102 Chapter three, 2016, field trip revised: 9 (1/2)
Maybe he had pushed the kids a bit too hard, especially those who were really the age they looked. Still, with the Red Rose situation brewing he couldn't afford doing anything else. The suicide was unexpected, even if he secretly was satisfied with the outcome. Rapists deserved death. Simple as that.
Nakagawa looked out through the window and saw how the fashion shoot wrapped up for lunch. Around him the dining hall filled up with their middle management guests and through the door opening to the lobby he saw the Matsumoto kid run up the stairs to his room. 'Yukio, was it? Yes, I think so.'
The Wakayama twins went straight for his table with the sister giving her brother a bewildered look. 'You kids aren't supposed to sit here. Ah, my bad, you're not the kids right now, you're in charge of today's events.' The brother apparently had a much keener sense of the social game than his sister.
He greeted the twins as they arrived. Today they were colleagues, not principal and students.
”Sensei.”
”Wakayama-san.” It felt strange to address one of his students as a peer.
Further back in the hall the Takeida girl stood searching for her friends among the tables with a forlorn expression in her face. Nakagawa rose and waved to her. ”Matsumoto-san is upstairs on an errand,” he said to save her some face.
She turned and gave him a surprised look. Then she must have seen the twins seated at the table and hesitantly walked up to them.
”Ryu, have you seen Kuri-chan?” Takeida-san looked at Nakagawa after asking the question. ”Sensei,” she added and bowed.
To his right Ryu smiled and nodded. ”She should be coming back from the beach soon enough. I had Yukio check up on Urufu.” Then he turned his head and looked Nakagawa straight in his face. ”I'm out of tricks. If Yukio doesn't manage to get Urufu down here I don't know what we'll do.”
”That makes for an interesting dilemma, wouldn't you say,” Nakagawa said. There wasn't much else he could do. When duty called, and when friends were in trouble, Hammargren would either rise to shoulder the burden, or he was so deeply traumatised by his experience that they'd have to call in experts.
A waiter came with their food and all four of them started to eat. It gave Nakagawa some time to think about what had happened and give it some context.
'And I can only wait and see. Ten years since Ashiga-san arrived and we failed so badly at bringing out his full potential.' That was a sobering thought. Meddling was needed, but in Ashiga-san's case it had been the new arrivals who forced him make a stand. Infuriating as his pranks were Nakagawa still preferred to see his old student having a direction in his life once again.
”Is there anything I can do if we have a situation?” Nakagawa asked. He wouldn't be party to actively crashing Hammargren's fledgling business, if avoidable.
The Wakayama girl gave him a stare. ”Sorry, sensei, but I doubt it,” she said between mouthfuls. ”I don't know what your speciality is, but I doubt it involves proactive processing in an event driven environment. After all our educational system can hardly be called a complex ecosystem.”