Death of a Teacher (20 page)

Liz had said, ‘I think you should tell her, Callie. After all, now she’s having a baby she ought to know.’ Then she had sidled away with her funny, sideways glance, leaving Callie red-faced and aggressive, standing in front of Sheila.

‘What you’ve said about my lad isn’t right,’ Callie had snarled.

Sheila had tackled Jonty McFadden earlier that day about his bullying. She had mentioned in the staff-room, in front of Liz Rudder, that she thought the boy was causing real problems. She had wondered aloud if Jonty needed help, some sort of counselling. She could see now how Liz Rudder could report her words, to provoke Callie to a tantrum of self-justification.

Before Sheila could explain any further, Callie had started screaming. 

‘You’ve picked on him, you cow. You’ve got it in for my son. Maybe that’s ’cos you want your own back on us. Just because me and Ray …’

Callie had got redder and redder, her mouth moving like a dying fish. She had worked herself up into an immense rage. Sheila had felt strangely detached watching her, thinking more about the strange sensation which was starting in the pit of her stomach. Callie had started to scream and spit, and in the middle of the tirade Sheila had heard the unbelievable.

‘What?’ Sheila had said.

‘Your wimp of a husband. You ask him what happened in the car park of the Crossed Foxes that Christmas! He was with me in the back of his car. And he’s been under my thumb ever since.’

Sheila had left the staff-room, with Callie roaring in triumph after her. But it wasn’t Callie’s words which had sent her away. She had felt the stomach cramps worsening.

Ray had been working in the little bedroom-cum-office back at their house, and by the time Sheila had driven home, braced over the steering wheel, she was seriously ill. That evening she was admitted to Cumbria Coast Hospital.

Now she’d said, ‘We should talk about it, Ray. I’ve been thinking about it all the time, deep down, almost without knowing I was doing it. What Callie said didn’t cause the miscarriage.’

‘But she told you—’

‘Told me what? That something went on between you in the back of your car after the Christmas party.’

Ray had put his head in his hands. ‘But that’s the trouble, Sheila. I genuinely can’t remember. I’d have sworn nothing happened. But if she says it did …’

Sheila had pulled her chair up to his and put her arms around him. ‘I’m to blame for a lot of this, Ray. I didn’t listen to you. I was wrapped up in my own pain. Look, I can’t believe for one moment that you actually seduced her, or even the other way round, in the back of your car.’

‘But she says I did.’

‘Not in so many words. Instead of all this guilt and obfuscation you need to try and remember exactly what happened. You were tipsy, and that was downright stupid for someone in your job. But somehow I don’t think that you would get so drunk you would forget years of discretion and
professionalism
. Do you know what? I think at most you probably had a harmless snog and then passed out.’

Ray’s head had snapped up and his chin jutted forward. ‘Well, that’s what I always thought. She had a flask and offered me more in the car. I told you I couldn’t remember and it’s true, I can’t. But now …’ Ray had suddenly put his head in his hands again. His back heaved. 

‘Now, what?’

He’d looked up, his face yellow with strain. ‘She says Jonty could be my son.’

To his amazement, his wife started to laugh.

‘Oh, don’t you see, Ray? She’s gone too far this time. Jonty? Your son? For goodness’ sake, if there was any likelihood of that, a woman like Callie McFadden would have taken you to the cleaners long ago. She’s enjoyed your embarrassment for ten years, and she’s made petty little advances as a result. But this? It’s ludicrous! For some reason she’s decided to put the screws on tighter, but this time she’s gone too far and made a fool of herself.’

Ray had said nothing, and she’d had the sense to leave him to think. She had gone out of the kitchen, over to the cupboard in the dining room to fetch a bottle of good red wine. She’d poured him a glass and then sat back and waited.

Eventually she heard the whole story for the first time. Ray had had a few drinks at the Christmas party and Callie had bumped into him several times as they all staggered out of the pub. Ray was facing another lonely Christmas: the usual bleak stay with his ageing parents, with his father making snide remarks about his lack of a wife. Callie was warm and soft and seemed
undemanding
. He had offered her a lift home. In the car she had taken out a hip flask and offered him another. The next thing Ray knew, he was waking up on the back seat, dry-mouthed and headachy. Callie had gone, and he was in no state to drive. He’d called a cab from the Crossed Foxes bar and gone home to sleep it off. It was only when Callie made sheep’s eyes at him back at school that he wondered what had really happened. And he had cursed himself for his stupid behaviour.

‘Why didn’t you tell me when we got together?’ Sheila had asked.

‘Shame, I think,’ Ray had said. ‘And denial. Callie was emerging as a monster and Jonty was already spoilt and disruptive. One of the things which attracted me to you, as soon as you joined the school, was the way you took no nonsense from her. So how could I tell you I had fallen into her trap like that? And I always felt that somehow I owed her support.’

‘For what?’ Sheila had said again, snuggling into him. ‘Call her bluff, Ray. We’ll deal with this together.’

And on Bank Holiday Monday they had gone to the garden centre and bought a gnome, and laughed a lot. In the night, Sheila put her arm round her sleeping husband and fell peacefully asleep herself. Together they would see off Callie McFadden and her stupid threats, Sheila thought. And the threats
were
stupid, really stupid. She wondered, fleetingly as she drifted into sleep, what had made Callie overplay her hand.  

T
he Tuesday after the Bank Holiday was day ten of the Marsh Murder enquiry. The school computer had yielded nothing unusual except a great deal of information about physiotherapy, and job searches which left some people looking a little sheepish. Brenda’s house had been unnaturally clean and tidy, with all her ornaments dusted and her paperwork filed. The local sociopaths all had alibis.

Jed Jackson had planned a quiet day at the station for the first day back at work after the Bank Holiday. He had been involved in house-to-house enquiries in Pelliter the previous week, trying to find anyone who had seen Brenda Hodgson on her last walk. It had been pretty fruitless. Six o’clock on a spring Saturday in Pelliter saw most people sitting in front of the telly or in the back gardens.

‘Come on, lad, get a move on,’ Sergeant Liddle had said, passing Jed’s desk. The community team had an open-plan office, but Sergeant Liddle had artfully arranged a noticeboard screen to cordon off his bit of the territory.

Jed was watching for Ro. She would be coming in to the station at some point. He hadn’t liked to enquire too deeply into her schedule for the day, but he knew she was on shift.

She finally arrived at about eleven after a couple of hours on the usual foot patrols. All had been quiet. Ro’s younger colleague was bemoaning the fact and Ro was laughing. Jed’s face jerked up to see her. His first thought was that she looked better. She’s caught the sun, he thought. Her scar showed up as badly as ever, but the suntan suited her. And the laugh was easier too.

But when the other PCSO went to report back to Sergeant Liddle, and Jed caught Ro’s eye, he saw the old anxiety tightening in her face. I should remember, he thought; she’s had to face a lot of people being rude and
insensitive
over the years. I’m just another one. Ro ignored him and sat at the PCSOs’ hot desk. He saw her glance round almost furtively as she picked up the phone.

‘Hello, is that the Manchester hackney cabs office?’ he heard her say. 

She had begun this personal investigation; it was as if she was on a roll and had to go through with it. Newcastle cabs weren’t black, and in Glasgow they had no one who had travelled as far as Cumbria that Friday. But when she had emailed Manchester she had been in luck. A cabbie from the airport rank had told ‘control’ that all his birthdays had come at once – a fare had asked him to drive over a hundred miles to West Cumbria. The cabbie had picked up a chap who he said he had flown in from Toronto. The bloke had enough money to pay for a cab, and said he needed to go by car because he had
problems
with his eyesight. The cabbie had taken him to a school in Pelliter, then dropped him on the shore road. He’d said he was going to be picked up later by a local.

Bingo. That had to be the man Alison and Suzy Spencer had seen. But was he the dead man? Or was he still alive and well, back in Toronto perhaps, or travelling around the Lake District? If they could find out more about him they could at least eliminate him.

The next step was to speak to Air Canada. The cabbie was pretty sure his fare had travelled with them; he remembered the red and white luggage labels.

The Air Canada customer services adviser put her through to operations and Ro explained what she needed. As she had expected, it wasn’t
straightforward
, but she was neatly passed from department to department with no chance to back out. She would need to fill in a data protection form and send a written request for the passenger list detailing any men between the ages of twenty and forty, travelling alone on the flight which had landed in time for the young man to pick up his cab at around lunchtime. The form needed to be signed by a police officer. But would that mean a PCSO? Hardly. But Ro wasn’t stopping now.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ll get on to it.’

As she sat thinking, Jed took his chance and walked over.

‘Coffee?’ he said to her with his most winning smile.

‘No thanks,’ Ro said curtly, and turned away to her computer screen.

Jed had half expected Ro to blush and launch into a conversation, but he had been too optimistic. He lolloped out, towards the canteen. Over his cooling coffee, he thought, why should she forgive him? His behaviour had been unforgivable. He had to do more than just casually apologize.

When he came back into the office ten minutes later, there was some sort of muted but heavy discussion going on behind Sergeant Liddle’s screen, and Ro was not at the desk.

‘I really don’t know what you thought you were doing,’ Sergeant Liddle was saying loudly. ‘You’ve been enquiring about a plane passenger. What’s this about?’ 

‘I’m sorry,’ Ro said. ‘I didn’t realize it would be such a sensitive issue.’

‘Of course it’s a sensitive issue. You can’t just get passenger lists and start ringing people up. The airline called back to verify who and what you were. It put me in a very difficult spot. You’re just a PCSO. It’s not your job to make enquiries.’

‘But if it turns out that this man has disappeared, it could have been him at the chapel.’

‘And how do you think we’re going find out? Fly you over first class to Toronto to make enquiries, since you’re such a budding detective? Look, CID has got enough on their plates with the Marsh Murder. The man in the morgue can wait. And you should wait for instructions. You’re lucky to be here anyway.’

‘What do you mean, lucky? Are you saying I’ve only got my job because I’ve got a disabled son?’

Sergeant Liddle looked at her, frowned and shook his head. ‘What? I mean that you’re lucky to be making enquiries. You’re just a PCSO. You got the job because you were smart and committed, but now I think you might be too smart by half.’

‘Sorry.’ Ro blushed. Over the years, she thought she had learnt not to
overreact
to her situation. It was embarrassing to find herself in the wrong. It was because of Jed Jackson, she thought. It was Jed who had fuelled her fear that her job was just the result of some wretched diversity policy.

Sergeant Liddle was saying patiently, ‘I’ve spoken to the airline. They’re going to send the information over as soon as they get the data protection form. But it needs a proper police officer to do that and I’ve no one to spare.’

‘Sarge.’ Jed Jackson put his head around the screen. ‘I’ve just overheard. Could I be of any help on this one?’

‘Well, you’ve nowt to do at the moment, have you, so I suppose you might. You and PCSO Watson can get back on to Air Canada – with the proper procedure – and see if there’s anything in this. If there’s one thing that annoys me more than the public wasting police time, it’s the police wasting police time. So you’d better come up with something pretty damned quick!’

Ro stood up. She had no option but to walk away with Jed, watched by the sergeant.

At St Mungo’s School, Alison MacDonald felt the atmosphere in the class was better, which was just as well because she felt dreadful herself. She had left Mark’s flat the day before and driven blindly up the motorway. At Tebay
services
she had stopped, parked at the back of the car-park, and cried for about half an hour, a miserable anguished wailing in the privacy of her car. When her mobile phone rang and showed Mark’s number she didn’t answer. 

She knew that if she spoke to him he would try to talk her round. And put her on the defensive. He would argue that it had all been a one-off, something Dazza had thought of; or something they’d just come across. And anyway, he would say, everyone did a bit of porn now and then. She must know that. It was a massive internet industry. And it was human nature – well, men’s nature anyway.

‘It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. Or fancy the pants off you,’ he would say. ‘It’s just that men are different.’

But how would Mark feel if she got sexual pleasure from other men, even in pictures? It was a double standard of the most insidious kind because by and large women didn’t lust after pictures of perfect men. There were reasons for that, she supposed – less economic power, social conditioning, ‘time and place’ pressures, and a more realistic approach to sex. Women weren’t schooled to expect perfect creatures to perform for them. So it was an unfair comparison.

‘Watch the stuff with me,’ Mark might say, though she felt that the feral male mob thing was part of his turn-on. Could she get to like stuff like that? No. Porn of any sort would have been bad. But this wasn’t even
straightforward
voyeurism. Something really nasty had been happening in
Babes in Chains
, and she felt sick thinking of it.

Father Peter Hodgson woke up on Tuesday morning feeling pleasantly contented. He had slept astonishingly well after three sherries the evening before. Well, four actually, because he had found a bottle in the cupboard. It had been crystallized and sticky round the top through lack of use. He suspected his mother had bought it for the odd occasion when the Hodgsons had visitors. He had finished it off. The only disappointment was that he hadn’t been able to bring home the last scrumptious little profiteroles from Liz Rudder’s.

He wondered how on earth she had made them. Although, they could have been from a supermarket – they had been extremely regular and consistently shaped. If those little profiteroles could be bought, maybe he could try to get some himself. He hated the thought of braving the stores. Brenda had done his shopping for him since he came to Pelliter, and she had usually cooked his Sunday lunch. Previously a helpful lady parishioner had often obliged (until she started to get ideas!). But perhaps he could risk a trip to the supermarket. With luck, people would avoid him. If he looked suitably devastated by his sister’s death, no one would have the gall to come up to him for a chat. Mmm. Perhaps that would be a good idea.

He pulled the bedclothes up to his nose. Even though it was May, the bedroom at the back of the big old house was chilly. But not for long, Father Peter thought. He would put Brenda’s house up for sale as soon as it was 
decent to do so and he would get rid of it, whatever it took – a house would always sell if the price was low enough. There would be enough money from the sale to put new heating in at the family home, decorate the place and do the kitchen. The more he thought about it, the more he realized Brenda’s death had been even more of a windfall than he’d expected.

That made him think about Liz Rudder’s strange assertion that standards at St Mungo’s were declining since his sister’s murder. It was hard to see how things could have changed in such a short time. But he could see Mrs Rudder’s point. It did seem inappropriate to have children cavorting in front of a picture of St Trallen. And surely a concert of this nature was most
insensitive
when a teacher had been brutally murdered.

An idea which had been brewing for a long time in Father Peter’s brain began to bubble. His sister had felt very strongly about St Trallen’s being ‘off limits’ to the plebs of Pelliter. He glossed over his row with her the night she had died – no one else knew that she had ever advocated closing the chapel. And no one had said anything, as yet, about a memorial to Brenda. There had been mutterings about special services, and plaques in the church, or gifts to the school in her name. There had been the vague suggestion of money being donated. Nothing had seemed right.

But a plea from her distressed but dignified brother for the chapel to become a working church in memory of Brenda might have the sympathy vote! The chapel could have its own chaplain, for a small but reasonable stipend. There would be a congregation of none – the perfect place for someone with a vocation like Father Peter’s.

The first step would be to put his marker down on the legitimacy of the chapel by insisting this indecent concert at the school was stopped. Thank goodness Liz Rudder had alerted him to it.

It’s turned chilly again, Robert Clark thought, as he drove towards Norbridge Community College on Tuesday morning. That evening they were due to go to Ro’s to see her picture. He was interested in it and, despite the change in the weather, looking forward to seeing her cottage in the remote Burnside valley. He watched the thick grey clouds blow in from the west. But the memory of the barbecue had been overshadowed by anxiety.

Robert had spent a great deal of time thinking about what Jake had said the evening before. Robert had Googled ‘poltergeist’ and ‘kinetic energy’ himself late on Monday night, with interesting results. The information on the web seemed to be quite categorical. Young women, usually around puberty, could cause manifestations of strange things. There were endless anecdotal accounts of furniture moving, or utensils flying through the air. The girls seemed to have other power too, the ability to make things happen. 
But nothing seemed to have been proved, despite the confident tone of the articles.

Robert went over everything Jake had itemized. The first time had been on Becky’s initial visit when Suzy had lost the casserole dish. Since then there had been several disappearances. But were they really significant? Robert couldn’t actually remember seeing Becky in the kitchen, in a position to move things. But he had no evidence that she couldn’t have done it either. So it could be a form of theft, or it could just be a coincidence. The most convincing thing for Robert had been Jake’s intuition. The boy asserted that he had been disturbed by Becky’s presence.

‘It’s not all the time,’ Jake had said. ‘I don’t want you to think I’m nuts, Robert, but sometimes she can have a really funny effect when she stares at you. She can be very intense.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She looks at you with those eyes as if she knows exactly what you’re thinking. And during the barbecue—’ He’d stopped.

‘Go on,’ Robert had said.

‘It was as if she could keep Ben upright just by willpower. And there’s also the way she’s calmed Molly down. It was unbelievable really. Molly’s like a different person now.’