Dying Fall

by Judith Cutler

  The rest of Saturday I spent cleaning up after the workmen. Gavin made what might have been a serious proposal for a date but I wasn’t sure how Chris would rate a round of golf for safety and I thought it might score high for boredom. Then I cooked: sauce for spaghetti and chilli con carne. And then my time was my own. Dreadfully my own.

  I’d got the marking out of the way by ten on Sunday morning. It was pouring with rain and normally I’d have taken myself to my fitness centre, buying the Sundays on the way back. But I’d agreed to eschew my cycle, and the occasional presence of a large white van fifty yards down the road did little to persuade me to break my promise.

  So there was nothing for me to do except plough through the computer manuals and photocopies. I yearned to correct the English of the former, and the latter were all afflicted by an irritating blot in exactly the same place. Chris was right, of course. There was no substitute for hands-on experience. On Monday I would ask Philomena to let me into the Computer Suite – later I’d cajole a key from Richard – and I’d try to get into WordStar or WordPerfect on one of the Amstrads. If the Office Technology kids could master them, so could I.

  ‘Well, Sophie, how you going on?’ asked Philomena after I’d been tapping away, much more slowly than the students she’d let in too, for perhaps an hour. She parked her vac, one with a face painted on it, and peered at my screen.

  ‘Fine, thanks.’

  ‘So why you been using all those rude words, girl? If I was your mum, I make you wash your mouth out.’

  ‘Sorry, Phil. I didn’t realise anyone could hear.’

  ‘The good Lord, He can hear. Well, you got yourself a document. Now what you going to do with it?’

  ‘Print it. And save it. And all it does is bleep at me.’

  ‘I don’t blame it, all that language.’

  I never knew quite how serious Phil was when she went into gospel-talk, and I preferred not to risk offending her. So I kept mum.

  ‘An’ I think –’ I could feel her smile before it broke –‘if you want to save, F10 might help you. There.’

  There was an eager buzzing. A light pulsed in what I now knew was the disk drive.

  ‘And now you want to get your printer on line.’

  She stubbed her finger on a touch pad. The printer clattered into action.

  ‘Look,’ I cried, clapping my hands like a kid. My document, there in black and white, peeled towards me. ‘That’s brilliant, Phil.’

  ‘I just started this course, see, Sophie. With the OU. Computer Technology. But don’t tell no one, eh – or ol’ Philly, she never get no work done.’

  The phone rang. Phil looked at it and at me and picked it up. ‘Ms Rivers’s secretary,’ she said, cool and Moira Stuart. ‘No, I’m terribly afraid he’s not in yet. May I take a message? You’re sure? Very well. Good morning.’ She replaced the handset. ‘They want the Computer Suite Manager. Only an hour too early for him.’

  I grinned in appreciation. Then an idea occurred to me. ‘You said Wajid used the phone a lot?’

  ‘Like he owned the place.’

  ‘Did he bring anything in when he came? A little box?’

  ‘Not what you’d call a box. More a little flat packet, this big.’ Her hands suggested a cigarette packet. ‘First time I saw it, I say to him, “You know you not supposed to smoke in here, young man,” and he give me a lot of lip, and say it to do with the computer and ol’ Philomena an ignorant ol’ woman. But next week he buy two whole books of raffle tickets from me for the Sickle Cell Fund, so I forgive and forget. I don’t tell no one about his modem.’

  ‘Modem!’ My blush started in the region of my navel.

  ‘I tell you he use the phone,’ she said, sardonically. ‘Why else he use the phone? I think you better do this course, Sophie.’

  I spent the intervals between the morning’s classes trying to cajole one of my colleagues into swapping evening classes with me. No one was very keen, but at last Sean, the head of English, agreed that he really ought to be home for his daughter’s third birthday party and that he would indeed allow me to get my hands on his evening A-level group. A three-hour class for a two-hour one – but as a beggar I could scarcely choose. All I had to do now was nip down to his room to collect copies of the texts I would be teaching – Hardy and Chaucer.

  The lifts or the stairs with their ninety-degree bends? I hesitated at the staff room door. I was frightened. After all this time at college I didn’t want to leave the security of the staff room. I listened. The place was unnaturally quiet. None of the phones was ringing. All my colleagues were teaching or closeted away in meetings. For once there were no students demanding help. The corridor was so quiet I could hear the pings of the lifts. At the far end a class laughed, politely, obediently. In a room nearby someone was playing a French video.

  And I had to make my way to the tenth floor.

  I did, of course. Used the stairs, too. Found the books and legged it back again. Up the stairs.

  The staff room door was unlocked. Surely I’d locked it?

  I flung it open. And woke Shahida, who had her head down on her desk.

  She blinked up at me. ‘You seen a ghost? Sophie?’

  ‘I’m fine. Honestly. And you? Shas, don’t make a martyr of yourself. If you feel rough, why not go home?’

  ‘Just tired. But I’ve got something for you. I suppose I could have passed it on to Chris Groom myself, but he’d rather have it from you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You must have noticed – he really fancies you. And now Kenji’s gone home –’

  ‘I’m happily living on my own. Very happily. Just because you’re besotted with Tanvir you want everyone else to smell of April and May. What have you got, anyway?’

  She burrowed in the chaos she called her desk, sifting through piles of marking. At last she turned to the windowsill behind her desk and grabbed a single sheet from another pile of academic detritus.

  ‘There. Tim was going to throw it out. The report from Wajid’s work-experience placement.’

  ‘Why chuck it?’

  For answer she glanced across the room. Tim’s desk was completely clear.

  ‘I didn’t like to think … just because he was dead … Here.’

  All our students have the chance to go to local firms to learn about Real Life – shops, solicitors’ offices, even a bookmaker’s. There was a strong rumour that two of our former business students were financing their course at Southampton by running what was by all accounts an extremely profitable brothel.

  I looked at the paper she’d passed me, a single A4 sheet. Presumably it was the standard report. It had been completed in a convoluted script. Wajid had worked very hard and come in early if necessary. He had been pleasant and cooperative. He had learned how to input and retrieve information. His appearance had not been up to standard. He had not therefore worked with the public.

  I tapped the sheet. ‘This bank. International Commercial. Never heard of it.’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘You’d be a Barclays or a Lloyds woman. But if you had a shop on the Soho Road, you’d bank with International Commercial. My father did.’

  ‘Did?’

  ‘Oh, there were some rumours a few months ago. He moved his account – to Barclays as it happens. But most of his friends stayed put. Too much bother to change your bank, especially when the staff speak Urdu or Punjabi or whatever.’

  ‘What sort of rumours?’

  ‘Perhaps people’s money wasn’t as safe as they’d thought. But nothing positive.’

  ‘Would Tim have visited Wajid at the bank?’

  ‘He should have done: why?’

  ‘Just a feeling. And I don’t even know what sort of feeling, yet.’

  Shahida smiled. ‘Trust intuitions,’ she said. ‘Always.’

  Apart from his determination to keep paperwork to a minimum, Tim was an old softie. You didn’t even have to wheedle him, you just asked. So I asked him if he’d care to take me to v
isit the International Commercial. No, he didn’t have anything particularly urgent on this afternoon except a meeting he’d rather dodge, and taking me on a visit would provide a splendid excuse for dodging it. He didn’t even blink when I told him how he was to introduce me.

  I’d rather have gone on my own, of course. But I’d worked out a scenario which shouldn’t arouse too much suspicion, and Tim was an essential adjunct. Not to mention a useful chauffeur, though it must be confessed I found his whole approach to wheels somewhat casual. It must have been the influence of Chris and Ian. He rejected two possible parking slots as too short, and, when he finally found one to his liking, didn’t so much park the car as abandon it.

  The International Commercial staff – the deputy manager and someone whose job I never quite established – welcomed us cautiously. Perhaps they were disconcerted that Tim should want to bring me into what seemed a male preserve. I thanked the gods of coincidence that I’d chosen a much longer skirt than usual that morning.

  ‘Miss Rivers is to take over my job when I retire at Easter,’ said Tim. ‘I want to make sure she’s properly trained.’

  They nodded in appreciation. I smiled hard. Perhaps they wouldn’t see my clenched teeth.

  I started by asking simple questions – how long they’d been taking on students, and from which schools and colleges. They answered courteously and in full, even if they were surprised by my apparent naivety.

  Then there was a tap at the door. A young woman in kameez and salwar brought in tea. It was thick, sweet and milky, the sort Shahida had taught me to enjoy. My acceptance of a second cup seemed to earn me Brownie points.

  I was able to move the conversation round to the work Wajid had done. It seemed he’d caused a little irritation by insisting on wearing jeans. The designer jeans, no doubt. But he’d made up for it by the work he did with computer records. He’d had such skill and enthusiasm for his inputting that there’d been talk among the management of offering him a holiday job and possibly a full-time post.

  An odd little silence followed that. Almost as if someone had spoken out of turn.

  He’d learned other skills – answering the phone, filing. He’d shadowed the manager at a couple of meetings. The bank had clearly been conscientious in their approach to training. The men bowed dismissively when I said so.

  Then I stepped up the conversation a gear: had Wajid had access to classified information?

  ‘All bank information is confidential,’ said the man without a title.

  I decided to turn his implied reproof. ‘Then you are all the more generous to have trusted him,’ I said. ‘Do you ever have students who betray this trust, and try and pry into private files?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘So you have to supervise them all the time?’

  ‘A bank relies on trust. Your college sends only students worthy of that trust. In any case,’ he added with almost a grin, ‘any particularly sensitive information would be accessible only by means of a password.’

  ‘So you’d be happy for someone like Wajid to work on his own.’

  ‘Of course.’

  His voice suggested that my welcome might be wearing slightly thin. Never mind. I pressed on.

  ‘What opportunities would be open to someone as hardworking and talented as Wajid if he came to work for you full-time?’

  A gesture from the deputy manager implied that the sky itself was hardly a limit. ‘We are, after all, a truly international organisation. Wherever large numbers of Asian businesses are to be found, you’ll find us. The Indian subcontinent, of course. East Africa.’

  ‘America?’

  ‘Certainly. North and South. And we’ll be developing further still.’

  I nodded my admiration. Tim caught my eye. It was time to go. We were both teaching in half an hour. We smiled and shook hands and promised more students as good as Wajid and made it back just in time for me to phone the police. Ian took the call and promised to pass on the message. And he’d make sure I had a lift home, he said, almost as an afterthought.

  I suppose I had expected Chris to be waiting when I emerged from the college at six. I felt my weekend’s reading and my visit that afternoon had given me some pointers he might use. But it was only Ian, looking weary in an elderly Maestro.

  ‘Appearances can be deceptive,’ was all he said when I commented on it. Then he explained that Chris was having his jabs but might be round later.

  ‘Jabs?’

  ‘For India. Didn’t he tell you? He’s off to Delhi on some exchange scheme. A month or more. And he’s being sensible for once – having his jabs against hepatitis and typhoid and everything.’

  ‘Are you going too?’ I could scarcely ask if Chris would be kept here in Birmingham until he’d sorted out the murders. Not to mention the murderers.

  ‘Too old, too lowly. Not that I mind, Sophie – don’t think that. I never did like the heat. And it’s good for Chris’s career. He’s a good lad. The best. I didn’t take kindly to the idea of some whizz kid as boss, I can tell you, and I don’t think I’d have stomached anyone except him. There’s this DCI in charge over Solihull way and I tell you – you wouldn’t have to look for the murderer: it’d be me.’

  I let him talk on. I found I was shaken that Chris hadn’t chosen to tell me something I’d have been interested to know. Most of the time we seemed to be functioning as friends, after all. I’d ignore Shahida, who was inveterately romantic when it came to me and my sundry relationships. In any case, fancying and keeping quiet about your future seemed pretty incompatible.

  I asked Ian to stop off at Safeway: Gavin and his predilection for cheese had quite made me forget a load of things on Saturday, and I felt like an evening in the kitchen. Ian insisted on pushing the trolley for me, dismissing Gavin’s tastes in wine and proving an expert on sherry, not, alas, my usual tipple. His wife, he said, used Sainsbury’s, and he preferred Tesco’s amontillado. As he watched my selection of vegetables, his expression changed. I deduced that his wife’s trolley did not normally include chillies, okra or ginger. I winced at the price of fresh coriander, but bought two plastic boxes holding about a quarter of the bunches you could buy on Soho Road and at twice the price. I’d cook a curry. If I couldn’t escape to India, it’d still be authentic. The father of Bashurat Ali had celebrated his son’s unnaturally good results by feasting all who’d taught him at his restaurant – and by teaching us to cook what we ate.

  On Ian’s instructions I locked myself in the house. And yes, I would try a glass of sherry before I set to work in the kitchen.

  I had got no further than opening the bottle when Chris arrived, greyish and sweating.

  ‘Ian said you thought it was important,’ he said, lurching into the living room. ‘No, I’m not infectious. They said I’d get a reaction. Feels like flu and a half.’

  I poured water on three aspirins and thought of a different recipe.

  The sight of him asleep on my sofa brought another problem sharply to my mind. Amid my preparations for the coming evening with Stobbard I’d forgotten one small but essential item. In today’s etiquette, whose job was it to buy the condoms? When the rabbit-loving Kenji left my life, I went off the Pill, and we were, after all, now in the era of AIDS. So prudence dictated I must arm myself, and must organise – it was horrible that even the simplest visit took on the proportions of an expedition – a trip to a pharmacy. Not my local one, either, whatever his expertise in suggesting remedies for teacher’s throat. And I needed someone’s expertise. Surely someone must have written a Woman’s Guide to the things. They come with a wide enough variety of unhelpful names – Arouser, indeed, or Fetherlite. I plainly needed something called Toughasoldboots or Safeashouses. Or, of course, I might need nothing at all. Chris might even insist on a police escort.

  ‘You know, Sophie,’ said Chris an hour later, chasing the last grains of rice round his plate, ‘you really are a brilliant cook. But I still can’t see what Wajid’s work experience had to do with his
getting knifed.’

  I passed the fruit – I’m not very good at puddings – and waited till he’d chosen his apple.

  ‘Wajid, according to Philomena, used the Computer Suite telephone. He shouldn’t have, but he insisted it was for his computing project. When he used the phone he used a modem. I suppose you haven’t found one among his things?’

  ‘No, but that doesn’t mean anything. He could have borrowed one, or it could have been stolen by whoever killed him. Go on.’

  ‘He couldn’t dial long distance. He’d have had to go through the switchboard for that, and –’

  ‘But he might have done. I’ll –’

  ‘I’ve already checked. The Finance Section have computerised records which show the destination of every phone call we make. All they could find for the Computer Suite extension was a regular, very long call to a bank. Does the International Commercial Bank mean anything to you?’

  He shook his head, then winced, as if the movement hurt him.

  ‘I think it’s got something to do with his work experience there. Look.’ I showed him the report Tim had meant to bin. In his present state of health he’d rather not know about my visit.

  ‘Not much different from his college reports – keen, hard-working, prepared to come into work early …’ Chris’s voice tailed off.

  ‘And which department was he mostly based in?’

  ‘Computer inputting.’ He rubbed his hands over his face.

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘Sophie, just spell it out, will you? I feel so bloody …’

  I poured him more water, and then ferreted through the pile of photocopies which had so amused him the night Stobbard had called round. ‘Here, read this. All about hacking.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Chris looked like a drooping plant shot a particularly potent fertiliser. ‘So you think he spent his time at the bank hacking into someone’s system –’