The Detective's Daughter by Lesley Thomson Read Free Book Online

He longed to break free from Simon’s grip. An oblong of dry stones lay where his daddy’s car had been.
    ‘We eat here.’ Simon waved his other hand at a hall with a fireplace the size of a doorway. A table stretched away and high above were rafters.
    ‘I won’t be here,’ Jonathan informed him confidently.
    ‘Yes you will.’
    Half of Simon’s finger was missing. Jonathan wrenched his hand away, revolted by what was not there, but Simon recaptured him and held him fast.
    ‘Don’t do that again.’
    He concentrated instead on the ceiling beams. His daddy had told him about the principle of the Action of Forces. Fact: builders put a short distance between each beam to keep the load to a minimum. Jonathan would tell the boys this. He was startled by a clacking like bullets and saw the lady who had been nice when they arrived behind the counter. She was busy with her typing and did not see him this time.
    The boys barged through a green baize door that closed by itself.
    They clattered along a tiled passage with a vaulted ceiling, their voices deafening him. One boy exclaimed in disgust at the greasy cooking smell, the others imitated him until the teacher silenced them. There was no daylight and Jonathan pretended they were in a dungeon, the walls hung with chains. It was not hard.
    The cloakroom smelled of cheese and the coats hung like roosting birds from giant hooks. Simon led him to one labelled ‘Justin’. Jonathan said nothing because he recognized his own coat.
    They were on a stretch of grey asphalt with a gravel path around it and on one side a sloping grassy bank with a beech hedge with leaves of burnt umber: Jonathan’s favourite colour.
    The Daisy teacher was chatting to a lady with a chin like the moon and Jonathan wondered if they were talking about him because suddenly they looked at him. He smiled but they did not smile back, and he took heart from this: perhaps his wish had come true and he was invisible.
    Simon let him go and ran off to join in a game of football. Beyond the hedge, Jonathan saw hills speckled with frost and splodged with dark patches for woods. He trailed around the pitch gravitating towards a female blackbird hopping along the hedge with a stick the same length as herself in her beak. His mummy had called him Pig Wig for eating too much cake and he said that Pig Wig was a girl and the cake was his. The blackbird flew away over the hills. Pigling Bland and Pig Wig escaped from Thomas Piperson. Jonathan could be Pigling Bland and Pig Wig; that way he would not be alone. He wished for wings, but nothing happened because he had run out of wishes.
    A football slammed into his chest. Jonathan kept upright and pretended he was fine, tripping over the ball at his feet. The boys were waiting for him to kick it back into the game but he could not breathe and his inaction decided even the kinder ones that the new pupil was after all an enemy:
    ‘Sissy.’
    ‘Four-eyes.’
    He snatched at his spectacles but Simon threw them into the air. Eventually he discovered them in the grass. Mummy did not know about his new spectacles. He escaped up the slope to a flower bed with no flowers. He identified rosemary, lavender and rhododendron bushes and then found a gate in the hedge and, beyond, a muddy path with brambles that twisted out of sight. He gripped the top and fitted his foot into a space in the metal but then stopped. He would be quickly captured; now was not the time.
    Jonathan returned to the flower bed where he found a spider completing a web strung between a seeding thistle, fluffy like sheep’s wool, and a tall cane. He counted the threads that connected the spans. There were ten on one segment, nineteen on another and twelve on a third. The number would relate to the stress on each section between its points of suspension. He nudged the thistle with his sore hand and the web trembled, making the spider stop its work. His daddy told him that spiders were natural engineers; their