‘Exactly. Even though he’s the salt of the earth and been there for years. I mean, Gil,’ said Olivia with increasing passion, ‘how could anyone have it in for the doc? All right, he lives in his own little world, but he’s a gentleman – never says a bad word against anyone. Even when JP and Ashley kept dropping in to “observe” him, scribbling away on clipboards and poncing about in their smart suits like Hope’s creepy answer to the Blues Brothers, he never took umbrage. Always scrupulously polite even when Ashley sneered to his face. There was just one time when I saw the doc’s hands trembling. And then, I tell you, I wanted to kill Ashley!’
Markham sent up a prayer of gratitude that no-one else was present to witness Olivia’s vehemence.
Suddenly realizing what she had said, Olivia flushed and fell silent. Observing her downcast expression, Markham prompted, ‘Do you think resentment at Ashley’s meddling could have spiralled into something more deadly?’
‘Not with Doctor Abernathy, no.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘But Ashley certainly had plenty of enemies. It was that cruel streak of his, you see.’
‘He and Helen Kavanagh were two of a kind, then?’ The deputy head had struck Markham as ruthless.
‘Oh God.’ Olivia sounded disgusted. ‘That android! Charges around trying to brainwash people with PC gibberish like something out of The Manchurian Candidate.’
Markham burst out laughing.
‘I’m not sure the lady and I exactly hit it off.’
‘You and the rest of the western hemisphere! I don’t know how Dave Uttley stands it. Poor sod gets a hand bagging every day—’
‘More like a stiletto in the heart,’ Markham interjected as he thought of Kavanagh’s footwear.
Olivia’s eyes crinkled with delight. ‘Yeah, you figure she’d be into Hillary Clinton pantsuits but it’s kitten heels or bust! Freud would have a field day!’ Her face suddenly clouded over. ‘Somehow I’ve survived, Gil, but it’s no thanks to Goneril. She’s always sniping about my “dramatic escapades” … makes me sound like some kind of nut case!’
Markham forbore to mention that DCI Sidney engaged in very similar rhetoric.
‘You don’t see Kavanagh as a murderer, then?’ he enquired with airy casualness.
Slowly, Olivia shook her head. ‘She’s poisonous all right. But despite her nickname, I can’t imagine her losing control like that. Her weapons are character assassination and innuendo.’ She added with a shudder, ‘There was something so passionate about the way Ashley was killed. As though someone wanted to obliterate him from the face of the earth.’
Markham sensed her mind was travelling down dark by-ways.
‘Just one more question, Liv, and then we can batten down the hatches and have a box-set binge.’
‘Ask away.’
‘Is there anyone on the staff you think might be capable of violence like that – if pushed too far, say?’
Olivia looked down at her plate with its half-eaten supper, seemingly lost in thought. Then she looked across the table with childlike earnestness.
‘I honestly can’t think of anyone, Gil, though there was lots of muttering in corners. Matt called Ashley a twat once. And Harry told him to stick his clipboard …’
Markham grinned. Matthew Sullivan’s waspish sense of humour had enlivened many an evening at The Sweepstakes, and Harry Mountfield was clearly cut from the same cloth.
‘I get the gist,’ he drawled. ‘Hope’s senior leaders are used to subservience, aren’t they? When I say jump, you ask how high. But there’s no bowing and scraping from those two!’
A light broke through the gloom of Olivia’s face. ‘That’s why they’re my best friends,’ she said simply.
‘Right!’ Markham got up from the small oval table where they had dined, gesturing her across to one of two tartan high-backed armchairs waiting invitingly on the other side of the room. ‘Doctor Markham prescribes mindless entertainment, my love,’ he said with gentle warmth, ‘so dig out a DVD while I make coffee.’
‘Anything I like?’ she asked happily, rising too.
‘Hmm, within reason. Let’s rule out Scandi noir and anything with subtitles,’ Markham replied, enfolding her in his arms and kissing the top of her head. ‘How about Downton? Let’s disappear behind the green baize door for the evening.’
The following morning saw Markham slipping out of The Sweepstakes bright and early.
Wreathes of mist were slowly breaking up, allowing cold clear sunshine through. Listening to Sunday bells chiming across Bromgrove, Markham was filled with nostalgia for the time when he was a regular churchgoer. A lapsed Catholic, it was as if the corrosive loss of innocence had somehow outlawed him from his faith.
Long-forgotten lines of poetry rose unbidden to his mind and, for a moment, he was back in the lower sixth form, listening to one of his Jesuit instructors in full spate.
“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind.”
Sometimes he accompanied Olivia, a practising Anglican, to St Chad’s. But whenever he tried to raise his thoughts to Heaven, he felt the gates were firmly closed and bolted against him. As though he was too tainted by sordid experience to receive spiritual consolation. As though the ghosts of numberless dead clung to him and would not let him move out of his cold, dark tunnel into the light.
‘Don’t worry,’ Olivia told him with touching certainty. ‘One day the fog will lift.’ Maybe, he told himself, her arrival in his life heralded the advent of hope and a time when those tightly barred gates would swing open. In the meantime, while all the familiar landmarks might have disappeared, he could at least continue to fight for those whose wrongs cried out for justice.
Once he arrived at Hope, Markham sank low in his car seat and watched as the staff arrived in gaggles of twos and threes. All appeared subdued and self-conscious, looking apprehensively over their shoulders as if they suspected the car park of being bugged.
Burton drew up in her Mini Metro, followed by Noakes and Doyle together.
‘I wonder how Ms Mullen’s doing,’ Doyle said as the DS carefully locked the Ford Mondeo, his pride and joy, keeping a wary eye out for any teenage tearaways who might be lurking.
‘Wouldn’t ask the guv, if I were you, lad,’ grunted Noakes. ‘He’s very buttoned-up about his private life. No Entry signs all over the shop.’
However, Noakes’s thoughts were also running on Olivia. She doesn’t look a teacher, more like a hippie or a witch, was his first thought when Markham introduced them. Wonder if she dyes her hair that colour, was his second. My Muriel’d say she isn’t the full shilling, he ruminated. Can see why a bloke would get ideas, though – you could drown in those big eyes.
But for all the DS’s bewildered susceptibility to Olivia’s rare brand of enchantment, he was doggedly loyal to the guv’nor and bristled when anyone – including DCI Sidney – made snide remarks, reacting as though such insults were reptiles to be throttled and flung off. All that mattered was she was good for the guv’nor. The rest of the world could mind its own business.
Turning his thoughts back to the present, the DS noticed that Doyle looked distinctly down in the dumps.
‘What’s up?’ he prompted. ‘You’ve got a face like a wet weekend.’
‘It’s Sally,’ came the glum response.
‘Given you the heave-ho again, has she?’
‘Summat like that.’
Noakes drew himself up with something of a Churchillian air.
‘Now come on, lad, you can’t bring your love life to work.’ He lowered his voice conspiratorially, gesturing meaningfully at Kate Burton. ‘Leastways not when Miss Goody Two Shoes is sniffing about for all the best jobs.’
The DS had a genuine affection for the young PC, despite his gormlessness.
‘You’re a local boy, an’ we don’t want outsiders having it all their own way. So, look lively and show the DI that you’re as good as any university
hot shot.’
Doyle started to look more cheerful.
‘D’you really think there’s a chance of me moving to CID, Sarge?’
‘’Course I do.’ Noakes slapped him on the shoulder. ‘But not if you’re drivelling over that bossy little besom instead of keeping your mind on the job.’ He leered affably and gave the younger man a portentous wink. ‘Save it for the pub. I’ll give you some tips on your love life then.’
‘There’s the DI.’ Doyle sounded livelier now.
Together the two men headed over to where the tall dark figure was standing, DC Burton in close attendance.
Markham was clearly impatient to get on with the day’s work.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘First stop the LRC, whatever that is—’
‘The Learning Resource Centre, sir,’ chipped in Burton.
‘Good. We’re meeting all the staff there for a briefing. Then we’ll get started on interviews.’
He led the way towards the foyer, where the tinted plate glass obscured what lay beyond.
As the electronic doors of the main atrium swooshed shut behind them, they were assailed by a breathy whisper.
‘Can I help you, officers?’
The speaker was a drab little woman who seemed to have materialized out of nowhere. A lanyard proclaimed her to be the HR manager, Tracey Roach (aka ‘Cockroach’, recalled Markham, casting his mind back to Olivia’s account). Dressed in some sort of dreary beige caftan-cum-twinset, she stood with arms outstretched so that, for one appalling moment, Markham feared they were being invited to participate in a group hug. The moment passed, however, and she ushered them towards the Learning Resource Centre (why on earth can’t they just call it the library, wondered Markham irritably) wittering away about the ‘devastating loss to our family’. He felt a pang of compunction at his uncharitable reaction, reminding himself that grief manifested itself in widely different ways: it did not necessarily follow from Tracey Roach’s gush of words that she was insincere.
Waiting at the door of the LRC was the head’s PA Audrey Burke (‘The Berk’). Looking at the red-rimmed eyes which peered myopically up at him through hideously ugly bottle glasses, Markham felt instinctively that he was in the presence of genuine distress. Fear too. Nervous fingers pleated her cheap skirt into tight folds and she kept glancing over her shoulder, looking furtively through the glass panel of the LRC door as though to check the whereabouts of something or someone. The Cockroach briskly manoeuvred the policemen past her fluttering colleague and into the LRC.
Too much time in this place and I’d have a thumping migraine, thought Markham, as he absorbed the colour coded posters which adorned every spare inch of wall space. Exhausting, not restful, he concluded.
Helen Kavanagh bore down on them. Out of the corner of his eye he observed PC Doyle clocking the kinky footwear with fascinated interest – Jimmy Choos, from the look of it, totally inappropriate for her scrum-half’s build.
While Killer droned on, Markham scanned the staff whose haggard faces seemed leached of colour by the glaring hues of the LRC’s decor. Thanks to Olivia’s entertaining, and unprintable, descriptions of Hope’s dramatis personae, Markham was able to place many of them.
The teaching staff appeared to be seated by department. Markham easily recognized Doctor Abernathy, a Gandalf clone whose decrepitude made Noakes look positively dapper by comparison. Next to him sat a ginger-haired, cadaverous young man who looked like a cross between DH Lawrence and a heroin addict. That had to be the second in department, Mike Synott. A couple of sturdy women were eying up the hapless Synott as though they fancied him for lunch. Furthest away from Abernathy and co sat the minor satellites – presumably newly qualified teachers or juniors. Matthew Sullivan, lounging against a bookcase behind the group, met Markham’s eyes with a look of weary complicity. This is going to be a production and a half, his expression seemed to promise.
There was no sign of James Palmer.
God, when was Kavanagh going to come up for air? The unpalatable truth was that Ashley Dean had most probably been murdered by someone from the school, quite likely one of those sitting quietly at that moment in the LRC.
Gathering from Kavanagh’s pious platitudes about the ‘sad increase in random violence,’ she was still hoping to steer the police firmly in the direction of local mental patients.
Kavanagh was on a hiding to nothing, decided Markham. With his extrasensory awareness of danger, he knew he felt evil right there in the kiddie-friendly setting of the LRC.
From what Olivia had told him, this murder was the work of someone who knew the school and the victim – someone who had stalked his or her prey, staked out the killing zone and staged the gruesome tableau into which Olivia had stumbled. He would have to ensure the school jungle drums broadcast the fact that she remembered nothing of that night and was too traumatized for any attempt at regression therapy. Otherwise she could be in danger. Spotting the stocky, rumpled figure of Harry Mountfield at the table just next to the English team, Markham thought he could count on Olivia’s friend to help with that. He noted with amusement that Mountfield’s face wore an expression of startled incredulity which deepened as Kavanagh really hit her stride and began denouncing ‘The Selfish Society’ for its lack of compassion towards ‘those on the margins’.
Markham decided that he’d heard enough. Any more of this twaddle and Kavanagh would be suggesting he cut out the middleman and head straight to the Newman to conduct interviews there. Case closed!
He cleared his throat, halting Kavanagh in her tracks.
‘We’re keeping an open mind at this stage, Ms Kavanagh. All lines of inquiry will be vigorously pursued.’
The deputy head appeared to be getting her second wind, so he continued hastily, ‘What I want to do today is conduct preliminary interviews with all teaching staff along with DC Burton whom I believe some of you have already met. My colleague DS Noakes will be speaking to support and administrative staff.’ My God, he thought, was that hard-faced harpy at the front with the fearsome nail extensions actually getting out a compact to check her make-up? Wait till she clapped eyes on Noakes!
The other deputy head, the wimpy one, Dave Uttley, was mumbling about having a room ready for them. The man looked terrible, bad eczema giving him the look of a Pointillist portrait gone awry. There were great dark bags under his eyes which bore a haunted expression. Of course, that could be accounted for by present company. Godzilla had to be the coadjutor from hell!
Now Uttley was introducing the caretaker Jim Snell. Markham caught a sour whiff of whisky and sweat and decided that he didn’t much care for the man; a shifty, weaselly little customer and no mistake. What was it Olivia had called him? Belligerent of Bromgrove? Well, the fellow certainly had a surly puss on him – he must have hated Ashley Dean leaving him in the dust as he whizzed up the promotion ladder!
Markham made a mental note to do some digging into Snell’s antecedents, then followed Kavanagh, Uttley and the caretaker along a claustrophobic warren of corridors to a small office. Giving it a quick once-over, he decided it had all the essentials (most important – certainly as far as Noakes was concerned – being a kettle and fridge). Kavanagh seemed inclined to linger, but PC Doyle, catching Markham’s eye, scotched the deputy head’s plan for a cosy tête à tête with the Senior Investigating Officer, politely ushering her out into the corridor. Trailed by her hapless lieutenant and Snell, she left them to it.
‘It’s a bit dark and poky, sir.’ DC Burton gestured apologetically around the cramped space whose three desks – two crammed up side by side against one wall with a third jutting out awkwardly from the other wall into the middle of the room – showed signs of having been hastily vacated, piles of manila files and paperwork pushed aside and the odd grungy mug left behind. The one meanly proportioned window looked onto a strip of gravel which bordered some straggling bushes and sparsely planted flowerbeds, their etiolated shrubs contributing to the melancholy aspect. Beyond the flower beds was a
stretch of scrubby grass ending in a block of four netball courts. Even these looked tired and unloved, with their faded grid lines and potholed surfaces, festooned with crisp packets and burger wrappers. As Markham watched, Jim Snell appeared, his mouth set in a grim line, heading for the courts with his litter picker.
All in all, not the most prepossessing billet. Even on the brightest day, the sun’s rays would never cheer it. At that moment, a breeze whipped up outside, sending the thin leaves into a kind of frenzy before suddenly subsiding when it hit the building. As though something about the school struck a chill even into Nature, the DI thought uneasily.
‘At least that HR woman knows how to look after visitors. We’ve got tea, coffee, milk an’ chocolate digestives, Guv.’ Noakes, as ever, was focused on the claims of the inner man, plonking his booty down on a tiny, verdigris-encrusted sink at the back of the office to the left of the window. Ignoring Burton’s disapproving gaze, he set about brewing up while PC Doyle disinterred some mugs from a dusty cupboard next to the sink.
Markham was just resigning himself to the pit stop when there was a timid knock. Dave Uttley’s head appeared around the corner of the door.
‘Would this be a convenient time, Officers?’
Markham nailed an encouraging smile to his face. ‘Of course, Mr Uttley.’
‘Dave, please.’ Uttley advanced into the room as though about to face the firing squad.
Markham noted the sheen of perspiration on the deputy head’s upper lip and his nervous hand-wringing. Once again, he was struck by how ill the man looked. Need to go gently with this one, the DI told himself.
‘Let’s have a cuppa before we get started,’ he announced reassuringly. ‘DS Noakes can do the honours.’
As a manoeuvre to help Uttley relax, the tea-making was useful. The man was so wet you could wring him out, but Markham felt a twinge of sympathy. Working in harness with a ball-breaker like Kavanagh was guaranteed to drain the life out of anyone.
After some anodyne chit-chat about the ever-changing educational landscape, Markham moved up a gear.
Detective Markham Mysteries Box Set Page 27