Then You Were Gone

скачать книгу бесплатно


‘How can I not look for him?’ Jazzy put in, almost incoherent with frustration and fatigue. ‘He’s my best friend, and my work colleague, and Rory’s godfather, not to mention Simone’s – whatever he is to Simone. I can’t just think, oh well, that was fun while it lasted, he’s obviously had enough of this life so we’ll all have to move on too. He could be in real trouble! If I don’t help him, then who’s going to?’

‘I know,’ she nodded. ‘I’m sorry. Look, let’s go to bed. But I just think, if you’re going to find him, you need to at least decide where to start.’

Jazzy did not have the least idea where to start, so in the morning he got up and went to work as normal. He arrived in the office slightly earlier than usual again, before Keith was likely to show up – before even Ayanna – desperate to buy himself some quiet time in which to hatch a plan to get information out of Keith. It was the only thing he could think of to do. He went into the office, switched on all the lights and the coffee machine, then went and sat down behind Mack’s computer again. He knew that he had switched it on, and he must have entered the correct password, because when he jerked awake nearly two hours later, the machine was humming away happily, Mack’s screensaver photo of Mount Fuji in spring only serving to disorientate Jazzy even further.

‘Keeping you up, are we?’ There was no humour in Keith’s tone, and Jazzy felt absurdly guilty. Keith was not his boss in any direct sense of the word, but ultimately he paid his wages, although Jazzy would probably have been terrified to be caught napping by him even if the power roles were reversed.

‘Sorry,’ Jazzy said, rubbing his eyes. ‘Bad night with Rory last night.’

Keith nodded politely but uninterestedly. Despite having fathered four children of his own, he never displayed any interest in Jazzy’s family life. ‘Still no Joe?’ He did not sound concerned.

Jazzy ran his tongue around his fur-lined mouth. ‘Um… No. Still nothing. You’re probably right, he’s probably decided to take a bit of time off. He’s owed some, you know the hours he’s been working lately.’

‘Yeah, the boy deserves a break,’ Keith said absently and he continued leafing through the pile of post he had brought into the office with him. ‘Don’t you fancy a bit of the same yourself? A bit of R&R with the wife and nipper? You can get some cheap deals this time of year, why don’t you take a bit of time off too? You look like you could do with a rest.’

This was the most fake Jazzy had ever heard Keith sound. Those words were absolutely, one hundred percent the opposite of the kind of thing Keith would normally say. Keith didn’t believe in holidays, he didn’t believe in resting, he didn’t believe in spending time with one’s family, and he certainly didn’t believe in being nice to people, especially to Jazzy. And anyway, Jazzy reiterated to himself, he’s not my boss. If I want to take some time off, I’ll bloody well take some time off, I don’t need him to tell me when to do it. ‘Nah,’ he said with studied casualness. ‘There’s too much needs doing here.’

‘OK,’ Keith looked at him with a little more interest. ‘Things been busy in the office have they? Many phone calls or anything? Any new clients? If Joe’s away, it might be as well to refer any of that stuff on to me, you know, any calls, emails, personal visitors.’

Jazzy did not recall ever having a customer show up at the Anastasia offices in person. Which was probably no bad thing, he reflected, seeing as it was essentially one room plus an entrance vestibule in a poxy serviced block in Tottenham. ‘No, not busy with customers, just… just some IT stuff that I’ve been working on.’ Keith never asked about Jazzy’s work and Jazzy never told him.

‘OK,’ Keith nodded, turning to go. ‘Well in that case then, why not take a few days off.’ When Jazzy did not respond, he said, ‘Well, it’s up to you. I just thought it might do you and the family good to get out of London for a bit.’

As Jazzy watched Keith disappear out of the office, he tried to decide, through the paranoid fog of sleep deprivation, whether or not Keith’s words had been a threat.

Chapter Six (#ulink_092c494b-fc3a-5430-b689-b047087caf58)

Simone had been standing across the road from Mack’s flat for nearly eight minutes, she calculated. Granted, she was at a bus stop so she did not look overtly bizarre, but two buses had passed by without her boarding them and she was going to have to do something soon to avoid drawing attention to herself.

It was not as though she would be breaking and entering; she had a key in her bag. Mack had given her a set of his keys a month ago, a profound and unexpected gesture that had filled Simone’s head with visions of something she had not dared allow herself to believe in before. A future that contained Mack – her and Mack, together. That was before the L-bomb text, before any of this, when the furthest ahead Simone felt able to plan was maybe a weekend away together over New Year.

She had never used the keys. If she stayed at Mack’s flat she arrived with him and left with him. She did not think Mack had ever really expected that she would use them. It was not the use of the keys that he had been giving her. He had been using the keys to tell her something that he was unable to say himself.

And she had never, under any circumstances, imagined that the first time she used the keys would be to sneak into Mack’s flat to rummage surreptitiously through his past.

Jazzy had phoned her the previous night sounding exhausted and frightened. Jazzy was not strong, nor was he brave. He refused to watch 18 certificate films or walk down back streets alone after dark. But Simone did not think she had heard him sound frightened like this before. ‘It’s something to do with Keith,’ he said, his voice heavy with defeat, and described the conversation he and Keith had had in the office.

Simone had felt a rush of panic. She did not like Keith. No normal person, she felt sure, could like Keith. Even Mack did not like Keith; she could tell from the way he acted around him, the fake persona he adopted of asking about golf handicaps and pretending to care about brake horsepower, always on edge as though waiting for some terrible backlash to come his way. And he was always reluctant to share things with Keith, to tell him even seemingly mundane details of his life. Simone was not even sure if Keith knew for definite that she and Mack were an item. It was as though Mack was worried Keith might one day use this kind of information against him. Mack still referred to him, in unguarded moments, as ‘Uncle Keith’, and Simone had put Mack’s willingness to spend time with a man who certainly dealt in cars of dubious provenance and illegally imported cigarettes, and probably had fingers in numerous even less savoury pies, down to the blind loyalty people feel to members of their family. Except Keith was no actual relation of Mack’s. He had known Mack all his life and was some kind of non-specific ‘family friend’, but Simone had not yet discovered on which side – Mack’s mother or his absentee father? Finding these things out had never mattered before. She had assumed she would find out the nature of Mack’s complicated relationship with Keith over time, or perhaps never. After all, she rarely needed to see the man; it was Mack and Jazzy, not she, who had gone into business with him, prostituting themselves to someone who only usually dealt in things on the very farthest side of legality, if not over the edge. It was Mack and Jazzy who ought to have asked themselves where Keith got all his money from in the first place before they had been willing to take any of that cash for themselves.

Mack’s flat was in a purpose-built block in one of the edgier parts of Dalston, and it was starting to get dark. Deciding she would rather be alone inside a flat that was not hers than alone on the street for any longer, Simone crossed over and typed the code into the door’s keypad.

She did not pass anyone else on the communal stairway and was relieved that nobody saw her unlock Mack’s front door. She could not shake this furtive feeling of being somewhere forbidden.

The inside of the flat was tidy, but no more so than usual. Simone had never managed to catch Mack out in terms of the presentability of his flat. Whatever time of day or week she had been round, whether he had been expecting her or not, everything, from his keys and wallet to his salt cellar and spaghetti spoon, was in its habitual place. ‘Just a spot of OCD,’ he had said self-deprecatingly when she first commented on the eerie tidiness. ‘We can’t all be slovenly artistic types who can’t find their Oyster card for all the piles of beautiful, hand-crafted tat everywhere.’ It was true, of course. Her flat was a tip and her Oyster card often went missing for days at a time. It had been beginning to worry Simone, before all this, before she actually had something proper to worry about, how she and Mack would cope if they ever did end up living together.

This flat had always seemed to Simone like an embodiment of the essence of Mack. Just as her flat was essentially Simone in converted Victorian terrace form – small, nice features, beautifully if unconventionally decorated but generally a bit scruffy – so Mack’s modern, clean-edged shrine to order in a rough-ish part of east London was indicative of the tight control he kept on all parts of his life underneath the earthy, common-touch exterior.

Simone was not sure where to start looking – or indeed what it was that she should be looking for. She and Jazzy had talked on into the night in endless circles, trying to exhaust all their options of what to do next, and ultimately concluding that one thing was resoundingly clear. They could not go to the police. Mack was not technically a missing person – he had written to them both only days ago, telling them of his intention to disappear. More to the point though, before he disappeared Mack had bought himself what amounted to an entirely new fake identity. They felt sure that this information might make the police keener to look for Mack, but not in the way that Simone and Jazzy hoped.

The next step they had agreed in their plan of action, if you could call it that, was that Simone would try and see if she could find anything to help them here in Mack’s flat. It was still possible that he had left something for her, some sign or pointer that only she would understand, some clue as to what was happening to him to make him so afraid.

Simone moved towards the lounge’s plate-glass window, realising with some amusement that she was walking on tiptoes. Mack’s laptop was not in its usual spot on the sideboard, just to the left of the framed photograph of Mack and Jazzy dressed in yukatas standing outside a Japanese temple, grinning like the pair of moronic tourists that they were. The computer’s absence did not strike Simone as particularly significant. She had never known Mack take a trip anywhere without it. She wandered into the bedroom, still having consciously to remind herself that nobody was watching her, nobody knew what she was doing – and that even if they had known, she was doing nothing wrong.

Mack’s bed was made and there was nothing on his bedside table apart from his alarm clock. The wardrobe doors were shut. It occurred to Simone that she did not even know if her wardrobe doors did shut – the thing was always overflowing with clothes, shoes, discarded carrier bags, items which she did not know where else to put, so she never even attempted to get the doors closed.

She slid open the doors of Mack’s built-in cupboard and was greeted with a line of neatly ironed shirts, jumpers, jackets and trousers, all arranged according to garment type, season and whether they could be classed as ‘work’, ‘dressy’ or ‘scruffs’. The smell of Mack’s laundry detergent caught in Simone’s throat and she pushed the door shut again before she allowed her emotions to get the better of her. Sitting down on the bed and idly picking at the seam on the pillowcase as she debated what to do next, she fought an almost overwhelming urge to climb under the covers and go to sleep, reminding herself that even if she did that, even if she woke up in the morning in Mack’s bed, it did not mean that Mack would be there beside her.

The flat was small, only the lounge/dining room, a tiny (and, of course, immaculate) kitchen, Mack’s bedroom and an en suite bathroom. There was nowhere to hide anything, should a person wish to do that. She thought about her own overflowing drawers of all life’s essential paperwork – bills, certificates, instruction booklets, letters from the days when friends still wrote to each other on pieces of paper. She refused to believe that Mack did not have at least some of that stuff around here somewhere. Nobody could have reached the age of thirty-three, could have lived a proper grown-up life without bringing with them some sort of paper trail, surely?

Going back into the lounge, she went over to the chest of drawers where Mack usually left his laptop and started to look through the drawers.

The top drawer was evidently the ‘receipts and instruction manuals’ drawer, everything piled neatly. The second one was filled with utility bills and other official correspondence, all filed according to subject and date, but the bottom drawer seemed more promising. It was stuffed to the brim with papers of differing sizes, none of it apparently in any particular order.

Simone lifted out the whole pile and put it on the rug before she started to sift through, still not sure what she might be looking for. Near the bottom of the heap she spotted some pieces of thick, cream paper with a crest at the top. They looked like exam certificates or something equally irrelevant but she glanced briefly through them out of a sense of thoroughness, mindful of what Jazzy had told her. ‘We need to concentrate on the parts of his life we don’t know about,’ he had said. ‘The things that happened before we knew him.’ The top certificate was his BA, Third Class from the University of Glasgow. That, she thought, at least chimed with what Mack had told her and Jazzy. And then, she caught herself. Could she already distrust Mack this much? Had she thought, even subconsciously, that Mack would have been lying even about his degree? Nobody, surely, would pretend to have got a third in their degree. If he had got a first or a 2:1, then Mack was not the type to have kept that quiet. And if he had been lying about having a degree at all, then he would surely have lied about having a better one.

Underneath the university certificate were his GCSEs and A-levels. The GCSEs were from a St. Aidan’s RC Comprehensive in New Cross, which sounded exactly the sort of place Mack had described to her in his anecdotes about smoking behind portacabins, sneaking out to the chippy at lunchtimes and high times on the altar boys’ trip to Rome. The A-levels though were from a different school. And not even a school in London. Chignall School, Essex was all it said at the top of the sheet. Simone had never heard of this place. Mack had never told her anything about living in Essex or changing his school. As Simone scanned the rest of the page she raised an appreciative eyebrow. Four A-levels in English Literature, History, Politics and French, all awarded at grade A. Seemed like Mack had been quite the star pupil before things took a dive during his university days.

She remembered her initial, instinctive, reaction to Mack’s degree certificate, her relief (or surprise?) that he had been telling her the truth. Had she always sensed something slightly off when Mack talked about his youth, some details being fudged or held back? What was this Chignall School? Something about the elegant crest with its Latin motto underneath and the heavy-duty writing paper of the letter containing his certificates, smelled of money. Was it a fee-paying place? Jazzy would know. Simone tended to assume that if a topic was anything that she associated with the lives of people richer than most, from pheasant shooting to collecting air miles, then Jazzy would be the person to ask. It was, so far, an assumption that had yet to be proven incorrect. Jazzy not being with her, she decided to look it up. Simone took out her phone and swore under her breath. Bloody thing. Mack’s flat was always a black spot for getting online, but her phone normally connected automatically to his wifi. She looked around for the router so she could re-enter the password, but it wasn’t in its usual spot. That was odd. Sighing, she flicked the hair out of her eyes and looked again at the certificates, as though, now technology had let her down, good old-fashioned ink and paper might miraculously provide her with the answer.

His A-level results were testament to his ability – might he not have won some kind of scholarship to this Chignall place? But if that were the case, why never mention it – especially to Jazzy? Simone had been to Exeter University – in fact that was where she had met Jazzy – and it had provided her with an education in, amongst other things, how posh people worked. Before the end of freshers’ week it had become apparent that for people who had attended private school, simply to mention the name of one’s alma mater was to instantly be allowed access to a kind of nameless, shapeless club whose members spoke a special language and whose rules were utterly impregnable to outsiders. Would not Mack have wanted to flash his credentials around when he met a fellow member like Jazzy? It was true that Mack was proud of his working class roots, had in fact made them a central part of his persona. And it was true that he called himself left-wing, had, he proudly declared, voted Labour all his life regardless of Clause 4, tuition fees, Iraq or the bright but short-burning flame of Nick Clegg that had swayed some towards the Lib Dems. But Jazzy similarly liked to think of himself as a lefty, liberal type regardless of his own privileged background as the son of a wealthy Cornish farmer. If Jazzy did not think having been to private school prevented him from having a social conscience, then nor did he think it was anything to be ashamed of. So why should Mack have felt it was something he needed to hide?

Simone looked at the wall clock. It was after nine, and she was unsure how frequent the buses were round here in the evenings. She did not relish the prospect of spending too many minutes on this street by herself, and the spookiness of an abandoned flat was beginning to get to her. She had come across no sign or pointer, no secret code or private byword that he had left for her, and the exam certificates seemed to be the most enlightening thing this bottom drawer contained. For a moment, she was tempted to take the pile of papers with her, but she decided against it. After all, Mack might return at any time. How would it look if she had trusted him so little that she had helped herself to all his personal stuff?

As she attempted to place everything back in the drawer at the precise angle it had previously been she saw a corner of beige paper, a grid marked on it in red ink. There was only one kind of official document that looked like that. She slipped it swiftly out of the pile. Afterwards she would ask herself what she was hoping to find. What, after all, can really be gleaned from a person’s birth certificate? Maybe she was conscious on some level of what Ayanna had told them, conscious that Mack leaving his birth certificate behind might be significant purely because he no longer needed it; because that person on the certificate was no longer him.

But she gazed at it for several moments and still the letters and numbers on it made no sense. This was not Mack’s birth certificate. It was not even the birth certificate of another man, one Mack might have been pretending to be. This was a woman’s birth certificate. A woman called Jessica Maria Novak. But then, as Simone continued to look at the letters, the numbers, the dates, she realised this was not even the birth certificate of a woman. It was a girl, a seventeen-year-old girl.

Chapter Seven (#ulink_3234e698-f1d9-5633-b2bd-3cae0c3f1215)

Keith had not been back to the office for three days. Of course not. Not when Jazzy wanted to speak to him. The man had a sixth sense about where he was least wanted, then made sure to be there whenever possible.

In fact, it was not even that Jazzy wanted to speak to Keith. He never wanted to speak to Keith. He knew he ought to, knew that Keith, if anyone, would be able to shed light on Mack’s past. But he had tried and tried to imagine how the conversation might go, and he just couldn’t. If Keith genuinely did not know where Mack was, then he would be worried by now – worried enough to say something to Jazzy or come into the office again or send out a bunch of his loaf-headed henchmen as a search party. And the fact that he had done none of those things surely meant that he knew where Mack had gone, or at least had some idea as to why. And if he wanted Jazzy or Simone to know these things, Keith would have told them. But he hadn’t.

When Simone had come to Jazzy and Petra’s house three nights ago with Mack’s exam certificates and that inexplicable birth certificate, it was the first time that Jazzy had felt genuinely afraid of what Mack might be running from. He had looked at the two certificates, one marking the pinnacle of a young man’s academic career, one marking the birth of a baby girl, daughter of Maria Novak, ‘father unknown’, at a hospital in Lewisham seventeen years ago and tried, without success, to connect the two, all the while Petra’s words echoing in his head. How well do you really know this guy?

Simone had asked him what he thought. ‘I don’t think anything,’ was the only truthful answer he had been able to give. He had, for the first time, truly understood what people meant when they said their mind had gone blank. It had been as though he was staring into a very bright light, blinding him to everything and wiping any coherent thought from his brain.

The exam certificate thing was probably nothing. It could just be inverse snobbery, be Mack pretending to be more street than he really was. Jazzy possessed just about enough self-awareness to realise that Mack, with his flawless sense of social infrastructure, knew that if he was trying to impress someone like Jazzy, then better to be a comprehensive school boy made good than a scholarship boy desperately trying to ingratiate himself with the boarders. The birth certificate thing though was weird, and scary. Jazzy had seen enough films and read enough airport thrillers to know that you could fake someone’s identity by using a stolen birth certificate – usually a dead person’s. Ayanna had told him that Mack had asked for a fake birth certificate. He wanted one for himself, Jazzy supposed, but he had not said anything about one for someone else. Maybe he hadn’t needed to, because he had already managed to get that person one.

Jazzy cleared his throat and gagged on the acid reflux that came up. He took a swig from the bottle of Gaviscon that was open on his desk. It was one thing for Mack to disappear; it was one thing for him to buy a fake identity before doing so. It was another thing altogether to be dealing in fake identities for seventeen-year-old girls with eastern European names.

Jazzy had let the last few days go by in the hope that something would happen to make all this go away; that Mack would walk back through the door as though nothing had happened and nobody would ever mention it again. That would suit Jazzy just fine. But now it was after eleven-thirty in the morning, and Mack had been gone for over a week. Jazzy had spent most of the day so far ignoring the work that had been piling up, and staring instead at the office door. He wanted Mack to breeze in and tell him he had been having a prolonged dirty weekend with a ladyboy he met on the internet, or that he had had a vivid and delusional nervous breakdown, but that he was all better now. He wanted Ayanna to come in and tell him that, oh yes, she forgot to mention, here was that forwarding address Mack had asked her to give him, and that by the way her brother had accidentally left one of the fake birth certificates for Latvian prostitutes that he dealt with in amongst Mack’s fake papers and could he have it back please? He wanted Keith to come in and shoot Jazzy through the head with a stolen gun and then he wouldn’t have to worry about anything any more. He wanted to SLEEP, for Christ’s sake!

Ayanna had not been in to work since she had told him about Mack asking her to help him hide. Nobody had been to clean the office at all for the first couple of days, but today when there had still been no sign of a cleaner by ten o’clock Jazzy had rung the cleaning company, to be told that ‘somebody’ would be round within the hour. ‘Somebody’ had been, but it had not been Ayanna, rather a man in his late twenties or early thirties of indeterminate nationality who either did not speak or understand English or was unbelievably rude, or both. Jazzy had asked the woman at the agency whether Ayanna might be coming back, and she had laughed a throaty smoker’s cackle and said, ‘Dear me, love, I wouldn’t have a clue. You don’t expect them to tell me, do you? I’m just their employer.’

Jazzy had rarely felt so old – or so conspicuous – as he did standing in this semi-circle of paved ground dotted with benches and water features. It was the feature entrance plaza of the spanking new sixth form centre of Ayanna’s college, built only months before the economy went tits up. He had been sitting on one of the benches for a few minutes, believing that his six foot four frame and receding hairline would stand out less if he was seated, and in that time he had realised that he needed to get inside the building.

Jazzy was reminded of the time he first took a girl out. She had been a new pupil at his school’s sixth form, the stage at which girls and boys were allowed to mix, and she had, miraculously, agreed to meet him in a pub in town well known for serving under-age with no questions asked. But when Jazzy had arrived to meet her, he had left her sitting alone at a table for a full five minutes; he had not recognised her out of her school uniform. And he now found he was having the same problem placing Ayanna without her green tabard and hoody.

He had already seen at least four girls who could have been her – all tall, all slim, all black with long, straightened hair, all wearing skinny jeans and carrying cheap cotton shopping bags over their shoulders. To his utter mortification, he had jumped up and run after one of them, getting halfway across the plaza before he realised it wasn’t her. For God’s sake, he was lucky the police hadn’t already turned up to question him on suspicion of grooming. He forced in a deep breath and tried to calm himself; after all, he could easily be a lecturer taking a break between classes. Or, a much more disturbing thought occurred to him, he could be the father of one of these kids. He paused and did the maths; yes, it was a stretch but it was just about possible that he could be the dad of one of these heavily made-up young girls or skinny-jeaned young lads, all strutting around looking as though they were posing for a prospectus photo. He shook his head. That thought did not make him feel any better.

It was hopeless sitting here, he realised. So many students were constantly bustling in and out of the plate glass and chrome entrance hall that he could easily have already missed Ayanna. He needed to get inside and find his particular needle in this seething haystack of adolescent hormones.

The building was huge, and, as he stood gormlessly in the entrance lobby looking at the signs pointing to Rooms L8 – M22 and Floor G, every corridor that led away from the atrium looking identical, Jazzy saw at once that his only chance was to brazen it out. Not for the first time, he thanked whatever force of creation it was that had endowed him with such a trustworthy, unthreatening demeanour. OK, maybe he would never be CEO of his own multi-million-pound company, but he did come across as a nice guy, and sometimes that could be worth a lot.

He put a hand in his pocket and strode, smiling towards the central reception booth. ‘Hi.’ He leaned forward onto the counter and broadened the smile still further. If he acted as though he and the young man behind the desk had met before, he felt sure the guy would feel obliged to play along. ‘How’s it going?’

The young man smiled, only the smallest amount of wariness behind his eyes. ‘How can I help you?’

‘I’m just here to see Ayanna. Ayanna Abukar? I’m supposed to be meeting her outside her class but I’ve left my diary in the office so I don’t have a note of which room she’s in just now.’

The man blinked. He did not look much older than twenty. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude but… who are you?’ He flashed Jazzy an apologetic grin.

Jazzy laughed, as though acknowledging the absurdity of his having to ask. ‘I’m Sam, I’m her case worker.’ It was the vaguest job title he could think of that also sounded sufficiently important to allow him access to a student. Petra always told him that the main thing that prevented people achieving what they wanted in life was not knowing their limitations. Jazzy knew he was never going to be able to pass himself off as a nurse or a lawyer or a probation officer. He would be laughed out of the place in seconds. But he hoped he was both scruffy enough and middle class enough to pass muster as some kind of generic pastoral worker.

That, or maybe just the smile, seemed to work. The man typed something into his computer. ‘She’s in Chemistry right now,’ he said. He turned to look at the clock behind him. ‘She’ll be finished in about five minutes.’

Jazzy nodded. ‘OK. Thanks. And, erm, where exactly is…’

The man regarded him for a moment. ‘The labs,’ he said, gesturing behind him. ‘In the science block. If you just wait in the main corridor you should see her as she comes out.’

‘Brilliant, thanks a lot, mate.’ He turned and walked the way he had indicated. Shit. The whole point of making up those stupid lies was so he would not have to loiter in the corridor like a deviant or a dead-beat dad.

He found the science block and followed a long corridor with classrooms either side. Most of them were occupied and he peered through the doors’ glass panels trying to work out which one might be A-level Chemistry.

Jazzy had done Chemistry himself at sixth form and, scanning the white board in the first room he looked in, he was able to dismiss that class immediately. A cross-section of a spinal column. Biology. The next one was also Biology, the one after it was empty, then one with a class of fourteen teenage boys copying the longest mathematical formula he had ever seen. Physics, surely. The one after that, though, was more promising. The slide on the screen was titled: The electron configuration of an element. Jazzy felt his eyelids growing heavy with boredom at the mere memory. Bingo. Doing a quick scan of the corridor, he ascertained that the remaining two labs were empty. The electron configuration group must be Ayanna’s. Jesus, poor kid.