by Jane Casey
The assembly hall was almost full. I had managed to find a chair near the front, by the wall, facing in so I could scan the entire room. The girls, who had never been known to be completely quiet in their lives, were just as silent as the teachers had been earlier. Not a flicker interrupted the rapt attention they were paying to the stage where Elaine was speaking, again flanked by the chief inspector and the press officer. In the intervening hour or so, Elaine had ironed out a few of the kinks in her presentation. She ripped through her speech without a twitch.
The assembly hall was much emptier than it should have been; I guessed, looking along the rows of girls, that around half had been kept home from school or had gone home already. That tallied with what I’d found in my own greatly diminished class on taking the roll. Word had got around already that it was an Edgeworth girl who had died. Now they just wanted to hear the details.
‘This will be a difficult time for all of us,’ Elaine intoned, ‘but I expect you to behave with dignity and decorum. Please respect the Shepherds’ privacy. If you should happen to be approached by the media, don’t comment on Jenny, the school or anything to do with the investigation. I do not want to see an Edgeworth student speaking to any journalists. Anyone who does will be suspended. Or worse.’
Some of the older girls looked more devastated by the media ban than the news about Jenny. Their heartfelt sobbing had not so much as smudged their impeccably applied make-up, I noted.
‘The school secretary is contacting your parents as I speak,’ Elaine continued. ‘We are asking them to collect you or make other arrangements for you to be looked after for the next few hours. The school will be closed for the rest of the week.’
DCI Vickers looked a bit shocked at the fizz of excitement that spread through the assembly hall. I wasn’t. The girls, like all teenagers, were self-centred and unthinkingly brutal on occasion. They may have been genuinely upset about Jenny, but they were also working the angles for themselves. An unexpected week off, for whatever reason, was not to be sniffed at.
Elaine held up her hands and silence fell again. ‘This is Detective Chief Inspector Vickers. He is leading the investigation into this very sad death and he has a couple of things he would like to say to you.’ Another ripple ran through the hall. I wondered if Vickers had ever been the focus of so much overexcited female attention before. His ears, I was amused to see, were delicately shading to dark pink before my eyes. He stepped forward and leaned in to the microphone. Looking rumpled, pale, slightly shabby, his edge was well disguised.
‘Thank you, Ms Pennington.’ He had leaned too close to the microphone and the ‘p’ of Pennington popped from the overamplification. ‘I’d like to appeal to any of you who have any information regarding Jenny Shepherd to come forward and speak to me or one of my team.’ He nodded to the back of the hall. Like everyone else, I looked around and I jumped when I noticed Andrew Blake leaning against the door frame, two uniformed police officers beside him. Valerie was presumably tied up with the Shepherds.
‘Alternatively, you can speak to one of your teachers if you find that easier,’ Vickers said. Every head in the hall turned back to face him, as synchronised as the crowd at a tennis match. ‘They’ll be able to help. Don’t think that what you know isn’t worth telling us. We’ll decide if it’s useful or not. What we’re looking for is information about Jenny – in particular her friends in and outside school, and anything strange that you might have heard from her or about her, anything out of the ordinary. Was there anything worrying her? Was she in any kind of trouble? Was she involved in any disagreements with other students or anyone else? Was there anything going on that she was keeping a secret from grown-ups? If anything, anything at all occurs to you, please don’t keep it to yourself. But I would say one thing: try not to gossip among yourselves before you talk to us. It’s all too easy to talk something up until you’re not sure you can distinguish between what you know and what you’ve heard.’ He looked around the room again. ‘I know there will be a great temptation to speak to the media about this. They are very good at getting information out of people – better than the police, sometimes. But you can’t trust them, and you really shouldn’t talk to them, as your headmistress says. If you have something to say, talk to us.’
The girls nodded, hypnotised. For a man who was about a thousand points down on the glamour scale from Inspector Morse, Vickers had done pretty well.
What he hadn’t done, of course, was answer the questions they had really wanted to ask. So for the rest of the day, in between supervising study groups and developing emergency revision plans for the exam students, I tried to deal with the speculation that was raging through the school.
‘Miss, did she have her head cut off? Someone said her head was, like, gone?’
‘I heard that she was stabbed hundreds and hundreds of times, yeah? And all her guts were hanging out, and you could see her bones and everything.’
‘Miss, was she tortured? I heard she was all burned and cut.’
‘Was she raped, Miss?’
‘How did she die, Miss?’
‘Who killed her, Miss?’
I was as repressive as I knew how to be. ‘Get on with your work, girls. You’ve got plenty to do. The police will find out who did it.’
I actually felt sorry for them. Despite their bravado, the girls were scared. As an introduction to mortality, it was a tough one. What teenager doesn’t think she’ll live for ever? To have one of their own snuffed out so violently was a shock, and they needed to talk about it. I got it. But it made for a tiring sort of day.
I was still at the school at half past five, as Elaine had predicted. The last of the girls in my care had just been collected by her father, a fat-necked man in an expensive suit, driving a Jaguar. He had taken the opportunity to tell me what a waste of his time it had been to make him collect his daughter, and that as usual the school had completely overreacted. I wondered what exactly was usual about the murder of one of his daughter’s contemporaries, but I managed not to say anything as the girl climbed into the car, mute and round-eyed with misery. I could practically hear her begging me not to make things worse by arguing with him, so I smiled serenely.
‘We’re just doing our best to make sure the girls are safe. That’s the most important thing, I’m sure you agree.’
‘It’s a bit late now to worry about keeping the girls safe. Horse and stable-door stuff, this. And you get yourselves a nice little holiday into the bargain by closing the school for the rest of the week. No consideration for the parents, who have to sort out childcare for the next four days.’ His face, which was already flushed, went a shade darker. ‘You can tell your headmistress that I am deducting a week from this term’s fees. That should make her reconsider her priorities.’
‘I’ll pass that on,’ I said, then stepped back smartly as he revved the engine and sped away, tyres spitting gravel. It hadn’t been worth pointing out to him that the Shepherds would give everything they had to be in his position, but I had thought it.
As I turned to go back into the school, someone called my name and I looked around. Oh no. Geoff Turnbull was jogging across the car park, heading straight for me. Running away would have been undignified. Besides, he was quick on his feet. I’d have to tough it out.
‘I haven’t seen you all day.’ He stopped altogether too close to where I was standing and ran a hand down my arm caringly. ‘This is horrendous, isn’t it? How are you coping?’
To my utter horror, the question made my eyes fill with tears. It was totally involuntary, the product of exhaustion and stress. ‘I’m OK.’
‘Hey,’ he said, shaking my arm gently. ‘You don’t have to pretend with me, you know. Let it out.’
I didn’t want to let it out, especially not in front of him. Geoff was the staffroom flirt and he’d been pursuing me since I started working at Edgeworth. The only reason he was still interested was because I wasn’t. As I tried to think of a nice way of getting rid of him, I f
ound myself being pulled into his arms for what was supposed to be a reassuring hug. Geoff manoeuvred himself so that his entire body was in contact with mine, pressing himself against me. My skin crawled. I patted his back feebly, hoping he would let go, while mentally debating the relative merits of the swift-knee-to-the-groin approach versus taking one of his grabby hands and bending the fingers back. Too polite to do either, I gazed dully over his shoulder – straight into the eyes of Andrew Blake, who was crossing the car park himself, heading for the school hall.
‘Geoff,’ I said, beginning to wriggle. ‘Geoff, get off me. That’s enough.’
He loosened his hold on me so he could look down at my face. He was still looking intensely sincere, an expression I felt he had been practising in the mirror. ‘Poor little Jenny. It’s no wonder you’re upset about her. Did you hear, they’re saying it was one of us who found her? I wonder who that could have been. Who goes jogging around here?’
He knew very well that I ran to keep fit; he’d offered to run with me more than once. I shrugged, managing not to react, and took a step back to put a few important inches of air between us. ‘It’s really dreadful. But seriously, I’m coping. I just had a moment of being upset.’
‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of.’ He reached down and took my hand. ‘It’s just a sign of what a caring person you are.’
Oh, please.
‘Maybe we should sit down and talk about this over a drink. You deserve it. You’ve done your duty. Let’s get out of here.’
I thought fast as I worked my hand free. ‘Sorry, Geoff. I’m going to the press conference. I just want to keep in touch with the investigation. You know.’
Without waiting for a reply, I started towards the school, heading for the door Blake had gone through. The press conference should have started already, I thought, checking my watch. I hadn’t been planning to go, but anything was better than being interrogated by Geoff in some tacky bar, sipping a warm Coke and watching his every move.
I slipped through the door at the back of the school hall, closing it behind me. The room was absolutely packed – journalists at the front, photographers along the aisles and cameramen at the back of the room. Some of the other teachers were there, standing to one side. I found myself a spot beside Stephen Smith, who nodded at me wordlessly. He looked exhausted and upset. Once again, I felt the slow burn of rage at whoever had done this.
At the front of the room, DCI Vickers was sitting at the centre of a long table. Jenny’s parents were to one side of him and I spotted Valerie Wade not too far away, standing beside Blake. On the other side of Vickers was the press officer who was running the press conference, and beside her was Elaine. I guessed that she had insisted on representing the school, in case there were any questions that might reflect badly on us. She looked terribly nervous. So, it had to be said, did Vickers, who was shuffling his papers and patting his pockets while the press officer introduced him.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to announce the preliminary results of the autopsy, which we’ve had performed today, and then pass you over to the Shepherds, who would like to make an appeal for information. We’ve been informed by the pathologist that Jennifer Shepherd drowned some time yesterday.’
Drowned?
At his words, every journalist in the room stuck a hand in the air. Vickers, who had no sense of the theatrical, was looking through his papers again. My eyes were locked on the Shepherds, who clung to one another. Mrs Shepherd was weeping silently, while her husband looked like he had aged ten years over the course of the past thirty-six hours.
The press officer selected one of the waving journalists to ask the question everyone was thinking. ‘How did she drown? Is there any chance that this was an accident after all?’
Vickers shook his head. ‘No. There are suspicious circumstances to do with this death, and we are quite sure that we are not dealing with an accident. These are preliminary results from the autopsy, but the pathologist is quite definite about the cause of death.’
I flashed back to the woods, to Jenny lying fully clothed in a hollow, nowhere near a source of water. I hadn’t even seen a puddle nearby. Wherever she’d drowned, it hadn’t been where I’d found her body.
Vickers was still speaking and I stood on my tiptoes, straining to hear what he was saying. ‘We aren’t yet sure where Jenny died, or the circumstances, and for that reason her father, Michael Shepherd, has agreed to make an appeal for information, in case anyone out there can tell us where Jenny was between Saturday evening around six and Sunday night.’
‘Sunday night,’ another of the journalists repeated. ‘So that was when she died, you believe?’
Vickers shook his head slowly. ‘We’re not sure of that at this stage. We’re waiting for further information from the pathologist, but that’s the margin of time we’re interested in at present.
‘We want to know where Jenny was during that time, and who she might have been with. We want to know if anyone saw her. We want to know if anyone is acting suspiciously, or has been behaving in a strange manner since the weekend. We want any information that might lead us to her murderer, no matter how insignificant it might seem.’
Just as Vickers said the word ‘murderer’, Diane Shepherd gave a sob. Instantly camera flashes exploded around the room. Her husband glanced at her, then spread a piece of paper in front of him, flattening it out with his hands. Even from the back of the hall, I could see the tremor in his fingers. At a nod from the press officer, he began to speak, faltering a little, but seeming to be very much in control.
‘Our little girl, Jenny, was just twelve years old. She’s – she was a beautiful little girl, always smiling, always laughing. She’s been taken from us too soon. This is our worst nightmare, as it would be for any parent. Please, if you have any information about this crime, anything at all, please tell the police. Nothing will bring her back, but at least we can try to get justice for her. Thank you.’
He swallowed convulsively as he finished, then turned to wrap his arms around his wife, who was now crying hysterically. Valerie ran forward and whispered in Michael Shepherd’s ear. He nodded and got to his feet, supporting his wife. The pair followed Valerie to the side door that led out of the hall. As the door closed behind them, a confused babble of questions rose from the assembled reporters.
‘Is this the work of a paedophile?’ one shouted above the others and Vickers leaned back in his chair, gathering his strength before replying.
‘We don’t yet know …’ I heard as I opened the door at the back of the hall and slipped out. I couldn’t stand to hear any more speculation. The journalists were just doing what they had to do, but the atmosphere in the room made me feel uncomfortable. I was heartsick for the Shepherds and tired to my very bones. The rest of the press conference would be too much to bear.
Lost in thought, I didn’t realise that the Shepherds were walking towards me, guided by Valerie, until they had almost passed by. I was standing beside the main door to the car park, where their car was waiting.
‘Mr Shepherd,’ I said impulsively, ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’
He turned and looked at me, his eyes coal-black with hostility, and I shrank back against the wall. Valerie ushered him on with a pert little nod in my direction and I watched them go, open-mouthed. Then I realised – of course. He knew exactly who had discovered the body; he would have been told. I was the one who had taken away the desperate hope that she might be found alive and well. I could understand why he might be upset with me, even though it was far from fair.
I swallowed, fighting for composure. I could cope, I told myself, with a bit of misdirected loathing, even though it stung.
‘Are you OK?’
I looked up to see Andrew Blake leaning over me, concern on his face.
‘I’m all right. I just don’t understand why those poor people couldn’t be allowed some privacy. Was there really any reason to drag them out in front of the press like that?’
‘We’ve got to take advantage of the media interest at this stage, before they start criticising us for not finding the killer. The parents make good TV. We’ll be at the top of all the news bulletins.’
‘Practical as ever,’ I observed.
‘So what? It’s not like we can get on with doing anything useful at the moment. My boss is stuck in there, trying to cope with that pack of sharks. Every time I try to get out and do some actual policing, I get hassled by them. Not to mention the fact that they’re conducting their own investigation. They’re doing more interviews than we are. I’ve heard back from the guys who are doing door-to-door – the tabloids have got there first. They’re stepping all over this, getting in the way, and they’ll be the first to tell us that we’ve cocked it up when they’re the ones who are causing the problems.’ His voice had risen. He ran his hands through his hair and paced back and forth a couple of times before turning to face me again. ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t shout at you. It’s not your fault.’
‘I’m used to it,’ I said lightly. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He looked quizzically at me, but I shook my head. I wasn’t going to elaborate.
‘It just frustrates me. The first few days of the investigation are the most important, and what are we titting about with? Play-acting for the media instead of actual investigating. And if we wanted to get press attention for something they could actually help with, we could whistle for it.’ He sighed. ‘But we still need to do it, just in case something comes of it. And if we didn’t give them information and access to the family, they’d be ten times worse.’
‘You don’t think the Shepherds’ appeal is going to be useful?’