Chasing the Dark by Sam Hepburn

singer till the morning of the crash.’
    He peered closer. ‘What makes you say that?’
    â€˜That’s when he found her on the Trafalgar Arms events page.’
    The Professor pulled off his glasses and rubbed his temples. ‘This is all very unsettling, Joe. However it is hardly proof that my son and your mother were murdered.’
    But as he paced up and down the room I could see his planet-sized brain was working overtime, turning over all the evidence we’d got so far.
    All the way back to the station I was going mad tryingto match those numbers in Ivo’s notebook with the hazy memory floating in my head. I was still thinking about it when the Prof grasped my shoulders, thanked me for coming and said we should meet up again as soon as he got back from a lecture he was giving in Edinburgh.
    I boarded the train, put Oz under my seat and spread the list of numbers on the table in front of me. The door slammed. Maybe the sound jolted my brain or maybe it was seeing the paper against the brown plastic table that did it but a picture suddenly flashed in my head. Eleven black printed numbers on a white label . . . stuck on a brown cardboard box . . . on a still frame . . . of a YouTube clip.
    â€˜Stay there, Oz. Don’t move.’
    I barged back through the line of passengers coming down the aisle, ran for the door, jammed down the window and stuck my head out. The train was pulling out.
    â€˜Professor! I’ve got it! Those numbers. They’re files! The KGB files Ivo looked at!’
    A sudden smile cracked the sadness on his face. Raising his fists in a double thumbs-up he shouted into the wind, face flushed, eyes bright, hair whipping wildly round his head. ‘Well done, Joe! I’ll order copies and get them couriered.’
    I waved till he was just a small lonely dot on the platform, and jumped when a tall heavy man brushed passed me lugging a suitcase. I stumbled to my seat, scared and excited, and lifted Oz on to my lap. He fell asleep pretty quickly and I was suddenly so exhausted it didn’t take melong to drop off too.
    This time the crash dream had a different twist. It was all about Ivo Lincoln smashing his car up trying to rescue Mum from Eddy Fletcher and her scabby life on Farm Street. The savage scream of brakes jolted me awake. As the train rolled into the station I caught my reflection in the window: a weedy kid in a cheap, washed-out hoodie. Mum had been planning to get me a new one. We’d have gone round the shopping centre, just her and me, trying on stuff we couldn’t afford, having a laugh, pretending we were rich. That was never going to happen again. I felt totally lost. Mum’s death might have strung a temporary bridge between my life and the posh bubble that people like Ivo and the Professor lived in, but our worlds would always be about a hundred million miles apart.

CHAPTER 9
    I got back to Saxted to hear that Norma Craig had moved into Elysium that morning, Doreen was cooking her dinner that night, and I had to deliver it. Doreen wasn’t sneering about Norma Craig’s dodgy past now. In fact, from the fuss she was making you’d have thought she’d been asked to cater a royal wedding. It wasn’t just the menu she was worried about. Oh, no. She was so petrified that I was going to ‘let the side down’ she made me have a shower while she shouted instructions through the bathroom door about what I had to say and do. How I’d got to stand up straight and look Norma in the eye and say yes Miss Craig, no Miss Craig, anything you say Miss Craig and take no notice if she was doddery and bad-tempered. And just in case Norma wanted to chat I had to keep to three safe topics: the weather, Doreen’s amazing cooking, and mybest subjects at school.
    She’d also been shopping. When I got out of the shower she was in my room laying out a disgusting blue shirt, striped tie, tweed