Two officers stayed with her. One was young, with a penetrating gaze. The other was older, and had a beard that needed trimming. Neither of them seemed openly unkind.
Allie sat in a battered metal chair, facing them. The younger one was at a computer, where he typed things in using only his index fingers. The older one made notes on a pad of paper. He asked her name and age, and she answered numbly as the young one entered the information into the computer with surprising speed.
When the older one asked for her parents’ names and address, though, she pressed her fingertips hard against her aching temples.
This was so bad.
‘Please. Could you just call Isabelle le Fanult at Cimmeria Academy?’ she said after a long pause. ‘She knows me. Can I have some water?’ Her mouth was so dry it felt like her tongue was permanently attached to the roof of her mouth.
At the mention of the school, the two officers exchanged a look.
‘Are you a student at the school?’ the older officer asked. With a fatherly face and greying hair, he didn’t look threatening.
Allie nodded.
‘Now that is interesting.’ He turned to the younger officer, who was typing busily. ‘Have we ever had a Cimmeria student in here before?’
Without looking up from his monitor, the younger officer shook his head. ‘I don’t think we have.’
The fatherly cop turned back to Allie, studying her with open curiosity. Squirming a little, Allie had a good idea what he saw – a teenage girl with dirt on her face, tangled dark hair and a pounding hangover.
‘What’s a nice boarding-school girl doing burgling a church? Couldn’t your parents just buy one for you if you really wanted one?’
The computer cop snorted a laugh.
Looking back and forth between them, blood rushed to Allie’s face. She hated being laughed at.
Tilting up her chin, she met the officer’s gaze coldly. ‘You have no idea what my life is like.’
But the cop didn’t seem intimidated by this in the slightest. In fact, he looked as if it was the reaction he’d hoped for.
‘Oh really?’ He leaned back in his chair so far the front legs came off the ground. ‘Why don’t you tell us?’
Sullen, Allie shook her head. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘That is a shame,’ he said, his smile disappearing. ‘Because talking about it is the only thing that’s going to get you out of here in a hurry.’
A tingling sense of suspicion made goosebumps rise on Allie’s arms. This wasn’t right. She’d been arrested several times before and the police had never acted like this. They never cared where she went to school. It was always straightforward and no nonsense: ‘What’s your name? How old are you? Who’s your parent or guardian?’
Keeping her voice steady, she held his gaze. ‘I am sixteen years old. I can’t talk to you without a responsible adult present. Call my headmistress, Isabelle le Fanult. She will tell you everything you need to know.’
‘Oh, we’ll do that,’ the officer assured her. He didn’t look so fatherly now. ‘But first we want to ask you a few questions.’
For what seemed an interminable amount of time, they asked questions and she refused to answer them. How many students were at the school? How many teachers? What were their names? What went on at the school? Any strange classes? Any odd behaviour? Anything illegal? Drugs?
Allie just stared at the floor, angry and exhausted. All she would say was, ‘Call Isabelle le Fanult. She will answer your questions.’
When she finally heard Raj’s familiar voice from the front desk, the relief felt like fresh oxygen in her lungs. She took a steadying breath – she was going to get out of here.
The two officers left her alone then. The walls were thin, and she could hear Raj calmly presenting paperwork proving she was a student at the school, explaining – lying – that Mark was a student too, and that it was all just a childish prank. The school would, he said, pay for any damage.
He was nothing but polite although she could hear simmering anger beneath the surface of his voice. Whether that anger was directed at her or the police, she couldn’t tell.
When the police asked him about the school’s security system, he never raised his voice but his tone was chilling.
‘I could answer your questions, of course,’ he said. ‘But first, why don’t you tell me how long you held these children before you notified the school they were in your custody?’
A pause followed.
‘We would have called you sooner,’ the officer replied after a moment, ‘but they refused to tell us who they were. We had a devil of a time identifying them. Seems you’ve got some problem kids up at that school.’
Hearing the flat lie, Allie stared at the door in disbelief.
But the unspoken threat in Raj’s question seemed to have the intended effect. After that they asked no more questions. When she walked into the room a few minutes later, Raj’s eyes searched her face for signs of harm.
‘You OK?’ he asked.
‘No thanks to them.’ She shot a contemptuous look at the officers.
Raj’s face darkened. ‘Don’t blame them. You got yourself into this trouble.’
With that, the sense of relief evaporated – Raj might be rescuing her from the local cops but he was also still angry.
As they walked from the police station Allie squinted tiredly into the sun. The sky was bright blue, the late winter air crystalline and cold. The beauty of the day struck her as ironic.