Jude raised a hand. “Alright, Year Ten! Before we plan your holiday romance soundtrack, you’ll need to complete the worksheet. Quietly.”
The room hushed.
Jude smiled into his coffee.
Then he glanced back out of the window.
And thought that maybe he’d been wrong all along…history might not matter anymore.
Chapter five
Out Field
Warren’s first week had been exhausting.
But not bad.
He’d enjoyed it. More than he’d expected to.
There was something about slipping back into the rhythm of it. Early bells, muddy pitches, the easy banter of kids who didn’t know who he really was, that felt almost comfortable. Familiar.
Beneath that, of course, the UC part ticked along like a metronome.
Every corridor he walked, every classroom he stepped into had been filed and logged. Access points. Blind spots. Who hung where between bells. The building itself was bigger than it looked from the outside. Modernised with glass walkways and open-plan corridors designed more for aesthetics than control. Too many staircases. Coded doors on IT suites. A CCTV camera on every hallway junction.
And not enough staff on duty when the bell rang.
The behavioural hotspots had already started to surface. He could tell by how certain kids moved. Heads down, always watching, voices too loud when they thought no one was listening. Posturing. Testing. Claiming corners of the school as theirs. Warren saw it all. Took mental notes while running warm-ups and refereeing football. This was the job. The duality. Teach rugby in the morning, profile a fifteen-year-old mule before lunch.
And try not to let his gaze drift too often towards the Humanities block.
Of course, it did though.
How could it not?
He told himself it was the job. Ellison was on his watch list, after all. Keeping an eye on him in lessons was as important as clocking him on breaks. That was the line Warren stuck to. But if he was honest, once he’d clocked that Ellison’s classroom overlooked the sports field, he found himself checking the windows more often than necessary. In case there were eyes on him. In casehewas there.
All part of the job, he told himself again.
Except the pull in his chest didn’t feel like work. Not in the same way he analysed the Year Tens crowding corners of the yard, or the way he measured the kids’ responses to Mr Stanmore, Head of PE and his direct supervisor.
That was assessment. Pattern recognition.
With Jude though, it was… something else.
Warren didn’t want to put a name to it.
Most of the week had been spent with Mr Stanmore. Ex-rugby type. Built like a boulder in a tracksuit. Veins like rope. He’d slapped Warren on the back as if they were already old teammates.
“Good to have another set of hands,” he’d said. “Mornings are chaos. We’re short-staffed, and half the Year Tens are still usingbroken toes as an excuse to sit out.” And he kept calling himNewbie.
Warren hadn’t been called that in years. At thirty-six, he was well past the age of fresh starts. But his carefully curated CV painted him as a former PE teacher turned personal trainer, now easing back into school life after an ACL rupture. So, fair enough. He was meant to be new. Green. Unweathered.
Nobody here needed to know he’d seen more blood, betrayal, and buried truths than half the staffroom combined. That was the point of the cover. Let them underestimate him. It made the job easier.
And allowed Warren to watch.
No one had flagged as a behavioural outlier yet. No safeguarding triggers. Just kids trying to survive their first PE lessons without humiliating themselves. And between short breaks where Stanmore regaled him with tales of his glory days on the rugby pitch through mouthfuls of Greggs sausage rolls, he pressed too many questions about Warren’s years out of teaching, giving Warren a chance to rehearse his cover.
