by Desmond Cory
‘Midge?’
‘She was Bev’s best friend. You see, it’s all very confidential.’
‘Well, but … Honestly, Elspeth … Don’t you have a student counsellor or someone like that? I mean, if it’s a problem of a personal nature—’
‘We’d be most awfully grateful,’ Elspeth said, ignoring all this dithering and adopting a stridently hectoring tone rather reminiscent of Mrs Thatcher addressing a group of Young Conservatives, ‘if you could … Well, if you could manage to come round after school, Midge can’t get away, you see, she’d never get permission unless … There’s quite a good cafeteria here, you know. We’d be delighted to sock you to tea and a rock cake. Or even two, if you’re feeling peckish.’
Victory in the next election campaign was clearly just round the corner. ‘Oh, wow,’ Dobie said. ‘Well, if you’re sure your finances will stretch to it …’
‘Just about. Does that mean you’ll come? Today?’
‘Today, that may be a bit difficult, in fact, because—’
‘It’s going to be far more difficult after today ’cos Midge reckons that once the newspaper reporters and people start clustering round the place old Midders won’t let any visitors in at all.’
Midge, whoever she was, clearly had a point there. ‘Just tell me one thing, though.’
‘Yes?’
‘Why me?’
‘Because you’re clever.’
‘Oh dear,’ Dobie said. ‘Not always.’
‘But you’ll come?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Oh, brilliant! I’ll tell the porter to expect you. Four o’clock, right after school. And I’ll meet you at the main gate. So don’t be late.’
‘You did say rock cakes?’
Monday March 26th
I wish to God that Dobie would come and see me again. If I could get a message to him somehow. There it is in the newspaper, there’s no mistake, I have to talk to someone about it. So I just have to see Dobie and tell him. Popeye’s useless.
Besides you worry about these things, of course you do. With all these screwballs around, you start to wonder. And I don’t want to give Popeye any wrong ideas now I’m so near to
They could keep me here longer if they wanted to, or even send me back I suppose to that other dump. It’s as easy to go back as to go forwards, they’re always saying that. Up the ladder and all of a sudden there’s a bloody great boa constrictor sprawled across the passage and down you go. For more ping-pong and crossword puzzles and games of chess with Horse. Horse can’t even play chess. I’m always having to show him how the knight’s move goes.
Pressing lidless eyes. And there she is all the time in the newspaper, by the barbarous king so rudely forced, poor kid. I never know what you are thinking, Popeye, except that you think you know what I’m thinking but you don’t. It’s all like that. It’s all a game. We all have different moves, one square forwards and one diagonal, up the ladder and down the snakes, another barbarous king for a royal flush, shake the dice and try again. We have ours and the shrinks have theirs, men make certain moves and women make others, up and down in and out fucking they call it but it’s all the same, it’s all a game, our favourite indoor sport. I know the moves all right but not since Derya
Outside they play at making money but you need different moves for that, it seems I don’t know them. A teaching job I suppose would have a fair screw, my wife didn’t do too
and Dobie must do all right, a professor and all. They ought to teach you all the moves at school, that’d stop all those buggers out there from inventing their own. Those girls’ schools, they can’t teach you anything, no wonder the kids have to pick it all up as they go along. One across: Someone who’s picked it up too late. Answer: FEMINIST. See how that fits into the squares, Charley.
Training them for their future role in society. That’s what they’re supposed to be doing to us, isn’t it? But are they kidding us or are we kidding them? We’re society and this is the future. We’re the post-industrial world. Popeye and all the other middle-aged freaks, they’ve been left behind. And they know it. Or if they don’t, they should by now. That kid in the newspaper, she’s the future, that’s what she’s doing in the dream. She’s been showing them the moves. Fear, that’s what. In a handful of dust? Bloody hell, no. Eliot, you might as well say Aristotle. All that stuff’s gone for ever, and a good job, too. All that punk school stuff.
I don’t think I’ll write any more today. And I don’t think I’ll ever be a teacher. I’ve learnt too much in here for that. Thanks a lot, Dobie, now fuck off. And don’t bother to wave as you turn the corner.
No, no more today. That’s enough.
Midge’s real name, it appeared, was Annabelle Midgley-Johnson but Dobie appreciated that in those circumstances abbreviation might well be a matter of convenience. ‘How do you do,’ he said. Midge was not a notably attractive girl, bearing in fact a marked general resemblance to a very thin Ojibway Indian totem pole with a tangled mop of red hair on top and an all but expressionless mask directly underneath; her eyes, however, were attentive and intelligent and Dobie imagined that her apparent expressionlessness was due to an initial and no doubt very proper caution. ‘One lump or two, Mr Dobie?’ She sounded not at all like Mrs Thatcher but, on the other hand, almost exactly like Hermione Gingold, whom she couldn’t, on the other hand again, possibly be old enough to remember.
‘Three please,’ Dobie said.
‘Oh, splendid. I do so admire immoderate men.’
Older than Elspeth, though. Probably about the same age as … Well, yes, if indeed she were Beverley Sutro’s best friend, a similarity in their age-groups was to be expected. Seventeen, then, or thereabouts. Dobie swirled his teaspoon around in the cup, liberally splashing tea into the saucer.
‘And it’s extremely good of you to come, Mr Dobie. I expect you’re veddy veddy busy, being a university teacher and … and all that. It must be such a wearing profession.’
She was, Dobie thought, overdoing it a bit. Nobody could possibly be as posh as Annabelle Midgley-Johnson sounded to be. ‘No, not really, or at least … not right now. I’m not actually teaching at the moment, you see.’
‘But there again, it must broaden the mind. Dealing with your students, I mean. And all their problems.’
‘There’s always room,’ Dobie said, ‘for a little further mind-expansion. You want to tell me something and you’re afraid I’ll be shocked … Is that it?’
‘I was really hoping you’d tell us something first. It’s really true, is it, that Bev was …? Someone killed her?’
‘Yes. That’s why you don’t have to worry. You can’t tell me anything much more shocking than that.’
‘I see what you mean. But … even so …’
She looked down at the tablecloth. There were tablecloths all right, nice clean white ones, and the cafeteria itself was nice and clean and white with a well-scrubbed highly polished parquet floor and with reproductions of Impressionist paintings hanging in whitewood frames on the shiny walls; it was quite different from the comfortably slummy kitchen where Kate and Dobie usually enjoyed their meals and totally unlike the University cafeteria, where Dobie now and again consumed a greasy lamb chop with watery greens. It was more like a very up-market tea room in one of those Olde English villages frequently featured in the pages of Country Life. But then, Dobie thought, the whole damned school seemed to be like that. He hadn’t expected to feel at home here and he didn’t.
‘You wanted to tell him,’ Elspeth said suddenly. Not to him, of course, but to Midge. ‘He’s come here, hasn’t he? No point in changing your mind about it now.’
‘I haven’t changed my mind, silly. What I don’t quite see is how to … how to put it. Other than quite bluntly. So, well, bluntly then …’ She turned back to Dobie. ‘Bev was a tart. I mean, she really was. The policeman asked me this morning if I knew who she’d been seeing and I said no, because I didn’t. I really don’t. But whoever it was, I know s
he took money from him for … you know. Doing it. She told me so.’
Dobie could do the expressionless bit, too. ‘You think it was true? She wasn’t having you on?’
‘No, I thought it was true and now I know it’s true. I mean, it’s awful, but I’ve got to tell someone because it could have something to do with her being killed … Couldn’t it?’
‘I suppose it could,’ Dobie said. ‘You should certainly have told the police about it. It’s not really—’
‘I just didn’t dare. There’d be such a terrible scandal. I know Miss Midwinter is always going on about us girls showing enterprise and initiative, but she doesn’t mean in that particular direction.’
‘No, probably not. And besides, you couldn’t really prove anything, could you?’
‘Except I’ve got the money.’
‘You have?’
‘Yes. When the cops were looking through her things this morning, I thought maybe that was what they were looking for, I thought maybe they knew something … But they didn’t find it because they didn’t know where to look for it. And I did. Lots of us have got hidey-holes, you see, where we put … And I knew where Bev’s was. I’ve got the money but I don’t know what to do with it. I can’t possibly keep it and if I give it to the police now, I suppose I’ll get into trouble, even if I tell them I don’t know where it came from. That’s the problem.’
She had, Dobie noticed, lost all her earlier aplomb. And he himself, if it came to that, was a little puzzled … Puzzled that he wasn’t feeling particularly surprised. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘we can find a way round it. Between us. Apart from anything else, the policeman in charge of the case is a friend of mine. I think if we explain the situation to him, he’ll be ready to keep it all under his hat. In fact, he’ll want to. Even if it should lead to an arrest, I can’t see why he should need to bring you into it. He’ll act on information received, as the saying has it. It happens all the time.’
‘Yes, that’s what Elspeth said, but—’
‘How much money did you find?’
‘Two hundred quid. All in twenties. Yes, but that’s not all. She said she was going to get a whole lot more.’
‘Perhaps she was getting greedy,’ Dobie said.
‘And perhaps the man she was seeing didn’t like it. Exactly. I think she was planning to run away from school and go off on a holiday with him and she was asking him for two thousand pounds. At least, that’s what I—’
‘Tooth …?’ Dobie was staring at her. ‘She must have been kidding you.’ He couldn’t believe it. They didn’t make that much even on the Gulf Air flights. No, Jackson wouldn’t wear that one. Unless, of course … He shook his head. ‘It’s just not on. Not just for sex.’
‘But that was for starters. Look, she didn’t exactly tell me about it, but … there was this bit of paper rolled up with all those banknotes. It’s her handwriting all right. What do you make of it?’
Dobie, normally – to put it mildly – somewhat distrait, retained enough presence of mind at that juncture not to touch the thing. ‘Just put it down on the table, will you, so I can … That’s it.’ Craning his neck, he found he could read it without too much difficulty, though it looked to have been written very hurriedly and possibly on an uneven surface. It said: Holiday March 24th £2000. £3000 to follow
‘What’s it mean?’
‘I don’t know. But it would have to be somewhere abroad, wouldn’t it? Maybe it’s what she thought the tickets would cost him but … you could fly to Australia on that, surely? So it can’t mean that after all.’
‘March 24th. That was Saturday. The day she was killed.’
‘Yes. So she didn’t go.’
Dobie took a paper napkin from the holder on the table, used his knife to fold the note inside the napkin, and put it in his inside pocket. ‘You haven’t showed that to anyone else?’
‘No, I haven’t. Here. You’d better take the money as well.’
‘I’ll give you a receipt.’
‘I don’t want a receipt. All I want is to get shot of it and to know that … that something’ll be done about it. If anything can.’
‘Yes, something will be done about it all right. She didn’t tell you anything else?’
‘Not really.’
It was remarkably quiet, Dobie thought, in the cafeteria. Somehow he had expected a girls’ school to be a great deal noisier. There didn’t even seem to be very many girls about the place; through the windows, opened to invigorating currents of healthy Welsh air, he could see only the grey stone walls and red-brick facings of other buildings, a damp-looking slate roof and, a little further beyond, the almost startling green gloss of a well-tended playing field. ‘She didn’t ever say why? I mean, this is a pretty expensive school, isn’t it? She couldn’t have needed the money all that badly.’
‘She wanted to get away from here, I think. She didn’t like it.’
Looking out the window again, Dobie could see why. All right for South Walians, maybe. But Italy it wasn’t. He asked the question anyway. ‘Why?’
‘None of us do. Very much. This is hell, nor are we out of it.’
‘It’s as bad as that?’
‘Maybe I’m exaggerating. But only slightly. And anyway I’m quoting. Doctor Faustus.’
Dobie hadn’t met him, but he could, he thought, always ask Kate about that later. And it probably didn’t matter. ‘Not many of us run away, though,’ Midge was saying. ‘Not much point in it. But if someone offered me two thousand quid to do it, I don’t say I might not be tempted. As yet nobody has, needless to say.’
‘The note doesn’t say that, exactly. It could be about something altogether different. Are you sure she never told you anything else which might …?’
‘Well …’ The damned girl had gone all hesitant again. Dobie waited patiently, fingering the remnants of his rock cake and reducing them to crumbs. ‘Except she once said her mother started off as a call girl … and always wished she’d stayed that way because her marriage hadn’t worked out all that well … So,’ Midge said, with sudden emphasis, ‘she said she didn’t see why she shouldn’t … Oh, it was all very vague and I’m not sure if that part of it was true. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if it were. And I’m not throwing any stones, I don’t know that my own bloody parents are very much better. But that’s by the way.’
Dobie wasn’t throwing any stones, either, or even picking up the bill, so they left the cafeteria together, Dobie standing politely aside to allow the ladies priority of egress – a gesture which, he noticed, seemed to occasion some private amusement on their part. Extraordinary creatures, girls, when you thought about them. Perhaps the trouble was that he didn’t, or not very much. He still couldn’t feel that he had learnt anything of very much value about the object of his present concern, except that her family background appeared to be slightly unusual – though perhaps no more unusual than most. ‘What,’ he asked, blinking vaguely upwards towards the upper storeys of the school buildings, ‘was she like? You shared a room with her, after all. You must have got to know her quite well.’
‘That depends. Some people you do. Some people you don’t. She only came this term, you know … but even if she’d been around for years I don’t think I’d have got to know her very much better. Bev was one of the don’ts, you see.’
‘But did you like her? As a person?’
‘I think I admired her. For that reason. She never seemed to want to weep on your shoulder like lots of the other kids do. I suppose she was a bit of a tough, really. Especially about the sex thing. Somehow I never got the impression that she, you know … enjoyed it. She didn’t talk about it hardly at all. Maybe that was it. With all those other nincompoops sounding off all the time about how terrific it was the last time round … some of them never seem to talk about anything else. Bev was different. You felt she really did know the ropes. I hope,’ Midge said, after a pause, ‘I’m not giving you the wrong impression. The girls here aren’t such a bad lot, really.�
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‘Of course, Bev, as you call her … I suppose she was prettier than most.’
‘Actually, no. It was odd. She looked quite ordinary with her clothes on. But when she wasn’t wearing any … she was gorgeous. She looked … alive, you know what I mean? I used to think, well, if that’s what sex does for you … but it wasn’t that – or I don’t think so. It was just the way she was. Sort of natural. I’m not explaining it very well, but perhaps you’re getting the picture.’
‘I’m trying very hard not to,’ Dobie said.
His car was parked just round the corner. He shook hands courteously with his informant and with Elspeth (a mistake in the latter case, since he’d promised to give Elspeth a lift back home) and was opening the car door when Midge, who had fallen rather silent, spoke to him again.
‘There is one other thing she said.’
‘Yes?’ Dobie paused attentively.
‘Only it sounds so awful I really … don’t like to tell you.’
Dobie continued to pause attentively. This not through any profound insight into schoolgirl psychology; it was just the way he was. Sort of natural. In fact he was thinking about something else.
‘But I suppose the police are trying to find out who it was she was seeing on Saturday afternoons …’
Dobie stopped thinking about something else. ‘Yes?’ he said again.
‘Well … She once said there were two of them.’
‘Two of them?’
‘Two men. Yes. Only there was something funny about it. Like it was some kind of private joke she was keeping to herself. I couldn’t understand it, really. But that’s what she said.’
‘Do you think she meant there were two men who were—’
‘I think that’s what she wanted me to think. But that wouldn’t have been very funny, would it? Just rather … sordid. And disgusting. No, there was something about the set-up that amused her. That’s all I can say.’
5
Elspeth had been rather silent, Dobie thought, throughout that interview and she was silent now, staring out through the side window of the car at acres of inauspicious moorland as they drove through the school gateway and out on to the road. In a way, that was understandable. ‘Are all the girls at your school so confiding?’