A Fall from Grace (6 page)

Charlie grunted to show that he'd registered and understood. Some minutes later Felicity said, “I wonder if this is something we could talk to Chris about.”

But from the other side of the bed there came only the sound of deep breathing. Felicity knew when Charlie was fast asleep.

But perhaps the idea had got through subliminally, or perhaps he had got the idea independently (talking to Chris, after all, was practically an automatic reaction in Slepton Edge when situations of crisis or even mere difficulty cropped up). Because three days later, when miraculously Charlie had got home before six, Chris and Alison dropped in for coffee later in the evening, and as they settled down, Charlie on an impulse said to Chris, “Do older men ever suddenly get the need to have children—have them sexually, I mean—when there's never been any suspicion of pedophilia before?”

Chris raised his eyebrows and thought.

“You'd probably know more about that than I would. I never came across a case in my period as a GP. But who knows what's going on in people's thoughts. I just couldn't say.”

“I don't think it's sexual,” said Felicity. “If that is the problem the reason is his need for admiration, cossetting, unconditional love.”

“I take it that it's your father we're talking about,” said Chris.

“Yes,” said Charlie, stirring his coffee meditatively. “We've had an indication that he hasn't been entirely
honest with us—that he had to leave his cottage in the West Country after some kind of trouble.” He gave Chris a summary of Mrs. Easton's letter. “Felicity has got the idea that the trouble involves young girls, though that's certainly not stated, and to my mind anything else is equally possible: he could have pressured one of the older women, who obviously were doing everything for him in the domestic line, for sex.”

“Does it have to be sexual?” Alison asked. “Couldn't he have swindled one of the women out of her comfortable nest egg?”

“He helped us—considerably—to buy this house,” said Felicity, “on top of buying his own. He's
very
comfortably off—from writing, but mainly a large legacy.”

“When did being comfortably off stop people from wanting more?” asked Alison.

“You've got to face it, Felicity,” said Chris. “The problems back in wherever-it-is—”

“Coombe Barton.”

“Pure Agatha Christie land. The problems could be anything: exposing himself in a public place, not paying his tradesmen's bills, spreading malicious gossip, even putting some of the sterling citizens of the village into one of his books. If you fix on young girls, perhaps it's because you're feeling slightly guilty—feeling that you failed him in some way.”

Felicity shook her head at Chris's suggestion.

“I am
not
feeling guilty. If Dad has a need for total admiration, he's the one who should feel guilty. And to a lesser extent my mother, who gave it to him all their married life. She was nothing to him but a doormat,
and I feel ashamed of her. I'm proud of myself for seeing through him when I was still a child.”

“OK, OK. But you really know the answer to this, don't you? You have to ring this Mrs. Easton and ask her straight.”

“It seems such an invasion of his privacy,” said Charlie.

“That's what it is. So if you're not willing to do that, you'll have to live with uncertainty. That's not so very terrible. Most of us do that all the time, often with people we know well.”

“A policeman hates living with uncertainty,” said Charlie.

“But a policeman has to do it, the same as everyone else, and probably more frequently.”

“Hmmm,” said Charlie, considering. “I suppose that's why we always say we know who did most of the well-known unsolved crimes. We know who did it, but we can't put together a case that would stand up in court. We don't like facing up to the fact that if we can't put together a strong case, we can't really know who did it.”

* * *

The next day the Leeds police hunt for the gunman who had shot the policeman involved Charlie again, and for the next four days. It ended with the arrest of the culprit in a bed-and-breakfast dive in Bolton. It was an appropriately dingy and depressing end to a sad case. And after that came the mountain of paperwork and cross-checking. So it was nearly a week after the earlier conversation with Chris before Charlie could ring
Harvey Buckworth, the drama teacher at Westowram High. He was interested and cooperative, as well as a little apprehensive, as most people are at unexpected approaches from the police. He was teaching the class that he thought Charlie might be interested in the first period after lunch next day, and he had a free period for a chat immediately afterward. He suggested he meet Charlie at the school gates about half past one.

Loitering there next day, Charlie hoped no one was going to take him for a pedophile. Some of the girls—no, some of the
pupils
—in the playground seemed to be dressed and behaving in a way calculated to attract the wrong kind of attention. Charlie was relieved when he saw Harvey Buckworth approaching from the main building. He knew at once it was him, because he recognized him from seeing him in the Black Heiffer. Otherwise he would not have thought him an obvious drama teacher: he was short, bespectacled and quite lacking in charisma. His handshake, however, was firm and welcoming, and there was a spark of vitality in his eyes.

“I think the best idea would be for me to put right out of my mind any knowledge of what you told me over the phone,” Buckworth said. “As you know, it's not clear what if any offense was committed, and it's not clear either what motive or aim there is in what these children are doing.”

“That's fine by me,” said Charlie. “But why am I supposed to be here?”

“I'll just call you an observer,” said Buckworth,
as they began toward the main school building. “You could be a talent scout from
Emmerdale Farm
or
Corrie
. These children are performers, all of them, and they'll be thrilled that you're here.”

Charlie felt distinctly dubious about this, but kept silent. They entered the school's main building and made for a room that was larger than a classroom but not quite a hall. The desks were all toward the back, making a good-sized playing area at the front. There was no teacher's desk facing the class, merely a chair set a little apart from the desks, from which Buckworth could watch the performers and turn easily to address the rest of the class. Harvey Buckworth gestured Charlie to one of the desks in the back row, which Charlie overfilled, and then Harvey talked to the class from his chair.

“We have an observer with us today,” he said, raising his voice over the moderate din and quelling it, “so I want you to be on your best behavior. And to give your best performance.”

Charlie was conscious of faces turned slightly, eyes alert, note being taken of him. He thought that most of them had heard of a black policeman coming to live in the area.

“We'll go back a little,” announced Buckworth, “to Act Two, scene two, and we'll take it up at Stephano's song—‘I shall no more to sea.' I'll take the first cast today, and we'll go straight through to the end of the scene. Right: Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano.”

Three of the boys went to the acting space and took up well-rehearsed positions as Stephano began his
song about the “master, the swabber, the boatswain and I.” Caliban, Charlie noticed, was a strong-looking dark-haired white boy of about fifteen. Trinculo and Stephano were smaller and younger, and Trinculo was black. Color-blind casting. The three boys were surprisingly good at acting drunk—perhaps through watching their parents, perhaps through watching their fellows or themselves. They weaved around the stage waving their bottles with the abandon of a twentysomething on a cheap holiday in Majorca.

“Now get it together,” said Buckworth from the sidelines. “You've got to get it disciplined before it can be loosened up a bit. Right, from ‘I'll show thee the best springs: I'll pluck thee berries.' ”

And the boys shed some of the assumed haziness from drink and came together, naturally enough, in the center of the stage, as Caliban led them with “Farewell, master; farewell, farewell” and the three, looking straight into the audience, sang the song Charlie remembered hearing a parody of.

“'Ban, 'Ban, Ca-Caliban,

Has a new master—Get a new man.”

“Right, that's fine,” said their teacher. “But let's start getting it a bit more natural, a bit less disciplined. Don't all look at the same part of the audience. Each of you choose someone to sing the song to, then change to someone else at some point as you go along. Right—from ‘Farewell, master.' ”

They began again, this time more of a rabble and less
of an army, and as the song progressed some of the audience began to join in—Charlie noticed which ones. By the third repetition the whole class was joining in the song, belting it out with disciplined ferocity. Charlie was impressed by Buckworth's quiet mastery of his talented class. What exactly had worried this teacher so much that he had talked to Chris Carlson about it?

They had gone on to the next scene, Ferdinand carrying logs, observed by Miranda and, from a distance, Prospero. The boy playing Ferdinand did a convincingly sweaty job, but the girl playing Miranda was quite extraordinary. She glowed in her fresh, innocent appreciation of Ferdinand—her voice took to the verse as if it was her playground argot:

“. . . I would not wish

Any companion in the world but you,

Nor can imagination form a shape,

Besides yourself, to like of.”

Charlie knew her, knew her at once. She was the leader of the little gang who were persecuting the Nortons, one of the older ones. And he knew something else: when she looked into the audience she looked at him, and she knew who he was. It didn't put her off her stride one iota, but she knew he was a policeman, and that he lived in Slepton Edge.

The rehearsal progressed smoothly to its end. The play was clearly halfway ready to be a really notable public production. When Harvey Buckworth called a
halt to it there were still five minutes of class time left. He looked interrogatively toward Charlie, who made a swift decision. He had once toyed with the idea of trying to get into drama school. Performing was in his blood, though he knew if he'd taken a role in the rehearsal he had just witnessed he would have acquitted himself embarrassingly beside these talented teenagers. He knew that because he had experienced something like envy when he had watched them—young performers, one or two of whom could be poised to start a professional career in the theater. Still, he had stood up in front of school classes before, and he felt he could even say something to these drama specialists. He got up and went to the front of the class.

“I enjoyed that. And I was impressed by it too,” he said, looking at them. He felt sure he could identify one or two of the younger children he had seen walking past his home. “I can see how exciting it is, being in a play, and how naturally you all take to it. But there's one thing I don't think some of you have learned yet.” And he let his eye range around the group, occasionally resting on faces that he recognized. “Acting is one thing, real life is another. Some actors will take hours before a performance to get into a part, so he or she feels they
are
the character in the play. But even he has to draw a line between being onstage and being off it. Because otherwise the wife of the man playing Othello would be in danger of getting strangled in a fit of jealousy. Or the man sleeping in the spare bedroom of the woman playing Lady Macbeth might be in danger of getting a dagger thrust into
his heart. Do you understand what I'm saying? Some of you have been carrying over things you've been acting out here into your everyday lives. And if you were to take it much further than you already have, you might find yourselves in real trouble.

“Thank you for letting me watch you today.”

And joining up with Harvey Buckworth he went down the aisle between the desks and out the door. But before the door shut he heard a girl's voice say, “What does he know? He's just a thick black cop.”

He and Buckworth looked at each other.

“Want a chat?” the teacher asked.

“I think so, yes,” said Charlie. “There are one or two things I don't know.” As they walked toward an empty classroom he said, “They were pretty impressive.”

“Thank you. They're handpicked, of course, from the whole school, so I have would-be thespians of all ages.”

“The girl was fabulous.”

“She is. There was strong competition for the part, because Shakespeare never has enough women's parts. Anne Michaels was the best of a very promising bunch.”

“She's one of the little group.”

“I guessed that from looking at you.”

“She's the leader, I think.”

They found a classroom and shut themselves in.

“I'm sad about that,” said Buckworth, sitting at a desk. “But it's probably just a phase: the usual hormonal problems of teenagers magnified in the case of would-be actors. They crave excitement, recognition, status among their peers—it's perfectly natural.”

“Maybe. Tell that to the Nortons when they've got seven or eight of them shouting and chanting outside their living room.”

“What exactly have they been doing?”

Charlie told him, ending up: “In other words, borderline stuff as far as the police are concerned, but unpleasant and well-organized.”

“Well, at least your little talk should have stopped
that,
” said Harvey. Something in his tone caught Charlie's attention.

“There's a ‘but' in your voice.”

“But it won't have done anything to rein in the impulses that led to this particular outbreak of activity. They'll find something else to do—either as individuals or as a group. Let's hope those are things that are less unpleasant, less upsetting to the victims.”