Death of a Teacher (2 page)

Two walkers passed him. ‘How do,’ said the man, trying the Cumbrian greeting.

‘’Ow do,’ said Phil, and smiled. I look like the local bumpkin, sitting here in my cords and check shirt, he thought to himself. But this is all my land, and I’m really the local lad made good. He roused himself from the bench, and felt the comfortable weight of the iron keys in his pocket. Then he scrambled down the path and inserted the keys into the door of St Trallen’s Chapel. Phil loved the chapel. No one knew whether it was a folly or had once been a real shrine. But it had been one of the reasons Phil had bought the farmhouse, and the land, when he decided to come back to Pelliter.

Perhaps it had been a mad idea, with all the place’s associations, but he had to confess that he had been drawn here. His parents had lived in Pelliter all their lives, starting in one of the smallest terraced houses where Phil had been born, before graduating to a bungalow near the shore. Phil had left home at seventeen to work in the south, like a lot of ambitious young working-class lads did in those days. He had never expected to come back. Then his youngest child, his only daughter, had gone to Cumbria to study art at Norbridge College and the area had started to resonate with Phil again. His 
daughter had chosen to live with her grandparents – until she had moved to the squat on the Pelliter Estate.

Becky’s mother had been creative, innovative, and unconventional. Inside the chapel Phil sat down and bowed his head. He thought of his two sons who had both inherited their mother’s practicality. One was an accountant in London, and the other was a teacher in the Midlands. But as always in the chapel – and everywhere else – he remembered his favourite child.

‘Oh, Samantha,’ he whispered into his cupped hands. ‘How could you?’

He asked her regularly when he was alone. How could you? How could you? To die and leave a child, a tiny baby. To take your own life through stupidity and indulgence, expecting everyone else to cope with the mess you left behind. He had always felt an affinity with Samantha and he had been shocked to the core by her death. But his wife Judith’s common sense and pragmatism had pulled him through the tragedy, and he was grateful to her for that. And, above all, they had Becky to care for.

The silence of the chapel gave him time to think, unlike the hive of domestic activity at home. He sometimes thought that Judith’s way of coming to terms with things was by dashing round in never-ending activity, but she had always been a busy housekeeper, dedicated to the family – to the boys, anyway. It was an ugly truth he rarely dwelt on, but Judith and Samantha had never really got on.

But that wasn’t true of Becky. She was a great kid, bright and talented, who loved her grandad and grandma. Her adoption had been almost trouble-free.

Phil stood up and straightened the big picture board on the stone wall of the chapel. It was a copy of a page of the medieval
Book of St Trallen
, showing the young St Trallen weeping in the famous scene where she rejected the pagan prince. The
Book
was the chapel’s only claim to fame, once housed here and now safely in the Norbridge Abbey crypt. Phil opened the chapel every morning and locked it at teatime. There was one simple window at the
north-east
end, and a rusty bell over the door to the south-west. It was very plain. Few people bothered to go inside, besides himself and Becky.

But Phil noticed that the little pewter dish had tumbled off the altar table again. That was very odd, he thought. It was the second time he had found it on the floor. It reminded him that his wife had found a stainless-steel pan lid in the garage early that morning.

‘How did that get there?’ Judith had said, irritated. She liked everything to be shipshape. She’d be expecting Phil home soon. Becky would be waiting for him too, busy on the computer. She would shake her head irritably when he patted her dark curls and say, ‘Grandad, I’ve told you not to do that. It’s childish.’ And he would laugh at her and do it again. Becky was a clever girl 
and that brought problems too. Now to add to his worries, the local private school would be announcing the date of the new special scholarships with temptingly reduced fees. Judith was desperate for Becky to enter. But it would still be a financial struggle and what would be right for his granddaughter?

Phil stood up slowly from the pew, suddenly feeling his age. The calm of the chapel was a rare oasis in his life. He locked the door on the peace, and started the ten-minute walk over the coastal path to his family in the old farmhouse.

That evening at dusk, when the pretty shoreline south of Pelliter was quiet, one of the walkers who had passed Phil Dixon earlier, discovered that she had lost her compass. A few minutes later, she and her husband left their B&B and were striding back along the silent road, looking for it. They panted as they clambered up the softly rounded cliff head. Her husband stopped. St Trallen’s Chapel snuggled into the bracken on his left. On his right, there was a sudden dip down to the sea.

‘Watch out,’ her husband said. ‘You could have a nasty fall.’

Then he yelled out. Someone else already had. A life-size puppet in a
business
suit was sprawled just a few feet below them, its neck at an angle. A mop of dark curly hair was ruffled softly by the breeze. At the sound of the walkers, a foraging animal lurched reluctantly away, darting almost silently through the gorse.

The woman’s shrieks went on and on. Her husband had tried to shield her from it, but she pushed his arm aside. She couldn’t help screaming at what she saw. The dead man’s face had been slashed and he had no eyes.

T
he next day, at Norbridge police station, the sergeant from community policing was on the phone to the pathologist at the hospital. It was Saturday morning and Sergeant Liddle had come to work specially. Fatalities were rare when it wasn’t a car wreck or domestic violence, and he wanted the information from the horse’s mouth.

‘So what do you make of it?’

‘Well, don’t quote me, Sergeant, but the bloke died from a nasty fall. Broke his neck. The face was probably slashed afterwards with one of those
cat-skinner
knives. That’s the only sign of an attack.’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘Well, if he was being chased and fell, maybe the attacker didn’t realize he was dead and went on slashing around the face.’

‘Sounds nasty. What are the crime investigators thinking?’ Sergeant Liddle had transferred to community policing a few years earlier, but he had kept up his contacts. He disliked going cap-in-hand to the CID for information. The pathologist could supply him with plenty of useful inside gen.

‘The man was obviously robbed. There was nothing left on the body of value. In fact, I hear that there were no personal details at all.’

‘So it was a violent mugging? In the middle of nowhere? Some wandering thief got lucky, did he?’

‘Very funny, but what else do you make of it? Perhaps the chap was walking on the headland and this was his look-out.’ The pathologist grunted. ‘Or not, when you see what’s happened to his eyes. That’s the sort of nasty touch these gay-bashers go for. Knife crime is everywhere.’

You don’t say, the sergeant thought. As far as the community team was concerned, their job would be to revive anti-knife talks in schools and church halls. And in the meantime the mystery man would stay in the morgue.

Police Community Support Officer Ro Watson had found the body at the chapel hard to cope with. PCSOs didn’t usually do death, and it had been her 
first time at a fatality. She had been sent to the chapel the night before to make sure bystanders didn’t gather at the scene, but it had been late and the place had been deserted. When she got there, the body had been roughly covered up, thank goodness. PC Jed Jackson, one of the constables in the community team, had been given the job of taking the walkers back to their accommodation and, while he was away, Ro managed not to look too closely at the slack figure under the piece of tarpaulin borrowed from the farm.

‘So who do you think he was?’ Jed had said when he got back. They were waiting outside the chapel for the paramedics. The ambulance was having trouble negotiating the sandy track.

‘I don’t get involved in solving crime, you know,’ Ro intoned in imitation of Sergeant Liddle. ‘That’s not the role of a PCSO.’

Her imitation made Jed laugh. ‘That sounds just like him. But seriously, Ro, I’m interested in what you think.’

Ro had rolled her eyes, but she had been secretly flattered. She hadn’t expected a younger person to care about her views, never mind a man with deep-brown eyes and a face like a junior George Clooney. However confident you seemed, it was never easy going back to work as a middle-aged woman, and at first she and Jed had merely exchanged platitudes while they waited for the ambulance. But then, the isolation and silence had given them an odd sense of comradeship. Jed was a bit of a loner at the station. He was reputedly a churchgoer with strict views on drink and drugs. But he seemed to enjoy talking to Ro about the local legend of St Trallen. Ro was originally from Liverpool and all this was new to her. As they waited, he told her about the history of the chapel and the medieval frontispiece of the
Book of St Trallen
, which he had seen in Norbridge Abbey. He liked art, he said, and so did she. But inevitably their conversation came back to the covered bump of the body, out of place on the cliff side.

‘Is there really no identification on him?’ Ro had asked, aware of how strange it felt to be standing in the growing darkness, talking to one young man she hardly knew, about another.

‘So they say,’ Jed answered. ‘But he’s not a vagrant. If he was, we’d
probably
know him round here anyway. He was wearing decent clothes, and a good quality jacket. But apparently there was no wallet or cards or anything.’

‘Any sign of a car parked?’ Ro asked.

‘Not yet. They’ll check the bus service, but it’s only twice a day along the coast. His shoes were in good nick and smartly polished so he can’t have walked far.’

‘Then someone must have dropped him off here, don’t you think?’

Jed said ‘Maybe,’ and looked at her with more respect.

It had taken quite a while for the paramedics to get the body on to its 
stretcher, and down the track to the road. When they eventually said
goodnight
, Jed promised to let her know what the crime scene guys figured out.

The chapel had haunted Ro’s sketchy dreams. On Saturday morning, after a virtually sleepless night, she was shattered. She needed to get her
twelve-year
-old son Ben up, and over to his grandparents in the morning. It was her routine to go to the big supermarket for the weekly shop every Saturday. Her eyes felt hot and scratchy, and while Ben was dilly-dallying around getting dressed in his painfully slow way, she made herself a scalding hot black coffee.

Ro’s cottage was an old weaver’s house and workshop, one of a cluster in Burnside valley, with three floors built into the river-bank. She had bought it when she moved from Liverpool to Cumbria, and she loved it. Her sitting room led straight from the front door, and in the recess, on the right-hand side of the huge fireplace, was Ro’s pride and joy – an original painting in a heavy gilt frame. The rest of the walls were bare, and the room had only a three-piece suite, a TV and Ben’s computer. Ben needed more space to get around than other kids. But it looked cosy and the huge basket of spring flowers in the fireplace lit up the plain room. The kitchen was in the
basement
, with one wall taken up by two big windows looking into the valley. The back door led from there to a patio beside the river.

Before going outside, Ro caught herself in the reflection from the
backdoor
window. She was in her mid-forties but she knew she looked older. The product of a hard life, she thought, and laughed at herself, but there was some truth in it. The scar on her left cheekbone was an ugly pink colour compared with the rest of her skin tone; there were deep worry lines on her forehead and a constant crease across the bridge of her nose.

But things are getting better, she told the harassed woman gazing back at her. You have a great home. Ben is improving. And you have a really
interesting
new job, even if half the people you meet think PCSOs are a waste of time. Watch this space, she thought. Getting the job was thanks to a tip-off from her next-door neighbour, who had suggested she apply to be a Police Community Support Officer.

‘Don’t be daft!’ Ro had said. ‘Me, a woman with a fatal attraction to double yellow lines?’

Mrs Carruthers had laughed. ‘You do make me smile, Mrs Watson. You’d be really good ’cos you make mistakes like everyone else.’

‘Thanks a bunch!’

But Ro had decided to take this as a compliment. Her elderly neighbour was pretty shrewd; Ro had a lot of time for her. She even let Mrs Carruthers look after Ben sometimes. Ro’s son had been born prematurely with cerebral palsy and Ro had cared for him ever since, doing freelance work from home when she could. But her neighbour was right. Now Ben was settled at 
Norbridge High School, it was time for Ro to move on, and being a PCSO sounded interesting.

And maybe Ben needed a break from constant maternal monitoring.

‘It’s a really worthwhile job,’ Mrs C went on. ‘I could stay with Ben when you work shifts. And you’ve said yourself you want to do something useful. You used to be in public relations, didn’t you? And you’re a good listener.’

I’m not really, Ro thought. It’s just that these days I don’t say much, and her neighbour could talk for Britain. Mrs C had been a godsend, but Ro hated the idea of being dependent on anyone. One of the reasons she had moved to Cumbria was that Ben’s paternal grandparents lived in Norbridge and they were anxious to help. They compensated for Ben’s father, who was now married to someone else and living in Sydney. But it meant she could keep Ben’s care largely in the family, with no need for a wider social network.

So now she thought of herself as a loner, a Scouser in exile like most of the others! But the idea of being a PCSO had stuck in her head. She had been outgoing, once. A job like Police Community Support Officer would be a different sort of public relations, one which was much more important. It would give her a role in a community where she still felt a bit of a stranger. And if Ben needed more independence, the best way forward was to be more independent herself.

A few months later she had seen an advertisement for PCSOs in the library, and she’d applied. The fact that PCSOs were underestimated appealed to her. What were they sometimes called? Plastic police. Their role was community liaison, patrolling streets and making relationships. Hardly the stuff of TV dramas. That suited Ro. The punitive side of policing wasn’t for her. She knew what it was like to have people pointing the finger and making accusations – ‘She must have drunk while she was pregnant’ or ‘What did she do wrong to have a baby with all those
problems
?’ Perhaps that was why she rarely talked to anyone at work about her home life. The last thing she wanted was to be labelled as the single parent with the disabled son, like some sort of case study. Sometimes she feared that she had got the job as part of some secret diversity policy, which didn’t bear thinking about.

She took her coffee outside, sat at the garden table and tried not to think about the dead young man, either. She made a rough shopping list on her notepad, but her mind wandered. Pelliter was just a few miles away from the valley where she lived, but it was completely different, and a place she had hardly visited. The sprawling coastal area was an interesting mix: some wealthy farms and some light industry which was just about surviving; the notorious Pelliter Valley council estate; the funny little chapel on the
headland
looking over the Solway; and a big shiny supermarket on the outskirts, 
with a massive car-park, which was where she should be going rather than sitting drinking coffee in the fresh early sunshine.

‘Come on, Ben,’ she called from the kitchen, and heard him bump down the stairs. In some ways it was a crazy house for a boy like him, but he treated it as one big climbing frame. He clattered into the kitchen, and walked towards the counter. He could get around well now. Adolescence for Ben meant increasing strength in his muscles, and increasing confidence too.

But there was one remaining problem. Ben had developed cataracts as the result of a bad fall when he was a toddler. Ro hated thinking about that. But soon he would be old enough for an operation, a relatively safe one, though all surgery had its risks. Ro knew that her son, normally so brave and capable, was worried about it. Stop thinking about it, Ro told herself, as the idea of the dead man at the chapel with his injured eyes flashed on her own inward retina.

‘I’m dropping you at Grandma’s while I do a big shop,’ she told her son. ‘Make sure you’ve got your Xbox.’ Ordinary family life, she thought. Great. What she wanted now, most of all, was for her and Ben to be an ordinary family. And tentatively, she thought they might be getting there.

Suzy Spencer and Robert Clark hardly constituted an ordinary family, but Saturday shopping was a great leveller. Life at The Briars in Tarnfield usually followed a pattern at the weekends. Suzy hated the supermarket, so she would give Robert a list and he would go into Norbridge or the new superstore at Pelliter. In return, she would do the housework, which she hated only slightly less than the shopping, and Robert would call in at the library on his way home. Robert was a lecturer at the local college, but he really wanted to be a writer. He’d tried several genres, from literary novel, through Gothic
melodrama
, to a recent attempt at chick-lit which had made even the grumpy Molly laugh at how useless it was. Saturday morning after the shopping session was his time for research, which usually meant sitting reading in the corner of the big comfy kitchen while Suzy made a late lunch.

But this Saturday the kitchen table was occupied. Suzy made signs at him to follow her into the living-room.

‘Becky Dixon’s here.’

‘So I see.’

Robert ruffled Suzy’s spiky blonde hair. She seemed tense, but smiled back and grabbed his hand, putting it on her shoulder and squeezing it.

‘Becky’s grandma called me and asked if they could drop her off. Of course, I said yes. There’s been a fatal accident on their land. A young bloke fell down the cliff, Judith Dixon said. He’d been slashed with a knife, too.’

‘That sounds grim. Was he someone local?’

‘That’s the weird thing. Judith Dixon says there wasn’t any identification on him. He was found near this old chapel.’ Suzy shuddered. She and Robert had come across violent death before. The idea that country life was placid and pastoral was a myth. ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’ meant human nature too. Robert put his arm around her, and to distract her he said, ‘Oh, you mean St Trallen’s Chapel. Fascinating place …’

‘Saint who?’

‘Trallen. She helped bring the relics of St Andrew to Scotland. She’s supposed to have plucked out her beautiful eyes to stop a local pagan fancying her. She’s a patron saint for ophthalmologists now.’

‘You’re kidding me!’

‘I’m not. Google her yourself. The chapel is named after her. Her other name is St Tribuna. There’s the fragment of a book about her in Norbridge Abbey. It’s supposed to be a scrap of a medieval illuminated manuscript, like the
Duc de Berry’s Book of Hours
– you know, all those fantastic miniature paintings.’