The Girl of Colours (Book TWO)

Once Upon a Dream

"Mr Smith, I need you." I whispered, coming into the attic in the dead of night. "Quietly, don't wake up Luke." Sarah Jane was away for a night, investigating something in Swindon. Something about there being a sudden influx of signals coming from a school there, so we were left alone, just for a night, but Mr Chandra came and checked in at ten, and he would again at 8.

"Calliope, it is 2:23am, is there something wrong?" He asked me, smoothly sliding out of the wall, without the usual fanfare and hisses of steam. 

I shook my head though, still in my pyjamas as I sat on the steps. "N, no, nothings wrong. I just... I had a dream, and it gave me an idea. Um, are you able to access the police records from 1998? A, um, a car accident, concerning two little girls and their parents?"

A box appeared on his screen, showing a list of all of those accidents. "I'm afraid you're going to have to be more specific, Calliope. Do you know the date of which this accident happened?"

There was no way that I would ever forget. "March 1st. It was concerning Lucie, Harry, Katie and Jaclyn Monroe."

"Result found. They skidded off an icy path at night, where no one found them until the following morning on the 1st, and by this point there was only one survivor, the elder daughter Jaclyn, though she first went missing, and then died in 2005."

"She didn't die, Mr Smith." I told him softly, taking my hair out of the braid I had to keep in in for school. "She had her death faked to get away from her abusive foster parents, and that body didn't die for another 40 odd years."

"I suppose that is your way of telling me that you are the sole survivor of the car crash." No shit, Sherlock. "Is there any reason in which you have chosen to look at the police report of the accident that left you hospitalised for many months?"

Sighing, I shivered a little, grabbing Sarah's back up blanket from the table and wrapped it around myself. "Because Harry, my dad, staged it all. He did it to get at dad, and I just... Call it a hunch, but I want to research any people who miraculously appeared the same date in the accident. Any new people in the database. A 6 year old girl and her mother, aged about 28."

Mr Smith didn't do anything for a moment, and I just sat there in the empty black silence until one of us broke it. "Are you suffering with nightmares, Calliope?"

Hit the nail on the head why don't you, Mr Smith. "That has nothing to do with any of this."

"Calliope, you have been through more trauma than most people ever would see in two lifetimes, it is understandable for you to have nightmares about it. Have you spoken to Sarah Jane or Luke about them?"

No, no I couldn't... I couldn't talk to Luke about all of it, there was only one person I'd ever told the whole story to. "Mr Smith, please. Just run the checks. 6 year old girl and 28 year old woman who suddenly appear on the records around that date."

"I have already done so, I just wanted to be sure that you were ready for what I told you." He replied, then got up the images of two women, and my hearts stopped in my chest I knew both their faces. "This is Katerina, Katie, Prince, and her mother, Lucille, Lucie. They were first on record the morning of the accident, both in Oxford with limited memories. They believe that they were in an accident, where the father and sister died."

Oh my God... Oh... "T, that's my mum, and my sister. Well, my adopted family." I breathed, standing up, still with the blanket around me and walked toward the screen. "Oxford, I've never been there, and the Master, he would have known that dad never really went there either, he could hide them away without me finding them. Can you print off um, where Katie works? If she works?"