SCATTERING - Coming soon

 Extract:

We saw the girls, who had finished their lunch and were chattering surrounded by several young men. Clare sighed. ‘Takes you back, doesn’t it?’

I gave her a weak grin. ‘I was never that popular.’ 

While we were watching, some of the workers began to trickle back to work. People crossed the open space in front go the forge and suddenly I held my breath. At the far end of the small square, someone had crossed from the forge to the next building. In the five or six strides he took, I recognised him. I’d know that easy, slight swing of his hips anywhere. It was Sugden. 

‘Clare! Did you see that man crossing at the back there?’ I could hardly get my words out. She peered through the small crowd and saw nothing. I was out of the door in an instant, racing around the corner of the visitors' centre and across the space. Behind the cluster of old workshops there was nothing but hedges and undergrowth. I ran inside the store shed but there was no one there. A second later Clare and the girls were behind me. 

‘What is it? What did you see?’ Bianca grabbed my arm.

‘I thought I saw someone I knew.’ I smiled apologetically at them. ‘But it couldn’t be,’ I looked across at Clare. Lynn had joined us.

‘I’ll talk to our security.’ Clare spoke softly as we followed the girls making their way back to the car. ‘We do have some security cameras.’ 

I was certain that I’d seen him. Belatedly, I realised that if I’d drawn attention to him, he could have been arrested. To many survivors in Sheffield, he was the man in charge of the community surveillance force, the dreaded CSF, but to me he was the man who had brought toys and much more to the orphans I’d supervised. He was the man with Japanese tattoos on his torso, who had tried to teach me about good Scotch, and he was the man who had warned me about the danger the children would face when the army attacked the Town Hall. I tried to keep involved with the conversations in the car, but I couldn’t get the image of him out of my mind.