It was only ten o’clock and already hot. The sun shone unequivocally in through the windows and picked out the murky patches of old chewing gum on the floor and the grease marks on the seats. A good day to go to the country, I suppose, if you have to leave London, which I hate to do. I’m a street rat. But even I have to admit that London isn’t at its best in the heat. I’ve never understood how it manages to be at once humid and dusty.
At the station I hired a car. I like hiring cars with someone else’s money. I can’t see myself affording my own just yet. If ever. I chose a middle-range Nissan and checked that the radio and cassette player was working before I drove away towards a chain hotel clearly marked on the free map.
The hotel suited me nicely. It was on the edges of an industrial estate on the edge of the town, a range of low, box-like buildings in a concrete car park, flat Oxfordshire fields one side, factories the other. It was only two years old, the teenage desk clerk told me, but the carpets in the foyer were already stained and I could tell from his stuffed-fish expression that he had no idea who or what I was and didn’t care. I gave him my expense account credit card, took the key, and found the room. I hung up my spare jeans and T-shirts, put my underclothes in the drawer and my washing things in the bathroom. The lavatory, a strip of paper across the bowl told me, had been sanitized for my protection. Looking at it, I wouldn’t have guessed. Perhaps sanitizing was cheaper than cleaning.
I rang Alan’s office. He was there, and fussing. Same old cowardly Protheroe. When I first knew him I called him Ping-Pong, because he had celluloid balls. When he overheard the nickname one day I said it was a reference to his well-known quick-wittedness. When he’d worked it out (some minutes later), he’d been flattered.
He was bound to be in a bad temper anyway after his girl’s behaviour the night before, and when sober he was excessively cautious. He wanted to back out of our deal but I wouldn’t let him. It was in his own interest: he knew he’d almost certainly need me to pick up the pieces of his autumn shoot. He knew, and I knew, that if the girl couldn’t manage the PA work the shoot would fall apart and then I’d have to step in and do the whole thing. I’d researched it; I knew the material and the interviewees; I could PA it in my sleep. He needed Alex Safety-net Tanner.
Eventually we settled that I could say I was working for him on a freelance basis: tell Geoffrey Ellis, the Rissington head, that he was being considered for the documentary, and ask him if he’d be prepared to take part. That might get me inside the door, anyway. Alan moithered on about all the things I mustn’t commit him to and I agreed. I would protect him, of course. With any luck the school needn’t know what I was really after.
I made some notes on the angle he was going to take for the real documentary: it would save me having to invent one of my own, and would cover our backs with Geoffrey Ellis if the doco was ever made and shown, and he watched it: at least my questions wouldn’t look too incongruous, in retrospect.
Next, I rang the school.‘Rissington Abbey GHQ, Good morning!’ said an adolescent male.
GHQ? Had I heard him right? ‘The Headmaster, please.’
‘Is the Major expecting your call?’
‘No. Please tell him it’s Alex Tanner from Protheroe Associates.’
‘May I tell him what it’s in reference to?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ said the voice, in a much younger squeak. ‘Just a minute.’
Click, click, silence. He made me wait much longer than a minute. Eventually: ‘Ellis here!’ I held the receiver away from my ear. ‘Alex Tanner? I’m a very busy man. May I ask why you wouldn’t explain yourself?’
‘I was talking to one of the kids at your school, wasn’t I?’
‘You were talking to the private on telephone duty.’
‘Isn’t he a kid in real life?’
‘Well—’
‘And I didn’t think you’d necessarily want the whole school to know what I’m calling about.’ I waited for him to bluster, but he didn’t. So I gave him the Protheroe cover story. ‘Oh!’ he said, moderating his voice from a bellow to a bark.‘Well . . .’ he sounded doubtfully eager, as if his natural optimism had often been bruised by experience. ‘A television programme? On the BBC?’
‘More likely a commercial channel.’
‘Still . . .’
He was nearly hooked. ‘Of course, we have plenty of alternative headmasters to consider, so if . . .’ I didn’t think he’d let me finish, and he cut straight in.
‘Give me your telephone number, and I’ll ring you back . . . oh, you’re at a hotel? I’d better have your office number as well, in case you’re an impostor . . .’ He chuckled. A half-impostor, I chuckled too. ‘So you’re at a hotel in Banbury. Are you going to interview another local head?’
‘Possibly,’ I said.
‘And if I’m prepared to see you, when are you free?’
‘Any time tomorrow. After that, I’m not sure. When are you likely to ring back?’
‘Later this afternoon. Goodbye, Miss Tanner.’
‘Goodbye, Major Ellis.’
I called the desk, told the boy I was expecting a telephone call and could he take a message. ‘Of course,’ he said huffily. I wasn’t convinced but I could always ring the school later. Then I packed my bag with the tape recorder and notebook, and all the cassettes I’d brought with me. I’m trying to educate myself musically. At present I’m working through Beethoven, so the Nissan and I set off with the windows rolled down and the ‘Emperor’ concerto blasting across the hot concrete of the car park and the hot macadam of the roads.
Chapter Six
Banbury used to be, I suppose, a pretty market town. Now it’s a one-way, pedestrianized wasteland: drably urban without urban compensations. I parked in a multi-storey car park that served a shopping centre, went to the nearest newspaper shop, and wrote down the office address of the two local papers on sale. According to the Pakistani cashier, the nearest was the office of the Banbury Courier, just out of the shopping centre and down a side street.
The side street had been beautiful once: narrow, with medieval wooden buildings that almost met over your head. Now it was pedestrianized with cobblestones and flash shopfronts advertising only for sale signs, with no pedestrians passing to read them. It was the graveyard of the boom years of the eighties: you could guess the products that were now, in the grimmer nineties, unaffordable and unwanted, from the names and the littered, vacant displays. Water filters; fitted Swedish kitchens; one shop calling itself Countree Thynges still featured a few forlorn baskets of dried flowers.
The only businesses now trading were a video shop (everyone still had a telly, a video, and their dreams) and the Banbury Courier. I followed the signs through a door and up narrow, uneven, damp-smelling stairs. The girl in reception, very young, podgy-faced, podgy-thighed in black Lycra cycling shorts (a mistake), willing, understood simple sentences the third time around. She was usually occupied, I could see by the displays round the walls, in selling copies of the newspaper’s photographs to friends and family of people featured in them, and she found it hard to understand and respond to another request. But she giggled and tried. Eventually I was established in a cramped room off reception with the two relevant issues of the paper, the one after Olivier’s death and the one after the inquest.
His death was the lead local story that week. There was indeed a photo of him, a studio portrait by a top photographer of a dark French boy with thick floppy hair, good bones, and shadowy eyes. It was a head-and-shoulders shot: his bones had outgrown his muscles and he looked coltish, un-filled out. tragedy at local school was the headline. The piece was boxed and featured with the photograph of Olivier and a shot of the school, a Georgian house, with modern buildings in the background, set in grassland and trees. I glanced through it, noted the byline (Martin Kelly) and turned to the inquest issue. Same byline, plenty of photographs in this one too. The Coroner, Olivier and the school again, and Geoffrey Ellis. He looked
late fifties/early sixties with a military moustache, a firm chin, and a sombre expression. I’d have looked sombre too, in his place.
Then I read the articles through. Rissington Abbey was an exclusive, expensive school. Ellis was sixty-one, his wife Anthea fifty-two, housemaster Alistair Brown thirty. Nothing new on Olivier, and Kelly hadn’t picked up the Michel Mouche connection, although possibly Banbury wouldn’t have been interested in it anyway. I doubted most people in Banbury would have heard of Mouche. Still, Kelly could have made something of the mother: English girl, now French pop star, might have been worth a para. Chances were he didn’t know.
The inquest one was more use. Olivier’s English grandparents had been there – a blurred shot of two shabby old people, no comment – and so had Plummer, who’d given Kelly an anodyne quote. But Kelly had included some extra background material in the inquest article, most of it details of the school but including one interview with the old woman whose house Olivier and another boy had been painting as part of the school’s service to the community programme. ‘He was ever such a nice boy,’ she said. ‘Kind, thoughtful, sensitive.’
Kind? I hadn’t got that impression from Plummer, nor from the inquest comments by the headmaster. ‘Attention-seeking’, Plummer had called him, which was probably solicitorspeak for ‘a pain in the bum’. ‘Troubled’, the headmaster had said, presumably teacherese for the same thing. I’d make a point of seeing the old woman.
I persuaded Cycling Shorts to let me photocopy the articles and asked about Martin Kelly. Apparently he’d be in the local pub by now (quarter to twelve). I got directions. It would work quite well: I could have lunch at the same time. I asked for a description of him. ‘He’s old,’ said the girl. Good, I thought. Even if her idea of old was over thirty, it probably meant Drunken Has-been. ‘He looks like a priest,’ she went on.
Did she mean in a black dress and a clerical collar? ‘What does a priest look like?’
‘I mean,’ she struggled to express herself, ‘he was a priest. So he looks like a priest. Not like a journalist. Like. If you see what I mean.’
‘That’s interesting,’ I said, trailing my coat.
‘It is. Isn’t it?’
‘Really interesting. Unusual,’ I plugged on.
‘Yeah. Really interesting.’
I’d have to prod some more. ‘How did it happen?’
‘What?’
‘How did he stop being a priest and get the job here?’
‘I think he just stopped. Like. They can’t make you keep on, I don’t think, but I’m not a Catholic, if you just say you don’t want to be a priest any more, if you see what I mean.’
‘I see what you mean. But how did he get a job on the paper?’
‘He applied,’ she said, wide-eyed. ‘You write in. And send your curriculum vitty.’
‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ I said grinding my teeth behind my smile. ‘But lots of people apply to newspapers, don’t they? And he hadn’t trained as a journalist, had he?’
‘Hadn’t he?’ she said, surprised.
‘If he was a priest, I mean.’
‘Yeah. Yeah. I see what you mean.’
‘So maybe there was another reason why he got the job.’
‘Yeah. There might have been, I suppose, like.’
‘Who owns the paper?’
‘The paper?’
‘The Banbury Courier. Who owns it?’
‘Mr Flynn.’
‘Is he Irish, maybe? With a name like that?’
‘Oh, no. He lives in Birmingham, he owns lots of papers, all round the Midlands.’
‘Is Mr Flynn Catholic?’
‘Oh, yes, of course. He must be.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, because Martin used to be his family priest. In Birmingham. Well, Edgbaston, like. Before Martin came to Banbury. He was the priest here, for a while. Before he stopped being a priest.’
That was all I needed. An innocent amateur, fixed up by a sympathetic ex-parishioner. I wanted an old soak who’d worked on a national daily, preferably a tabloid, as full of dirt as a Hoover bag.
Never mind, I’d give Martin Kelly a try. I also wanted some lunch.
Chapter Seven
The pub was big, dark, shabby, smelling of beer and smoke and chips and too many people, even though, as it was early, it was almost empty, apart from some adolescent boys playing pool and a man, presumably my man, at the bar. He was smoking as if the process needed concentration and skill, and filling in The Times crossword with confident expedition. He had very short brown hair and a clean-cut, wide-eyed, unlined but hollowed face that was hard to put an age to. More than thirty, less than fifty, was as close as I could get. He was wearing grey flannel trousers, white shirt, dark tie, and a dark blue lightweight jacket. A neat black briefcase stood at the foot of his barstool. Cycling Shorts was right, he didn’t look like a journalist. More like the key member of an American evangelist’s entourage, sneaking a smoke.
‘Martin Kelly?’
He nodded and smiled, a tired, automatic smile. ‘That’s me. How can I help you?’
I introduced myself and offered my hand. He eventually shook it, but not before sharply withdrawing his own in a defensive reflex which I’d last seen in a concert pianist. I gave him the Protheroe cover story, saying I was looking for background on the school, trying not to let him see me looking at his hands. He held them with the fingers curled into the palm, and when he picked up his drink, newspaper, cigarettes, and briefcase to follow me to a grubby booth by an open window, I saw why. His nails were painfully bitten, rusty with bloodstains.
He heard me out courteously enough. I sensed another withdrawal, this time psychic, not physical, but whether it was a general reticence or a particular reluctance to talk about the school, I couldn’t tell. When I’d finished he said, ‘Ah. So that’s the way of it,’ in a resigned tone. Perhaps he just didn’t want me to disturb his solitary lunch.
I offered to buy him another drink but he refused. ‘One diet Coke’s enough for now,’ he said. His voice still had traces of a soft Southern Irish accent.
‘The girl at Reception told me you’d be here,’ I said. ‘She said I’d recognize you because you looked like a priest.’ I was fishing. I wanted to hear about his strange mid-life career change.
‘Did she indeed?’ he said blandly, lighting a cigarette.‘I’ve ordered my lunch. If you want to order yours, I’d advise the shepherd’s pie.’
I fetched myself a Coke and ordered the shepherd’s pie so as not to offend him, though it was the wrong weather for hot food. I needed to get his measure and build up a working relationship. I wanted not only what he knew, but what he’d guessed, about the school and Olivier’s death.
‘How did you get into journalism?’ I said.
‘The Courier is hardly journalism,’ he said.
‘Jobs are hard to find, though, even on a local freesheet.’
‘I was lucky. The owner is an ex-parishioner of mine. Does that satisfy your curiosity?’
‘I hear you were a priest in Banbury, before you left.’
‘Yes,’ he said, after a noticeable hesitation.
‘And Rissington Abbey was in your parish,’ I guessed, but spoke as if I knew.
‘It’s a Church of England school.’
Still guessing: ‘With some Catholic boys.’ The French were often officially Catholic. Olivier might have been.
He nodded.
‘And you were responsible for the Catholic boys at the school?’
‘They attended our parish church, yes.’ I’d pressed him enough.
‘And how do you like being a journalist?’ I said, and we chitchatted for a bit.
The barman brought our lunches. The shepherd’s pie was excellent. Real meat, real potatoes, plenty of Lea & Perrins in the gravy. Not surprisingly, the pub was beginning to fill up, mostly with minor businessmen in tired suits, some of whom nodded to Kelly as they came in. A middle-aged woman put a pound in the jukebox and
a few seconds later Tina Turner was churning out her raunchy scream. I couldn’t hear the words but the subtext was that it’s Fun to be Fifty. I screened out her implied reproach: it was only intermittently Fun to be Twenty-Nine.
Kelly was explaining that he’d wanted space to reflect about himself and life. The priesthood was demanding: responsible, and emotionally draining. Working as a journalist, more detached from people, would give him scope to find out the truth.
‘What truth?’ I said. ‘Is there one?’
‘It’s a big word. Perhaps I mean something much smaller. The truth about myself.’
The one unachievable truth, I thought. Always fogged by the bias of the observer. I wondered if it was a serious intention, or merely what he had chosen to believe, to give himself a purpose or to cover up guilt at his failure as a priest.
‘Are you sure you really want to find it?’ I said.
‘I’m seldom sure about anything. At least I’ve learnt that . . . How long have you been a researcher, Miss Tanner?’ We chatted on for a bit until we’d finished the shepherd’s pie. Then he pushed his plate away and said, ‘Right. I can give you a half-hour, then I’m going home. It’s my mid-week afternoon off because I work Saturdays. How can I help you?’
He’d warmed up to me a little, by now, so I went straight in. ‘Tell me about the school. What kind of place is it?’
He considered, started to speak, checked himself, and tapped his fingers on the table. ‘What kind of a person are you, Alex Tanner?’
In At The Deep End Page 4