Skeletal by Katherine Hayton Read Free Book Online Page A

with.
    I know what’s coming next.
    The room is half-full at the moment. People have wandered in and out all day. It surprised me. I thought that there’d be the few people directly connected with me, and that would be all. But there were people taking notes, people sketching details. Some had identity cards around their necks. I presumed they were press, but they could have been office workers taking a break from the monotony.
    Public interest in little old me. Little old me. Little old me that no one gave a shit about at the time, but give me ten years lying in the cold ground and suddenly I’m a person of interest. Is it wrong to feel a thrill of pride at that? Hardly down to me now, was it. I shouldn’t feel pride. I do.
    But this isn’t going to be pretty. It wasn’t at the time, and unlike my frail corpse, this isn’t a story that ten years is going to colour any way except embarrassing.
    Miss Jenner shakes her head at something on the stand. Her head is a bounty of soft, brown curls that follow the movement with grace. She wasn’t this pretty back then. Not when I knew her. In the intervening years she’s really come into her own.
    ‘Now, Miss Jenner. Could you tell us about an incident during your class, concerning Daina Harrow? I believe it was touched upon at the last hearing, but we didn’t deem it relevant at the time.’ The coroner smiles an apology. Terrible to drag her into the court twice. Terrible to make her give evidence this many years after the fact, with a memory that wouldn’t grow any clearer with time.
    Don’t make her do it, then. You don’t need to hear this. I could just let you know who was responsible, if you can’t guess, and what picture it involved, as if you didn’t know, and we could just move on from there. Move on Mr Coroner Man, you don’t need to bore all these nice people with this rubbish.
    ‘I used to teach social studies at Northfield High School. During that time Daina Harrow was a student in my year ten class. She arrived mid-term in the third term in the year.’
    She looks at the coroner for approval, and he nods for her to continue.
    ‘Daina was a good student. Her school record was a mess, she’d moved twice before in that one year, but she had consistently good reports. And she had a great memory for facts and figures. We briefly looked at statistics, and I would’ve loved to spend more time with her on that. She had a real flare.’
    Oh. Okay. This is nice then. I didn’t know that she’d even noticed me, let alone remembered what my interests were. Maybe she was quiet but observing everything, same as me.
    ‘In one class I took the pupils through a series of photographs of the area from settlement to modern day. I’d had to put them into the computer.’ She turned to the coroner. ‘They’d originally been on slides, but the bulb had broken in our last projector, and we couldn’t get a replacement anymore. I still had the originals and a camera shop transferred them into a PowerPoint slideshow instead.’
    Some dick in the back row, coughed into his hand. ‘Bor-cough-ing.’
    Miss Jenner colours, the blush running up from her cheeks to her temples. It makes her look so pretty. I bet she doesn’t even know.
    The coroner frowns at the back of the room, but Miss Jenner’s already got the message loud and clear.
    ‘Someone in the class had added a slide into the file. We’re not allowed to password protect the computers in case we have to swap them out, so anyone could’ve done it if they had the opportunity.’ She looked pointedly at Michelle who met her gaze full-on, eyebrows raised.
    ‘The slide was of Daina Harrow. She was standing next to a fence, her skirt was up around her head and her underpants were down. I didn’t notice for a minute, I was reading the text for the photos from a sheet so it was only when the class started laughing that I realised something was wrong.
    ‘When I looked up I was horrified. I turned it off immediately,