Devil's Game by Patricia Hall Read Free Book Online

looked perfectly ordinary upstairs,’ she said. ‘Though she’s got a lot of sexy underwear, I will say that. A few things I’d never seen before. Must have come from one of those special shops. My parents would go potty if I came home with anything like that.’
    ‘Perhaps she and Terry have an exciting sex life,’ Mower said mildly. Nasreem shuddered slightly.
    ‘Rather her than me,’ she said.
    ‘Are you married?’ Mower asked tentatively.
    ‘No, I’m the despair of my parents’ life,’ Nasreem said, with a shrug. ‘It’s not as if they’re particularly religious. There was no nonsense about covering my head, or anything. And they were happy to support me at school and college and with my career. It’s just that at my age, most Muslim women are married with kids. It’s obvious they’d like grandchildren. They always do, don’t they, parents?’ She shrugged and glanced at Mower. ‘It’s just the problem of finding the right man. Thelonger I’m independent, I guess, the harder it’s going to be.’
    ‘I know the feeling,’ Mower said, the image of the beautiful Indian girl he had once loved and then lost flashing briefly into his mind. He seldom thought about her these days. Their affair had been brief and had ended tragically. But that was as close as he had ever got to marriage, he thought, and he could not imagine that it would ever happen again.
    ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and chase up Mrs Bastable’s friend, Charlene, and see if she knows anything about where she might have gone or who she might have been meeting.
     
    Sutton Park School occupied a motley collection of dilapidated buildings on a steep hillside overlooking the centre of Bradfield. Its core, originally a boys’ secondary school, was a grim stone pile which in the expansionist Sixties had proved inadequate for its new mixed intake as a comprehensive school, and had been surrounded and almost overwhelmed by extensions and temporary classrooms. As Laura Ackroyd drove into the car park and reversed into a solitary slot marked for visitors, she pulled a wry face. She knew the temptation there must be here to accept a multimillion pound rebuilding programme and began to wonder why the governors and staff could possibly object to what they had to give up in return for becoming an academy. Could passing control to Sir David Murgatroyd be so dreadful that they would rather continue to live and work in this municipal slum? On the surface, it seemed like a small price to pay.
    She locked her car and followed the notices which led her to a cramped reception area and then to the office of the head teacher, Debbie Stapleton, a smartly dressed plump womanwith a warm smile in spite of the lines of strain around her eyes.
    ‘Come in,’ the head teacher said warmly, holding out her hand. ‘Your grandmother said you would give us a fair hearing in the Gazette . We could certainly do with some support.’
    ‘Tell me about it,’ Laura said, accepting the chair Debbie waved her into and switching on her tape recorder. ‘Why have you been singled out to be an academy?’
    Debbie waved a hand at the view from her window, where puddles of rainwater stood on flat roofs and scaffolding surrounded a dilapidated outcrop from the original stone building, although there were no workmen in sight.
    ‘The place is falling down,’ she said. ‘And we’ll get no money for rebuilding for years and years unless the council goes for academy status.’
    ‘That sounds a bit like blackmail,’ Laura said.
    ‘You said that, not me. I couldn’t possibly comment.’ Debbie Stapleton’s face relaxed into a smile. ‘I’m not allowed to.’
    ‘So what’s so bad about it?’
    ‘There are two objections, really,’ the headmistress said. ‘One of principle, the other specific to this school. In principle, I personally don’t think that control of schools should be taken away from the local community. The governors here are not political