Too Close For Comfort (11 page)

‘Thanks for coming,’ he said eventually.

‘I’m glad you asked,’ I said. ‘I’m not arrogant enough to think I can do a great deal in three weeks, but if I can be any support to you, I’d like to
try.’

He grabbed a ballpoint pen from the pen pot on his desk, started clicking the mechanism in and out. He was wearing a wedding ring that gripped the skin of his fleshy finger like it was too small
for it.

‘That’s all we can really do, isn’t it?’ he said, looking up, his gaze intense. His eyes were almond-shaped, brown, too small for his wide face. ‘Try?’

‘In this instance?’

‘More life in general,’ he said, voice leaden. The next silence that came felt more loaded. I waited it out. ‘These sessions are confidential, aren’t they?’

‘Unless you tell me something that’s critical to the police investigation.’ I looked at the way his shoulders hunched inwards under his bog-standard black crew neck, his
fingers still fiddling obsessively with the chewed plastic pen. All I wanted – all I ever want with clients, apart from the odd one I want to drown – was to make him feel that he
wasn’t completely alone. ‘And I know so little about it that unless you tell me you . . .’ I stopped myself, then finished the sentence. ‘Were directly
involved, then it seems unlikely.’

‘What, you mean if I’d pushed her?’ he said, words laced with grim humour. ‘I assume you know about the bruising on her body?’

‘I do, yes.’

He shook his head. ‘It still feels completely unbelievable. It’s like it’s a horrible practical joke, and someone’s going to jump out with a camera and it’ll all be
over.’

‘Of course it does,’ I said gently. ‘It’s only just happened. You’re in shock.’

‘Shock’s one word for it.’

It seemed like a strange response. Was he shooting for a fake kind of nonchalance? I see it sometimes, particularly in men – an attempt to distance themselves from their feelings to
self-protect.

‘If shock’s one word, what would be another?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You said that was one word for it, as if you were thinking about a word which might better describe your feelings.’

‘Feelings.’ He almost spat the word out.

‘Well – how did it feel when you found out? Did the police tell you face to face?’

‘Dunno,’ he said, jaw rigid under the doughy flesh that covered it. ‘I felt – angry, if anything.’

‘Angry with who?’

‘Angry about all of it,’ he said, an answer to a different question. His voice dropped at the end of the sentence, like the ‘all’ was infinite, a stone thrown down a
well, a distant splash. Was he skirting around the incident at the school that Krall had made mention of? ‘I mean obviously I felt terrible for the family. For Max.’

His postscript had none of the emotion of the first half of his reply.

‘Ian, can I ask what you mean by “all of it”?’

‘The whole thing is obviously a huge mess. Lives have been devastated.’ He was depersonalising my questions, keeping me at arm’s length, but all the time he was laying down
breadcrumbs, encouraging me to venture closer. ‘A child’s life has been destroyed,’ he added for good measure.

‘Of course. I appreciate all of that. I just wondered about how it felt for you, specifically. In your role.’

‘What? Potentially having recruited a murderer? Fabulous, Mia, as I’m sure you can imagine.’

I laughed. I needed to take him at face value, break the tension.

‘I’m sorry if that sounded trite.’ He gave a smile that felt real, present in a way that he hadn’t been up until now. ‘You want the truth? I’m not sure
I’ll ever be the person I was a month ago. He seems like a fool.’

Again, it wasn’t so much the words as the delivery.

‘A fool?’ I was going to continue but he cut straight across me.

‘Can we talk practicalities?’ he said, suddenly acid. ‘Or is this all going to be deep and meaningful?’

‘The session’s for you, Ian. It’s about what you find most useful.’

He drew himself up in his chair, ramrod straight. He suddenly felt like a headmaster, like he could dole out lines or a suspension without breaking a sweat.

‘How do we come back from this?’ he demanded. ‘How do my children, my staff, ever start to feel normal again?’

‘I think the truth is, that normal will have to become something different now.’

His gaze was intense. ‘OK, so how do I make this place feel safe again?’

‘By telling the truth,’ I said, watching how his face moved downwards at the sound of the word. Did it sound more glib to his ears than I’d intended it to be? ‘Or rather
– by acknowledging what’s happened instead of spreading a layer of fake normal over the top. Children are very resilient, but they’re also very sensitive. They know when
they’re being lied to. I would encourage the parents to tell them that Peter’s died, not feed them stories about him having gone away.’

‘Really?’

‘They read fairy stories, see pets die, lose grandparents. They’re much better off knowing he’s died, and then having lots of support to feel safe in that reality. And Max will
want to talk about his mum, I imagine, if he hasn’t already.’

‘Right.’ I could sense the anger that he was talking about, the insistent pulse of it. ‘Don’t they say tabloids have a reading age of nine? They should all be well and
truly up to speed by the time they get back.’ It was hard not to find his gallows humour repellent. ‘Did you see the headlines today?’

‘I did, yes. And I found it shocking to see their faces there. I can’t imagine how hard it is for those of you who were close to them.’

The newsagent had been crowded with people when I’d walked past it today. Sarah and Peter’s photographs had been plastered across the front pages –
Double
Love Death in Farthing’s Village
said one.

‘I wasn’t close to them,’ countered Ian. ‘I was an employer. A headmaster to Sarah’s child. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t care.’ His gaze was
intense again. ‘Or that I don’t care now.’

‘Absolutely. I can see how much it’s affected you.’

Ian’s gaze swivelled to the window.

‘I tried my best.’ His voice cracked. ‘What does my best look like now?’

The emotion was right there on the surface. I decided to risk trying to draw him a little further.

‘What do you think it would look like?’

Just for a second, he looked utterly helpless, like he himself was a child, but then something hardened and calcified.

‘I asked you,’ he said.

I was going too fast. Part of him wanted to spill the emotion, but the larger part couldn’t risk it yet.

‘I would have an assembly the day the school comes back. Talk to everyone – staff and children – and let the kids know that they can talk about it in smaller groups with their
teachers. The council are going to provide ongoing access to counsellors for your teachers, aren’t they?’

‘Yeah, no, I get it. Talk. Talk and talk and talk.’

His face was scarlet, the pen clasped tight in his hand again.

‘It’s OK to be angry,’ I said, making my voice gentle. ‘Something terrible has happened, and you’re right in the firing line. This might sound like therapy speak,
and if it does, I can only apologise, but I think you need a lot of self-compassion right now. This isn’t your fault. You need support so you don’t feel alone with what it is you have
to get through in the next few weeks.’

My eyes flicked around the room, looking for personal touches, a sense of his wider life, what might be holding him. I couldn’t find anything, just dreary MDF shelves overflowing with
textbooks and ring binders.

‘It’s useless, this, isn’t it?’ he spat.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You don’t know if it’s my fault. You’re just coming up with phrases . . .’

I paused a second, angling my next shot. He was angry, no question: it wasn’t just his face that was reddened by it, the flush spread down below the neck of his black jumper. But below the
anger I sensed something else. Pain that was too raw, too dangerous, to give words to.

‘Like we said at the beginning, unless you . . .’ The words stuck in my throat, but I pushed them out. ‘Unless you murdered those two people, it is emphatically
not your fault. So no, it’s not just a phrase.’ His shoulders slumped, his eyes lifting to meet mine.

‘OK. Point taken.’ His mouth stretched into an almost-smile. ‘Round one to you.’

I smiled back, paused as I formed the next thought.

‘It’s just so hard for us to believe in it, I think. The finality of death, even though it’s the one thing that’s in the job description of being human.’

He didn’t speak, just stared out of the window into the empty playground. My gaze followed his, the two of us watching a single magpie swooping downwards and landing on the roundabout. It
cocked its head, gimlet-eyed, its talons tightly wrapped around one of the metal bars that quartered the surface.

‘I did try,’ he muttered eventually, eyes still trained on the black-and-white bird. It gave a loud squawk, its beak pointing skyward.

‘What did you try?’ I asked.

‘I tried, you know, I tried to keep the show on the road.’ He gave an ironic wriggle of his hands. I stayed quiet a minute, waiting to see where he’d go. ‘I’m a
headmaster, not . . . some fascist dictator.’

‘What show was it you were keeping on the road, do you think?” I asked him.

‘Do you have kids?’

‘No. No I don’t,’ I said, affecting a nonchalance of my own.

‘Schools are very emotional places. Feelings run high.’

‘The police did mention that there was some kind of incident.’

Ian gave a humourless laugh.

‘If only. An incident I could’ve solved. Keep calm and carry on.’

He stared at me, challenge in his eyes. The room felt airless, the session infinite. This was day one, and it was already this complicated.

‘So how was it if it wasn’t like that?’ I asked.

‘Peter was someone who seemed to stir up a lot of feelings. He didn’t seem like he’d be that way when I hired him.’

‘And people seem to say the same thing about Sarah. How did he make you feel?’ He didn’t reply, his face immobile. ‘Did you think he was a good teacher?’

‘One of the best I’ve ever come across,’ he said, the compliment delivered without a trace of warmth. It was every bit as ambiguous as Kimberley’s answer to that same
question. Then he straightened himself in his chair, the connection lost again. He’d disappeared behind his title; I could sense it. ‘We haven’t got long. Why don’t you talk
to me more about how children deal with death? Help me get into the mindset of it?’

I talked him through the accepted wisdom, illustrated it with a few examples from my own patients, but he’d left the session already. And before long it was officially over, his stiff hand
shooting back over the desk to shake mine.

‘Let me know if there’s anything more I can do,’ I said, aware how drained I felt by the hour we’d spent together.

‘Is this not something we’re just doing now?’ he asked, terse.

‘Not unless you want it to be. It can be an every day thing, or never again.’

He gave an efficient smile. ‘Let me give it some thought.’

He knew how to dismiss a person from his office with just a tone of voice. It came with the territory.

*

She made me jump. She was standing there, a suspiciously polite distance from Ian’s door, tapping at her iPhone with a long, manicured finger. She waited a second to look
up, even though I knew she’d heard the door swing open.

‘Are you all wrapped up in there?’

‘For this session, yes,’ I said, hoping now that Ian wouldn’t tell her that it had been a complete waste of time.

‘I’m so glad I ran into you today,’ she said. ‘What you said back there, you made me realise we can’t just sit around waiting for the dust to settle. We need to
move forward.’

I was sure I’d said nothing of the kind. It was a fortnight that had been punctuated by two deaths – if I, a rank outsider had said that, it would be the height of insensitivity.

‘What were you thinking?’ I asked.

‘A dinner. You know – breaking bread together. I’ve already called Lysette, and she’s agreed.’ I tried not to look surprised by that news. ‘Helena and Alex
are in. Just to warn you, I’ll be mortally offended if you’re not too. Particularly as it was your idea.’

She grinned at me as she said it, angling her lovely face to the side as if I were a reluctant suitor.

‘Well yes, if it’s not an intrusion, I’d love to come.’

Would I? And also should I – all that training I’d done about confidentiality and boundaries seemed to be a complete waste of energy in Little Copping.

‘Great. I’m sorry it’s in such sad circumstances, but it’s actually very refreshing to have a new face in the village. It can all get a bit Desperate Housewives round
here, if you know what I mean.’

I didn’t, but I laughed along with her, tried to convince myself that this was evidence I should like to hear.

‘Wisteria Lane here I come,’ I called after her retreating back, but she was already halfway to Ian’s office, our business satisfactorily completed.

Part of me dreaded it, but part of me was intrigued. How would it be to see the Farthings in their natural habitat?

Jim was outside the police station when I emerged, a fag trapped between the fingers of his left hand. I’d been in there signing some paperwork, the sight of the teeming
incident room every bit as discombobulating second time around. What was I doing, getting mixed up in all of this? I got the distinct impression that, however much Lawrence Krall wanted me there,
some of the residents of Little Copping wanted nothing less.

Because of that – but not only because of that – there was a certain pleasure in noting the way that Jim’s face lit up when he spotted me. He hugged me hello without bothering
to check if it was welcome. I kept my body stiff and rigid as a point of principle, even though a part of me longed to let go – I’d been holding on too tightly the last few days. The
smell of him infiltrated my senses almost against my will, the same and also different. The CK One was long gone, but there was still something there, a kind of sweet, lemony musk that his skin
always seemed to produce, which I now knew I’d never quite forgotten.