Authors: Jane Casey
‘But you’re sure, it was definitely Saturday you were supposed to go out?’ I checked.
‘Yes, but she cancelled.’
‘Did she do that a lot?’
‘Yeah.’ Millie squeezed her knees to her chest. ‘I mean, I didn’t mind, but she liked to change arrangements when it suited her.’
‘That would fit with using you for an alibi so she could meet her boyfriend,’ Derwent pointed out.
‘Oh my God. You’re so right.’ She put one foot down and kicked at the table.
‘What’s the matter, Millie?’ There was obviously something she wanted to say. I glanced at Derwent, who leaned forward.
‘The best thing you can do for Laura now – the only thing you can do to help her – is to tell us the truth, Millie. What’s wrong? What do you think we should know?’
When she eventually replied, her voice was pitched at a nearly inaudible level. ‘The thing is, I know Lydia said I was Laura’s best friend, and it was probably true, but she wasn’t easy to get to know. I’ve got other friends who I’d say were closer. But she kind of didn’t, so I can see what Lydia means.’
‘So we shouldn’t be surprised she had secrets from you, is that it?’ I asked. ‘And that you didn’t mind it?’
‘I’m not surprised, that’s all I can say.’ She bit her lip.
‘Laura
kept things to herself. She wasn’t big on sharing. I know things weren’t that happy at home, but she never really told me what was happening. Maybe she was afraid I’d spread it around school, but I never said a word to anyone. She didn’t trust me.’
‘But she trusted you more than anyone else.’
‘I suppose.’ Millie blinked at us. ‘I just don’t think that means very much at all.’
Chapter Ten
IT HAD BEEN
three years since Christopher Blacker was cleared – belatedly and on appeal – of raping one of his students, but it might as well have been three days. Nothing had faded in him – not the burning sense of outrage at the unfair treatment he’d received, not the anger at the poor representation that had sent him to prison for a year until his appeal was heard. And not the fear that brightened his eyes as he opened the door of his flat just wide enough to let us in. It was understandable. A conviction for statutory rape – even one that had been found to be unsafe on appeal – was a heavy burden to carry.
The flat was a dingy space overlooking a busy road in Acton, little more than a single square room with a narrow hallway and tiny bathroom. It wasn’t quite a studio; one corner of the main room had been partitioned off to make a tiny bedroom. I glanced in as I passed, seeing a single bed and a row of hooks on the wall instead of a wardrobe. A cardboard box in the corner functioned as both bedside table and as storage for more clothes – underwear and T-shirts, by the look of the piles I could see. It reminded me of nothing more than a prison cell.
The rest of the flat wasn’t much better. The carpet was old and thin, threadbare in places, patterned in red and black. A makeshift kitchen in the corner had a sink, a half-size fridge and a hotplate but no oven. There was room for a two-seater sofa, which Derwent sprawled himself across without asking permission. Blacker sat down at the table
by
the window, his back to the light. I wondered if that was accidental or on purpose, a habit he had learned to hide what he was feeling from police officers. It didn’t matter much anyway; the net curtains that hung at the window were dark grey with dirt and let in very little daylight. Derwent turned on a lamp that stood beside him, which marginally improved the situation.
‘It’s pitch dark in here. How do you manage to read that lot?’ He nodded at the shelves that lined one wall. They were loaded with paperbacks. I skim-read the spines and saw that most of them were second-hand, old editions of classic non-fiction books that were dog-eared and faded.
‘I manage.’ He unbent a little. ‘The wonder of electricity helps.’
‘Stick the main light on, Maeve,’ Derwent commanded. Blacker didn’t protest so I flicked the switch. The bulb wasn’t particularly strong but the extra light was enough to see my notebook, and the damp that was puckering the paper around the window. I looked at Blacker with interest. My first impression of him had been coloured by the stress that was making his thin frame vibrate, but now I saw that he was attractive, or would have been if he hadn’t been so gaunt. He had dark, curly hair that was long enough to cover his collar, heavy straight eyebrows over toffee-coloured eyes and a sensitive mouth. He wore jeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, revealing thin forearms covered in black hair. His hands were long, with elegant, tapering fingers.
‘May I sit here?’ I indicated the other chair at the table.
‘Yes, of course.’ Blacker leaned across and began to gather up the papers and books that were stacked up in front of me, his movements jerky and hurried. A cereal bowl lurked under the last pile of loose pages and I handed it to him without looking too closely at the contents. ‘Sorry. I use this table for work and eating. Sometimes at the same time.’
‘It’s fine.’ I put my notebook down on the table, wishing I could give it a good scrub first. There was a constellation of old crumbs by my elbow and I could hear more crunching under my notebook when I leaned on it.
‘It’s not usually this messy in here. I work from home sometimes so I have to keep it neat.’ The words tumbled out of him at top speed. ‘It’s just that I don’t have any students at the moment.’
‘Students?’ Derwent’s tone was challenging and I shot him a warning look. We needed Blacker to trust us, not to clam up. He wasn’t officially a suspect; we didn’t have any grounds to arrest him if he refused to talk to us. He was well within his rights to kick us out, in fact, and I had expected him to refuse to see us right up to the point where he’d beckoned us in.
‘I still teach. But not in a school. I couldn’t go back after what happened.’ He clamped his hands together between his knees. ‘Legally, I could have. I tried. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.’
‘Too traumatised?’ Derwent drawled.
‘You can joke about it if you like.’ Blacker’s voice sounded strained. ‘Probably seems funny to you. But I got flashbacks. Panic attacks. Couldn’t breathe, let alone teach.’
‘Just from being in a school?’ I asked gently.
He nodded. ‘I don’t do well with large groups of people any more. I didn’t fit in, in the staffroom – I thought everyone was judging me. It was worse in the classroom. Every time someone whispered, I panicked. I thought they knew what had happened.’
‘Did they?’
‘It was a different school. Different part of London. And I wasn’t using the same name, with the head teacher’s permission, so they couldn’t have found out by searching the Internet.’ He swallowed. ‘It was just paranoia, really, but that didn’t make it any easier to cope. I ended up leaving. Walked out one day. The kids weren’t bad, but
they
could tell I wasn’t able to deal with discipline problems, and things just got worse and worse. It was like being bullied, every class. Thank God, they never found out about the court case. They just turned on me because they were bored and I was an easy target.’
‘What did they do?’
‘Talked. Shouted things when my back was turned. Passed notes. Wrote things on the whiteboard before I got into the room. Two of the boys who sat on opposite sides of the room brought in a rugby ball once. They spent the class throwing it back and forth, over their classmates’ heads. I pretended I hadn’t noticed. I couldn’t deal with a fight.’
‘What were you trying to teach them?’ I asked.
‘Maths and physics.’ He grinned, showing white, even teeth. His face was so thin that the effect was more death’s head than Hollywood, but once it might have been the latter. ‘You know, maths and physics aren’t exactly crowd-pleasing subjects at the best of times. They’re also not that popular to teach, which was why I was able to get that job in the first place. I had experience and a good reference from my old school, so the head was willing to overlook what she called “teething problems”.’ He pulled a face at the phrase; I guessed it had been understatement of the century. ‘I used to love my job but I didn’t miss it when I left. I wasn’t sorry, even though I ended up being signed off work for months because I had a breakdown. The good old welfare state came to the rescue, with not quite enough to live on for not quite as long as I needed it.’
‘At least you had something coming in.’ Derwent didn’t sound terribly moved.
‘I had a bit, but it was a struggle to make ends meet. Not like now. Now I’m doing really well for myself.’ He smiled at the expression on my face. ‘It might not look like much to you, but this place even has a bathroom I don’t have to share. It’s all mine.’
‘Going up in the world.’ Derwent leaned forward, his eyes narrowed in concentration. Hunting. ‘Tell me more about the students you teach here.’
‘Worried for their safety? Afraid I might be molesting them?’ Blacker was looking wary, a pulse jumping in his throat. ‘You’re all the same, aren’t you? Give a dog a bad name.’
‘It’s a reasonable question.’
‘It’s a question you’d ask if you were concerned about their safety,’ Blacker said harshly. ‘It’s something you’d be curious about if you thought I was guilty.’
‘It’s habit,’ I said. ‘DI Derwent likes to know everything about everyone.’
Blacker gave me a look that showed what he thought of that particular line: not much. But it had taken his mind of Derwent for a moment, long enough for him to recover his temper. He fixed his eyes on the wall just above Derwent’s head. ‘I teach students here, but I’ve got rules. The first one, and the most important, is no girls, ever. No students here on their own – they come in twos, or I go to see them at their house with a parent in the same room with us at all times. If one of them doesn’t turn up when they’re supposed to be here, I go to the library or one of the local coffee shops with the other one. We stay in public at all times. I make it clear from the start I’m not prepared to be alone with them.’
‘Doesn’t that raise people’s suspicions?’
‘Mostly they’re glad I’ve said it first. They don’t want to look paranoid, but they’re protective of their kids. Rightly so. There are plenty of weirdos out there.’
‘And plenty of students in need of extra tuition?’
‘I usually have about six boys to teach – more coming up to the GCSEs and A levels, obviously, but I also do special tutoring for the Oxbridge entrance exams. I advertise locally, but most of my business is generated by personal recommendations. I am a very good teacher and I don’t
hate
tutoring, especially when the boys get good results. I make enough money to survive. What else do you want to know?’
‘Got a girlfriend?’
‘Not at the moment.’
‘Since you went to court?’
‘There have been women. Casually. Nothing serious.’ He ran his hands through his hair, frustrated. ‘Women, Inspector. Not girls.’
‘She was pretty.’ Derwent’s comment was something of a non sequiter, but neither Blacker nor I had any trouble with following his train of thought.
‘Isobel Sairey was fourteen at the time we were supposed to be having an affair. I haven’t been attracted to a fourteen-year-old since I was fifteen or there abouts. She was a pretty girl – she probably still is. But I didn’t see her that way. She was just one of my students. If I thought about her at all before she made her allegations, it was just to wonder whether she’d understood the answer when she asked me a question.’
‘You must have been aware that your presence in a girls’ school could cause trouble. A nice-looking fellow like you, and young, and all those teenage girls with their hormones raging out of control.’
‘I was a member of staff. I wasn’t there to act as a focus for their emotional confusion, or whatever you’re suggesting.’
‘That was what happened though, wasn’t it?’
‘I couldn’t control what the girls thought or how they expressed it.’ Blacker seemed to have shrunk into himself. His voice was fainter, as if he was losing his hold on the conversation.
‘You couldn’t help it.’
‘I don’t think I could have, no.’ The brown eyes were fixed on Derwent’s.
Look, I have nothing to hide
. ‘I never talked about my private life. I never asked any of the girls
about
theirs – I didn’t even ask if they’d had a nice weekend, mainly because I didn’t care about the answer. I kept it about the work. I was pleasant to them when they behaved in class and did their homework, but I would never have been someone they would have wanted to confide in. I left that kind of thing to my female colleagues and counted myself lucky that I didn’t have to think about it.’
‘But you should have been thinking about it.’
‘Yeah, in retrospect I was naive. I don’t have any sisters. I went to a boys’ school. I did have girlfriends, then and later, but I probably didn’t realise how highly strung teenage girls can be. I’d just never been around them enough to know what they were like.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘If you’re expecting me to be bitter about what Isobel Sairey did to me, you’re going to be disappointed. She was young and confused, and she didn’t understand the consequences of her actions. I made peace with that a long time ago. When she’s older, she’ll realise what she did, if she doesn’t already. I wouldn’t want to have that hanging over me.’