A Promise Worth Keeping

Chapter Two

"Vernon!" screamed Aunt Petunia, rushing forwards to her husband's body and collapsing beside him. She rounded on Harry, hissing, "This is all your fault! You've killed him!"

Harry shook his head, staring at her in disbelief. "I didn't do anything." But even as he denied it, Harry remembered the crunch as he had kicked Uncle Vernon in the shins.

"Yes you did, you freak! You're just like them, you made this happen." She burst into tears. "And now he's dead!"

Uncle Vernon groaned.

"Vernon!" Aunt Petunia shrieked, sobbing over his chest. "Tell me you're all right!"

But while Uncle Vernon was certainly not dead, to Harry, huddled on the floor where he had fallen, he seemed to be very far from all right.

Heavy footsteps clumped down the stairs. "What's happened?" Dudley demanded in a querulous tone walking into the room. "I can't hear my telly because of all the -" He broke off as he saw his father lying beside the fireplace.

"It was him!" Petunia said viciously, pointing at Harry. "He attacked your poor father."

Harry stared at her. "No I didn't!" he yelled, stung at the injustice. "He attacked me!"

Dudley looked dubiously at Harry as if trying to work out quite how Harry might have caused his father to end up unconscious on the floor.

Petunia stood up, her eyes rapidly reddening from crying, but her pinched face was determined. "He hit your father on the head," she told Dudley. "I saw him do it."

Dudley gaped at Harry, but Harry was staring at Aunt Petunia in astonishment. "I didn't," he whispered.

Petunia glared at him and marched over to the phone where she dialled 999. She explained to the person at the other end of the phone how her nephew had gone mad and attacked her husband. The person must have queried this as Petunia burst into tears again and started sobbing hysterically. "I was there!" she yelled down the phone. "Vernon's lying there bleeding all over the new carpet. You've got to do something!" There was another pause and she said, "How long? Twenty minutes? He could be dead by then!" She slammed the phone down, but not before she told them the address.

Now that the first shock was beginning to wear off, Harry started to feel very afraid. This wasn't going to be like getting beaten up by Dudley's gang. This was much more serious. He started to move slowly backwards, trying to get out of sight. Surely Aunt Petunia wasn't going to go on saying he had hit Uncle Vernon on the head? But looking at her set face, he wasn't so certain. And Uncle Vernon would say it hadn't been him… his train of thought faltered. Both of the Dursleys would do anything rather than appear strange or freakish. And you didn't get much more freakish than suddenly flying through the living room and hitting the mantelpiece.

Aunt Petunia noticed that Harry was trying to disappear. She marched over and grabbed him by the arm, pulling him roughly to his feet. She didn't say anything to him, but bundled him into his cupboard and locked the door.

Harry sat on the bed, hugging his knees and started to shake. He could hear Aunt Petunia crying again in the living room and what sounded like Dudley trying to calm her down. He wasn't being very successful. Eventually, in the distance, Harry heard the noise of a siren. It grew steadily nearer, and stopped outside the house. Doors slammed, and footsteps ran up to the front door.

"Oh thank God you're here!" Harry heard Aunt Petunia say as she opened the front door.

"It's all right, Mrs, er Dursley? Where's your husband?" a man's voice responded. It must be the ambulance men, Harry thought, as Aunt Petunia told them her version of what had happened.

"The police'll be here shortly, seeing as it was an assault…" Harry couldn't hear the man's next words because they were muffled as he lowered his voice and turned away. He was right. They were going to put him in prison!

Aunt Petunia said something Harry couldn't hear either and then, "Is Vernon going to be all right?"

"Let's just get him to hospital, Mrs Dursley," the man said, not answering her question.

Tears started to roll down Harry's face. He didn't like Uncle Vernon, but he didn't want him to die. Only, when the paramedics said things like that on Casualty the patient always died.

A car drew up outside the house and doors slammed. The front door must have been open as the people walked straight into the house.

"Ah, Mrs Dursley, I'm DS Green and this is DC Abassi," another man's voice said.

"Er, hello," Aunt Petunia's voice said. She sounded drained.

"You reported that your nephew was responsible for the attack. Have you any idea where he might have gone?" Another man said.

"He's not gone anywhere," responded Aunt Petunia in a surprised voice. "I shut him in the cupboard under the stairs."

"The cupboard…" There was a pause. "Mrs Dursley, how old is your nephew?"

"He's ten."

"Ten? Oh bloody hell!" The policeman groaned. "Right." The man lowered his voice and said something else, of which the words, "emergency social work contact" were all that Harry could make out.

"I suppose we'd better have a word with him then, shall we?"

Footsteps came out into the hall, and the key unlocked the door to Harry's cupboard. The door was pulled open and Harry stared up into his Aunt's red-rimmed eyes. She was looking at him as if he were barely human. She made as if to grab his arm, but one of the serious looking men standing beside her put a hand on her arm and said, "Don't touch him, Mrs Dursley."

Aunt Petunia looked surprised but didn't say anything, she just gestured at Harry to come out into the hall.

Swallowing nervously, he stood up and walked forwards. In the living room, behind the two policemen, Harry could see a man and a woman in green paramedics' uniforms loading Uncle Vernon onto a stretcher.

The policeman looked down at Harry. "So, what's your name?"

"Harry, Harry Potter," he whispered.

"Well, Harry Potter, your parents aren't going to be very happy with you."

Harry must have looked confused, as Aunt Petunia snapped, "His parents are dead. He lives with us."

"Oh I see. Well Mrs Dursley as you're his guardian, we're going to have to take him down to the station, to speak to him formally about what happened. We'd really prefer it if you were there…" his voice trailed off in the face of Aunt Petunia's venomous expression.

"You expect me to leave my husband's death bed to hold his killer's hand while you interview him?"

The two policemen looked at one another. "Well when you put it like that, Mrs Dursley…" The one in charge said.

Harry noticed the glance the man flicked at the paramedic, and the almost infinitesimal shrug the man gave in response. That didn't look too hopeful.

"It's just that," continued the policeman, "we still need to interview the boy, so we'll take him down to the station, there'll be a social worker there, and er, we'll be in touch about arrangements." He paused. "We need his clothes."

"What?" Aunt Petunia turned from where she had been anxiously watching the paramedics.

"For forensics," he explained and nodded to the detective constable who went out to the car and came back with a large plastic bag. Aunt Petunia waved her hand at them as if to say, get on with it.

The one in charge said to Harry, "Right, son, take off everything you're wearing and put it in here."

Harry stared at the man in horror. "W-what here, in front of everybody?" he stuttered.

In response, the man simply held open the bag. He stood over Harry while he stripped off and put his clothes in the bag and got dressed in clean clothes the other policeman found for him.

The one in charge sealed the bag and turned to the paramedic, "Whinging General you're going to, is it?"

The paramedic nodded. The two of them wheeled the stretcher forwards and the policeman pulled Harry out of the way so they could get into the hall.

Aunt Petunia and Dudley climbed into the ambulance after the paramedics without a backward glance at Harry.

"Right, let's go," said the policeman and steered Harry towards the police car.

---

At one time Harry would have thought it would be quite exciting to go in a police car, zooming through the nighttime streets. Now that it was happening it wasn't exciting at all, it was terrifying, and they weren't zooming. The young detective constable was driving very sedately. Harry sat squashed in the back next the sergeant, almost smothered by his aftershave. Nobody said anything.

When they got to the police station the two policemen seemed annoyed that nobody was waiting for them. They told Harry to sit in the waiting area while they sorted things out. The one in charge came back about ten minutes later; he didn't look very happy. "Okay, son you're going to have to stay here tonight, seeing as the duty social worker hasn't seen fit to turn up."

Stay here? Did that mean…?

The man gestured at Harry to stand up and he did, slowly and reluctantly. The policeman put a hand on Harry's shoulder and steered him towards one of the doors. They went down some concrete stairs to a corridor that smelt of disinfectant and sick and something else Harry couldn't name, but which was deeply unpleasant. The detective left him with another policeman who looked at Harry and sighed. "Oh thanks a bunch, Dave."

The sergeant grinned and left, leaving the other policeman to fold his arms and say, "Right, kid take off your trainers."

Harry kicked them off. They were his old ones and really too small for his feet. Then the man opened a door and pushed him into, well it was a cell wasn't it, Harry thought. He was in prison.

Harry spent a miserable night. He didn't think he slept much. It was very noisy, with people shouting and sometimes even drunkenly singing. Even if it hadn't been so noisy he wouldn't have slept much. He kept running the night's events through his mind desperately wondering why Aunt Petunia had lied.

The next morning, just when Harry was wondering if they had forgotten all about him, and secretly hoping they might have done, a man came into the cell. He looked very young and tired, Harry thought, but his smile was friendly enough. "Hello, er," he glanced down at some papers he was holding and continued, "Harry, my name's Steve. I'm a social worker and I'm going to sit in while we try and find out what happened. Okay?" He was speaking to him as if he was five, Harry thought.

Steve took Harry up to an interview room set up with a tape recorder and a video camera. Two other men were waiting for them - they weren't the same policemen he'd seen the previous night.

They started off by asking a whole lot of questions that seemed to Harry to be quite irrelevant, about how he was getting on at school, and how long he'd lived with the Dursleys. Eventually though, one of them asked asked, "So what happened last night?"

"I don't know, I didn't hit him,"

"Whoa, let's start at the beginning shall we?" the man said. "What were you doing?"

Harry took a deep breath. "I was reading, " he began and proceeded to relate what had happened. However, when he got to the bit where Uncle Vernon had flown over his head he faltered, as the three adults looked at him with identical sceptical expressions. Harry looked down at his hands. "That's what happened," he said in a small voice.

"Hmm, right," said the other policeman after a long silence. "Well, there's other things we need to check out. We'll talk again later, Harry."

Suddenly Steve picked up on something. "Just a minute, Harry, you said your Uncle hit you. Where?"

"Er, here," Harry gestured at the side of his head.

Steve stood up and had a look. "He hit you hard enough to knock you over?"

Harry nodded. Steve turned to mouth something at the two policemen, and Harry caught the almost infinitesimal shake of his head that he gave them.

"Did you mention this to anyone last night, Harry?" one of the policemen asked.

Harry shook his head. Then he said, "Please, is Uncle Vernon going to be all right?"

"Sorry, son, we don't know. We haven 't been in touch with the hospital."

Steve fiddled with his pen for a moment. Then he said, "But I think we should get you checked over though, just to make sure you're all right. Did your Uncle knock you out when he hit you?"

"No," responded Harry, wondering why Steve suddenly seemed to believe what he had told him. "It made me dizzy though. I think I really saw stars."

"Was this the first time he hit you like this, or is it something that happens quite a lot?" Steve asked then.

Harry was puzzled at what he thought Steve was trying to suggest. "Er, he never hit me like that before."

"Hmm." Steve screwed up his face. Then he said to the two policemen, "We can see how Mr Dursley is while we're at the hospital."

Steve took Harry down to the hospital in his car. Once there, he had to wait for ages before a doctor could see him. The social worker left him sitting in a waiting area, watched over by a perfunctorily smiling nurse, while he went off to see if he could find out what had happened to Uncle Vernon.

Harry sat on one of the hard, plastic seats and stared at the clock. It slowly dragged round as people came and went, but nobody came to see him. Eventually Steve came back and smiled brightly at Harry.

"Good news, Harry," Steve said. "Your Uncle's going to be all right."

"Does that mean I can go home?" Harry asked.

Steve shook his head. "Er, well not quite yet, Harry. The police haven't finished investigating things yet. But don't worry; you won't have to spend another night at the police station. We'll find somewhere for you."

"Harry Potter!" the nurse on the desk called out. Harry jumped. Steve looked round. "He's to go up now," the nurse said, sounding bored.

They went up a flight of stairs to another floor of the hospital where they went into a small consulting room. The doctor didn't fit Harry's image of what a doctor looked like at all (which bore a close resemblance to the cast of Casualty). She was very young and very pretty and it was obvious to Harry that Steve fancied her rotten. This would have been quite funny, as she clearly didn't fancy him. However she didn't give Harry any opportunity to appreciate this as she became very business like and prodded his head, tested his eyesight and asked him a lot of stupid questions.

Eventually she sighed and said to Steve, "Well, it's hard to say. An open handed blow like that sometimes doesn't leave much evidence, although if he was hit, I might have expected to have seen a slight contusion, or perhaps some sign of concussion, but there's nothing."

Harry stared at her. What did she mean, if he had been hit?

Steve didn't look very happy with the doctor's conclusion. The bright smile he flashed at Harry as they went down to the car park wasn't quite as bright as it had been earlier.

After that, Steve took Harry to what he called emergency accommodation. It looked like an ordinary house to Harry when they got there, albeit a large one, an old red brick building with a large fire escape on the outside.

They went inside. It smelt like a school, with lino floors and harsh fluorescent lights. Harry was astonished to see from the clock in the hall that it was three o'clock in the afternoon. It felt like no time at all since he'd been doing the washing up last night.

A middle-aged woman appeared, and Steve talked to her for a few minutes. Then he turned to Harry, "This is Susan, Harry. She's in charge here, she'll get you sorted out." And he waved goodbye and left.

Susan smiled at Harry. He hoped she wasn't going to smile quite as much as Steve had done. "Right, " she said briskly, "let's get you a room and some pyjamas.

They went upstairs to the top floor. "Bathroom's along the corridor, the door that says 'bathroom' on it. Here we are," and she showed him into a small room, sparsely furnished with a bed, chest of drawers and a wardrobe. She gave him a pair of blue striped pyjamas. "These'll probably fit." She paused. "You can come down to the TV room or stay here, it's up to you."

"Stay here," Harry mumbled.

Susan made a face. "Okay up to you. You'll be all right?" Harry nodded. "Well tea is at six and breakfast is at eight. There's an alarm clock beside your bed." She pushed him into the room and closed the door behind him.

Harry went and sat down on the bed clutching the pyjamas to his chest. He didn't know what was going to happen to him. What if Uncle Vernon died? Would Aunt Petunia carry on telling everyone he'd hit him? It hadn't been him, it hadn't!

Only the fact that his stomach was rumbling dreadfully made him go downstairs for tea. When he got to the dining room though, he didn't really feel like eating. It was noisy and the food wasn't very good. There were a lot of children and only one adult supervising. The woman didn't notice that he hardly ate anything. Afterwards he drank a mug of hot, strong tea and crept back upstairs to his room.

Harry sat back on the bed clutching the pyjamas again, like some kind of security blanket. The fuzzy, nervous feeling in his stomach wouldn't go away and all he could think about was the image of Uncle Vernon flying over his head.

He must have eventually fallen asleep without setting the alarm, because he was woken the next morning by someone banging on the door and shouting, "Come on, up you get if you want any breakfast!"

Harry sat up with a start, realising he had fallen asleep on top of the covers, still clutching the pyjamas to his chest. He put them down, and slowly got to his feet, looking round the unfamiliar room. It hadn't been a bad dream after all. It was real.

He made his way down to the dining room. Two boys were helping a man clear away plates. The man turned round as Harry came into the room.

"Hi, " he said, " You must be Harry. I'm Jim. Help yourself to cereal. I think there should be enough milk."

Harry stood where he was, holding the door open by the handle. "Erm, where's Susan," he asked, finally.

"Oh, she just works back shift. You probably won't see her again," replied Jim cheerfully.

Harry helped himself to some rice crispies. They were the cheapest type of supermarket own brand, as were all the cereals. They weren't very good, but Harry knew from long experience, not to complain about food. While Dudley's every like and dislike had been indulged, if he had ever attempted to say he didn't like something, the only option Aunt Petunia had given him was not to eat it and go hungry.

After breakfast, Jim took Harry to a small interview room and told him to wait. "There'll be some one along from the social work department to speak to you soon," he told Harry.

The walls of the room were painted a horrible shade of pink, which almost went with the frayed grey carpet on the floor. Unfortunately the low, upholstered chairs didn't match the colour scheme and were covered with a clashing tweedy orange material. Harry stood at the window looking out. It was raining: the long, slow, heavy rain of an autumn downpour. It fell onto a large garden bare of anything except badly cut grass and a climbing frame. There was no one there.

Harry listened but couldn't hear much except for the distant sound of a Hoover. He thought the other children must have gone to school.

He hoped Uncle Vernon hadn't died.

Finally the door opened and a woman came into the room. She looked younger than Jim had, with that same, tired look Steve had had the previous day.

"Hi, Harry," she said. "I'm Elaine. I'm going to be your social worker, while we try and get this sorted out."

Harry almost dreaded asking, "Erm, where's Steve?"

Elaine looked blank. "Steve?"

"Er, yes, the social worker who brought me here yesterday."

"Oh, right. He must have been what we call the duty social worker. He'll be in a different team from me. I've not been there long so I don't know everybody yet." She smiled nervously.

Harry began to feel a sense of déjà vu. This didn't go away when the police arrived and neither of them were the same people he had seen the previous day, or on Wednesday night. They made him go over his story several times, clearly not believing what he said had happened to Uncle Vernon. He rather desperately wondered if he should lie and say his Uncle had tripped or something.

Harry didn't see Elaine the next day and nobody seemed to know what was going to happen to him. At least the police didn't come back. In one sense it was almost enjoyable. There were no Dursleys around to make his life miserable with their constant belittling, and although he wasn't allowed to go to school on Friday, there was a tutor who came into the centre in the afternoon, so he wasn't completely bored. But the weekend was deadly.

Then on the Monday morning, the duty care worker, yet someone else he'd never seen before, told him there was going to be a case conference about him that morning.

"What's a case conference?" Harry asked.

"It's a sort of meeting where we decide what's going to happen with you," the woman told him. Harry didn't know her name, and she wasn't really approachable enough to ask.

Harry wondered if they'd bother to tell him once they'd decided.

Later, just as he was finishing lunch, the duty care worker stuck her head into the dining room and said, "Harry, bring your things down once you're finished. You'll be leaving us this afternoon."

However, before he could ask her just what exactly that meant, she had gone. He went upstairs and put his things in his rucksack. It had appeared on the Friday morning, and Harry assumed Aunt Petunia had sent it. There hadn't been a message.

When he came back downstairs a woman was waiting for him. "Harry?" she asked on seeing him. He nodded and she smiled brightly at him. "Hi, I'm Jenny. Elaine can't come today, she's off sick, so I'm standing in for her. If you're ready we can get going."

In response Harry held up his rucksack. "Erm, are you taking me home?"

The social worker, who had reached out to take Harry's rucksack paused. "Well, not exactly, Harry. We had a meeting this morning to discuss what's best to be done. Your Aunt agreed that it would be better if we looked after you for a little while. But you can't stay here, this is for emergencies only, so I'm going to take you somewhere else. Okay?" She smiled brightly again. Harry wondered if it was something people got trained to do when they became social workers.

"What, you mean an orphanage?" he blurted out then, thinking of all the more unpleasant things he had heard about orphanages.

Jenny laughed, but Harry thought it sounded a bit strained. "Of course not! We don't have orphanages any more, we have children's homes."

Jenny drove Harry to the place, which wasn't an orphanage. It was on the other side of Greater Whinging so it took some time to get there. Eventually though, Jenny turned off the main road and drove down a narrow lane, through a belt of woodland. It came to an end in a car park, beyond which was a low building surrounded by a high wall, with CCTV cameras at every corner. Harry glimpsed a sign as they drove into the car park. He just had time to read -

St Brutus Secure Centre
Authorised Personnel Only