the Ladies, and longer to locate no. 209. There was a young couple dressed all in black passionately entwined in front of the section I needed. I waited as patiently as I could manage for about three minutes, tapping my foot on the tiles, but when I realised they had no intention of letting each other go, I asked them politely if they wouldn’t mind just moving slightly. The girl, skinny and dark, raised a tear-stained face to me before pushing her head into her Goth boyfriend’s neck so hard that I thought they might become surgically attached.
‘Oui,’ she shrugged. ‘Bien sur.’ They moved infinitesimally to the left so I could just about open the locker door, and began kissing again.
I had to bend to slide the key in, my heart beating ridiculously fast. It opened smoothly, and I crouched down to search inside. Within seconds I felt crushing disappointment as I realised it was empty. All this – and nothing. The police had obviously got here before me – though I wondered how they’d know about the locker if there was only the key on the ring as evidence. But whatever the truth, the answer to the real Tessa Lethbridge wasn’t here. My hands shaking, I slid them round the locker for a final search in some desperation, unwilling to believe that I had come here for no purpose.
My fingers made contact with something smooth and my stomach contracted: thank God. I pulled it towards me. It was an A5 photo, the ballet school students of 2010, a few of the girls’ faces ringed with blue biro. I felt an involuntary shiver. Amanda Curran; Sadie Malvern; Lucie Duffy. The new girl Anita Stuart. Favourites of Tessa’s, that much made sense.
I smoothed the photo out against my knee, and their bland faces gazed up at me; Sadie Malvern scowling, red-haired Amanda Curran smiling, Lucie Duffy smirking, a blue halo of biro around each of their heads. I turned the photo over. On the back was written ‘The Queen of Hearts, she had some tarts’.
I remembered Tessa saying that Sadie would never go far. ‘She brings too much baggage, that one,’ she shook her head as we sat in the staffroom one day, watching a tape of a rehearsal. ‘I had so much hope for her; technically she is brilliant, but she can’t lose herself when she dances. She is too conscious.’ She paused the DVD. ‘Not like Lucie and Manda.’
I had seen very little of Sadie Malvern myself; she wasn’t one of the dancers who tended to hurt herself, and she was a tough cookie, so I’d only treated her once or twice. She had broken her arm badly as a youngster in some kind of car smash, and it had set badly. Plus I knew she had some sort of eating disorder from the frailty of her structure, but although I always alerted Eduardo when I spotted it, not eating was absolutely rife amongst the girls. There was little to be done before they actually started collapsing in class.
I pushed the photo into my bag and checked the locker again. There was something else, shoved right up against the back wall; I reached in and pulled it towards me. A thin book, a leaflet almost, on African plants. I started to flick through it, spotting words scribbled in the back pages, but before I could absorb anything, out of the corner of my eye I saw someone approaching. Quickly I pocketed the book in my parka and began to shut the locker door. I was worried that a station official had rumbled me and was about to ask how I had come by the key. But that was ridiculous – I could be the temporary owner of the key; they would know no better.
I began to stand, ready with a string of excuses – and then something was flying at me, the weight of a body, and I was so shocked that for a moment I didn’t know what to do; I didn’t move fast enough. I felt myself falling, I was going down again, and the man too. As I tried frantically to find my feet, to stand again, I felt hot fingers on my ankle. Glancing down, I saw meaty knuckles tattooed with strange symbols.
I kicked out with all my might and pushed myself off the floor and away from the hand. Stumbling forwards, I smacked my head on the lockers and for a moment I stood,