Hush Little Baby, page 25
‘Nina, don’t take my word for it. You need to ring the school. I just thought you should be informed, that’s all. I’m trying to get in touch with as many parents as possible. The ones we know, that is. Our little friendship group. Dane might not be caught up in it. I just wanted to keep you in the loop.’
Might not be caught up in it.
Those words say it all. The possibility that he could somehow be involved looms large in Nina’s mind. She knows it. Sally knows it. Dane is a law unto himself. Always has been. She has tried to combat his escalating behaviour, his non-conformist ways, but she has been a lone voice whistling in the wind, her wisdom and advice obliterated by the oncoming hurricane. And now it is here, ripping apart their fragile existence. The storm is finally upon them and there is nowhere to hide, no shelter in sight. If she thought yesterday and the day before was bad, this piece of news takes misery and desperation to a whole new level.
It’s Rob that he listens to. Always has and probably always will. And therein lies the problem. She wonders how many of her so-called friends within that group of tight-knit parents will remain by her side when this all comes out, when it is over and the dust settles and the grisly truth of their tattered life emerges.
‘Right,’ she finds herself saying, her voice ethereal and without substance, a solitary sound that ricochets inside her head like a bullet bouncing off stone. ‘I’ll ring them. Ask what’s going on.’
‘They’ll probably be busy. Be prepared for a long wait before you get through now that word is getting round.’ Sally pauses, her voice dropping in volume. ‘Nina, as I said, I only rang to keep you updated. I didn’t want you hearing it from somebody else. Please don’t worry. It’s probably something and nothing. I’m your friend. I just thought you should know, that’s all.’
She’s right. Sally is always right. Always calm and measured. Always one step ahead of the game, able to control things, to keep her little household in order. Everything in ship-shape fashion. Her boy won’t be involved in any of this. Sally with her perfect family and well-behaved children. Sally with her wonderful husband and argument-free house. She has never lain awake at night wondering where it all went wrong. How it all went wrong. Who her husband is with, where he is. With a family who toe the line, never questioning her methods or judgement, a quiet, peaceful home, a malleable husband and high-flying progeny, Sally has it all.
Nina sits, takes a deep breath, tells herself to stop it. Her thoughts are uncalled for: ill-timed and judgemental. Her imagination is in overdrive, her nerves frayed. Sally is a good person. A decent human being. Sally is her friend. Nina has a wonderful house, one that many of her friends could only ever dream of owning. But that all it is: a house, not a home. There is little else to draw people here except its size and sheer magnificence. The absence of love within these walls is a crushing sensation that she feels every single day. The last few days have proved how pointless it all is – the money and status, the widescreen TVs and sleek sports cars. Nina has nothing. She is an empty being, devoid of all the things other people keep stored inside. The things that give people momentum, pushing them forward, giving them the confidence to face each day with a smile on their faces – love, security, ambition. She has none of those.
‘Thanks for letting me know. This is all a bit of a shock, isn’t it?’
‘It really is. Not what you expect to hear at all. Thing is, since this new head teacher came along, the kids don’t have their phones with them, so it’s not as if we can even ring them. All the mobiles get put in a locker until breaktime. Anyway, I’m sure the police have everything in hand.’
‘I’m sure they do,’ Nina says, chewing at the side of her mouth, tugging and nibbling until a sharp crack of pain causes her to stop, her vision misting over as an eye-watering ache sets in and a thin, oily streak of metallic-tasting fluid fills her mouth.
‘I’ll see you later then.’ Sally sounds distant now.
Nina wonders if she is regretting her actions, wishing she had never made this call. It feels like a warning, a pre-emptive strike. What if Dane is involved? What then? She has no set script in her head, nothing prepared to help her deal with this scenario. She feels lost, alone on a choppy sea with no land in sight. She did this with her actions over the weekend. This is all her fault. She set this thing in motion and now look what has happened. Look what she has done.
‘Yes. Thanks again, Sally. I’ll see you soon.’ Gravel has filled her throat, stopping her from speaking properly. Her gums are sore, her eyes heavy, her tongue thick and furry with the anxiety of not knowing. And yet at the same time, knowing.
She puts down the phone, leans her head under the tap and takes a long gulp of cold water, clearing her mouth, soothing her throat. Attempting to wash away her terrible thoughts.
Her hands are trembling; her knees are weak. Without a shred of evidence, she is already faltering, assuming the worst, picturing her life falling down around her, a wrecking ball battering against the crumbling walls that hold her life together. She visualises it smashing against the bricks, watching as they topple, too broken and fragmented to ever be rebuilt, turning to dust as they hit the ground. This is worse than what happened at the weekend. Much, much worse. And if Dane is involved, then she did this.
If he is involved.
There are almost one thousand pupils at that school. The odds are stacked in her favour.
And what if this person is wrong? What if this lady who spotted the armed police heading into the school has a vivid imagination and a loose tongue? What if she is no more than a conniving old gossip who doesn’t care how much worry and anxiety she causes?
Word has spread rapidly. Parents are frightened, their senses heightened, every nerve ending shrieking at them, putting them on red alert as they wait for updates. And still no word from the school. Surely parents would have heard something by now? It would be remiss of them to not inform parents and carers. And yet, all those calls to make. The families of over one thousand pupils to contact and only a handful of office workers to do it. It could take them all day to get in touch with everyone. Nina’s heartrate increases. She swallows, rubs at her eyes. She is exhausted. It is only 11 a.m. and already she is so incredibly weary, too tired to think clearly, her logic and lucidity in freefall.
Dark, unwelcome thoughts tumble and fight for space in her head. Dane and his new friend. Dane and his sullen behaviour. Dane and the events that took place in their house recently…
Then she thinks of the obvious and turns on the television. Armed police storming into a school will make the news. It has to, doesn’t it? There will be some sort of attention for such an event. There has to be. Lesser stories have made the news. Surely an event of this magnitude will warrant major coverage?
Sky News and the BBC report on the usual mundane matters as she stands and waits, watching the scrolling updates at the bottom of the screen. Nothing. The weather, falling share prices, the usual bickering of MPs who bat comments back and forth like a ping-pong ball. Nothing about armed police entering a school. It feels conspicuous by its absence. It feels as if this woman has dreamt it up, set in motion a story that has gained speed and is now an unstoppable rock rolling down a hill, ready to crash into the lives of every parent in town while she sits, sated and replete, happy that her words have stirred up a whirling eddy of terror and uncertainty.
The wait continues, Nina’s guts a mass of hot liquid. Theirs is a small town, tucked away in the remoteness of North Yorkshire. It will take time for word to filter through to the national news. That’s what it is. This woman won’t have lied. Why would she? What is to be gained from fabricating such an outlandish tale? Nobody is that stupid or thoughtless, are they?
Nina nibbles at her nails, wishing she hadn’t read those notes in Dane’s room, wishing she could be sitting here in blissful ignorance. Her insides shift and growl some more as she recalls those images, those words. She has done her best to blot them out, to pretend she didn’t see them. Except she did. She has spent weeks and months and years making excuses for her boy. So many excuses, so many sleepless nights. He’s an immature lad, still trying to work out the dynamics of the world at large. She knows that, she really does. Dear God, he barely understands his own emotions. He certainly doesn’t have the capacity to climb inside the heads of those around him, the figures of authority who hem him in, force him to do things he doesn’t want to do. He was lashing out when he wrote those notes, drew those images, that’s all it was. A kickback against the adults in his life.
She has lost count of the number of times he has told her to shut up, calling her a stupid cow and telling her she has ruined his life, this boy, this lad who is almost a man. Her baby. And then with things turning sour at home, it may well have pushed him over the edge. They did this to him – his parents, her and Rob. They created the perfect storm for their boy and then cut him adrift, left him to flounder, watching as he splutters and drowns, sinking to the bottom of the ocean.
For so long now, she has buried the feeling that something is wrong, told herself he cannot process his emotions in the usual fashion, that it is simply a phase he is going through – a long, drawn-out phase that seems to have no end – but a phase borne out of teenage angst and anger nonetheless. She is his mother and despite her deep-rooted sensation that all is not right in his world, she still feels the need to protect him, to provide a rational explanation for his actions and conduct. But now that sensation is rising to the surface, threatening to drag her under. She struggles to breathe, her head swimming as she stands and makes her way upstairs, her legs carrying her towards his bedroom. His sanctuary. The place where he hides away from everybody and everything. Including his own mother.
It is everything she expects it to be – untidy, smelly, his personal possessions strewn far and wide. Wires snake over the floor, trailing a path to a pile of unfathomable machines that take up so much of his time. She has no idea what they are, these machines and computers, and admittedly has long since stopped monitoring what he watches or who he interacts with. Which parents do? Even the ones who claim to be vigilant and responsible let things slide. It’s a minefield, this technology thing, a bloody minefield and she wouldn’t have the first clue how to work out what sort of content he views. Christ, he could be watching porn or murder videos or any kind of shit that undoubtedly fascinates and repulses many teenagers in equal measure.
Telling herself he’s no different to any other fifteen-year-old out there, Nina slumps down onto his unmade bed, idly smoothing out the covers with her palm, breathing in the scent of him, questioning her parenting techniques. Wishing, wishing, wishing. What exactly is she wishing for? A different life? A different child? She shakes her head, tears falling freely now. Maybe she has it all wrong. Maybe Dane is at school, working hard, oblivious to what is happening around him. Maybe this is all one big, fucking nightmare. He’s her son. She needs to quell her niggling fears, have a little faith in her boy. He’s not a bad lad, just slow to develop.
If she hadn’t found those notes, she wouldn’t be having these doubts. If things hadn’t escalated so badly at home over the past few days, she wouldn’t be so nervous about his mental state. She would be concerned for his welfare, worried he may be in danger. It wouldn’t be this. Definitely not this. She wouldn’t be having these bad thoughts. Thoughts that he is the one behind all of this. She wants them to go away, to leave her be, let her think clearly, not clutter up her mind, drip feeding her bits of toxic information that poison her brain, turning her against her own child. For all she knows, he could be crouched behind a desk, cowering from an unknown assailant, praying to be saved. Thinking about his mum. Wishing she was there to help him.
A sob escapes. She searches for the drawings, her hands quivering as she sifts through his things, moving socks and underwear out of the way, opening books, tipping them upside down, hoping for those incriminating pieces of paper to flutter out and miraculously land at her feet.
God, this is terrible. She stops, her hand pressed to her breastbone in despair. What is she thinking? This isn’t some American high school shooting. This is a small town in North Yorkshire. It’s all in her head – an imaginary scenario. She is losing control, letting her imagination run riot, letting her worst fears take over.
Her footfall is loud and clumsy as she heads back downstairs and grapples with her phone. The school will have the answers she needs. No point in wild guesses and suppositions until she has all the facts. That’s what her dad would say – get all your facts sorted and in line before you start firing your weapon. A bad analogy given the circumstances, she thinks.
She punches in the number, the one she knows off by heart, and waits, a thousand unimaginably horrible visions filling her head. She is greeted by an answer machine that tries to direct her to different departments and in her confusion, she presses the wrong key and ends the call.
Shit!
A visit to the school website and Facebook page proves fruitless. No news there. No updates, no pleas for parents to remain calm. No notifications to reassure them that everything is in hand and that it is a regular occurrence for armed police to visit the school. Nothing to see here. It’s another normal day at a normal school in an average town.
Just as she begins to think that perhaps this is all a big mistake, a terrible misunderstanding by a witness who has alerted the entire neighbourhood over a false alarm, the phone rings. It stills her blood, makes her feel weighted to the ground, as if she has been encased in concrete, the ringing a shrill echo in her ears.
Her palms are slippery, her brain, her skin, her entire body burning with fear and anticipation. She wants to know. She doesn’t want to know. She snatches up the phone, hardly able to breathe, her heart a caged bird banging against her ribs, desperate to be free, its wings fluttering manically. She sits, her legs too weak to hold her upright, clears her throat and speaks.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This was a tricky one to write! It needed lots of adjustments and I would like to thank my editor, Emily Ruston, for her advice and guidance without which, this book would have very possibly ended up being discarded and thrown into the sea from a great height. I would also like to thank Emily Reader who gave sound advice for my copy edits, making sure the story was as finely tuned as it could possibly be. A big thank you also, to Rachel Sargeant, my proof reader for finding those pesky errors that despite various edits and re-reads, still slipped through the net!
A huge thank you to Valerie Keogh and Anita Waller for putting up with my endless moaning! You two are amazing. My writing days would be long and drab without having you at hand.
I would hate to miss anybody out when writing acknowledgements so am not going to name people personally but I would like to give a massive thanks to my ARC group who are just the best, and also to all the bloggers and reviewers who read and help promote my books, spreading the word and saying the most wonderful things about my stories.
A final thank you to Nescafé and Cadburys who make writing difficult novels just that little bit easier. I’d be less wired and two stone lighter without you but would never have managed to pen eighteen books in the last seven years.
I am available to chat on social media. Feel free to contact me at:
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Best Wishes
J.A. Baker
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J. A. Baker is a successful writer of numerous psychological thrillers. Born and brought up in Middlesbrough, she still lives in the North East, which inspires the settings for her books.
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ALSO BY J. A. BAKER
Local Girl Missing
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The Quiet One
The Passenger
Little Boy, Gone
When She Sleeps
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The Guilty Teacher
Hush Little Baby
First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Boldwood Books Ltd.
Copyright © J. A. Baker, 2024
Cover Design by Head Design
Cover Photography: iStock
The moral right of J. A. Baker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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