. Yes, yes,” she nodded. “I will. Love you too. Bye Dad. Bye!”

  Liberty snapped her phone shut, uncrossed her legs and looked at Jinx. “Well,” she said, “that was weird. In more ways than one.”

  “So, what did he want?” asked Jinx, very relieved indeed to see Liberty looking so happy and pleased at having renewed communication with her father. “Anything interesting?”

  “Well,” Liberty said, reaching for her own mug and sipping thoughtfully, “he didn’t say one single word about the row or me going to America or Mum or anything.” She laughed ruefully. “But I didn’t really expect he would. Why change the pattern of a lifetime, hey?”

  “Hmm,” Jinx murmured, not really knowing what to say about this at all.

  “He asked me about my school work, how the exams were going, and whether I had enough money. And then,” Liberty said, putting down her mug and frowning, “he started banging on about some property plans he’d been sent by a business associate.”

  “What do you mean?” Jinx asked, looking blank and wondering what the hell Amir had up his sleeve now.

  “Well,” Liberty went on, “he said he’d been sent the floor plans of some luxury new flats. He said the location was top secret but the planners were trying to ascertain interest or something, and he’d been sent one.”

  “So what?” a baffled Jinx replied, knowing that Amir never discussed any of his business ventures with his daughter. She’d once asked Liberty what her dad did and Liberty hadn’t been able to tell her. “What’s it got to do with you?”

  “He said he thought the plans looked like Stagmount,” Liberty answered. “He said he recognized the formation of the main school houses and said the helipad on the plans is in exactly the same place as the one here.”

  “I don’t get it,” Jinx said, standing up and stretching. “What’s he saying?”

  “He basically said he thought someone might be trying to buy Stagmount and turn it into a property development,” Liberty said, looking Jinx in the face. “And that since Mrs. Bennett had visited him in Saudi in December he wanted to see if we knew anything about it.”

  “Mrs. Bennett went to Saudi?” Jinx asked incredulously, sitting down again. “In December? This December?”

  “Yep,” Liberty nodded. “Apparently she was passing through on her way to a meeting about something and she came round to Dad’s for coffee.”

  “But--” Jinx interjected before Liberty cut her off, knowing what Jinx was thinking pretty much even before she did.

  “When I was there,” Liberty said, “exactly. He said they talked for two hours and she convinced him to send me to live with Mum. He also said he respected her as a sensible English woman and that I was lucky to have her as my headmistress.”

  “Bloody hell,” Jinx exhaled, truly shocked by all of this. “I knew Mrs. B. was cool but I never realized she was, like, the raddest dude alive. I can’t believe she did all that. Passing through! My goodness. What a woman! What else did he say about it?”

  “Well, he banged on about the plans,” Liberty continued, “but then said he might well be wrong. I think he was looking for an excuse to get in touch and used them—it must be a coincidence.”

  “Who knows,” said Jinx, still shocked by the revelations about their headmistress’s intervention into Liberty’s plight. “And who cares. I’m sure Stagmount can’t be sold—the whole idea’s ridiculous. It’s a charitable trust as well as a listed building—there are rules and regulations about those kinds of things. You can’t just knock a place like Stagmount down. I still can’t believe Mrs. Bennett went to Saudi and saved your ass and never said a word about it.”

  “Me neither,” Liberty said, shaking her head and shuddering at what might have been if Mrs. B. had done nothing. “We owe her so much.”

  “Yes,” agreed Jinx. “We certainly do.”

  They looked at their watches and realized they had only three and a half minutes in which to make it back to the main school for lunch, and so they grabbed their bags and sprinted back up the drive. For once, the rain had stopped. They turned their faces to the weak March sun trying its best to shine through the clouds and laughed as the puddles splashed around their furiously racing feet. Weak with laughter and exertion, they skipped down the corridor barely daunted by the prospect of a gross lunch and feeling happier than they had for ages.

  By the time they hooked up with the others at their usual table they were so intent on telling them about Amir, Mrs. Bennett, and Jamie’s text that all thoughts of the plans Liberty’s dad mentioned had flown their minds entirely.

  22 Tutor Group

  Jinx and her friends Sat in classroom 4b on Thursday morning, waiting for Mrs. Carpenter and their daily tutor group session to commence. All of the lower sixth were positively delirious compared to how low they’d all been feeling a week ago. The weather must have had something to do with it. Whilst it had seemed floods of biblical proportions were scarily imminent for pretty much the whole freaking term, today had dawned cold but sunny, for once, and all of their moods had lightened as a consequence.

  Chastity, Jinx, and Liberty, in that order, were sitting in the very center of the back row with Liv next to Chastity and Charlie next to Liberty. The girls were whiling away their waiting time with good-humoured, idle gossip about dear old Mrs. C. Meanwhile Fiona—who sat at the front due to what she claimed was her terrible eyesight but actually had more to do with her terrible fear of missing something one of the teachers might say—was sitting on the side of Liberty’s desk, swinging her legs and enjoying joining in the chatter until the teacher arrived. Even Daisy had thrown in a couple of remarks and not been shouted down. Their tutor had, they unanimously agreed, been in the very best of moods all that term.

  “Hey,” Mimi Tate yelled from her seat at the end of the second row, “it’s because she’s in lurve.”

  “Yeah,” said Chastity, looking round for Igor and not spotting him anywhere. “But where is the object of her affection?”

  “Masha?” Jinx directed her comment at the three identical backs in front of her. Even though she didn’t know which one was Masha, she knew they’d all turn around when she said one of their names.

  “Yes?” said Masha, who was wearing, if Jinx had only thought to look, the corresponding green diamond on her finger.

  “Where’s Igor?” Jinx asked, winking conspiratorially at them, for she liked these girls a lot.

  “We don’t know,” replied Irina with a shrug and an unconcerned glance at both her sisters. “We haven’t seen him yet this morning.”

  “Some bodyguard,” muttered Liberty. “My dad would have a fit if his security guys left him alone for even a second.”

  “Oh, we don’t care about that,
” said Olga, flashing a blue glint around the room as she ran her right hand through her hair and the huge diamond on it caught the light. “We’re going to tell our dad we don’t need him next term.”

  “Yes,” Masha added with a giggle. “Next term we won’t need him at all. But he’s here now so it’s a bit difficult for us to get rid of him with just a few days still to go.”

  “What about him and Mrs. C.?” pressed Chastity. “What do you think about that?”

  “Oh,” Irina said, pausing to glance at her sisters almost as if she wanted confirmation of something before continuing. “We don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Are you serious?” asked Liv, who found it very hard to believe all three of them had singularly failed to notice the budding romance as it occurred underneath their very noses. “Come off it. We’ve been talking of nothing else for weeks. You guys can’t have missed it, surely!”

  Whatever the triplets’ response might have been was lost to a gust of cold air as the door flew open. Mrs. Carpenter strode through it and headed straight to the chair behind her desk. Fortunately this term there had been a total sea change in both Mrs. C.’s moods and the way she interacted with the girls in her class. Sweetness and light was very much the order of the day and—very strangely, considering the undiagnosed bipolar disorder the girls were utterly convinced she suffered from—she’d hardly been heard to raise her voice above polite conversational level at all. She’d also not once thrown a lump of chalk at any of their heads.

  When she raised her head to look around the room, however, the girls who were arranged in neat rows in front of her immediately realized all was not well in the mad, mad world of Mrs. C. Dressed entirely in black, as usual, accessorized with chunky silver pieces of jewelry, the vibrant flash of block colour the tutor had, of late, been adding to her all-black repertoire on a daily basis was missing. Her red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes provided the only accent on today’s outfit. Her swollen face, heaving shoulders and shuddering breaths indicated to all of them that Mrs. C. had rocked up to tutor group fresh from an absolutely mammoth crying fit.

  The girls stared at her, beyond appalled. It was one thing to deal with each other having a personal crisis of some kind, but quite another to be faced with a member of staff going through the same thing. And Mrs. C. was evidently in the midst of a really bad one. None of them knew quite what to do, and they all felt more than a little uncomfortable. At that moment the silence in 4b was completely deafening.

  Igor’s tall, forbidding form suddenly appeared in the doorway. The expression on his face was unlike anything the girls had seen before. The tension in the room, alongside the sudden drop in temperature, somehow found its way through Mrs. Carpenter’s misery, and the tutor raised her head to see what was causing it. When her anguished eyes landed on Igor in the doorway, they instantly welled up with fresh tears and a small moan escaped her lips. Igor’s face appeared to have been molded from the hardest granite. So fixed was the stern, forbidding, and above all closed-off look on the bodyguard’s face that some of the girls couldn’t stop involuntary shivers from shuddering down their spines.

  After what seemed like a lifetime of Mrs. C. and Igor staring at each other eye to miserable eye but was in fact only a few seconds, the door slammed shut behind Igor. He strode across the room to his customary seat adjacent to the triplets and next to the classroom’s biggest picture window, folded himself down into it, crossed his arms and stared pointedly out of the window. The triplets appeared not to have noticed anything amiss whatsoever. Their blonde heads were bent together over a letter they’d received that morning, and none of them so much as flickered an eyelash at the scene playing out in front of them. The rest of the girls had no idea what was going on, but a couple of things were abundantly clear.

  Mrs. Carpenter, whom they were very fond of when she was nice, was absolutely devastated. And the cause of this devastation, obvious from the stricken glances she kept flicking his way whilst desperately trying to pull herself together in front of her girls, was Igor.

  “Girls,” Mrs. C. said in a voice hoarse from crying, a distant relation indeed from her usual booming tones, after drawing a jerky breath, “I…”

  The girls watched, alert to her every shaky move, as Mrs. Carpenter grabbed her coat, bag, and class register from her desk and dashed out of the room as fast as her legs could carry her. They continued to sit there in a state of shocked suspension for a few seconds. All at once and seemingly out of nowhere a buzz of humming chat enveloped classroom 4b. Chairs were scraped back and desks pushed aside as the girls gathered in small groups on the corridor side of the room, away from where Igor was sitting, as if made of stone, by the window.

  The triplets still had not looked up and were now, giggling occasionally, whispering softly to each other in Russian.

  The bell sounded for the beginning of morning lessons, and the girls watched, enthralled, as the triplets stood up as one and pushed their chairs underneath their desks. They smiled around the room as if nothing had happened, waved at Jinx and Liberty, who were closest to them, and walked out the door. Igor followed close on their heels, his black coat flapping behind him like a crow’s wings. Most of the others followed suit, shooting meaningful glances at each other as they did so and raising their eyebrows in the direction of the dining rooms to indicate that today’s morning break was going to be one hell of a gossip fest.

  Since she’d finished this term’s project the previous week, Jinx bade farewell to Chastity, Liberty, Liv, and Charlie, who were heading off to double art and agreed she’d see them at lunchtime. Left to her own devices in their form room, she took her time in packing up her bags and thought about what had just happened in there. God, she felt sorry for Mrs. C. Although since Igor had looked so completely terrifying this morning she had to admit she was hard-pressed to see the attraction. Either way, thought Jinx, as she turned left down the corridor, she’d never seen anyone as cut up as that. That was something else entirely.

  Jinx minced along quite happily, studying the notice boards for anything new or interesting—not a chance. She decided to pop into the ladies’ loos on the off chance she might locate the trainers she’d misplaced the other day. As soon as she walked in, though, Jinx regretted this decision. Sitting on the very end of one of the low slatted benches that hugged the walls around the small shower area was Mrs. Carpenter. Her face was turned to the wall. She was hugging her knees, rocking slightly and moaning incoherently whilst taking in great, shuddering breaths. She looked, frankly, like a mental patient, and Jinx so did not want to be trapped in this confined space with her for any amount of time at all.

  At that moment Mrs. Carpenter looked up, wailed, and held her arms out to Jinx like one of those dolls that wets itself when you pull the string on its back. Oh Christ, thought Jinx in a panic, the bloody woman obviously wants a hug. Yucksville!

  Jinx managed to hold it together enough to smile weakly at her lachrymose form tutor before gingerly sitting down next to her, avoiding the outstretched arms at all costs. Jinx patted Mrs. C.’s knee whilst also desperately trying to avoid looking her in the face.

  “The thing is, Jinx,” wailed Mrs. Carpenter in a shaky, squeaky voice weakened by excessive recent emotion, “I love him so much b-b-b-but I just don’t think I know enough about him.”

  “Um…” Jinx really wasn’t sure of the appropriate response to this and was busy thinking on her feet.

  “An-an-and if you don’t know someone properly,” she continued in the same vein, “then can you truly love him?”

  “Well--” Jinx was hating this more than she could ever have imagined possible.

  “I mean,” Mrs. C. interjected, grabbing Jinx’s hand and fixing her with a desperate stare, “I obviously KNOW him. But I don’t know him. Do you understand me?”

  Jinx’s panicked prayers for intervention were answered by a most unlikely source. Daisy Finnegan strolled round the corner of the washbasins and into view. She pulled up sh
ort when she saw her form tutor and Jinx sitting on the bench at the back like that. But since Daisy had witnessed the whole morning scene she wasn’t as shocked as she could have been. Daisy, in her role as teacher’s pet and chief suck-up, was also a lot more used to “crisis management” than Jinx and her crew. Daisy turned back to a second-year who had come in behind her.

  “Betsy,” she snapped, after winking surreptitiously at a delighted Jinx, “none of your year seems to have the right number of towels. As head girl, it is one of your duties to make sure every pupil has the right equipment, and I should not have to be checking up on you like this.”

  “But,” Betsy said, staring mutinously at the lockers in front of her—she clearly didn’t give two shits whether anyone had the right amount of towels or not—“what am I supposed to do about it?”

  “You,” Daisy said, twisting round again to block Betsy’s view of the shower area, “are going to go back to your house, find the missing towels and bring them to me here.”

  “But,” Betsy said again before Daisy cut her off.

  “I’m not interested in buts,” snapped the older girl, causing a small wave of mirth to flow through Jinx’s veins even in the midst of this undesirable scenario. “I want you to go back to your house and scour the place. When you have done so, and not before you have found at least half of the missing amount, I want you to bring them back to me here and we will continue the inventory. Off you go!”

  The second-year threw a total death stare in Daisy’s direction but raced off to do her bidding nonetheless. Daisy waited until the door had closed behind her before moving over to sit on Mrs. Carpenter’s other side. Jinx was as appalled as she was impressed when Daisy put an arm round Mrs. C.’s shoulders and squeezed her tight, but since she’d rarely been so pleased to see anyone in her life she made a mental note to let it go.

  The arm seemed to have a soothing effect on Mrs. C., who dropped her head onto Daisy’s shoulder. Her breathing certainly appeared a lot calmer than it had a few minutes earlier in Jinx’s company, anyway. Jinx and Daisy locked eyes over their teacher’s bowed head and Jinx mouthed her extreme thanks for Daisy’s excellent save. Daisy blushed slightly at yet more unexpected niceness directed at her from the unlikely Jinx Slater and shook her head to indicate it was nothing. They both raised their eyebrows at the same time, and both smiled when it registered that for once they were on the same wavelength.