Kid Alone by Simon Mason

Author:Simon Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

The day was fine. It got hotter; by late afternoon the whole illuminated summer package was on display, even in Five Mile. Sunshine and trees, breezes and flowers. At four o’clock the sun shone strongly on the highway and the car plant, on street and shops. It shone on the stacks of newspapers outside Jamal’s convenience store advertising the new headline of the local evening edition: DAWN RAID ENDS IN CHAOS. It shone too on Top Pitch at the Academy, where Garvie Smith lay on the thick green turf, smoking gloomily with Felix and Smudge.

Smudge said, “No point in fretting now. It’s gone, mate. Get over it. Wasn’t your fault DI Psycho-Killer kept you in interrogation all afternoon.”

“I wasn’t interrogated, Smudge.”

“Threw you in the dungeon, whatever. What does Queen Bitch expect? As excuses go, I think it’s pretty safe. I’m sorry, Miss Perkins, I was wrongfully detained by the police, my lawyers are acting on my behalf, I’ll let you know how the case develops.”

Garvie ignored him. Miss Perkins had not in fact been impressed by his reason for missing his Eng lit exam. He didn’t think about that, however. He thought about walking to school that morning past Jamal’s and seeing the corrugated sheet of metal across the doorway, the squares of cardboard taped to the broken windows, the handwritten sign that said CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. He’d seen Sajid’s face at an upper window gazing out at nothing, and a few minutes later he’d had a call from Singh. Very brief, very uptight. There had been an altercation at the police center, Singh said: Khalid had resisted detention and was currently in the hospital. Simultaneously the police had entered his storage facility in East Field industrial estate and found it full of secondhand toys, which Khalid had been collecting on behalf of a charity providing for homeless children in the Middle East.

“He’d been scared to tell us because he’d heard of a friend who worked with the charity before, who’d been investigated under the Antiterrorism Act.”

Unfortunately, Singh had added, Dowell had now instigated an investigation into Khalid on exactly the same grounds. Headlines had already appeared on the internet: MURDER SUSPECT A TERRORIST. In the meantime Jamal had confirmed that Khalid was at home on the night of the eighth, and Khalid was officially no longer a suspect, nor even helping police with their inquiries. Many papers still ran stories on the mystery of Pyotor Gimpel’s extra math tutoring, for which no tutor could be found. Hundreds of responses had been received to the official appeal for information, though none had yet proved useful.

Singh had concluded his call to Garvie with an instruction: “Do not attempt to contact me again about this matter. Ever.”

It was a mess. Worse, it felt like his mess. He remembered what his mother had said: that whatever he had been doing was not what he should have been doing.

“We did warn you,” Smudge said. “You can always tell them by their eyes, the nutters.

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