Last Rites (19 page)

‘Just be careful,’ she added, without looking at him.

‘You make them sound like monsters,’ Mason smiled.

Kate didn’t answer.

‘What about my predecessor?’ he enquired. ‘How did he get on with them? The headmaster didn’t seem very keen on discussing him.’

Kate shot him a wary glance.

‘What do you know about Simon Usher?’ she snapped.

‘Very little,’ he admitted. ‘I was hoping you might be able to tell me something.’

45

‘What do you want to know about him?’

Kate held Mason’s gaze as she spoke.

‘I’m just curious,’ Mason told her.‘The headmaster looks as if he’s going to have a heart attack every time the guy’s name is mentioned.What the hell happened? Why did he leave? That’s all I want to know. What’s the big deal?’

‘No one knows why he left. He’d been ill for a week or two, missed some of his classes too.Then he just never turned up one morning. When people came to check on him he’d gone. Packed up all his stuff and just left. No note. No explanation why and no details of where he’d gone.’

‘How well did you know him?’

‘Just staff-room conversations, the odd drink after work sometimes but that was it.’

‘What kind of guy was he?’

‘I told you, I didn’t know him that well.’

‘Which teachers
did
he get on well with?’

‘Why, are you going to grill them about him?’

‘I wasn’t aware I was grilling you, Kate. Just asking some questions.’

She nodded and sucked in a deep breath.

‘Sorry,’ she murmured. ‘You’re right.’ She looked at Mason. ‘There were rumours about him. That he was involved with one of the students here.’

‘In what way?’

‘How do you think? Simon Usher had a roving eye and some of the older girls here made it quite obvious that they were available if he was interested. Maybe he was interested.’

‘He slept with one of the students?’

‘Like I said, it was just rumours. No one knows anything for sure, just like no one knows why he left here or where he went. I told you, these surroundings create even more of a closed society. Every little thing gets blown up out of proportion. People get bored. When they’re bored they gossip.’

‘So you think it was just gossip about Usher and one of the pupils?’

‘I haven’t really thought about it but it’s possible that something happened. He was a young guy. Good looking. I can understand how some of his girl pupils would have fancied him. Whether they fancied him enough to sleep with him I couldn’t say.’

‘That would explain why the headmaster’s not falling over himself to talk about Usher. It wouldn’t look good for the school, would it? A teacher sleeping with his pupils.’

‘Like I said, it’s just rumours. No one knows anything for sure. Why does it matter so much to you?’

‘I’ve got his job. I’m living in the house where he used to live. I’ll be teaching the pupils he taught. I told you, I’m curious. I suppose I should be grateful to him, for whatever reason he left. If he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have the job or this house.’

‘Why did you leave London?’

‘I had my reasons.’

‘Now who’s being mysterious?’

Mason smiled.

‘There was an incident,’ he confessed. ‘I was attacked by some of the kids at the school where I taught.’

‘Jesus,’ Kate murmured. ‘No wonder you wanted to get away.’

‘It was a very different school from this one.’

She finished her tea and got to her feet, crossing to the sink where she spun the tap and rinsed the receptacle.

‘I’m going to leave you in peace,’ Kate announced, wiping her hands.‘Let you carry on with your unpacking.’

‘Thanks for the visit,’ he said, getting to his feet.‘Listen, would it be against school rules for me to buy you dinner one day next week?’

Kate smiled, her cheeks colouring slightly.

‘That’s very kind of you but maybe you’d better settle in a little first.’

‘Is that a no?’

‘It’s a “wait a week or so and then ask again”. That’s all.’

Mason smiled.

‘If you want to come back again tomorrow, I could do with some help unpacking.’

‘I might just do that,’ she assured him as she walked with him to the front door.

Mason watched her as she climbed into her car, waving happily as she pulled away, then he closed the door gently behind her.

Kate Wheeler was more than two hundred yards from the cottage when she brought the car to a halt. She left the engine idling as she reached for her mobile phone, jabbing the digits she needed. She was breathing heavily by the time her call was answered and, she noticed, her hand was shaking slightly.

46

It was wrong.

That was the only phrase that kept going through Frank Coulson’s mind as he stood looking down at his daughter’s grave. This entire scenario was wrong. His daughter shouldn’t be dead. He and his wife shouldn’t be standing looking at her resting place. No parent should have to bury their child. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t the way things were supposed to be.

Especially not for his beautiful seventeen-year-old Amy. She was supposed to have had all her life ahead of her. It wasn’t meant to have finished at the end of a length of rope taken from his shed and certainly not ended by her own hand.

Frank Coulson tried to fight back more tears. He had to be strong for his wife. Margaret had crumbled since she’d found Amy’s body. Frank couldn’t think of another word to describe her emotional and physical descent during the last few days. Normally a strong woman, she had barely been able to function since Amy’s suicide. Frank had made all the arrangements (he’d even had to help her dress that morning before they’d left their house). Not that he was complaining. Organising his daughter’s funeral had at least given him something to do. It had occupied his mind since the terrible discovery. Only at night, when they were alone, did he have to confront the thoughts and realisation that he would never hold his beautiful girl in his arms again. Never hear her voice. Never see her married or ever see her present him with the grandchild he and Margaret had so desperately craved. There was none of that to come for Frank and Margaret Coulson. Only the crushing knowledge that their only child was dead and that, as far as they were both concerned, life held very little in store for them that was worth waiting for.

She had been the pinnacle of their world and now she was gone. Frank gripped his wife more tightly to him, feeling her shaking as she stood there beside him. She had barely stopped crying since discovering Amy’s body. Her grief had been so complete, so all-enveloping that, for the first day or two, Frank had feared she might follow Amy and take her own life. The doctor had been of course and he’d prescribed some tablets for her but Margaret Coulson had barely looked at the bottle when Frank had returned with it from the chemist. He had sat with her, urging her to take the small white tablets as he watched her dumbly sip at the water he’d given her. Watching as it dribbled down her chin. Frank had wiped it away patiently and stared into her blank eyes looking for some fragment of the woman who had been there before their daughter had died. She looked sedated. She moved around like a zombie and she hadn’t spoken more than twenty words since Amy’s death.

A tiny, angry part of Frank wanted to follow his wife to that place she now inhabited. A very small piece of him resented her for having been able to shut out the rest of the world. A fragment of his consciousness envied her the state of near stupor she was in. At least she didn’t have to face reality. She didn’t have to accept that Amy was gone. He wanted that feeling too. That anaesthetised state that provided protection from the overwhelming pain of accepting that his daughter had hanged herself. Anything to allow him respite from the suffering he felt so acutely but was reluctant to show except in moments of solitude.

They couldn’t both crumble, could they? The two of them couldn’t just give up. One of them had to be strong and support the other. Frank was the one, whether he liked it or not.

He had listened to the words of condolence spoken by the other mourners before and after the service but they had barely registered. Just as the handshakes of commiseration and the kisses of sympathy had done little to drag him from his torpor. The vicar had said something to him about coming to church, about spiritual comfort but Frank had felt only anger towards this man of God. The servant of the God who had taken his only child. Frank wanted no part of what he offered. He wanted his daughter back and no one was going to provide him with that. Not man nor God.

Now, with no one else around, the enormity of their situation seemed to register fully. During the service, Frank had felt as if someone had wrapped him in plastic. Every sound had been muffled, every word distant, every movement slowed. But now, with just the two of them staring down at Amy’s grave, Frank began to feel the true magnitude of his pain.

The wind had been mercifully gentle during the service that morning but now, as Frank and his wife stood motionless beside the grave of their daughter, it began to build in pace and ferocity. Frank could feel the first spots of rain in the air too. The Cellophane that encased the bouquets of flowers stacked by the grave rattled noisily as the wind stirred it. One single rose petal came free and was buffeted across the cemetery by the breeze that then promptly died as soon as it had sprung up. Frank, supporting his quietly sobbing wife, moved towards the array of bouquets and wreaths, noticing that the card on one was coming loose. It was on a small bunch of white carnations and it was handwritten.

He looked at it, frowning a little as he read it.

THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES. HA HA.

What the hell was this?

He didn’t recognise the name on it. He couldn’t think who had sent this floral tribute with such a bizarre message attached. He studied the name once again.

ANDREW LATHAM

47

Mason pushed the light bulb into place and stepped down from the wooden steps.

‘Turn it on,’ he called from the cellar.

Up in the kitchen, Kate Wheeler flicked the appropriate switch and the new bulb glowed brightly.

‘That’s it,’ Mason called back.

He replaced the steps and glanced around him at the papers that had spilled from the box he’d dropped the previous day, still scattered across the floor of the cellar. He bent down and began picking them up, hearing Kate’s footfalls on the steps as she descended to join him.

‘My God,’ she laughed, glancing around her. ‘Is this all stuff that Simon Usher left behind?’ She saw the boxes towards the rear of the cellar piled floor to ceiling and shook her head in bewilderment.

‘I don’t know if all of it’s his. Some must have belonged to the person who lived here before him. If it is all his then he was one hell of a hoarder.’ Mason indicated the boxes full of magazines.

Kate crossed to one and dug inside. She pulled out one of the girlie magazines and held it up, a smile on her face.

‘There’s loads of them in there,’ Mason told her, kneeling down to pick up some of the spilled papers.

As he lifted the typed, printed and handwritten sheaf of paper he noticed that there were also photographs among the spilled contents of the box he’d knocked over. He held a Polaroid between his fingers, inspecting the image there. It was a man in his thirties. Dark haired and unshaven, dressed in a pair of jeans and a shirt. He wore a pair of metal-rimmed glasses. His face was expressionless.

‘Is this Simon Usher?’ Mason asked, holding the photo up.

Kate joined him and looked at the Polaroid.

‘That’s him,’ she acknowledged.

‘I wonder who took it?’ Mason mused, picking up more of the spilled pictures. He shuffled slowly through them, noticing that they all seemed to be of Usher and, more perplexingly, that the man was not smiling in any of them. He wore the same nondescript expression in every one. They were taken from a dozen different angles, as if the taker wanted to capture his features from every available side. Kate edged nearer to him, also looking down at the pictures, surveying each one as he revealed it.

There were thirty-four photos of Simon Usher standing unsmilingly before the camera.

‘Doesn’t look too happy, does he?’ Mason observed. He nodded in the direction of the box that he’d knocked over earlier. ‘See if there are any more in there, Kate.’

Kate crawled on all fours over to the box and peered inside.

‘My God,’ she breathed. ‘There’re hundreds in here.’

‘Let’s have a look,’ Mason murmured.

She lifted the box and brought it to where Mason was sitting on the cold stone floor.

‘Can’t we do this upstairs?’ she asked, pointing towards the ceiling. ‘Where’s it’s a bit warmer.’

Mason nodded and got to his feet, taking the box from her. He led the way up the stone steps to the kitchen and then through into the sitting room. They both sat down on the sofa, the box of photos in front of them. Mason dug out a handful and began sifting slowly through them.

‘What exactly are we looking for?’ Kate wanted to know, also grabbing a handful of pictures.

‘I’m not really sure,’ Mason admitted. ‘Maybe some clue about what kind of guy he was. There might be some answers among these pictures.’

Kate raised her eyebrows questioningly and began flicking through the pile of photos she held.

‘I told you,’ she said, quietly, eyes fixed on the succession of images before her. ‘Usher was a normal kind of guy. Nothing out of the ordinary.’

Mason finished looking at the first batch of pictures (a little dismayed that they showed nothing other than views of the school and its grounds) and reached for more.

‘Are you looking forward to your first day teaching again?’ Kate enquired, slowly shuffling the pictures she held before her, similarly unimpressed by some shots of the local countryside.

Mason nodded, still transfixed by the Polaroids he was working his way through.

Tiring of the task, Kate placed another batch of pictures on the sofa and got to her feet.

‘Maybe a cup of tea would help,’ she offered. ‘Shall I make one while you carry on with your detective work?’