Larkin's Barkin' - Pete Adams

A Quirky Mystery Book Series

Larkin's Barkin' by Pete Adams

Series Excerpt

Miss Doyle, sensing she ought to check on the toilets, found Chas shivering and hunched in a crouch in the corridor. She embraced the wreck of a child and not letting go of her hug, she took him off to the gymnasium. After cleaning him, she gave him some lost property gym shorts, saying she would wash his school ones and dry them in time for when he went home. Chas was so grateful he cried more, welcomed the further tug into the waist of the teacher’s skirts and lingered as she calmed and soothed him, but eventually, ‘Okay, we've been some time. So, let's get you to your classroom.’

Chas murmured a reluctant yes, knowing full well that by the time he got to the classroom the Saint boys will have spread the word of his accident and he would have to bear this along with the additional ribald comments about his PE shorts. But the anticipated cacophony of cajoling lackey school children, all scared of the Saints and equally relieved Larkin took the brunt of the gang torment, did not happen. The classroom was silent. No Saint gang, just an attentive class facing the front, paying attention to the Headmistress while a police constable stood behind the formidable woman, springing backward and forward, heel to toe, hands clasped behind his back, occasionally dipping and bobbing up with bent knees, full of self-importance.

As Chas and Miss Doyle entered, the spell of torpid, benumbed attention, was broken as the kids swung their gaze, relieved, distraction had entered like the cavalry over the hill. Chas, intuitively knowing he had to seek shelter, dived under the skirts of Miss Doyle, to the immediate merriment of the children. The pressure valve was released, and the class engaged in a thunderous cachinnation of belly laughs that resisted even the stare of the teacher but was brought under immediate control when the headmistress clapped her hands.

‘Larkin,’ the Headmistress barked.

‘Yes?’ Larkin replied, his response muffled by Miss Doyle’s skirted tepee.

‘Come out now!’

Miss Doyle made to say something but was immediately hushed, and Chas felt he had no choice but to reveal himself and accept all that was obviously coming his way.

As Chas emerged, the teacher made a hand gesture to silence the children who were fit to burst again.

‘Miss?’

‘Larkin,’ and the head looked to the constable, ‘PC Arbuthnot...’ she paused as the kids laughed at the name, then froze in response to the harridan's stare. Quiet achieved, she continued, ‘PC. Arbuthnot has some questions for you.’

Chas’s curiosity was piqued, but he knew enough to know that whatever the questions were, it would be a formality. The headmistress already swished the cane.

The constable opened up. ‘Larkin, you took advantage of a distracted Mickey Saint and smashed him over his head with a lump of four by two in the toilets.’ It wasn’t a question, as Chas had already surmised, but he could not disguise his shocked face. It was a look that said, what on earth are you talking about and, hope, that the persecutor of his short life might be dead and on his way to a fiery hell. ‘Saint is in hospital, in a coma, but he was sufficiently coherent as he was taken to the ambulance, to name you as his attacker, and this has been supported by his cohorts, all of whom you equally knocked about.’ The Constable looked for a response, a denial, or a confession. Chas knew it made no odds either way, he was bang to rights regardless and was dreading what would happen now.

Chas’s plaintive cry, "But Roisin," was met with confusion and was very soon dismissed. The Headmistress intervened as the class, Miss Doyle, and Chas were dumbstruck, not that Chas could see anything; all was a blur to him, his sight and his memory. Certainly, he had dreamed of the day he would be able to pound to death Mickey Saint and his gang and, in silent reflection, he thought a piece of four by two wood was a pretty good idea, but he couldn’t remember doing it? Did he do it? And whilst he mused in his little dream world, he could not avoid a generating a nervous grin and, realising his error, straightened his lips in panic, but they mischievously curved upwards again, his previously crimped innocent countenance cast aside.

This was all the headmistress needed to affirm guilt and she beckoned the miscreant boy with a crooked finger that Chas could not see, but he did hear, ‘Larkin, come here boy and bend over.’

He was drawn into the ingesting voice of the cane swishing crone, longing desperately for a saviour. There was the suggestion of a temporary reprieve as Miss Doyle made a plea for sanity to prevail but was immediately dismissed from the classroom. Chas felt doomed as his only ally departed, challenging the decision, but with no authority to countermand. It was the way of the world and nobody knew this better than Chas Larkin.

Chas felt the back of his collar being seized and, he was tugged so hard, momentarily, his one good foot left the ground. His club boot dragged noisily on the wooden floor of the dais as he was yanked to the teacher’s desk, folded over and, to Chas’s excruciating embarrassment, the headmistress tugged down his PE shorts expecting to bare Chas’s underpants, but he had none. He hoped this would stop the Headmistress in her tracks, but it didn’t. She gained additional strength from the shocked communal sucking in of breath from the class of children, who up until now had hardly dared breathe. She held Chas’s head down and began swishing, barking in time admonishing comments as she stroked painfully hard. Chas cried out to stop, but this seemed only to enthuse the demented woman who made the strokes land harder. So, he stopped and bottled up all his cries and feelings and dreamed he had the four by two and could strike back. It was how he weathered and suffered the searing pain, which made it difficult to focus even on a safe haven as the Head explained, stroke by stroke, that after this beating he will be taken to the police station and charged with attempted murder.

All Chas could think was this would be a relief. Could a police cell be a safe haven? Eventually, the swishing stopped, and, beyond his internalised sobs, he now thought, what would his mum say? And then, what was the silence? He heard Roisin’s voice. That distinct lilt was increasing in vehemence as it got nearer and louder. It was a sound he had never heard before; she was raging.

He dared to look behind him and, across his striped lambent bottom, he saw in a blur, a red-headed Valkyrie land a powerful swinging punch to the chin of the headmistress who went careering across the classroom stage. The copper went to grab the girl, but she stopped him with a fearsome stare and, through gritted teeth said, ‘Don’t you lay a feckin’ finger on me bluebottle, or you will answer to me Dah and his O'Neill brothers.’

The copper stepped back and began to weigh up the multiple threats that faced him. The O’Neills were still an unknown quantity, but the Saints were brute force incarnate, what you call in the law enforcement field, a rock and a hard place.

In the meantime, Roisin had lifted Chas’s shorts, threatened the class blue bloody murder in the form of the wrath of the O’Neills if they grassed, ‘And that goes for you, woodentop,’ she added to the floundering copper. He nodded his understanding and passed an advisory glance to the headmistress who looked back at the unfolding events from the floor, not realising more was to come for her as Roisin grabbed the woman’s hair and towed her, feet scrabbling to catch up with this slip of a teenage gangly girl, who seemed to have such amazing strength. Roisin forced the woman to the desk, where she was folded over, and prone, the headmistress felt a cold draught as her skirt was lifted and Roisin tugged down her old girl’s bloomers and set about caning the viperous woman, calling out with each stroke what would happen to her should she consider becoming a "duck’s arse" and grass on her.

Considering Roisin had only been in London a short while, her assimilation of the cockney slang was quite remarkable and that was all Chas could think as he relished the humiliation of the headmistress. Although he did consider with stark realisation that his trip to Kilburn, the Irish sector of London, in a futile attempt at running away, had borne remarkable fruit. Pleased now he had walked all of that way not treading on one cracked paving flag.

Books In This Series

Black Rose (Larkin's Barkin' Book 1)