Rosie looked terrified then and before Mrs Wood could say any more, she burst into tears. ‘It was only meant to be a joke,’ she wailed. ‘I didn’t know she would go to hospital.’
Rebecca folded her arms. She considered Rosie with a mix of pity and anger.
‘Right,’ said Mr Whitman quietly. ‘Rosie, you do know that what you did is very serious indeed.’
Rosie continued to cry.
‘We’re going to have to ask you to leave the school for the rest of the day.’
‘You’resuspendingher?’ said Mrs Wood. She quickly gathered herself, smiled. ‘Oh, come on, James, I realize we need Rosie to understand what she did is completely wrong, but that’s a little over the top, isn’t it?’
Rebecca watched as Mr Whitman wrestled uncomfortably with the familiarity of her using his first name. ‘I think, under the circumstances, it’s the very least Rosie should expect.’
Mrs Wood didn’t like that, not one bit. Rebecca got the sense she expected Mr Whitman to take some token action to let it be known it wasn’t OK to take another child’s vital medicine, then brush it all under the carpet and move on as if nothing had happened.
‘Rosie, we will talk about this more on Monday. Over the next few days you need to think of a suitable apology for Lara,’ continued Mr Whitman.
Mrs Wood stood. ‘Was Lara suspended when she tried to drown Rosie?’ she asked.
‘Imogen, that wasn’t—’
Mrs Wood put up a hand to silence him and walked towards the door. ‘This questioning’ – she waved a hand at Rebecca – ‘is completely unethical. The way you’ve handled my daughter, it’s bullying,’ she spat, helping Rosie out of her chair, and they left the room.
All of a sudden it was silent. It was a moment before Mr Whitman spoke.
‘It’s lucky Imogen doesn’t know there is no CCTV directed at the field,’ he said.
Rebecca shrugged. ‘No one ever knows where the CCTV is. And it got the confession, didn’t it?’
SIXTY-FIVE
Friday 8 January
Nancy received a telephone call from Mr Whitman. He informed her that Rosie and her mother had attended a meeting with himself and Miss Young, and that Rosie had been suspended until Monday. She’d owned up, he’d said. When Nancy had asked: ‘Willingly?’ he hesitated long enough for Nancy to understand it was a ‘no’. She briefly wondered how they’d prised it out of her, but that brought forth various imagined scenarios: Rosie denying it at first, squirming, showing absolutely zero regard for her daughter, and it angered her so much she had to stop thinking about it. Mr Whitman had gone on to say that Rosie would be apologizing to Lara once both girls were back at school. ‘We will also be putting her on supervised play for a week. In case you’re not aware of what this means, she will be staying inside the classroom for all breaks, accompanied by a teaching assistant.’
‘And then what?’ Nancy asked.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said, sounding genuinely surprised at her question.
‘What happens when she decides to bully Lara again?’
‘Well, we don’t know she will,’ he stated firmly. ‘Hopefully she will have understood that it’s not something we tolerate here at Ripton Primary. Not under any circumstances.’
Except it had been going on for months, Nancy thought. Months of torment before any real attention had been paid to it, and that was only because Lara had ended up in hospital. And now Rosie had a mere week of sitting colouring in a classroom during breaks before she was let loose in the playground again to do whatever the hell she liked.
Nancy didn’t believe for a minute Rosie understood they didn’t tolerate bullying at Ripton Primary, because they turned a blind eye, or they followed some feeble process that was always weighted in favour of the bully. Rosie had proved to herself again and again that she could get away with it. She might have been caught this time but that was only going to make her a whole lot more sneaky in the future.
Nancy knew the school couldn’t ignore it if it happened right in front of their noses but actually relying on them to stop it, to suitably punish the perpetrator, to put Lara first and be angry on her behalf – as angry as she felt now – well, that was never going to happen.
Which was why she was going to take matters into her own hands.
SIXTY-SIX
Friday 8 January
Nancy walked steadily down the high street, her breath blowing clouds in the cold air. Lara was still in hospital and Beth was visiting her, so Nancy had taken the opportunity to come home briefly and pack an overnight bag before she went back to stay in the put-up bed next to her daughter.
It was almost six and the street lights picked out the frost on the pavements. The shops were all closed and the only buildings that were lit were the pubs and eateries.
