Dying Fall

by Judith Cutler

  I slopped some of the coffee. I stared blindly at the little puddle. Chris reached for the J-cloth and mopped it. Then he picked up the tray.

  This time he sat on the floor, his legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles. Occasionally he would draw a circle in the air with one foot or the other, his shoes creaking softly.

  ‘George and Jools must have worked very closely together,’ he said at last. ‘But from what you’ve said of George, and what I’ve gathered myself of Jools, they don’t seem to have been very similar. Chalk and cheese. Did they get on?’

  ‘Ask Jools.’

  ‘Sophie, I know she’s a friend of yours, but don’t be quixotic about trying to defend her. As far as I know she doesn’t have to be defended. I just need to know about her. About anyone. But I thought I upset you in there when I mentioned George.’

  ‘It’s just that I need to brace myself. If someone mentions him without warning, I – But I can talk about him all evening if you want me to. Where shall I start? His worn cartilage? Buying his evening clothes from the Oxfam shop? His addiction to Spender? Loved a bit of anarchy, did George. But he was rock solid. Ask Tony Rossiter. He used to get George to sit in on auditions and interview panels far more regularly than anyone else because he was such a good judge of character. And Tony’s probably told you that he sometimes asked George to have an avuncular word.’

  Chris responded with not so much as a flicker of an eyelid.

  ‘With Jools, for instance,’ I prompted. ‘You see, Tony’s my friend too. It’s an incestuous little world, isn’t it?’

  He scrambled to his feet and ostentatiously rubbed cramp in his left calf. Whether it was genuine was impossible to say. But he started to prowl round the room, peering at my china, my pictures, my books. He straightened a frame. I rescued piles of photocopies as he headed towards them, but I didn’t try to interrupt. I’d have done the same in his home, perhaps. It struck me how very little I knew of him. To have reached such a senior position while he was still in his thirties suggested he might have been on one of those accelerated-promotion schemes so resented by my less well-qualified police YTS students. If he was a graduate, what might his specialism be? Or did the police take over your life and soul to the exclusion of all your interests?

  At last he pounced on a book. A Penguin, The Canadian Air Force Exercises. Pity: I’d hoped he’d reveal a sudden passion for Greek philosophy. But at least it gave him an excuse to start talking again.

  ‘The trouble is that they’re so boring.’ he said, flicking the pages. ‘Wouldn’t you find a fitness centre more inspiring?’

  I opened my mouth to reply, and closed it. Then I started to laugh. ‘Any fitness centre? Or the one Jools just happens to use?’

  He shrugged, but not very convincingly. Then, as I held his eye, he started to laugh too. ‘OK. A hit. But the one I used to use has gone bust, and I’m looking for another.’

  ‘I don’t see you as a weights man.’

  ‘I’m into weights like you’re into computers. But I liked the rolling road and the rowing machine. And the sauna. Do you use a centre?’

  ‘I do. And it’s the one I introduced Jools to. Are you planning to join? Or do you merely want to case the joint?’

  ‘Perhaps we could go along together one day,’ he said. ‘I’d enjoy poseur-watching with someone. Tell me, do you wear a snazzy leotard?’

  His crow’s feet were much in evidence; damn it, the man was flirting with me.

  ‘Strictly a battered tracksuit. Lycra should be banned once you reach thirty.’

  The phone rang. I rather expected him to leap for it, saying, ‘That’ll be for me.’ But he sat down almost sombrely while I picked my way across the photocopies. He might as well have answered it. It was Ian Dale. They had a short, terse conversation. Chris terminated it and picked up his anorak.

  ‘Missing child,’ he said briefly as he opened the front door. Then he turned. ‘If you like,’ he said hesitantly, ‘I could DTP your CV for you. If you let me know what you want where and so on.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  I watched his car out of sight. Perhaps I had some notion of expressing sympathy and solidarity. As he headed down Balden Road, a taxi came up. It stopped opposite me, then did a trundling U-turn to wheeze to a halt beside me. I stepped back as it disgorged Stobbard Mayou.

  ‘Sophie! I came to see you.’

  ‘Come along in, then. Bit of a mess, I’m afraid.’

  Not great conversation; but I for one was wondering if he meant to step our relationship up a gear. Maybe more than one gear, from that smile. But he didn’t pay off the taxi.

  He surveyed the chaos in the living room with bewilderment. Suddenly he asked, ‘You don’t have any tissues, do you, Sophie?’

  I ran upstairs. He should have the new box from beside my bed even if I had to take off my make-up with toilet paper.

  He refused a drink: it might react with the antihistamines his physician had prescribed. He turned down tea and coffee, too, even decaffeinated coffee. I stood helpless, irritated. What on earth had happened to his savoir-faire? And why was he here? It seemed a pretty extreme way to cadge a box of tissues when he could have found a late-night chemist just as easily.

  At last he smiled. He unzipped his handbag.

  ‘I got hold of these. For the ballet. Week after next. I’d be honoured if you’d accompany me. As my guest.’

  ‘I’d love to, I –’

  ‘I’ll call for you – say, six-thirty? Maybe a drink before the performance. And the reception afterwards. The fifteenth.’

  I went to write it in my diary.

  ‘God, it’s a Tuesday. That’s my evening-class night.’

  ‘Cut it.’

  ‘I’m the teacher.’

  ‘Cut it anyway.’

  ‘I’ll try to swap it – I’d better let you know.’

  I followed him out to the taxi.

  ‘Six-thirty, remember,’ he said. Suddenly he stuck his head out of the taxi window. Then he pushed it down further and thrust a small box at me. Inside was an orchid.

  This time George didn’t tell me off when I poured a finger or two of Jameson’s. But I could feel him eyeing me with concern when I started to worry about buying a dress for the ballet. Could I really be planning so much effort for a man who’d been not so much casual as offhand about our date? Why didn’t I phone him and tell him where to put his gilt-edged invitation?

  And his orchid.

  And I might give Chris much the same advice about his leotard.

  In the end I stomped off to the bath with Persuasion. The chapter where Captain Wentworth, noticing Mr Elliot’s admiration for Anne, begins to admire her himself.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I’d almost forgotten that I was to spend Thursday not at William Murdock but at a conference centre in Bournville. It was the sort of day I always approached with mixed feelings. At the moment the dominant one was pleasure. The surroundings were almost rural and the centre itself was clean and quiet. But there was guilt, too, and on any event like this colleagues could be found totting up how much the day must have cost and trying to equate it with decorating just one of our college rooms to a civilised standard. And there was frustration: we were supposed to be sharing ideas with other further-education colleagues, not about the subject we all held most dear – teaching – but about a new government initiative called Records of Achievement. Students were to record all the positive things they’d learned during their education, and the suggestions of my more cynical colleagues were pleasantly ribald.

  To look at the name badges across the table was to see the history of Birmingham in the history of great men. Cadbury College. Joseph Chamberlain. Josiah Mason. William Murdock. Matthew Boulton. No James Watt – he was commemorated by a school in Sandwell. What about the future? The Sophie Rivers survival school?

  I suggested it to Shahida when we shared the mirror in the carpeted loo. She did not overwhelm me with her enthusias
m. But she sparked when I mentioned Stobbard and the ballet. ‘Of course you must go! And wear something good, too.’

  ‘I haven’t got anything good.’

  ‘Well, buy something good. Just because we live our lives in a scruffy, dirty building, where we daren’t wear nice clothes for fear of wrecking them, doesn’t mean we’re not allowed best bibs and tuckers!’

  ‘And I don’t even know if I like the guy. He’s so bloody moody.’

  ‘Treat it as just a posh night out, then. How many times have you gone to a posh reception? Well, remember there’s a first time for everything. And what was it you were saying the other day – the older you get, the more you ought to experience? Experience this. In a really posh dress.’

  ‘I can’t afford a posh dress.’

  ‘Hire one, then. There’s a shop in Harborne my sister went to. Don’t you dare make any more excuses. Just go.’

  ‘You couldn’t spare the time to come with me? On the way home, perhaps?’

  ‘Do you want my opinion or just a lift? Come on, cheer up. Cinders will go to the ball.’

  But it was Shahida who needed cheering at the end of the afternoon. She came back from coffee looking strangely subdued, and made a hash of her presentation. While she was unlocking her car, I said, ‘You’ll have to tell me what it is, Shas. Who’s been upsetting you?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  She had let me in and fastened her belt before she said, to the windscreen rather than me, ‘There was this guy in the coffee lounge. Very well dressed, very suave. About fifty, I suppose. With some other group – not one of us, thank goodness. He just turned to me and looked at me and said, “Breed like fucking rabbits, that’s the trouble with your sort.” And he just walked away.’

  I took her hand: what could I have said? There was the logical objection that she didn’t even look pregnant yet, but that wasn’t worth making.

  She drove so carefully I knew she was forcing herself to concentrate. She botched her parking – eventually I had to see her into the space. And then she laughed. ‘Good job that bastard didn’t see that. “Can’t park a fucking Fiesta, that’s the trouble with your sort!”’ And she tucked her arm into mine and steered me towards the dress shop.

  All through my Friday classes, I told myself the letter didn’t matter. But it did. Every time I didn’t have to think about anything else, it pushed back into my consciousness again. But I didn’t have any time to do the obvious thing, which was to phone Chris or Ian and ask them to handle it; perhaps I was afraid their reaction would prove the letter did matter.

  There was nothing intrinsically offensive about it: no abusive language, no overt threats.

  My dear young lady.

  It is safer not to interfere with that which does not concern you.

  But Chris and Ian, now sitting with me in the quietest corner of an increasingly noisy city-centre pub, stared at it grim-faced.

  ‘You should have told us about this straight away,’ said Ian reproachfully, tapping it with a heavy forefinger, ‘not wait till this hour of the evening.’

  Chris, who looked if anything even wearier than Ian, was less restrained. ‘Why the bloody hell didn’t you ring us earlier? This arrived at eight this morning, did you say? And now it’s ten at night. So whoever wrote this has had another fourteen hours to perfect his plans to fix you.’

  ‘Fix me? You mean – Chris, this isn’t serious, surely!’

  ‘You know bloody well it’s serious, don’t you?’

  Ian put in more gently, ‘In a murder case, everything’s potentially serious, Sophie. And you’re involved with two, don’t forget – we don’t even know which one this is connected to. There!’ He slipped the letter into one polythene bag, the envelope into another. They had become Evidence. ‘Whoever wrote it doesn’t give us much to go on,’ he added.

  ‘I thought you could identify which typewriter was used from the shape of the letters or something.’

  Chris sighed ostentatiously. ‘First we have to find the typewriter, Sophie. But in any case this is not a typewriter. It’s been produced by a word-processor or a computer, then printed.’

  ‘Don’t computer printers have identifiable characteristics?’

  ‘Daisywheels might. Even dot-matrix printers may have, I suppose. But whoever wrote this has done something else to confuse us – photocopied it.’

  Ian reached for it and pointed. ‘I reckon they’ve done it several times, reducing it, enlarging it. You can see how blurred the print is.’

  ‘They’d never use it on that advert for photocopiers,’ I said. ‘Tell me, do photocopiers have fingerprints? I mean, can you tell which machine copies come from?’ I touched a zigzag mark half an inch long which appeared at the bottom of the letter.

  I might as well not have spoken.

  ‘For God’s sake, Sophie, can’t you get it into your thick head that we can’t identify anything until we have something to compare it with? And to do that we have to have some idea who sent it. And this particular “who” knows who you are, knows where you live, thinks you know who he is. And wants to shut you up? We don’t yet know what lengths he’ll go to either.’

  He. Or she. But I shut my mind firmly against that suspicion and turned my attention to the envelope. Recycled paper by the look of it. A self-adhesive label. It looked as it it had been printed several times in a mixture of faces, roman and sans serif. The print was so blurred I was surprised the postman could read the postcode.

  ‘What’s the matter, Sophie?’ Chris asked sharply.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Come on. Do you recognise something?’ He leaned towards me, his voice no longer harshly official.

  ‘It just seems … so cold and professional. A house number, yes, even a street – you can get those easily enough. But the postcode! He must have had to look it up.’

  Ian pushed gently from the table, taking our empty glasses with him. Chris waited, then said, ‘You’re very vulnerable, Sophie. What if I were to offer you protection? Would you be sensible?’

  ‘Protection?’

  ‘To make sure the cold and professional author of that cold and professional note doesn’t get too close to you. At very least, go and stay with a friend.’

  ‘Might that put the friend at risk?’

  ‘I can’t deny it might. What about having a WPC to stay with you? Tina, for instance. You know her.’

  ‘What? All the time?’ I didn’t yet have a love life but being chaperoned would seriously damage my chances of getting one. ‘For the time being, couldn’t I just fit a few more locks? A burglar alarm? My back garden’s enclosed with a Berlin Wall and there’s one of those rottweiler hedges at the bottom –’

  ‘Berberis,’ put in Ian, plonking malt whiskies on the table.

  ‘And I’ve got one of those automatic lights. I’ve switched it off – the foxes …’

  ‘Switch it back on the minute you get back in,’ said Ian. ‘What about the front? Open plan?’

  ‘No, they are in the Beech Lanes Estate, but I’ve got a fence. And another automatic light.’

  ‘Also switched off because it might scare the foxes?’ asked Chris.

  ‘No. Just because they keep activating it.’

  He swirled his whisky thoughtfully. When I looked up I found him staring at me. He dropped his eyes swiftly to the whisky.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said at last, ‘I’ll have a word with an old friend. He’ll send in a team looking like gas men or decorators or something and upgrade your security. You’ll have to give up that bloody bike, too. I take it you’re more than capable of putting it back together if I have to dismember it to get it in my car.’

  ‘You wouldn’t pollute your nice new Peugeot with a tatty old push-bike? My God, that’s concern above and beyond the call of duty! But as a matter of fact I shan’t call on you to make the ultimate sacrifice – it’s Friday, remember. And Friday night is drinking night. Came on t
he bus today.’

  He didn’t laugh. ‘OK. So you’re safe for tonight. I’d like you to take taxis – get the drivers to take different routes. I may even be able to organise a driver for you. I suppose you couldn’t deign to take a few days off work?’

  ‘I don’t know how the Principal would like that. And I’m not sure how I would. I like teaching and I like the company. And surely to goodness I’ll be safe at college?’

  ‘I’ll bet Wajid thought that too.’

  The scream came louder and louder. I dragged myself from my nightmare to find the noise got worse as I woke up. I was shaking, my heart pounding so much that it hurt. And the screams went on.

  Someone had to help.

  I forced myself to the window.

  No sign of anyone.

  I dragged on my dressing gown and hurtled downstairs.

  There it was again. A choking gurgle. The sort Wajid might have made it he’d had time. Desperate. Inhuman.

  Which is, of course, precisely what it was. Through the glass of my front door I could see the shape slinking away. A fox.

  But although the vixen did not call again, the sound echoed on and on in my head, and I did not want to fall asleep lest I heard it again for real.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Saturday’s rehearsal was completely unremarkable. Stobbard Mayou worked us hard, but without drama. He did not attempt much eye-contact with me, and he concluded the rehearsal early because he had to dash off to Bournemouth for a gig with the Sinfonietta. Tony ran him to New Street Station, so I saw nothing of him, either. On Chris’s instructions I took a taxi home. The house was full of workmen ready for tea and coffee, and the house rang with Radio One. One of the men – who introduced himself as Gavin, a friend, he said, of Chris’s – casually slipped off his overalls and accompanied me to Safeway, making interesting suggestions about cheese and selecting a Hungarian white wine which he swore would be fruity. An instinct to stay away as long as possible made me insist on buying my meat from a local family store. Gavin stayed in his awkwardly parked pick-up truck while I exchanged badinage with Roger, the butcher, and his team. As an afterthought I bought a home-made pizza and a variety of pâtés and exotic sausage. Yes, I agreed, I was stocking up for a siege, and yes – with what emphasis I said it they were of course unaware – yes, I’d welcome a relieving army.