Dying on Principle (12 page)

Although politeness made me agree, I felt steadily more irritated as the morning progressed. I couldn't greet anyone in my gardening jeans, and my old Oxfam T-shirt was decidedly disreputable. Not to mention my nails, which seemed to attract dirt from within the leather gardening gloves which were supposed to protect them. So at eleven thirty I came in and scrubbed up; I even brushed my hair. Even as I peered at myself in the mirror, wondering if a spot of lipstick might be appropriate, I pulled myself up short. Why was I making such a fuss for someone I didn't like?

It was a waste to be inside; I took my coffee and
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out to what if it were larger might be called a patio. There was just room for a couple of chairs, a table and some big pots I'd fill with petunias and fuchsias once I'd got hold of the potting compost and there was no threat of frost.

The problem with the patio was that it made far too intimate a setting for what should have been the briefest of meetings. Ensconced in the better chair, with a cup of milkless Earl Grey to hand, Fairfax settled back for what appeared to be a long and meaningless chat about the problems of lawn maintenance. I couldn't understand it: here was a man to whom time must be of the essence, oblivious to the barrow of weeds with the fork and leather gloves laid, now I came to think of it, ostentatiously across the top. The proposals he was to put before tomorrow's meeting must be self-explanatory – certainly he made no attempt to fish them out of the A4 envelope that lay on top of my
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.

‘It must,' he said suddenly, ‘be hard to balance the demands of house and home against those of your job.'

‘No more than for any single person,' I said. ‘Though teaching must rate pretty high on a Richter scale of stress.'

‘You said you were working on some project: is that stressful?'

‘Not the computer work itself. What I have found hard is taking on classes this late in the year. They all resent having their proper lecturers whisked away. And who can blame them? Their exams start immediately after the half-term break.'

‘You teachers and your holidays,' he said. ‘Why on earth don't you work proper hours and weeks like the rest of the world?'

‘If you're referring to this particular half-term,' I said, ‘then the students need the time for last-minute private revision.'

‘What if they encounter any problems? Shouldn't there be someone there to help?'

If there's one thing that really makes me angry, it's people complaining about teachers without ever having done the job. But I've learned from bitter experience that there's simply no point in engaging in arguments with people who want more than anything else to cling to the belief that teachers work short hours for a lot of money.

‘Wouldn't a conscientious teacher
want
to be there to help?' Fairfax pursued.

‘I sometimes wish we could take their exams for them,' I said. There must be some reason for this interrogation.

‘And shouldn't you be there when the results come out?'

‘I've never known a college where the staff don't organise a rota to be there at the crucial time.'

‘That's not the same thing. How do you know when the crucial time is?'

‘By experience.' I hoped my tone showed I'd had enough of this interrogation. To emphasise the point I reached for the envelope he'd brought.

‘I'd have thought it was in the students' interests,' he pursued, ‘not to close in the summer. You don't get firms closing down wholesale.'

‘You do in France,' I said, despising myself for taking the bait. Then I opened the envelope and started to withdraw the papers.

‘Tell me, do you think Muntz is an efficient college?'

‘I think it's well on the way to being an unhappy one,' I said. ‘Someone seems to have forgotten that lecturers are people too.' I told him about the invasion of my office and the probable termination of my project. ‘Oh, and they've denied the staff the use of their common room and the students are so hostile to our invasion of the canteen that none of us use it. Some of the staff are on this new contract, the rest aren't, so you can imagine what that does for staff morale. They've just derecognised the union—'

‘How do you know that?'

I looked at him, torn between an urge to grass on la Cavendish and a strong desire to demand what business it was of his. Certainly it was time to end the conversation: dealing with the occasional vile student had taught me the flick of the eyelid and quick movement to my feet that would tell him I had had enough. But before I could dismiss him verbally, the phone rang. I gestured him, none too courteously, through the French window before me into the living room. I stopped to answer the phone and asked the caller to hold while I escorted Fairfax through the hall.

‘Unusual design this, having the party wall between the two halls rather than between the living rooms,' he said, smiling as pleasantly as if we'd discussed nothing more controversial than compost heaps.

I nodded. I didn't think a comment was necessary.

‘Until tomorrow evening, then,' he said

‘Yes,' I replied, and closed the front door on him.

‘Jesus,' said Chris, when I picked up the phone, ‘is that Sophie or an iceberg? Who've you been freezing off, eh?'

‘Richard Fairfax. Bloody fascist,' I added. ‘Spoiled my day.'

‘Can I unspoil it? D'you fancy going out to lunch?'

‘Sunday? Everywhere will be full of cheery families.'

‘My garden won't.'

‘You're on.'

It turned out to be a working lunch, in the calm of Chris's dining room. The death of Melina was high on the agenda. The parents recognised the shoes – in fact, the father had wept at the sight of them. And no one had managed to explain why she wasn't wearing them when – if – she jumped. Neither had anyone explained how she had managed to fall on the skip without injuring herself on the lumps of rubbish – not, said Chris, dropping his voice, that she hadn't suffered horrific injuries anyway.

‘The paving she should have fallen on didn't produce the bloodstains you wanted? Hey, this is a wonderful avocado.'

‘Thanks. No, nary a one. Not that this is a subject we should be talking about over lunch.' He got up and twitched the curtain slightly. ‘Sorry: I'm getting over one of my heads. Can't stand too much light.'

‘Bad?'

‘Bad enough. I think it was meeting her parents. Laid me low all evening. Didn't really surface till about ten this morning. And then Ian phoned about your purse. Why didn't you tell me?'

I scraped out the avocado skin and licked my spoon as if it were a lolly. ‘Common theft. As the lady said, life's a bitch and then you die.' I hadn't wanted to worry him.

‘I don't like coincidences. How much did you lose?'

‘What I got out of the building society: £200.'

‘Cheque book?'

‘Safe inside a zipped pocket. But it was a pain. And the
real
pain is that Simon's mended my radio, so I didn't need a new one.'

‘But you'll get one anyway. It's important.'

I nodded. Chris and Aberlene together constituted an irresistible force.

‘Simon and Adrian – the viola player – are now an item, by the way,' I said lightly. I didn't want to trivialise it into gossip, but Chris deserved to know, and I didn't want to make any heavy explanations. ‘He told me all about it when we went for a balti down Moseley Road last night.'

Chris gathered the avocado dishes; I followed him to the kitchen. It might never have seen a saucepan raised in anger, but a wonderful smell was emanating from the oven. He bent to remove a casserole, one of those heavy le Creuset ones, and bore it to the table. I followed with smaller casseroles: crispy roast potatoes and tiny buttered carrots.

‘Chicken,' he said.

‘Great. Somehow I'm off red meat.' I explained very briefly about the truck I'd followed.

And then we looked up at each other and said it together; ‘A tarpaulin! Melina might have fallen on a tarpaulin!'

‘How bloody premeditated can you get?' Chris exclaimed, pushing his chicken away untouched and reaching for his phone.

‘No, leave it till you've eaten. Please. Five minutes won't make any difference to the case, and it might to your stomach. Here.' I topped up his glass. ‘Go on: one won't hurt you, and it comes with St Paul's recommendation. Let's think about why anyone should want to kill her.'

We ate in silence for a few minutes. What had she said about her previous job? Something to do with the Jewellery Quarter. Computers in the Jewellery Quarter. Servicing them for industrial firms; ‘quite a few'…

‘If you service a computer,' he asked at last, ‘does that give you access to all the files?'

‘If you were very bright, you could explore all sorts of unauthorised highways and byways. Are you wondering if she might have found something in a computer?'

‘I don't know. Maybe. Something about one of her old clients – I'll have someone follow it up. There's even George Muntz, of course.'

‘But she was so discreet about her other job, and so cowed by Dr Trevelyan, I don't think she'd have blabbed to anyone about anything. Except that she wanted to talk to me urgently the night she was killed.'

‘So what had she found and what did she intend to do with her information? Do you see her as the blackmailing type?'

I wanted to protest, sharply, that Melina struck me as being very moral, but morality is not the same as discretion. And she seemed to have obeyed authority, in the form of Trevelyan, without necessarily respecting it.

‘I think she might have seen it as her duty to warn whoever was doing wrong that she would have to report it,' I said at last. ‘But the problem is her wanting to talk to me first, as if she might have wanted reassurance that she was doing the right thing. Oh, Chris, I don't know. If only I hadn't been in such a hurry that evening—'

‘So she could have said to X that if he or she didn't stop whatever it was, she'd go to someone in authority,' Chris overrode me. ‘Who would that be, at Muntz? Blake? Curtis?'

‘Blake's the boss, of course. But he's elusive, and in any case Curtis would probably be in charge of the day-to-day finances. I haven't quite worked out who does what yet – and just to confuse me further they keep on changing their job titles.
You
could ask.'

‘I could indeed.'

‘But then, what if one of them was involved?'

Chris laughed. ‘Sophie, you are incorrigible! It's a good job you didn't work for the Inquisition – you'd have sniffed out heretics all over the place. Especially in high places.'

‘Where better to sniff them out?'

Although Chris had phoned Ian to get people on to the tedious job of trying to locate the tarpaulin, he decided, as I knew he would, that he wanted to get back to Rose Road and the heart of the investigation. But he didn't take much persuading to go via the garden centre run by Birmingham University.

He was staggering to his car under an enormous bag of all-purpose compost, and I was at the till by the open door paying for trays of petunias, impatiens, trailing lobelia and sweet outdoor herbs, when I heard a familiar voice.

‘I was saying to my wife here – this is Sophie from work, June; Sophie, this is the wife – you always meet people when you go out. Mrs Cavendish yesterday in Rackhams, though she looked as if she hadn't expected to find the likes of me there, and then young Darren down by the crematorium when I was visiting my old mum, if you see what I mean, and now you.'

‘Hi, Phil. Nice to meet—'

June juggled two trays of snapdragons and a pot of sweet peas and shook hands with me.

‘Like I was saying, it's funny seeing these old tills. Expect everything to be properly computerised – bar-codes and that.' He shifted a tray of young lupins more comfortably on to the other hip.

We watched the man operating the till count and recount the petunias, and I was just about to trot out the Brian Hanrahan comment about counting them out and counting them in again, when something more important occurred to me. ‘Have you managed to crack Dr Trevelyan's password yet, Phil?'

‘Went back to paper files in the end. Seemed to be nasty little close-down instructions on the program.'

‘What'll you do? Take the thing apart and run it in bits?'

He nodded. ‘And as I was saying, you can't wait. You need paper and toner and that when you need them, not when Her Royal Highness comes back to work.
If
, I should say. Not to mention computers. Need to replace those that were nicked.'

‘Do we get many nicked?'

‘Bloody shoplifting, that's what it's like. No respect, these days. Buy them ten at a time; only seven or eight left at the end of the month. Blame me and the team, of course. Lack of security, they say. But half the locks haven't worked for months, and you're right, you can report till you're blue in the face but no one takes any notice.'

Did I dare risk it? ‘Who checks them in, Phil? When the new ones arrive?'

He looked at me blankly.

‘Is it your job of hers? Dr T's?'

‘Funny you should say that,' said June the wife. ‘Had a bit of a cross word at Christmas about that, you and the lady doctor.'

‘I told you, lovey, she's not that sort of doctor.'

‘What sort of cross word?' I prompted.

‘Nothing much. Not that you'd call cross. And like June said, if someone wants you to do less work, you shouldn't really argue, should you?'

‘
Less
work?' That didn't accord with what little I knew of Trevelyan.

‘Well, you might say less – though of course she found me other little things to do. But when she came, she went through all our job descriptions, crossing bits off here and there, and putting other bits in.'