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‘So whathappened?’
‘That night, I snuck down to Penleith Beach. I sat on the sand and cried my eyes out. Afterwards, I swore a vow – that from then on, I wouldn’t back down. I’d take control ofmy life. Whatever the cost, I wouldn’t give anyone power over me again.
‘Next day in class, the trouble started even before our teacher arrived for the register. Kerrie Bray, behind me, was one of the girls who cut my hair. She made a few comments and then she punched me between the shoulder blades.’
‘Uh-oh,’ Fin whispers. ‘What happened?’
‘I warned her that if she touched me a second time she’d regret it. The whole class erupted. Honestly, Fin, it was like a zoo. I don’t think anyone had ever stood up to Kerrie before. I’m pretty sure she realized if she backed down, she’d lose all the status she’d built up. She waited until my back was turned. Then she cracked me over the head with her phone.’
‘Coward!’ her brother hisses.
‘I thought I was going to pass out but I didn’t. I got to my feet and punched her right in the mouth – harder than I’d ever hit anyone in my life.’
Billie blows out her breath. ‘You don’t realize how much it hurts your knuckles until you try it. That punch split both Kerrie’s lips across her teeth. She looked at me, at the blood dripping all over her desk, at all the other kids watching, and then she fled. Straight to the nurse’s office to get patched up. Obviously, I had a week of detentions. But Kerrie Bray never bothered me again.’
‘So, you think I should bust Eliot in thechops?’
‘No!Jeez, Fin – I don’t think you should do that at all.’ Billie hesitates, lowers her voice. ‘Not unless you really have to. The point of the story is that people only gain power over you if you let them.’
Silence, for a while, from Fin. Then: ‘I’m frightened to go back.’
‘I know you are, Scout.’
‘What if they do something else?’
Lucy hears her daughter thinking.
‘You remember the phone Commissioner Gordon uses to call Batman whenever he’s in trouble?’
‘The Batphone?’
‘The Batphone, right. I think you need one of those, programmed with my number. And then, whenever you’ve got a problem, you can call me and I’ll come running.’
‘Like Batgirl?’
‘Exactly like Batgirl.’
‘But Mummy and Daddy say I can’thavea phone. Not till I’m eleven.’
‘No, Scout. They said they wouldn’tbuyyou a phone until you’re eleven. But I can. And it’s my eighteenth, which means –ker-ching– I’m in the money.’
Daniel puts his head close to Lucy’s ear. ‘She’s a good kid.’
‘The best.’
He smiles, kisses her forehead. ‘You don’t even realize, do you?’
‘Realize what?’
‘How much of it’s down to you.’
Lucy thinks of her life before she returned to Skentel. Of how bad things were in London, around the time of Billie’s birth. Of how much worse they grew in Spain. And in the Portuguese beach town where she ended up. ‘More luck than judgement,’ she tells him. ‘Sometimes I feel I owe Billie everything.’
Then you’d better find her. Hadn’t you?
Appalled, Lucy jerks her head away. And suddenly she’s no longer in her kitchen but in a police car, and Daniel andFin are missing and she can’t get hold of her daughter and she doesn’t know why this is happening but she has to figure it out, and fast.
A thought breaks through the chaos in her head: the voicemail from Billie’s boyfriend, Ed. Earlier, standing in the playground, she’d barely listened to his message. Lucy tunes out the detective, talking on his phone, and dials her voicemail.