A Beginner’s Guide to Murder

by Rosalind Stopps

  ‘Does anyone want to stop?’ Daphne said. ‘Because I’m for going on.’

  I feel as though I’m in one of those medical dramas where the emergency staff have to agree to continue or stop CPR.

  ‘We can’t leave her,’ Meg said.

  It’s the first thing she has said for a while. Bravo, I think, well done, Meg.

  ‘Meg is one hundred per cent correct,’ I say. ‘We can’t and we won’t.’

  ‘We’ve learned one very important fact from today,’ Des says. ‘It’s not entirely wasted time. We’ve learned, ladies and gentlemen, that we are right, he is very, very greedy. He came out for that money, and our best chance is to try that again.’

  ‘Don’t forget,’ says Daphne, ‘we still have the money. Nothing has been handed over yet. We need to keep trying.’

  That’s my girl, I think.

  We all agree to go on, but everyone’s mood is low. I’m glad when Meg goes to bed and Des to have a shower. Daphne and I are on our own and I feel I can relax, let go of some of the stress.

  ‘Excuse me asking,’ Daphne says, ‘but back there, in the park, I heard you saying “Dean”. I remembered that thing you said earlier about extraordinary circumstances bringing up echoes of other extraordinary times and I thought, it would be good to know more. I mean, only if…’ she looks shy as she speaks, ‘only if you want to.’

  My heart goes out to her. I imagine what she must have been like as a young woman, gawky and unsure of herself. We could have been friends then, I think; we might have helped each other as long as I didn’t frighten her away.

  ‘I was an angry young woman when I was twenty-five,’ I say now. ‘Would we have been friends?’

  ‘Oh gosh yes,’ Daphne says without skipping a beat. ‘I never learned to be angry. I could have done with someone to show me how.’

  ‘Step right up,’ I say. ‘I have been angry all my life. Angry that I didn’t manage to protect my lovely little daughter. Angry that when I had another chance to redeem myself, another moment when I could have made a difference for somebody, hang on, no, when I could have actually saved someone’s life, I missed it.’

  ‘I can see why you want this to work now,’ Daphne says.

  She’s right. We sit in silence for a moment. I almost don’t need to say any more, but I know I’ve sat on it too long. I stopped teaching after Dean, and I never spoke to anyone from Overcroft School again. Never. Not even my close friends who worked there. They guessed most of it, of course they did, but they never knew the whole thing.

  Daphne sits opposite me, waiting. It’s a companionable silence. I don’t feel pushed into speaking but I’d like to put the burden down for a few minutes. It’s different with Eleanor. That’s a burden I’ll never put down, because she’s mine and mine alone to carry. It’s all I can do for her.

  Dean Smith is something else. Dean Smith has always been too heavy for me to carry.

  ‘Has anyone ever come to you for help that you can’t give?’ I ask Daphne.

  I can see that she’s thinking hard, and that she wants the answer to be yes, to make me feel better. Honestly, I think, if the answer is yes you wouldn’t have to think about it. It would be there at the top of your head and you wouldn’t be able to push it away.

  ‘I think,’ Daphne says after a moment or two, ‘I think that the answer is no, certainly not directly. But indirectly, that’s something else. I believe I may have managed not to hear things I should have heard. I believe I may have been so wrapped up in my own troubles that I’ve missed important things that people may have been trying to say to me. Which is just as bad, really. The stuff I told you about Andrew and my past, I know I’ve let it consume me for a great deal of my life. In fact I thought about nothing else for many years. Think of all the requests for help I might have missed. And I’m not just trying to make you feel better.’

  I can see that she means it, she really does. I reach for her hand and I hold it tight while I talk.

  ‘Dean Smith,’ I say, ‘year eleven, fifteen years old. Not a boy a teacher would notice apart from when he’s playing up. Which was quite often, not as often as some but more often than most. Am I OK to go on?’

  I can still hear the shower running so I know we haven’t been talking for long but I’m tired, tired as a dog, and I’m hoping that Daphne will say, let’s stop now. She doesn’t. So I tell her all of it. How Dean had said, ‘I can’t,’ and how the echo of that phrase, I can’t, has followed me down the years. How I might have been able to stop him, how he might have wanted me to stop him, how I had been too busy thinking about myself to pick up the signals anyone else would have seen.

  ‘I’m not sure about that,’ says Daphne. ‘Perhaps he didn’t really want to be stopped.’

  I’ve thought of that over the years, of course I have. It doesn’t help. I was still the one he chose and I let him down. I don’t say that to Daphne. I can see that she’s trying hard.

  ‘So what happened?’ Daphne asks. ‘What did he do that you think was your fault?’

  I can’t believe she hasn’t put two and two together yet. That she doesn’t remember his name from the news, such a plain name but such a ring to it now, a byword for horror like Charles Manson or Myra Hindley.

  ‘Maybe you read about it,’ I say, ‘the boy who took two small children from the shopping precinct. They were cousins, out shopping with a woman who was mum to one and aunt to the other. In Stratford centre, before the fancy Westfield one was built.’

  I can see the realisation dawn on Daphne as I speak. She does remember, I can see she does. The whole country knew at the time, it was all anyone talked about for weeks. It was caught on video, you see, what Dean did – an early version of a CCTV camera. Everyone was familiar with the image of him walking down the street, each little girl holding one of his hands. For a while I was the most unpopular person in the country, after I gave evidence in court. No one knew exactly what he did, the details were too grim to release, but anyone with an imagination could see that I should have helped him.

  ‘I might have stopped him,’ I say to Daphne. ‘I think he wanted to be stopped.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘you might. There’s no getting away from that. And if someone had gone round killing Austrian newborn babies in 1889 they would probably have got Hitler. But life isn’t like that, is it? Life isn’t a clever novel plotted backwards. We do what we can with what we’ve got, that’s all. That’s the long and short of it. Of course you wished you’d stopped him. I wish you had, too. But I’m not sure that we can always police each other. Isn’t it hard enough to police ourselves? Isn’t that exactly what you’re saying? And who’s to say that he wouldn’t have done exactly the same whatever you had said to him? It’s not as if you had reason to carry out a citizen’s arrest or anything. You didn’t know what he was going to do, how could you?’

  I know what Daphne is saying makes sense. I’ve always known somewhere that it wasn’t really my fault.

  ‘Lost opportunities,’ I say, ‘that’s the thing. That’s why I’m in it now.’

  ‘You and me both,’ Daphne says, ‘you and me both, Grace. Lost opportunities. I’ve got money, I guess you’ve gathered that. My dad invested for me in a little start-up company and then he disappeared. The start-up company was Apple. Imagine that, I’ve got money and I’ve never been able to use it properly, give it away. As fast as I give it to charities it comes back.’

  Daphne looks at me so earnestly, wanting me to understand. I want to comfort her but it’s such an odd guilt.

  ‘Hang on a moment,’ I say. ‘You feel guilty because you can’t give your money away fast enough?’

  She blushes. I love that.

  ‘I’ve seen the other side of life, that’s the thing,’ she says. ‘I was in prison, long ago and far away, for soliciting. Before I got the money. I hadn’t got any then, and I was trapped into earning it, but I got caught. I lived with women in a prison for a couple of years, and I know how hard their lives are.
I do what I can but…’

  Daphne shrugs. It feels odd, having given each other our stories to carry. Maybe that’s how women bear the load, I think – we share the weight of each other’s stories.

  ‘We’ll get it right this time,’ I say. ‘We’re going to win.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Meg

  After midnight, Thursday, 28 February

  I could hear them talking after I’d gone to bed. Daphne and Grace, Grace and Daphne. Chatting away about everything that had happened and more, but I didn’t feel left out, even though I was expecting to. When it came down to it I was so miserable about Nina that I was comforted by the buzz of their chatter as I drifted off to sleep. Companionship amidst the horror, that’s what it was. Almost like a family. There was the sound of Des in the shower and my two friends chatting and all we were missing was Nina. I wondered where she was, and whether she had been able to go to sleep. I couldn’t bear to think about what might be happening to her, so I designed an imaginary bedroom for her instead. The sort of room a teenage girl might like. A big room with a sofa near to the bed, and a desk in the window with a chair that wouldn’t be bad for her back. It was my room, I realised, as I imagined a pretty yellow colour for the paintwork, the master bedroom as Henry always called it.

  ‘I guess we can’t call it mistress bedroom,’ he used to say. ‘That might sound like something naughty was going on there.’ That’s how he thought of any kind of intimacy, something naughty.

  I remember once early on in our marriage, when I still thought I might have another child, one I’d be allowed to keep. I decided to seduce Henry, kickstart the whole thing. I’d read an old marriage manual that suggested that reluctance to perform in the marriage bed was an indicator of a true gentleman, and that in these cases, wives were duty bound to step in. I did my best, see-through nightie and everything, but it just made him laugh. I don’t know what made me think of that then.

  My room was the biggest of the three bedrooms, so I decided right then and there that I would move out, go into the smaller back room and give this one to Nina. If she got away. If we managed to do the thing we had decided to do, if we were successful. It was too difficult to think of, so instead I tried to go to sleep, but I kept reliving that moment when I hadn’t managed to lock the car door to keep her in. And tonight, when I hadn’t managed to get her out. None of us had. My hands twitched, longing for another chance to rescue her. My Nina. I tried to stop thinking about her, even for a moment, but it was no good. The only thing that took my mind off her was picturing Henry. Henry as he was the last time I saw him, tucked up neatly in his coffin. It was the best place for him, I was sure of that.

  I was up before the others that morning. See, Henry, I thought, I’m an early riser. I could hear the violin as I got washed and dressed. Lilting, echoey, sweet. I could imagine my mother with her head on one side and her eyes shut as if she was channelling the music from somewhere behind her eyes to her fingertips, which I suppose she was. She had a special violin face, that’s what I used to call it when I was little. I didn’t like it then. I used to cry, and say stop it, stop it, and my mother would put the violin down and laugh. I didn’t want to share the attention, I suppose. I thought about that while I fussed around downstairs, getting croissants out of the freezer and making real coffee. How much each person needs to be special, I mean, and how each person has a past and a story to tell. That toad man, for example, did he have a mum who loved him? The kind who sat by his bed when he had a high temperature? The kind who looked at him and didn’t see a toad at all, just a dear little boy with the world at his feet? I shuddered. That poor woman, I thought, giving up her time and her love and her energy for a toad.

  ‘Are you OK, missus?’ Des said.

  I jumped a little. I’m not used to anyone being in the kitchen except me. Even when Henry was alive, it’s not a place he often came to. He’d put his head round the door and sniff, as if he’d been forbidden to come in any further. There wasn’t usually much to smell.

  ‘Do you worry at all,’ I said, ‘about what we’re doing? Should we be trying again? What else can we do? Do you think killing someone makes us bad people, even if we’re doing it for a good reason? Even if we have no choice?’

  I kept my voice low. I hadn’t known I was going to say all that until it came bursting out but it felt good. I wasn’t completely happy with what we were doing, that was the long and the short of it. Even though I worried about that sweet girl with all my heart, there was something about killing a person that made me uneasy.

  ‘That’s a lot of questions,’ Des said, ‘and I might not be the right person to ask, ma’am. I mean I haven’t always made good choices and there’s quite a few people would say I’m a terrible person. But the way I see it is, the world has changed. There isn’t a society that’s going to look after everyone any more. That was a dream, really, wasn’t it? It wasn’t real at all. The dream is over. So we’re left with everyone looking out for themselves, and some people can’t do it. So other people have to help them, and sometimes that means doing unpleasant things.’

  I realised that Des had spent a lot of time thinking about this. He seemed to guess what I was thinking.

  ‘When I was in prison,’ he said, ‘I had a lot of time to think. And excuse me, ma’am, for saying this, but I think us people of colour, we read the writing on the wall more quickly, if you don’t mind me saying so. The writing was more obvious to us, because it was addressed to us first. I did what I did to protect my sister, nothing else, and I’d do the same again.’

  He took the wind right out of my sails. I think from the way he spoke he had killed somebody before, but he seemed such a good man that I was sure the person had deserved it. We are both the same, I thought, siblings under the skin. Guardians of public morals. I wondered if it would be best for me not to think about toad man’s mum. I hoped for her sake she had died early herself, perhaps of something painless in her sleep.

  We had a council of war when everyone was up. Grace took charge. She was good at making sure everyone had a say, that we were all on the same page, I think that’s the correct expression. I told them how worried I was and they listened to me, they really did, but we all agreed that there was no choice, no other way of stopping him. Henry floated through my head followed by toad’s mum but I pushed them out. I voted to go on, and agreed that it would be wrong to back down and walk away, leave Nina where she was. Yes, I had niggling doubts, but Nina was the main thing. Nina mattered more.

  ‘It’s even more important now,’ Daphne said. ‘We absolutely have to finish what we started, we can’t leave her there with him. I reckon the plan is worth a rerun. I think he might be keen to get his hands on that money now he’s seen that we really were offering it.’

  We all agreed. There were probably a million reasons not to try again, but it didn’t matter. The stakes were high. That lovely girl. ‘Meggie,’ she called me. That picture I couldn’t shake of her looking at me through the car window, waving like a much younger child. Waving as if she was trying to say, don’t worry, I’ll be OK, even though she knew that we all knew she wouldn’t be. Maybe it helped her just to know that we were all rooting for her, I thought. I knew that it was important that we kept on trying, that we didn’t give up now. She was brave enough to wave to us, we needed to be brave enough to keep on trying.

  ‘How’s that violin, Meg?’ Grace said.

  I was surprised. I never expect anyone to remember anything I’ve said. I mean, I presume they’d have more important things on their minds. I think I might have blushed.

  ‘The violin is quiet right now,’ I said.

  They asked me to tell them the whole story then. I think they might have asked so that I wasn’t brooding on the whole murder thing. They’re thoughtful like that. I didn’t really want to talk about it but I didn’t want to seem standoffish, or disapproving. And we had time to kill.

  I had never told the violin story before, even though it had a
lways been with me.

  ‘My mother was playing her violin in the shelter,’ I said. ‘I think it was October 1940. Like I said before, she used to play for the people stranded down there for the night. Only till nine or so, because the children were supposed to go to sleep then, although it must have been very difficult for them. It was the Northern line. This night, her violin wouldn’t stay in tune. She couldn’t understand why, and she kept stopping to tune it. “I fiddled with my fiddle,” she used to say, “but it wouldn’t fiddle with me.”

  ‘At two minutes past eight, she said, and I always remember the exact time because she was so precise. She said the station clock stopped then. At two minutes past eight a German bomb hit a water main. The water rolled into the shelter and it was chaos. A bus drove into the crater the bomb had made, I’ve seen photos. Loads of people were trapped underground, where they had been bedded down. They couldn’t get to the stairs. Imagine it, trapped underground with water rising, some of it sewage water. There were woman with babies, little kids, all screaming. Trapped like rats in a bucket. My mum got out, but she ditched the violin. She said it took her a full minute to decide that she had to leave it, and during that minute the water rose from her knees to her waist.’

  I didn’t tell them the other part. The part about how when I was little, my mother used to say she swam to the next station, as if it was the easiest and most normal thing in the world. I believed it, of course I did. I still think of swimming along the tunnel whenever I’m on the Underground. It wasn’t until she was dying and having a hard time of it that she cried, and told me about the people she had ignored, the babies that had been held out to her that she hadn’t been able to take.

  ‘Survival comes at a high price sometimes,’ said Grace. I don’t know how, but she seemed to have heard the parts of the story I had chosen to leave out.

  ‘OK,’ said Daphne, ‘from now on we will totally listen to what you say about the violin. We’ll try again, and this time we’ll include the violin in all our plans.’