Watch Over You by M.J. Ford

Author:M.J. Ford
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-06-01T17:00:00+00:00

JAMES

FIVE WEEKS EARLIER

The small café was directly opposite the school gates. On the table in front of him, a cold cup of coffee and a folded newspaper showing a crossword half finished. The paper he’d found in a bin. He wasn’t interested in puzzles. His eyes were on the gates as the kids in their blue uniforms poured out.

He’d been in Oxford for two weeks, putting together the pieces of a temporary life. The first couple of nights had been spent on the street, until a bit of intelligence had sent him to a squat in the Headington area of the city. Six or seven drunks in a two-bedroom house that had been condemned. No heating, but at least a supply of running water. In the day he begged outside one of the colleges, and it was better money than he’d ever made in Manchester. It had provided him with enough money to purchase some of the materials he needed. The rest, when it was safe, he’d stolen. Hardware stores were often easy pickings. Local places, tight aisles packed with stock, one guy running things, no cameras, and no suspicion of a slightly scruffy customer carrying a bag. Buy the cheapest pack of nails, and load the rest of the ingredients into the sack. Putting it all together back at the house wouldn’t be a problem. Most of the residents couldn’t recognise their own parents, let alone an explosive device. That was all a last resort, of course. If things went south. First things first, he had to find her.

A little research back at the Manchester library had given him the locations of all nine Oxford secondary schools, and they were circled on the streetmap he’d stolen from the local charity shop. One day at each, morning and afternoon, positioned close enough to see the kids as they entered and left. Boring as hell, but necessary. It wasn’t a perfect system. Some kids arrived by bus, carried straight into the school grounds. Sometimes there was an influx and he struggled to catch every face. And if that day she was ill or absent … Still, it was the only system he had. Any other method was apt to draw attention.

Marsh Hill was the sixth school he’d cased out, and one of the easier ones. A couple had been tricky even to get close, stuck out in residential areas where the sight of a lone man would have sent a dozen eagle-eyed parents reaching for their phones to ring the police. He’d taken more care there, armed with alibis – that his car had run out of petrol nearby and he was looking for a garage, that he’d lost his dog, or his keys. Most of the time, though, he went unchallenged except for the occasional odd look. There’d been a more direct confrontation about a week ago, a fleshy-faced dad in sports gear demanding, ‘What exactly do you think you’re doing, hanging around here?’ In that case, he’d resisted the

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