“The caretaker. I didn’t recognize the caretaker.”
“But the caretaker’s Gerry,” Morgan said. The caretaker at their school was referred to only as Gerry. He was a small mousy man with huge jam-jar glasses. He was often seen pottering around school during the day, fixing light fixtures or battling the demons inside interactive whiteboards. The school could only afford one caretaker, so he was always really busy.
“This wasn’t Gerry,” Eren said, the color draining from his face.
“Then,” Morgan said slowly, as he matched Eren’s expression, “who was it?”
They were both silent for a very long time.
42
1992
“So this caretaker guy, you’re sure you haven’t seen him before?”
They were back in Eren’s room sitting on his floor. Eren doodled on a piece of paper while Morgan watched. Downstairs, Eren’s father was watching football. They could hear the chanting of the home team and various cheers as someone scored.
Eren had never been one for sports, much to the disappointment of his father. When his mother had died, his father tried to get him into football. Eren had seen it as some kind of attempt to get closer to him. They went to a couple of games, Eren pretending to be enthusiastic when Arsenal, the team his father supported, scored. But over time, he couldn’t keep it up, and eventually he told his father he just wasn’t interested.
“I didn’t recognize him at all. I’ve never seen him around school before.”
“What did he look like?” Morgan said.
“He had brown hair. He looked big, not like fat, but big like muscly. He had like a green overall thing on and he was using that thing to shine the floor of the hall.”
“Couldn’t he have just been a cleaner? Like someone who comes in when all us kids have gone home?”
Eren thought for a moment. He wished he could remember the man a little better. “I guess he could’ve been. But he looked more like a caretaker. And he definitely wasn’t Gerry.”
Morgan rubbed his eyes and sighed. “So what does this mean?”
“If this guy wasn’t a caretaker, and he wasn’t a cleaner, then what was he doing there?” Eren asked, with a degree of finality. He’d found it, that one strand of thread that didn’t fit in the picture. He felt happy for the first time since he had gone into that room. He was getting somewhere.
There was a fresh cheer from downstairs and the sound of Eren’s father shouting “Get in!” Arsenal had scored.
“You’re saying that...” Morgan didn’t finish, but Eren knew exactly what he meant.
“Yes. I think it was him. I think he killed Mr. Jefferies. I think he went into that room and he...he killed him. Made it look like Jefferies had killed himself to get away with it. Then he left the room, maybe heard people coming, and had to work out how to blend in. Maybe he found that shining machine and decided to pose as a caretaker. Then when I had passed by, he ran away.” Eren put his pen down, in resolution. “What do you think?”
Morgan scoffed. “I don’t—I mean it makes some kind of sense I suppose. And it sounds like it could’ve happened. But...”
“Yes?”
“...that doesn’t mean it did.”
Eren had known Morgan all his life. The two of them had met at kindergarten and had stayed together since. They’d never once fallen out. Even as an eleven-year-old, Eren had a basic understanding of how people worked, and he knew how Morgan worked more than anyone. If his friend was going to help him, he would have to appeal to his more exciting side. Eren needed to know what happened to Mr. Jefferies for his peace of mind, but Morgan had no such issue. Morgan was just a kid who wanted life to be more like it was in the movies.
“Morgan, imagine if Mr. Jefferies was murdered, and we caught the killer? Imagine how famous we would be? The two kids who caught a dangerous man, who had killed their own teacher. We could be better than everyone else. We could be better than the police. We would be superheroes.”
Eren slid the action figure across the carpet, in front of Morgan. It had still been where he’d thrown it a week before.
Morgan looked at him, his eyes alight. He picked up the action figure. And smiled. “Okay. So what do we do?”
“We need to make sure that that guy wasn’t just a cleaner.”
“How do we do that?”
“There’s a book with pictures of all the staff at the school. I saw it once—it was out at parents’ evening. They probably have it in the office. We need that book to see if that guy’s in there. I’ll know it if I see him, I just can’t describe him.”
“And what if he is in there? Hell, what if he isn’t in there? What then?”
“We’ll work that out when we’ve found out.”
Morgan nodded, not looking entirely convinced. “Okay, I guess.”
“One more thing, we have to keep this totally quiet. Only you and I can know we’re doing this. We could be in danger if it gets out that we’re investigating.”
Morgan looked insanely happy about this. The more danger, the more exciting it was to him, no doubt. “Okay.”
Eren put a fist out. “Pard’ner,” he said, in an old-timey voice.
“Pard’ner,” Morgan said, bumping his fist with his own.
Downstairs, Eren’s father howled. The other team had scored.
* * *
The next day during break, Eren and Morgan went to the school office, and were confronted with a rather crotchety Miss Erthwhile. She was an old woman who had worked at the school since the dawn of time, and famously hated children. She was always in the office, dunking biscuits into her coffee and typing slowly on the computer. She was also the qualified nurse for the sick room, and since she had taken up that particular job, the number of children who went to the sick room had gone down by more than half. No one wanted to be faced with her.
Eren and Morgan walked up to the desk slowly as if approaching an almighty dragon. Similarly to a dragon, Miss Erthwhile could be defeated if you knew her weaknesses.
“Hello, Miss Erthwhile,” Eren said sunnily.
Miss Erthwhile peered down at the both of them. Her face was just a pile of wrinkles. Many scholars had died attempting to figure out how old she was. “Yes?” she said.
“Me and Morgan here were wondering if maybe you had a book with pictures of all the staff at the school?”
Miss Erthwhile regarded them with her small squirrelly eyes. “The alumni book? Now, why would you want that?”
Eren and Morgan looked at each other. “We, uh, we’re doing a project,” Morgan said—he was always far quicker with the excuses. He’d had plenty of practice.
“Project for what?”
“Geography. We’re doing a map of the city, and the teacher says we can get pictures of everyone to stick on the map. Like which areas they live in.”
Eren looked at his friend, with something like admiration. Even he had to admit that that wasn’t a bad save.
“Hmm.” Erthwhile thought, while looking down her nose at them. “If you bring me a note from the teacher, I’ll let you have a look.”
Morgan smiled. “We don’t really have time for that, Miss Erthwhile. Our project’s due tomorrow and we really wanted to do the project now.”
“Sorry, but you can’t see it without a note,” Erthwhile said, not even attempting to hide her happiness that she had disrupted someone’s day. “That book is not for children to see.”
Morgan and Eren looked at each other again. Eren shrugged, not knowing what else to do. Morgan got in close and whispered in Eren’s ear, “Watch this. I saw this thing called reverse psychology on a TV show.” Morgan straightened up again and cleared his throat. Erthwhile watched him, bemused.
“Don’t give us the alumni book,” Morgan said, confidently.
Erthwhile chuckled, “Righto.” She went bac
k to typing very slowly on the computer.
Morgan looked confused. He leaned in to Eren again. “Okay, there may have been more elements to it.”
The two boys walked out of the office, dejected. Eren needed that book, it was the only way he could know for sure if the man he had seen worked at the school or not.
Out in the corridor, Eren slammed his fist into a locker. “Ouch,” he said, instantly regretting it. “We need that book.”
“Is there no other way?”
“No,” Eren said, rubbing his hand.
“Okay then,” Morgan said, “then there’s only one thing for it.”
“What?”
“One of us has to go to the sick room.”
* * *
During English, Morgan suffered an intense and concentrated stomachache. The teacher rushed him off to the sick room, telling the class to reread the opening of Of Mice and Men. Eren waited as long as he could, which was about two minutes, and then snuck out the back of the class.
The corridors were quiet, reminding him of that fateful day, but this time he could hear the muffled sounds of classrooms full of children all around him. He took the shortcut through the courtyard, nodding to Gerry, who was clipping a bush, as he passed. He emerged into the office corridor. The sick room was just down the hall from Erthwhile’s office and Eren could hear the howls of his friend. He was either overacting his stomachache or Erthwhile was torturing him. No one knew the horrors of the sick room.
Eren stuck his head around the office door. It was empty. He went round Erthwhile’s desk and started rummaging. The top drawer had packs of sweets in.
The next drawer down had random papers all heaped together. They all seemed to be spreadsheets filled with more letters and numbers than Eren knew existed.
To Eren’s dismay, the final drawer was locked. He tried pulling on it three or four times before he noticed that there was a sticky note on the upper right corner of the drawer. In Erthwhile’s unmistakable scrawl, it said “Key on monitor.”
Eren looked up at the bulky computer monitor but couldn’t see a key. All he found was another Post-it note, this time reading “Cactus.”
Eren almost laughed as he realized that this was Erthwhile’s version of enhanced security. He reached across the desk and picked up the small potted cactus in the corner. Just below a layer of soil was the key.
Eren unlocked the drawer and opened it. Piles of books were in there—big luxury embossed books. Most of them were yearbooks, dating back as far as 1985. But under them all, he found what he was looking for. A large leather book with “Alumni” embossed on it in gold lettering.
Eren opened it, flipping through the pages of staff. He saw Miss Rain smiling out at him and next to her, he saw the kind face of Mr. Jefferies. He looked so alive. But now he was dead. He turned the page quickly, and finally found the Cleaning Staff section. No one was smiling here, just a bunch of older women looking stern and very unhappy about having their photo taken. They were all women, not a man amongst them. Eren turned over the page, but saw that that was the only page for cleaning staff. The man wasn’t there. He wasn’t there.
Eren calmed down. He decided to go through the entire book, looking at every picture. He realized for the first time that he almost wanted to see the man. Because the alternative would be horrifying. He looked through the entire book, but he wasn’t there.
Eren shut the book and put his head in his hands. Who was that man? How could he be there, in the hall, when he had walked past. Was this man the murderer? It was the only lead he had.
Eren put the book back in the drawer, locked it and replaced the key in the cactus. He didn’t know what to think anymore. This was too real.
He looked up and almost jumped out of his skin. Miss Rain was in the doorway, watching him.
* * *
Miss Rain was nice—she didn’t even really ask what Eren had been doing. She said that all the teachers were worried about him. He’d been acting distant, not been working very well. That was mostly because he had been drawing diagrams of the Maths room and thinking about how someone could stage a murder to look like a suicide, but Eren didn’t tell her that.
“I understand, Eren. It’s horrible. It really is. And no one would blame you if you needed to take some more time off.”
“No,” Eren said firmly, “I can’t just sit around and do nothing.” He was talking about his investigation, but Miss Rain obviously took it to mean schoolwork.
She smiled sadly. “You’re very strong and intelligent, Eren. More than most eleven-year-olds. You could achieve such great things.”
Eren smiled at her, trying to ignore Morgan, who was standing outside the window, pulling funny faces.
* * *
“So this mystery man is our guy,” Morgan said, at lunch.
It was a nice day and Eren and Morgan had walked all the way down to the far side of the field, where no one ever bothered to go, so they could have a conversation in peace.
“Maybe. Possibly,” Eren said, thinking. He was thinking about what had happened after he screamed on that day. After he had reached the edge of his sanity and just howled. Who had come for him?
“What?”
“We have to consider...other possibilities.”
“Other possibilities? What other possibilities? You see a mysterious guy on the day Mr. Jefferies is killed? That seems pretty good to me. He’s our guy.” Morgan was climbing the fence and stopped about halfway up, perching precariously on an iron bar. Eren was always impressed by Morgan’s energy—he could never stay still.
“We need to look at every possible avenue. We don’t want to make a mistake.”
“Eren, if the police couldn’t solve this, what makes you think we can? What are we actually doing? Even if this guy did kill Mr. Jefferies—or someone else, or whoever—what do we do then?”
“Then we go to the police. If we don’t have concrete proof, they’ll never believe us. It’s just like you said, we’re eleven. We can’t even reach high shelves.”
“Exactly,” Morgan said, jumping off the fence and stumbling on the landing. He put his arms out anyway, like the gymnasts you saw on TV. “We’re eleven. We can’t figure this out.”
“Why not?” Eren said. “Eleven-year-olds solving a murder. Maybe we’d be the first.”
“It sounds great, Eren. But can we do it?”
Eren thought for a long time. “I have to try.”
“Okay, so what now?”
“We have to get into the Maths room.”
“More rooms, huh?”
* * *
Eren and Morgan stayed behind after school, pretending to study in the library. They waited until five o’clock, when they made their way down the quiet corridors toward the Maths department.
They found the door to Mr. Jefferies’s classroom closed—a wrapping of police tape around it. POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS.
“I heard the head talking,” Morgan said. “They’re just keeping the tape there to stop kids wandering in. The police are long gone.”
Eren nodded. He looked at the door, suddenly unable to move.
Morgan nudged him. “C’mon, it’s just a room.”
“I know, it’s just...” Eren trailed off, not knowing what it was just.
Morgan pushed the handle. The door creaked open wide of its own free will, revealing the perfect classroom behind. Someone had tidied up, of course. The chairs and tables were all set out in an immaculate symmetrical pattern. It was all ready for learning.
Morgan ducked under the tape and walked into the room. He stopped in the center, right under the exposed pipe, and looked back.
Eren was watching wide-eyed.
“Come on then,” Morgan said, and seeing Eren’s horrified face looked up to the pipe. He sidestepped quickly. Eren shook himself out of his paralysis and duck
ed under the tape. He shivered as he entered the room. It was as cold as it had been on that day. Someone had left the window open again.
“So what are we looking for?” Morgan said, picking up an exercise book that had been left on one of the desks and flipping through it.
Eren looked around. It was like nothing had ever happened in here. No one had died. No one had even lived. There was no hint that Mr. Jefferies had ever been here at all. His desk was scrubbed of any character.
Eren walked around it and expected to see the framed photo of his dog, or the weathered copy of The Catcher in the Rye. People used to ask him why he had become a Maths teacher if he loved books so much. Eren remembered his answer word for word.
“Maths is mechanics. You can work at it and get better, until you are the greatest mathematician to ever live. To write like Salinger is a gift, a gift you cannot teach, and one which I sadly do not possess.”
It wasn’t there. The book wasn’t there. It was always there, at the end of the desk, perfectly lined up to the edges. But it wasn’t there. It became imperative that Eren found it. Why would someone take it? Why was it not where it belonged?
Eren yanked open the desk drawers. They were all empty. There was nothing left. There was nothing of him. He slammed them shut.
“Careful,” Morgan said, stepping toward Eren, “we don’t want to make too much noise.”
Eren’s eyes were filling up with tears, and he didn’t think he could stop them this time. He buried his head in the sleeves of his school sweater. “He’s gone, Morgan. They got rid of him. All of them. All the grown-ups.”
“Turn around, Eren.”
“It’s like he never even existed.”
“Eren, turn around.”
“He’s gone. He’s all gone.”
“Eren,” Morgan said, in a sharp whisper, “he’s not gone, not quite.”
Eren finally heard his friend, looking up from his sleeves. He looked around.
Although the room was spotless, the whiteboard had remained untouched. It seemed whoever had cleaned the room had not been able to wipe away the last things Mr. Jefferies ever did. Eren saw the equations that his class had been working on, Mr. Jefferies’s convoluted explanation of Pythagoras, and in the upper right corner his name, which he had written the very first day they had met him and never erased. Eren looked at it and smiled sadly. It was almost like a mural to the forgotten.
Guess Who Page 19