‘Those names don’t ring a bell,’ she said, but nothing more, clearly expecting me to take that as my cue to leave.
‘Who are you, by the way?’ I asked. ‘Cleaner?’
‘I’m the Deputy Head,’ she said, firmly.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t be Miss Hicks, by any chance?’
‘How do you know?’
I smiled. ‘One of the boys outside told me your name.’
Get that ‘Miss’ – I could buy it. She was all Vosene and Pontefract cakes, spending long nights in, listening to Radio 2 and thinking of a man called Gerald who had once volubly admired her hibiscus.
‘I’d like to see the headmaster, if that’s okay. This is a pretty serious matter.’
She left me there with the ice thesaurus, and I decided against freaking her out any further by going for a wander along the school corridors, just to show her just how excellent the school’s security was, and instead waited by the staffroom, which was as full of furtive bitching as the bike sheds or the patch of spare wasteland behind the gym.
Presently, a rotund guy appeared through the swing-doors leading to the assembly hall. He and Miss Hicks scurried towards me like the Number 10 made flesh. His hair was receding and his dark suit was dusted with dandruff from the remnants. He had sad eyes, but who wouldn’t, being in charge of a shower like the ones I’d met outside?
‘Banbury,’ he said. ‘Don Banbury. Headmaster.’
I told Banbury what I’d told Hicks, and he was in the middle of saying the same thing she’d said when he cottoned on that I wasn’t talking about now.
‘Hang on,’ he said, and pinched his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger. ‘In 2009? I wasn’t here then.’
‘I didn’t say you killed them,’ I said.
He kind of half-laughed at that, as if I’d made a joke but he couldn’t quite enjoy it as much as he wanted to. ‘Come with me,’ he said, in that don’t you dare deny me kind of headmasterish way.
We went through a large door into what I supposed was his office. There were no canes or slippers lying around. They did it differently these days, the old violence. It was all psychological now – much more effective. Maybe they went on courses for it.
Hicks had vanished, glad to get shut of me. Banbury gestured at a chair and I sat down. He then got on the blower to someone called Ollie, and asked to see the registers for the year in question.
‘Tea?’ he asked me.
‘Coffee, if that’s okay,’ I said, and he nodded, relaying the order through to Ollie.
We played verbal tennis with the weather and the football, and then he served me something with a bit of topspin.
‘I’m not at liberty to tell you who I’m working for,’ I said.
‘But you’re looking for one of our ex-pupils. Someone you say is already dead?’
‘No,’ I corrected him, ‘I’m looking for the person who killed them.’
‘You think the person who killed them was a pupil here?’
‘It’s an eyebrow-raiser, I admit, but no less possible because of that.’
‘Mr Sorrell, this is a good school in an improving area. I’m not sure I’m happy with your theory that we nurtured a murderer here.’
‘I’m not saying you did. I’m saying it’s a possibility. And, anyway, it would have been before your time.’
He smarted at that, and might have come back at me were it not for Ollie coming through the door with our cups, a plate of biscuits and a couple of large folders.
I sipped my piss-weak Nescafé while he fingered the buff suspension files and pinched his bottom lip again. ‘Can I see some identification?’ he said.
‘I don’t have any,’ I said. ‘I work on my own. I used to be in the police force and I can give you some people to contact if you need references, but it will take time and there’s a man on a slab in London with his tripes hanging out of him, thanks to this bastard. Another murder occurring isn’t that far-fetched and this is my only lead. If it works out, you’ll be fêted. If somebody else dies because you were too busy playing red-tape fannies, then my mate Mike Brinksman at the Echo will be up your nose faster than a Vicks inhaler.’
‘There’s no need–’
‘There’s every need, Banbury. Now, come on, get shuffling.’
He went through the papers so slowly that I dragged my chair over to him and started giving him a hand. I asked him if there were any teachers still around from five years ago, someone who might shed some light on the girls who had gone missing, but he was shaking his head even before I got to the end of my sentence.
‘It’s not the most prestigious of schools, I have to admit,’ he said. ‘There’s rather a rapid turnover of staff here.’
He gradually got chatty again, giving me information about registers and photographs that I wasn’t asking for, but I was glad that he was cooperating – if only because he thought it might mean his becoming a local hero.
A knock at the door. A kid with hair like a twelve-inch record that had melted over his head entered the room. His glasses had little bits of Band-Aid on the hinges. He looked a feisty little twat.
‘What is it, Jeremy?’
‘Miss Sharples sent me, sir. I put a drawing pin on Tim Raines’ chair.’
‘Did he sit on it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Wait outside,’ said Banbury, ladling on the menace. I was starting to enjoy my day at school. But that didn’t last long.
I was still ploughing through the custard creams when he passed me a class photograph that I had seen before, many years ago. I knew it was the same picture, for a number of reasons. There was a kid on the end of the middle row, pulling a face, his lips drawn back from his teeth and his eyelids screwed up. Another had stuck his tongue out. At the front, in the centre, sat Miss Blythe – Gemma Blythe. I knew Gemma Blythe. I knew her very well.
‘Why are you showing me this picture?’
‘The girls,’ he said. He pointed at two faces, then showed me the corresponding names on the back of the photograph. ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding.’ My head was swimming. I hadn’t realised this was Gemma’s school. And I hadn’t realised that the two dead girls had been in her class. But on the back of this photo, the names were there: Kara Geenan, Georgina Millen. They were some years away from their deaths, and looked about as happy as two kids unaware of that fact could be.
‘Unlucky year,’ he admitted. ‘I wasn’t aware.’
‘Did you know Gemma? Or was she before your time, too?’
His eyes widened. ‘You knew Gemma?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We were an item for a while.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and the hairs at the back of my neck started to prickle.
I said, ‘It wasn’t that bad a relationship.’
He half-laughed again, as before, searching my face as if for permission to do so. He started shaking his head slightly, like a foreigner who isn’t quite following the thread of a conversation. He cleared his throat and stared at his empty teacup. ‘Tell me you know.’
‘Know what?’ I said.
‘Shit,’ he said, and carried on talking, but I didn’t listen for a while because I was still shocked at hearing a headmaster come out with a word like that. I finally zoned back to hear: ‘… why she committed suicide. She had a baby to support. Oh, God, it wasn’t…’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t mine.’
The baby was partly the reason I’d called it a day on our relationship. I was too immature to take on a woman and her child. I thought that leaving her would make it easier in the long run. It was certainly easier for me. There was no way I could possibly have known that she’d crack, as she hadn’t come across as one of life’s capitulators. Turned out that she killed herself, a couple of years later.
I felt exhausted all of a sudden, fed up with the musty old documents and depressed about my pending drive back to Liverpool. I wanted to be in London, teasing the cat and sitting with Melanie on her
big sofa, stroking her ankles. But then part of me railed against that, throwing up images of Gemma, impossible images of her dangling from a flex in a cold room while her kid cried over a congealed plate of food in front of a TV that wasn’t working. Nobody had told me about her death – but then nobody knew me. We’d had what, six months together? Hardly enough for someone to feel combined with another, but obviously enough for her. I remember her pleading with me to think about it, to change my mind, but all I could think of was the terror of responsibility.
‘I’ve seen enough, I think.’
Banbury stood up and walked to the door. ‘I hope you found what you needed.’
‘More than enough,’ I said, and looked away. ‘Sorry for coming on like an arsehole, earlier,’ I added. ‘I’m desperate to get hold of this bastard.’
‘Yes, well…’ Banbury said.
‘The photograph,’ I said. ‘Can I have it?’
Jeremy was now trying to pick a hole in the grouting between the wall tiles. Banbury growled at him to get into his office. As he did so, Jeremy turned to me and mimed a wank. Outside, the bell had gone for the afternoon’s classes to begin, so the playground was empty. I walked through the swirling crisp packets, the bubblegum and the spittle to the main gates. Someone had written the words Your a fuccking bellend on the car windscreen, in indelible pen. I didn’t disagree.
13
I sat in the visitors’ car park at Summerhead Hospital, listening to the tick of the Merc’s cooling engine, and studying that photograph for maybe ten minutes while everything outside its white border shrank away, turned dim, diminished. Including myself.
I stared so intently at her face that I thought I may have somehow affected the pearl surface of the paper, bruised it, worn it away slightly. Aside from the occasional memory – the bubble unlocking itself from the muddy depths of my mind and rising, unbidden, to the surface – I had not seen that face for almost twenty years. But, as the real world impinged again in the nearby sound of tyres on gravel, I saw that the photograph was still fine but for a few creases and a minute tear in one corner. It was me who was damaged. I had aged a little more, while she remained young and beautiful, and always would.
I put the photograph in the glove compartment and opened the car door. The vehicle that had just pulled up was a handsome, olive-coloured Stag. A middle-aged guy with silver power streaks in his hair got out, with a tan that made George Hamilton IV look peaky. His trophy wife followed him, quite a bit younger. Maybe she wasn’t his trophy wife, perhaps she was his trophy bit-on-the-side instead. Maybe they were going to visit his trophy wife in hospital. She was holding flowers and a smartly-wrapped box that might have contained chocolates. We all nodded at each other with flatline mouths, the kind of greeting that only ever happens in hospital car parks. I watched them leave the gravel and follow a white flagstone path up to the entrance to the psychiatric wing. Behind me, a great swathe of green stretched out to the edge of a small wood. A cricket pitch had been marked out on the grass, its wicket protected by lengths of carpet and a rope marching around its perimeter. The pavilion on the far side was boarded up for the winter: it looked pale and listless, as if it was made from the same stuff as the sky. To my left, the land fell gently away to a level, grassy area dotted with weeping willows. To the right of that, and behind the main hospital building, a steep hill carried a road up towards a lodge house and the hospital’s catering facilities: you could smell bleach and cabbage water drifting down. To my right, the road that I had followed through the hospital grounds ambled away through pleasant overhanging trees and squares of light green, that looked like the dry tablets in a box of watercolour paints. Birds tossed chirrups to each other through the soft Cheshire air. A fresh wind rustled the few leaves that were left on the trees, then rolled across the meadows beyond the hospital grounds, creating hypnotic currents through the tall grass.
All in all, a splendid place to be if you were seriously fucked in the head.
I followed the same path the trophy couple had taken, and pushed through a couple of heavy glass-and-brass doors into a faux-marble interior that was dark and cold and smelled antiseptic. That description went for the receptionist too: a starchy hen in a tweed suit and one of those white blowsy blouses with about an acre of soft collar that looks like a meringue gone wrong.
I slipped on a pair of reading glasses that cost a couple of quid from Boots, and went over to her, mussing up my hair and trying to look agitated. The receptionist was signing some stubby book of chits for a guy in royal-blue overalls, who was chewing gum and absently rolling the end of a pencil in his earhole. He was telling her about his day at the races, and she was either ignoring him with the effortless panache of the professionally aloof or she was stone deaf.
‘…came in at 10-1, can you believe that? I put a tenner on it, just to show off to her really, like you do, but I didn’t in a million years think it would romp home like that. I only picked it because its name was like hers, only a bit different: Tarte aux Pommes. Her name’s Pam, you see?’
I waited impatiently for him to shut up and for her to finish signing the receipts. I rubbed my hair some more, and shuffled my feet and whispered to myself: Shit, shit, oh, bother and blast.
Eventually she deigned to look up and ask me how she could help. I was knocked off balance slightly, because now I could see that she was really rather young, and not unattractive. I instantly ceased with the scatty-old-gent disguise and leaned against the counter.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m in a bit of a pickle.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it. What can I do?’
Christ, she was what? Twenty-two, twenty-three, going on fifty. What’s with the tweed? I wanted to scream at her, but maybe such an ascetic get-up had been forced upon her by her superiors. Maybe, back home, she showered off this dour exterior, poured herself into skin-tight leather and burned bras all night.
‘I had a friend here. He… left, unexpectedly, shall we say?’ I raised my eyebrows and looked around me, leaned in a little closer. I was pleased to see her mirroring my actions. A fragrance came off her, something sultry, almost feral. She was no member of the knitting circle, this one. She didn’t even know how to eat a Victoria sponge, let alone make one. I felt I should wink at her, just to let her know that I knew. ‘Name of Cullen. Gary Cullen.’
‘Ah,’ she said, and sat back in her chair. ‘We’ve been told not to talk about Mr Cullen until a full investigation has taken place.’
‘Yes, but I’ve driven all the way up here from London. He had a mistress and, well, she’s pregnant and only a few weeks away from giving birth. She’s not well.’ I was thinking wildly now, trying to come up with something that would get her to lean forward and create that little pocket of intimacy again. But I was losing her: the tweed was creeping across that gap that contained her heart. She actually fastened one of the buttons. ‘I just need to know if he had any visitors before he took off?’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but we’ve been given express orders not to talk to anyone about this.’
‘Not even a chap like me who would like to whisk you off for dinner later…’ I smiled, lifted the glasses, had a long look at the name tag pinned to her left breast, ‘…Sonya?’
I might as well have shown her a dead rat in a shoebox. I thought, How come Mickey Rourke managed to land none of this crap in Angel Heart?
The shutters went down in her eyes. I was dismissed.
A couple of overweight security bods in matching black serge stepped out from behind an arch that would have led me deeper into the hospital. I pretended not to notice them, nodded my thanks to the receptionist and went back to the car park. I waited for the guards in their itchy suits to step outside, and then I ostentatiously revved the engine and steered the car on to the road that led to the exit. In the rear-view mirror, I saw one of them speaking into a walkie-talkie. By the time I got down to the exit, three more puddings in half-mast trousers were waiting for me. One stood in the road, preventing my pr
ogress; another one approached me revolving his finger. The other stood there with nothing to do, fighting the urge, no doubt, to rescue the yards of serge that his arse was slowly eating.
I did as No. 2 was requesting, and wound down the window. He sank his head into view. He was wearing the kind of buzzcut and clipped moustache that you find on hard bastards in edge-of-town pubs. I bet he wore Fred Perry shirts and owned a Staffordshire bull terrier. I bet his best mates were only ever referred to in abbreviated form. I bet he saw them only on Friday nights, because Saturday nights was quality time with his girlfriend.
‘Afternoon,’ I said. ‘Problem?’
He wouldn’t fix his eyes on mine, which I didn’t like one bit. In my experience, that’s shorthand for I’m going to hurt you very badly. He was polite, too, which only tweaked my watch-it monitor up an extra few notches. I kept my foot hovering over the accelerator, and left the handbrake off.
‘Could be,’ he said. ‘Would you mind switching the engine off, sir?’
He invested the word sir with the tenderness with which Harvey Keitel says cunt.
‘I’d rather not.’
He was nodding, as if to say to himself, We’ve got a clever swine here. ‘I hear you’ve been making enquiries about Gary Cullen,’ he said. ‘Could I ask why?’
‘You certainly could,’ I said.
Time passed. His astringent aftershave muscled its way through the off-side window and stuck its thumbs in my eyes. His mates were strolling after him, looking this way and that, affecting nonchalance while their knuckles turned white.
No. 2 stepped back slightly and played charades some more: Get out of the car.
I smiled at him, quizzically.
‘Could you get out of the car?’ No please, no sir. Three bags full of edge and irritation. He was eager for violence now. He was bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet. I’ve seen that before, too. Right before the blood starts flying.
‘I could, yes.’
Instead, I floored it and traversed the fifty metres or so to the exit with No. 3 gurning against my windscreen. He slid off as I turned the Merc on to the main road, but his greasy expression of astonishment remained until I parked up in a lay-by, half a mile further along the road, and wiped it off with my handkerchief. I changed out of my Merrells into a pair of waterproof Caterpillar boots that I keep in the back of the car, and slid down the embankment to a barbed-wire fence. Once I’d picked my way gingerly through that, I found myself in a field populated by a piebald horse watching me in the good-natured way that horses do. I took my bearings and angled through the field. Ten minutes later I saw another fence, this one wooden, painted white. Beyond that I saw the tip of the pavilion. By the time I’d climbed over the fence, I could see the edge of the main hospital building.
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