This Is a Dreadful Sentence

by Penny Freedman

  I like my office. It doesn’t have a view – nowhere has a view on this campus any more – but it has windows down one side and the walls are covered with theatre posters. I don’t have photos of children or grandchildren anywhere: I hate that in other people’s offices. It seems to shout, LOOK, I’M A PERSON! I HAVE A LIFE! It’s no-one else’s business if I have life or not, and anyway work is the place where you go to forget about your life sometimes.

  The morning goes swimmingly until about eleven, when I don’t waste time going over to the Common Room for coffee but make one in my office. I need a cigarette, so I slip out of the building for a puff. I don’t take my coat, as a sign of a serious intention to be back in a couple of minutes, so I stand outside shivering (there’s a hell of a wind channelling past our building) and surveying what was once the green and pleasant campus of Marlbury College. Back when it was Marlbury Teachers’ Training College it consisted of a few human-sized buildings dotted around a tastefully landscaped campus but since it became a university college it has sprouted in all directions. MARLBURY UNIVERSITY COLLEGE – MOVING FORWARD read hoardings all over the town as office blocks are bought up, waste ground built on and historic buildings transformed to accommodate the educational phenomenon that is today’s Marlbury University College. On the campus itself every inch has been colonised. From where I stand, buildings loom in every direction, shoulder to shoulder like so many colossi jostling for space on a giant dance floor, each bestriding his narrow world.

  . . . . . and we petty men

  Walk under his huge legs and peep about

  To find ourselves dishonourable graves.

  I see a man come out of the library’s emergency door opposite. He stands looking around for a minute or two, then looks at me with a very odd expression on his face. Perhaps he’s wondering why I’m standing here without a coat on in the freezing cold, so I wave my cigarette at him in an explanatory sort of way and take a stroll past him and round the front of the library, just to stop him from staring at me. And as I round the corner, suddenly I’m on the set of CSI.

  Actually, stupidly, I do wonder first of all whether I’ve wandered into something the film department is doing, but nobody’s faffing about. This isn’t a performance. There are a couple of uniformed police and people in those white all-inone suits and the front of the building has been wrapped up in white tape. I know I’ve got my mouth open as I stand there and I’m furious with myself when one of the policemen tells me this is a crime scene and asks me not to get in the way, because I hate people who stand and gawp at accidents. I toss up as to whether to go into the common room, where someone will know what’s going on, or to go back to my office and log onto the college intranet. I head back to the intranet. And there I find a message from the Principal:

  I am sorry to inform you all that one of our students, Ekrem Yilmaz, was found dead in the Social Science library this morning. The circumstances of his death are not yet known and, as in the case of any unexplained death, the police are investigating. I would ask you all to co-operate fully with the police and to do nothing to hamper their investigation. I am anxious that teaching and the life of the College in general should go on as usual, in so far as this is possible. Mr Yilmaz’s family have been informed of his death and we send our condolences to them, as we do to his friends in the College.

  Norman Street, Principal

  I sit and gaze at the screen. Ekrem is dead, in circumstances suspicious enough to bring out a good chunk of the Marlbury constabulary. My shock and awe are tempered by the consciousness that there is no student I could have spared more easily. If another student had died, I would feel sad.

  Without quite knowing why, I head downstairs to Seminar Room 5, where I’m due to be teaching Ekrem’s class in twenty minutes time. When I was a schoolteacher, a boy in my ‘A’ level set died. He lost control of his motorbike when on his way to a band practice, crashed into a lamp post and died instantly. For a week his empty desk sat and reproached us until I did the only thing possible and rearranged all the furniture in the room. I think I have some thought of this kind as I go into the room – to remove Ekrem’s chair at least – but then I am arrested by what I see on the whiteboard. It reads:

  If I would kill him

  I would be happier

  It’s my writing, of course. As I often do, I forgot to clean the board after the class yesterday. Someone has cleaned everything else off, substituted him for you, and left this little gem behind. One of the cleaners? Unlikely. Most of them don’t know enough English to manage even this incorrect construction. One of the students, then, and with that thought I feel a bit sick.

  I trail back upstairs and I’m standing in my office, trying to think linearly because I’ve got to teach the class in ten minutes, but I have Ekrem’s death (murder?) going round in my head, and the weird message on the board, and the feeling that I should have rubbed it off before the students come in, and the worry about how I’m going to deal with the class when one of their number has just met a violent death, when there is a knock at my door. I don’t think I say Come in but he comes in anyway: tall, expensive suit, funny look on his face, and I recognise him as the smoker who was giving me a funny look half an hour ago.

  ‘Mrs Gray?’ he says.

  I admit, grudgingly, that I am.

  ‘DCI David Scott.’

  He flicks his warrant card at me like they do on the telly.

  ‘I’m in charge of the investigation into the death of one of your students, Ekrem Yilmaz. I take it you have heard about his death?’

  I tell him I have, and invite him to sit down. He sits, looks at me with that odd expression once more, rumples his nicelycut hair, and says,

  ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’

  I am flummoxed. I scroll back. What did he say his name was? I peer at him.

  ‘David Scott! You were in my first ‘A’ level class! 1985?’

  ‘Right on the button. Macbeth, The Knight’s Tale, The Mayor of Casterbridge and a book of poems I’d rather not remember.’ He grins and he’s all of seventeen. And he’s going to find out how Ekrem died?

  ‘I’m hoping you’ll be able to tell me something about Ekrem Yilmaz,’ he says.

  I look at my watch.

  ‘I’ll be delighted to help but I’m teaching in ten minutes and our instructions from on high are that teaching goes on as normal. I’ll be free at one. There is just one thing, though. Can I show you something?’

  I head off down the stairs to Seminar Room 5 with him behind me and I show him the message on the board. It takes a while to explain about the other sentences and these being just the relics but he’s quite bright and he gets the point and makes a note, though possibly just to humour me, and I just have time to clean the board when the students start arriving.

  I need not have worried about Ekrem’s empty chair casting a pall: someone has already removed it. Curiouser and creepier. Everyone else is there, including Ceren, who was off sick yesterday. She’s not looking well, though: very pale, with the kind of dark circles round her eyes that English people don’t get. And she’s been crying. Surely she wasn’t fond of Ekrem? He was almost old enough to be her father, and nasty with it. She sits between Christiane and Yukiko, who watch her anxiously from time to time. I haven’t planned what to say as an opening gambit so I find myself asking, ‘How are you all doing?’

  They all nod and smile and say OK quite cheerfully. Farid says that Ekrem’s death is a very terrible thing, I agree that it is very terrible, and then no-one is inclined to say any more. The waves, it seems, have closed over Ekrem’s head.

  As we pack up at the end of the class – a gentle trot through a reading comprehension passage on alternative energy sources – I see David Scott through the glass panel of the door, hovering outside, eyebrows raised questioningly. I signal to him to come in and it’s clear that he has been busy. He has obtained a list of the students in the class from the office and has scheduled interviews with them through
the afternoon. When Christiane asks where they should go, he turns to me and does the boyish charm bit.

  ‘I noticed,’ he says, ‘that Mrs Gray has a spare office. I was hoping she’d be kind enough to lend it to me.’

  It is true, I do have a second office with a communicating door, and either he noticed it when he was in there with me, or he’s been back snooping around. I keep all my books in there, and I use it for one-to-one tutorials. I like to think of it as my teaching office as opposed to my admin office. I have no excuse for refusing.

  ‘Of course,’ I say brightly and turn to the students. ‘You know the office, we mean? Where we have tutorials. Use the door from the corridor, then you won’t have to come through the outer office, but if he makes any of you cry, you can come and see me for sympathy afterwards.’

  I turn back to Scott.

  ‘I’ll let you have the key to the outer door,’ I say.

  I suggest that we go down to the Senior Common Room for a sandwich and coffee lunch and I freely admit that I enjoy walking in with a good-looking younger man in tow. I find us chairs at a low table in a quiet corner and he pays for my cheese and coleslaw sandwich. As soon as we’re settled, he gets down to business – no niceties, no school reminiscences.

  ‘So tell me about the dead guy. What was he like?’

  I explain that we believe that he was a government spy, sent to report on the other Turks. On the nil nisi bonum principle, I don’t add that he was stupid, idle and offensive. DCI Scott will find this out from others of less delicate sensibility, I imagine. I know he wants more but I’m not giving something for nothing.

  ‘My turn now. Tell me what happened to him. We’ve only had bland words from the Principal. Was it accident, suicide or murder?’

  He’s eying me, wondering if I can be trusted, wondering what he’ll get back in return.

  ‘We can rule out suicide: he was crushed between two of the rolling stacks.’

  My jaw actually drops. I thought that was just a cliché, a figure of speech, but I feel it clunk open.

  ‘How? When?’

  ‘We won’t know until the autopsy is complete, but we’re assuming after the library closed.’

  I have a host of questions to pour out but he waves a hand at me in frantic refusal.

  ‘I really need you to keep this quiet. The investigation’s –‘

  ‘At a very early stage. I know. It’s all right, I know how to play dumb.’

  As a quid pro quo I follow up with a few titbits of information about the other students: Laurent, we know has a drug problem (I have spoken to his mother and gathered that he has been sent to England in the vague hope that his problem won’t be noticed here); Valery’s father was shot by someone in the Russian Mafia shortly before he arrived and he is in no hurry to return home; Irina is here to escape a violent ex-husband; Desirée is here to be with her boyfriend. Sadly, I have to tell him, not all overseas students come here simply for the excellence of our universities and our high educational standards. On the other hand, they work hard; they have very good motivation since failure means being sent home to an uncertain future. He is clearly wondering whether to believe a word I’m saying. I let him wonder. If he’s any good, he will soon find out whether he can trust me or not.

  He has one last question and I know what it’s going to be.

  ‘Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to kill Ekrem?

  ‘Well I don’t suppose the other Turks were over the moon about being spied on,’ I say, ‘but they’ve never appeared to be particularly homicidal. I, on the other hand, could cheerfully have murdered him on several occasions.’

  Not helpful, I know, but I’m really affronted by the obviousness of the question. He’ll have to do better than that. As we part, I am not sure whether he thinks the £3.50 he paid for my sandwich and coffee was money well spent.

  4

  FRIDAY: Investigation Day Two

  Scott drove into the station early, fuelled only by double strength black instant coffee and a dubious end-of-loaf slice of toast. Fridays were always like this: the weekend’s shopping never lasted through and the milk went off. He would shop properly tomorrow, he promised himself, and eat some decent meals, and do some washing up, and clean the house, and get to grips with the laundry basket. He could even get the car washed. In theory.

  As he drove, he gathered his thoughts for the morning briefing. It hadn’t been a brilliant idea to use Mrs G’s office for interviews. All that Eng. Lit. for a start, lowering at him from her shelves. And he couldn’t help wondering if she was listening at the connecting door. Her manner with him was annoying too - that teasing tone. He had a sense of humour, of course he had, but this was a murder enquiry for God’s sake.

  The team gathered early in the incident room, plastic cups of coffee in hand. He looked around for his core people: Mark Tyler; nerdy Steve Boxer, the computer whizz, looking, as usual, as though he’d got dressed in the dark; ambitious Simon Kerr with his watchful eyes and confident swagger; little Paula Powell, spiky-haired and ferocious. His core team. There were plenty more here, twenty or so, some of them drafted in from around the county, but these were the people he would rely on. A good team, he thought with satisfaction. Tyler had put blown-up copies of the students’ passport photos on the board; Scott summarised the findings so far at the crime scene and the results of his interviews with students the previous afternoon.

  ‘Ekrem Yilmaz, age 37. Turkish. Student at Marlbury College. In the UK since last September, registered for a 2-year master’s course but apparently really here as an informer for the Turkish government. It was his job to report back on the other Turkish students and their families – political activity, links with Armenian or Kurdish groups, un-Islamic behaviour etc. He was found yesterday morning at nine a.m. by the assistant Social Science librarian at the college when she came in to work. Now this is what the library looks like – just a rough sketch.’ He pointed to Tyler’s sketch on the whiteboard behind him.

  ‘Some time after ten pm, when the library closed, he was crushed between two sets of bookshelves - rolling stacks, as they’re known - here.’ He pointed to the x on the diagram marking the position of the body. ‘If you haven’t come across these, I’ll explain. They’re a space-saving device for libraries because they mean you don’t have to have space between each set of shelves for readers to get in. They can be rolled together or apart as readers want to get into a particular section. This is done by turning a wheel at the end of a set of shelves, here.’ Again he pointed. ‘There is no question of this being an accident: the wheel must have been turned with considerable force and no attention paid to the victim’s protests. We can be pretty sure that the killer was male – Sergeant Tyler here demonstrated for me just how much muscle power was needed to roll the stacks at speed.’

  ‘So it’s the mystery of the body in the library. We should send for Poirot.’ An aside from Paula Powell, loud enough for all to hear. Cheeky cow.

  Above the laughter, he said, ‘Thank you, DS Powell. But I don’t intend to be the village plod who gets it all wrong, even if you do.’

  He turned to indicate the thirteen photos on the board: Ekrem’s in the centre, the others clustered round.

  ‘The murdered man and the students in his class. They’re not the only suspects, of course, but we’re holding on to their passports for the moment. We need to start with people who knew him and knew the way the library worked, so students and staff are in the frame. He’ll have known other Turks in the college – the people he was informing on. It’s a reasonable working assumption that it was one of these who decided to shut him up, but we have another line opening up as well, which is why we have these people up here. Now, they’re all in the same English Language class. They’re taking special programmes designed for overseas students. They take masters’ degrees which usually take one year, but they take two years over them, improving their English as they go.’

  He took up a pointer and circled the twelve
faces.

  ‘First thing is, none of them liked him. None of them are sorry he’s dead, except possibly this girl – Ceren Vural – another Turkish student, 21, the youngest in the group, doing an M.Sc in Microbiology. She seemed upset, looked as though she’d been crying, but claimed she hardly knew Yilmaz.’

  He paused. He could relax a bit now. Even make a joke, maybe, if he could think of one.

  ‘I saw them in alphabetical order, so that’s how I’ll report on them. Mark will write up the salient facts as we go along. Laurent Amiel.‘ His pointer found a hairy, scowling youth. ‘Swiss. 24. Rich. Studying Law. I’m told he has a drug habit – my informant wasn’t specific. He denies it. Refused to show me his arms for needle marks. Said I’d have to arrest him, which I may very well do. Alibi for Wednesday night: he was at a French film at the Film Club. He’s given me the names of some people who saw him there.’

  ‘Christiane Becker.’ He found her serious, spectacled face. ‘German, aged 23, taking a postgraduate degree in Women’s Studies. She was at the Students’ Union. It was a women only night and all five of the women in the class were there. Irina Boklova,‘ - Irina’s picture showed her mousey-haired and bespectacled - ‘now a red-head, by the way. 27. Taking an M.Sc in Biochemistry. Irina is Russian, makes no bones about the fact that she is here in part to get away from her ex-husband, who has turned into a serious stalker. Is there something you want to say, Mark?’

  Mark Tyler had stopped writing on the board and was holding up a passport taken from the pile lying on a nearby table.

  ‘Yes, sir. When I was doing the pictures from their passports, I noticed hers. You said Irina Boklova, but on her passport she’s down as Irina Yilmaz.’