Death of a Teacher (17 page)

Alison had hated the frowsy feeling of lying in bed on Sunday, waiting for Mark to surface after a night drinking and dancing. She lay watching the sunlight speckle the white walls. When he finally roused himself, he had been crabby and overtired. The trip to Derbyshire had not been a great success. They had both been hot, the car-parks were full, and Mark had not wanted to walk far. He couldn’t drink, as he was driving; Alison wasn’t insured to drive his car, something which made her cross in turn. In the evening they had ordered a take-away supper which wasn’t very appetizing, and Mark had gone to sleep watching a DVD. Then he had woken and spent most of the night on his computer while Alison slept fretfully. For someone who worked hard all 
week, Mark played hard at weekends too, and Alison had forgotten what it was like to be with him for more than twenty-four hours.

She sometimes wondered what Mark might be taking, to keep him going at the clubs and bars and internet games. The sales culture depended on drive and energy; many of his mates got their boost artificially. Alison knew that many of her friends took recreational drugs. But there were several reasons why she didn’t. She worried about how it might affect her work with kids and she hated the whole sneaky, hole-in-corner criminal thing which excited some of her mates as much as the illegal substances. She didn’t need it. She couldn’t afford it anyway.

But what about Mark? He earned twice as much as she did. He was in that sort of culture. Did he take stuff? Possibly. But his frantic lifestyle would stop when they had their house to pay for and kids to bring up. When they had first got engaged, Alison had lain in Mark’s arms and imagined the children they might have. Redheads like her, perhaps, or blonds like him. But lately, it was as if the children were at the other end of a long country lane, walking away from her.

On Bank Holiday Monday she and Mark went out for the inevitable brunch. Talking about the house they might have, and the things they might do, was getting a bit repetitive. As they sat at the pavement café, two young men walked past, wearing shades and loose, short-sleeved shirts over faded, torn jeans. They had shaved heads; they swaggered.

‘Markie!’ one said, and slapped his hand down on the little metal table. ‘Howya doin’?’

Mark had been absorbed in yesterday’s Sunday paper. He looked up, and Alison saw at once that he was embarrassed.

‘Archie my friend!’ he said. The other man just smiled and nodded.

‘This is my fiancée,’ Mark added.

Alison said ‘Hi’ without much enthusiasm.

‘Fiancée, eh? Well, well. Who’d’ve thought it. We’re off into town now,’ the one called Archie said. He leered mischievously and Mark squirmed under his long, slow smile. ‘Will we be seein’ ya tonight, Markie? Or is your fiancée goin’ to be around?’

‘Maybe,’ Mark said. He attempted a dismissive wave as he went back to his paper. The other man banged the flat of his hand on the little metal table so hard it shook.

‘What about later, today Markie?’ he said in a thick, slow, emphatic sort of voice. ‘We’ll call you later.’

Mark looked up quickly. ‘Yeah, yeah, OK, Dazza. Speak later.’

The two men slunk away. ‘Who were they?’ Alison asked.

‘Five-a-side footballers,’ Mark said without looking up. Alison watched the 
heavy men swagger down the street. They didn’t really look the five-a-side type, but then how would she know? She hardly knew any of Mark’s friends these days. For a moment she felt worried, as well as guilty.

A
t the same time, the barbecue at The Briars was in full swing. Nigel had been pleasant enough when he arrived with Molly, and meeting Ro again had taken the strain off his coming to The Briars. Suzy had watched
gratefully
as Ro greeted him enthusiastically and got him talking. Robert had actually asked Nigel to stay for lunch and he’d agreed, much to Suzie’s
amazement
. His girlfriend was a nurse, he explained, working until mid afternoon at the Freeman Hospital. She sounded a far cry from the glamorous PA he’d left Suzy for.

Phil and Becky helped the atmosphere too. Phil was easy to talk to and seemed genuinely interested in Ro’s PCSO work. There had been lots of laughter around the table, especially when Robert had nearly dropped a Cumberland sausage into the ashes and Jake had rescued it with reflexes that astonished himself as well as everyone else.

When the serious eating was over, the young people sat drinking cans of Coke at the bottom of the garden. Surprisingly, they were still outside rather than hooked up to various electronic games, though Jake told Suzy that Ben was known, school-wide, as a wizard at Intergalactic Warrior. Suzy served tea and coffee, and the conversation turned inevitably to the murder at Pelliter.

When they’d exhausted the topic, Nigel said, ‘Wasn’t there another body in suspicious circumstances around here recently? I heard something on the regional TV news. A body found by a weird chapel? How spooky is that?’

‘The chapel is Phil’s place. It was on Phil’s land,’ Ro said quickly, to spare him embarrassment. I’m saying too much, Ro thought, but Phil raised his eyebrows and nodded at her ever so slightly in gratitude. Ro felt herself colour up again. It was the first time she had blushed since she had fallen out with Jed Jackson, but it was once too often. It must be my age, she thought. 

‘Yes,’ Phil said. ‘The mystery man. We know nothing about him except he had a Canadian coin in his pocket.’

‘But something else has cropped up too,’ Ro said. ‘One of the teachers at St Mungo’s says she saw someone who sounds a bit like the mystery man in the school playground the same Friday. I’ve tried to get her to talk to the CID but she won’t …’ For a second Ro thought about Jed, and her face clouded.

But Suzy was turning to face her. ‘Hey, I think I saw him, too. I was at St Mungo’s because Molly’s teacher wanted to talk to me. I saw a smart young chap getting into a black cab. You don’t see many black cabs round here. He must have driven from somewhere else. He had black curly hair and glasses.’

‘Maybe he had flown over from Canada?’ Robert suggested. ‘That would explain the coin.’

‘And got a cab from Newcastle airport …’ Suzy said helpfully.

Ro shook her head. ‘Not very likely, I suppose.’ But the thought stayed with her.

‘And then there’s the drawing,’ Robert Clark was saying. ‘I met a girl who was on work experience with the local free newspaper. She said the dead man had a doodle. Or a tracing, she called it. It was too faded and pale to
photograph
well. But it looked like this.’

Robert was wearing his jeans again for the barbecue and the picture Poppy had drawn was in his pocket. He spread it out and put it on the table.

Ro stared at it. ‘That looks familiar,’ she said.

‘It looks a bit like a medieval picture to me,’ Suzy added. ‘Maybe it’s
something
to do with the St Trallen
Book
.’

‘I thought that,’ Robert said. ‘But it’s not quite right. It looks very like the sort of art in the
Book
, but at the same time it isn’t. It reminds me of
something
in my book on Ontario.’

‘I know why,’ Ro said. Her head was spinning. Was it the drink, or this very odd coincidence?

She took a deep breath. ‘This is a picture of something called Fraktur Art. It’s a sort of artwork done in North America, especially Canada. It’s derived from medieval manuscript art. It was done by religious groups for a long time, and it’s becoming very sought after now.’

‘How do you know all this?’ Suzy asked. ‘It sounds fascinating.’

‘I know,’ Ro said, ‘because I own one. It’s on the wall in my cottage.’

Alison backed her Mini out of the drive outside Mark’s flat and turned towards the North.

Mark had collapsed into bed when they’d got back after the brunch. She had been left looking at sheaves of house details, while he snored off
whatever
it was he needed to get out of his system. At three o’clock she had tried 
shaking him but he was so deeply asleep that all he did was mumble and turn over.

She had thought about the children’s work she had to mark, and the test preparation, and the programme for the concert which she needed to draw up. It was a waste of time lying here listening to Mark’s snoring. When he woke up he might try making love again, and get aggressive and irritable if it didn’t work.

I don’t actually want to be here, she’d thought. For some reason, Ro Watson’s cottage with the view of the fells came into her mind. She had liked Ro, her son with the sense of humour, the calm of Burnside. Alison thought about the wind on the shore at Pelliter, and felt a burst of homesickness. On Bank Holiday Monday lots of people went to Briggs’ ice-cream place. But even if everyone was there, there was still masses of space. You could walk along the low grassy dunes and see the ponies. Or walk out on the long flat shore with silvery ribbons of silt running down to the endless sea which lapped round the Isle of Man and Ireland on its way to America.

Mark had snuffled, coughed, and sunk into a deeper sleep. I’m sneaking off and going home, Alison had thought.

At The Briars, Ro heard herself saying, ‘Why don’t you come and see my picture, if you’re interested? Come tomorrow evening.’

‘I’d love to!’ Suzy said. ‘Molly’s getting very interested in art. Could we all come?’

Phil said, ‘I’d be interested too. I could bring Becky.’

‘Yeeesss!’ said Ben. Some new shouting and running game had started and he was in there with the others. It really has been a remarkable afternoon, Ro thought.

‘You’re very welcome. Come anytime around seven,’ she said. She thought of Alison McDonald’s remark that her house would be lovely for a party. Now, it seemed, she was having one. She took another sip of her red wine. In the distance Ben, Becky and Molly were being chased by Jake with the barbecue tongs. Jonty McFadden and his bullying seemed light years away.

Liz Rudder was spending a very dreary May Bank Holiday. John’s carers weren’t the usual team. Instead the agency sent two brisk new ladies whom she didn’t know. They weren’t local and they weren’t interested in chatting about the murder. Nor did they offer to do any little extras for Liz as a Pelliter celebrity. Worse, they could only do the morning session, which meant Liz needed to put John to bed, something she had only done once or twice before and which she hated.

By and large, though, Liz felt better. She had got over the shock of seeing 
Sheila Findley smiling at her in the garden centre on Saturday. It had strengthened her resolve. There was no way she was going to let the Findleys get back on track. Liz’s little one-to-one chat with Callie McFadden had been very useful. She was well aware of Callie’s hold over the head teacher, and suggesting that Jonty be entered for Dodsworth was her own stroke of tactical genius, really pushing up the pressure! Liz smiled to herself. She knew exactly what had gone on between Callie and Ray Findley – and Jonty’s birth nine months later had been a useful little bit of information she had been nursing for some time. Along with the murder, the stress of assessment tests, and Miss MacDonald’s problems with the parents, this new bombshell would mean the head teacher would have no chance to think about disrupting her comfortable life.

Liz tried some more of the Spanish language CD, but on hitting a difficult bit abandoned it for the time being. Later on, bored, she planted out the remaining begonias and tidied the front of the house. It needed painting, she thought. Would it be worth waiting until John died? Or should she get it done now, and risk having to do it again in a few years? Really, living with a disabled husband was very difficult to pace. She had read about these places where people went to commit suicide in Switzerland. She would have been prepared to take John if she could have squeezed agreement out of him. People might even think her rather noble. She couldn’t see the point in sick or inadequate people living half a life. Even someone like Brenda had been only half alive. Once Liz had grown away from her, there was really no other emotional outlet for Brenda. Poor virginal Pasty Podgy!

Liz looked down at her own body as she took a shower after doing the garden. It was interesting how the pink flesh of her stomach, buttocks and thighs still looked firm while her face had become wrinkled. Even her breasts weren’t bad. Pity no one but John had ever seen them. Maybe Peter Hodgson would have liked to, really, under his sanctimonious exterior. And he probably wasn’t the only one. But Liz had been faithful to John. Most of the time she had treated his infidelity with disgust, confiding in Brenda with laughing contempt each time John strayed during that awful patch about twelve years ago when he had gone off the rails.

Until that terrible time when John had really fallen for someone else. Someone twenty years younger than him, and he had thought it really was love!

Liz scrubbed hard at her thighs. Eventually she had managed to get things back on track so no one knew, except herself and John. And Brenda, of course. After that John had been different. For the last ten years of their marriage he’d been like a man who wasn’t really there. But that never bothered Liz. As long as they had a marriage in the eyes of the outside world she really needed 
nothing more. Sex had stopped – which had been a pity because she wouldn’t have minded having John back in bed, but he had totally lost interest. But that didn’t matter as long as the holidays, the neighbourhood gatherings and the upkeep of the house had gone on as before.

And then, out of the blue, John had seemed to wake up. Suddenly he’d started to make those horrible plans to change everything. Then he’d had his stroke. In a way, it had been a stroke of luck! She giggled naughtily as she soaped her body.

And really, things had worked out very well, as long as John didn’t go on as a creaking gate forever. She congratulated herself on having no children. They would have been in their twenties or thirties now, wanting money for a university education, or to set up their own homes. She might even have had grandchildren demanding school fees at Dodsworth, like Kevin’s brood.

She put her hands on her own stomach. Her hands were tiny, white and almost completely smooth. Like a child’s. I’ll still be in reasonable shape in a few years, she thought. With luck, everything would come together. John would pass away. She could retire from St Mungo’s. She would be on full pension. The recession would be over and she could sell the house for a decent price. And then she would be off to Spain and the sunshine.

She practised her Spanish to herself as she dried herself on the pink fluffy towels in the new en-suite bathroom she’d installed. Then she wrapped herself in her lovely pink, downy dressing-gown and, wafting sweetly of shower gel, went through to the bedroom and sank on to her bed. She picked up her phone.

‘Father Peter!’ she said. ‘I am so glad to have caught you. It’s Liz Rudder here. We haven’t spoken since this terrible thing happened to poor Brenda. But I’ve been thinking of you every day. I have been too devastated to do anything for a week.’

There was some noncommittal grunting at the other end of the phone.

‘It would be so good to talk. I know Brenda was very concerned about St Trallen’s Chapel and I’m sure you want to keep up the good work. As a senior teacher in a Church of England school I might have some influence myself! The problem is my husband John, who has had a terrible stroke as you know. I can’t leave him. Could you come round and see us here at High Pelliter? This evening? For a drink perhaps and some canapés?’

Peter Hodgson thought about the ham sandwiches and trifle from the corner shop which he had planned to have for supper. Since his sister’s murder, he hadn’t been able to face eating out. One good thing about Brenda had been the way she had cooked for him on Sundays. He enjoyed his food, but cooking was something he had really never mastered. It was hardly the preserve of a priest, and in the past he’d had a housekeeper. He really longed 
for someone to make his meals again. His reservations about Liz Rudder began to dissolve.

‘I dare say I could come if I make some rearrangements,’ he muttered.

‘That’s marvellous, Peter. I’ll see you in an hour.’

There was absolutely nothing wrong in having a plan B, was there? Liz thought.

Alison had driven in a sort of frenzy, mad keen to get back to Cumbria, but after about twenty-five minutes she was reconsidering. She pulled into a petrol station, where there was a queue. Think clearly, she told herself. What were the problems, and why had they blown up now? Firstly, Mark’s idea of how to relax was becoming increasingly different from hers. Manic clubbing and living life at breakneck speed was not what she wanted, and she was pretty sure there was an issue of ‘recreational substances’. Secondly, she was worried about the way he spent money but expected her to save. It didn’t seem fair. Thirdly, he seemed to have a parallel life which excluded her. He didn’t spend every night playing five-a-side, and what about the repulsive Archie and Dazza? Who were they? Fourthly, it was annoying that he was so insensitive about the everyday problems at St Mungo’s, but managed to take a prurient interest in Brenda Hodgson’s murder.

They’d been through another bad patch a few years earlier. Mark had gone out for a stag night while Alison had stayed in at her flat, working. The following lunchtime he’d turned up, obviously the worse for wear. Alison had finally wrenched out of him that he had been to a lap-dancing club and stayed out all night. It wasn’t a question of him tagging on in embarrassment with the crowd. He had really enjoyed his evening, and defended himself with an air of injury. He was truculent, as if her wringing the truth out of him made it her fault. But I’m the injured party, Alison had wanted to say. She felt betrayed and disgusted; no amount of ‘boys will be boys’ and ‘everyone does it’ and ‘it’s only once or twice in a lifetime’ made her feel better.