Читать книгу The Summer We Danced - Фиона Харпер - Страница 14

I stood with my hands on my hips and surveyed the chaos. Lucy, having left her case in the kitchen, stood close behind me, almost touching but not quite. I had a feeling she was a bit thrown by the morning’s events, and would probably have liked a friendly hug, but I had no idea if that was the right thing to do or not. Weren’t there all sorts of rules these days, to stop people being ‘inappropriate’?

‘Where are your lists of student telephone numbers?’ I asked Miss Mimi, who seemed completely oblivious to the mountains of clutter.

‘I’ve no idea where Sherri keeps them on that thing of her dad’s she brought in.’ She shook her head. ‘I should’ve stuck to doing it the way Dinah did, but Sherri said a computer would be better.’

‘What ever happened to Dinah?’ I asked, remembering the woman who’d been Miss Mimi’s administrator the whole time I’d been at the dance school, a stern lady with horn-rimmed glasses who’d never smiled. I’d never once dared be late with my envelope containing the cheque for my fees.

‘Oh, she got married and moved to Portugal,’ Miss Mimi said, as if it was nothing.

Wow. I hadn’t seen that coming. Dinah must have been fifty, if she was a day, and the sort of sturdily built, hairs-on-the-chin kind of gal that I’d assumed would be a spinster forever. It gave me a small glimmer of hope.

‘And Sherri’s your new administrator?’ I asked.

Miss Mimi laughed. ‘Goodness, no! She’s one of the older girls who volunteered to come and help me with the office a few hours a week.’

Ah. Suddenly the piles of paper, the text-speak emails and the clip-art-happy posters in the vestibule all started to make sense.

‘I did try to hire someone when Dinah left, but no one seemed to want to take it on.’

I took a sweeping look around the office. To be honest, if I’d turned up here for a job interview, I’d have run a mile in the other direction too, and I’d been used to touring with a rock band.

Something occurred to me. ‘Erm … Miss Mimi? Where is the computer?’

She waved an elegant hand towards the corner of the room. ‘Over there, of course. On the desk.’

Desk? I wasn’t even sure I could see a desk. Still, I trod carefully through the narrow path through the piles of stuff, rounded the edge of the largest one and discovered that it was indeed a desk, and that it had a clear spot where a dirty old grey computer sat, complete with dirty grey keyboard, mouse and chunky monitor.

‘I don’t even know how to turn the thing on,’ Miss Mimi said.

I glanced at her. Was that a faint tone of pride in her voice?

Well, thankfully, I did know how to operate a computer, even one as ancient as this. I moved a small pile of Dancing Times magazines from the wooden chair tucked half under the desk, pulled it out and sat down.

It took an agonising amount of time to boot up. While I waited, I turned to smile at Lucy, who’d followed me through the mess and was standing just behind the chair. ‘That looks old,’ Lucy said, frowning. ‘I think I saw one like it in the Science Museum.’

‘Do you like science, then?’

Lucy made a face. ‘Not really. My dad took me. I think he wants me to like science and football and stuff like that, but I don’t.’

‘What do you like?’

Lucy gave me a ‘duh’ kind of look. ‘Ballet, of course,’ she said. ‘And modern and tap.’

‘I’m learning tap,’ I told her, ‘but I’ve only had one lesson so far.’

Lucy’s little feet moved fast on the wooden floorboards of the office, her school shoes shuffling and scuffing over the wood in demonstration.

‘You’re brilliant!’

Lucy shrugged. ‘I’ve been doing it my whole life practically.’

I stifled a smile. That was—what?—all of five years since she’d been old enough to waddle into one of Miss Mimi’s classes. I turned back to the computer screen, which now seemed to be winking into life. ‘All I can say is that I hope I’m as good as you one day.’

Lucy gave me a doubtful look, but I didn’t take offence. To the kid, I must have looked as ancient and creaky as the computer on the desk.

‘O-kay,’ I muttered as I scanned the handful of folder icons on the desktop and decided that the one titled ‘School’ was the most likely candidate. I clicked on it and began reading lists of file names.

Hmm. Nothing like ‘register’ or ‘students’. This was probably the result of letting a seventeen-year-old set up your computer system. In the end I just started opening random folders and ended up finding something in one labelled ‘Girls’ that looked as if it might be a database.

‘Okay,’ I told Mimi. ‘I’ve found the list of phone numbers. All we’ve got to do now is work out who’s coming to what class this morning.’ I started rummaging through the directory again, looking for a class list.

‘Oh, that’s easy,’ Miss Mimi said, not missing a beat. ‘Next is Grade 2 Ballet, so that’s Lucinda Henderson, Megan Tremont, Freya Barry—’

‘Hold on!’ I said quickly. ‘Who was that first one again?’

‘Lucinda … Henderson.’

‘Okay …’ I clicked back to the database and hunted down the list. ‘Got her!’ I read the number out to Miss Mimi, who was standing by the office phone. ‘Give me the next name and I’ll call from my mobile.’

And that’s the way we worked through the list for the next forty-five minutes. When we’d made the final call, I pushed the chair back from the desk and rubbed the back of my neck. Lucy was cross-legged on the floor in a tiny space that only an eight-year-old could have sat down in and Miss Mimi was over the other side of the room, humming as she pottered around her piles of clutter.

I checked my watch. ‘Shouldn’t someone have come to pick you up by now?’ I asked Lucy.

Lucy looked back at me with large eyes and nodded. ‘I’ve only been living with my dad since October. He says he’s still getting used to my timetable.’

I frowned. ‘Is he often late?’

Lucy shook her head. She seemed happy to be talking, so I kept going. ‘Were you living with your mum before that?’ I asked, hoping I wasn’t venturing on to a sore subject.

She nodded. ‘She’s very good at her job and she’s got to go and work in America for a year, so I had to move to Elmhurst and live with my dad. Mummy said it was okay because Granny and Grandpa live nearby in case he messes up.’

Nice. I assumed it hadn’t been an amicable split, then.

‘You weren’t living here before that?’

Lucy shrugged. ‘No. We lived in London when I was very little but then Mummy and Daddy got divorced and I went to live in Edinburgh with Mummy. She had an important job there too.’

‘That must have been difficult—living so far away from your dad.’

‘He came to visit sometimes and I’d come back for school holidays,’ she said, ‘but Daddy had to work in the daytime so I’d go to Granny and Grandpa’s a lot.’

Poor kid, I thought. Sounds as if she hardly knew the man, although I had to concede that may not have been his fault. However, since he hadn’t bothered to turn up for his daughter on time I wasn’t feeling very inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. I held out my hand. ‘Come on, then. Let’s go and see if anyone’s looking for you.’

Lucy’s thin fingers slid into mine and I helped her to her feet. All three of us made our way back to the hall, but it was as cold and empty as it had been when we’d left it. Lucy’s eyes began to fill.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said, squeezing her hand gently. ‘He can’t be too far away. ‘

I tried phoning her dad once more and I was just listening to it clicking into voicemail when there was a loud pounding on the outside doors, the sound of two heavy and rather determined fists coming down again and again.

‘Lucy? Lu-ceeee!’

I ran, pushing through the swinging doors that led to the vestibule and then to the main doors, where I found the heavy bolts that slid across the top of the doors and the one that went down into the floor drawn. I released them as fast as I could and came face to face with a rather wild-looking man.

‘Where’s my daughter?’ he half-yelled. ‘What the bloody hell is going on?’

And then he stopped and stared at me. ‘Flip?’ he said, his face completely transformed with shock.

I heard a rushing sound in my ears. ‘Tom?’ I croaked back.