Surely that was a bit of an overreaction. She didn’t know, after all. She didn’t know.

She wished she had Laura’s phone number.

Afterwards, if you had asked Walden to pinpoint the moment of her exact worst mistake, the decision that should not have been made, the decision that poisoned all the others afterward, she would have told you: It was here. Here, at this moment, safe in my office, with no more proof than a very bad feeling. It was when I didn’t immediately make the call or send the email.

It was when I got up and went looking for him.

chapter twenty-seven SNOWDROPS

“Have you seen Mark anywhere?”

Annie held up one finger; she was on the phone. Walden hovered in the doorway. Of course she technically outranked the school receptionist, by quite a long way. It was amazing what a difference there was between a school’s org chart and how things actually got done. No sensible person made Annie’s life one whit harder than it had to be.

“Okay,” said Annie, at last, hanging up. “Sorry. Parent. What did you need?”

“I was wondering if Mark was on site today.”

It was only because Walden was already on edge that she caught the very, very faint lift of Annie’s eyebrows, immediately smoothed back to neutrality. It was only because she’d stopped assuming and started thinking that she understood what it meant. Support staff always knew what was going on before the teachers did. Walden and Mark had not been as subtle as she thought. She had said to herself: Well, my sex life is no one’s business. But school was a closed environment. One’s personal judgement—or lack of it—could very quickly become everyone’s business.

“He’s signed in,” Annie reported, still very neutral, after a glance at her screen. “I haven’t seen him this side of the road. He might be patrolling. You could try the sports fields. Or Scrubs.”

“Thank you,” Walden said. “I’ll have a look.”

She paused at the roadside, looked both ways, and then turned right and walked along the hedgerow until she could cross to the opening for the school coach park. The red-and-white minibuses were lined up in a row at the far end. Walden had her warm coat on and her hands in her pockets. The final few leaves of last autumn, blackened and brittle after the January frost, crunched against the expensive gravel under her feet. There was a cluster of green spikes coming up under the trees at the far end of the car park.

Snowdrops, she thought. The first snowdrops.

She had to look in among the trees, in the shadow of the humped row of buses. Her smart black brogues got muddy. It took a while. She would have given up, if she hadn’t been fairly clear already on what she was looking for.