The Art Teacher

by Paul Read

  He walked from the classroom, leaving his startled visitor to experience alone the timeless joy that is teaching, to play the underpaid security guard in the eternal battle between the Id and Superego. He swore his way through the Art office door and picked up the telephone.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ he demanded from reception. ‘Some journalist’s swanned into my classroom. Which cretin let him up?’

  ‘We didn’t send anyone,’ a defensive voice replied, with more contrition than sincerity.

  ‘Look, just send PC Thomas up to get rid of him.’ The journo had probably got in via the fire doors behind the kitchen, as the canteen staff routinely did. That was how Patrick smuggled the gun in on Thursday morning, after all.

  Harriet whispered his name and he swung to face her. He hadn’t even noticed her sitting there.

  ‘You look terrible,’ she said. ‘You should take some time off.’

  This, from Harriet. Things were bad.

  Patrick returned to his classroom to find Jack the Hack looking uneasy in the doorway. Aidan Humphries and Joe Coe were standing, dark grey streaks across their faces and clothes, obviously savouring the aftermath of a mini clay fight. Patrick hoped the reporter wasn’t wearing the kind of buttonhole video camera he’d seen on exposé documentaries.

  The journalist advised, ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave the room, mate,’ nodding his head towards the miscreants.

  ‘Piss off,’ Patrick snarled, barging him into the corridor and sending shorthand notation scattering across the floor.

  Amid the delighted whoops of Patrick’s class, the journalist aimed a few choice words at Mr Owen.

  ‘Bang him up, sir!’ someone shouted.

  It was then that Patrick became aware of a black shape moving in an ungainly but rapid manner in their direction down the corridor.

  ‘There you are,’ Patrick said to PC Thomas. ‘I need this guy…’

  He didn’t get any further. The resident policeman, flak-vested and wielding his truncheon, slid on a sheet from the journalist’s folder and crashed legs-first with terrific force into the intruder, scissoring him to the ground. He then incapacitated him by use of a clumsy half-Nelson and cuffed a pair of flailing arms behind his back while the victim, through a profuse nosebleed, angrily conceived new combinations of Anglo-Saxon obscenities which Patrick’s class would be quoting long into their remaining schooldays.

  Patrick’s classroom door opened at the end of the day and Charlotte, no doubt bored of sitting three feet from Harriet in the characterless Art office emailing silent memos back and forth, smiled with fake glee. ‘Here he is! Mr Celebrity!’ He’d made a tiny return to his glorious years of recognition, but underneath her fascination was palpable distrust: he was punching reporters and appearing in the papers. If that wasn’t milking the dead boy story, what was?

  ‘I need to use the kiln,’ she said. ‘It’s an emergency.’

  Patrick had his mobile in front of him on the desk and had been watching it for almost his entire fifth period. Still nothing from Ana. Nothing from Sarah.

  Too late, it dawned on him what Charlotte was up to. Before he could conjure a reason for stopping her she’d stormed across his room, produced her mammoth set of keys and unlocked the annex at the rear.

  He launched himself across the room and tore through the door after her. The annex was small and dusty, the large brick kiln stood in the middle, its green door still mercifully closed.

  ‘Fucking hell, I can’t get the bloody thing open,’ she complained, tugging at the handle.

  If the chamber remained in excess of seventy degrees the kiln door wouldn’t have unlocked but Patrick knew it sometimes stuck a little anyway and he made a big deal of checking the clasps on the side, trying to prise them open. The pyrometric controls verified the oven was off. ‘It’s definitely jammed,’ he said. ‘The mechanism’s broken.’

  ‘How much will it cost to get fixed?’

  ‘A small fortune probably. I’d suggest you get your kids to use air-drying clay.’

  This, it seemed, was too much for Charlotte. She wrenched at the handle with a possessed fury, screamed ‘Bullshit!’ at the summit of her lungs and succeeded in tearing the kiln wide open, hitting Patrick with the familiar burning smell that had lurked at the back of his classroom since he’d accepted the job. She stared aghast into the kiln’s innards.

  ‘What’s… this?’

  At the front, obscuring whatever smouldering traces of the murder evidence remained, was a wall of half-finished Year Seven sculpture Patrick, in a rare moment of forward-thinking, had thrown in the morning before.

  ‘Oh, that’s my Key Stage Three stuff. It’s kind of… abstract.’

  ‘Right… While you clear this out, I’ll go and get my pieces.’

  As Patrick watched her flounce out, he wondered what his head of department’s ambitions might once have been, whether she felt her dreams of being a famous watercolourist or curator slipping away with the passing of each holiday. Her response to the kiln door jamming, their profession’s latest trivial crisis, had been as absurd as expected.

  He removed, fast, his pottery from the kiln then worried his hand into a small pile of black ash at the bottom, feeling around for anything which had proved incombustible. There it was, the only piece of evidence the thirteen hundred degrees couldn’t have incinerated.

  A hexagonal, snub-nosed barrel. Chunky handle. Small loop above the rear sight. The gun’s polymer frame had bubbled in the extreme heat and reset in a stuccoed manner, stippled like the grip on the handle. It was hard to tell what had happened to the steel intestines of the pistol but he assumed the extent of its warping would have prevented the weapon from ever firing again. He stood there with the warm gun for a moment in contemplation, turning it over in his hands, weighing the heaviness of it. The clothes and trainers had been comprehensively barbequed.

  A thin voice shot behind him. ‘Here we are…’

  He turned to see her staring at the gun in his hand when the lights failed.

  Patrick swore, stabbed the gun into his pocket. He took out his phone and held it in exactly the same position as he’d been holding the gun. The haunted lights flickered back on again.

  ‘You scared the life out of me!’ he gasped, clutching with genuine panic at his flailing heart.

  She hovered at the doorway to the annex, confusion adorning her handsome features, her arms laden with an assortment of sculptures: a doughnut; a cake slice; a half-peeled banana. They weren’t bad representations, for a Year Seven, but he suspected they’d been fashioned by one of her sixth formers. He made a big deal of putting his phone back in his pocket then took her sculptures and placed them, piece by piece, above the cindered remnants of his immoral collusion.

  ‘I thought…’ she began.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing… That poor boy… What do you think happened?’

  The smell came again, as it had, on and off, for the last two days. A sweet, coppery scent mixed with defecation, burnt hair, natural gas. Raw meat. Death.

  ‘What do you mean?’ He removed the last slice of clay pizza from her hands, a giant cupcake, an oversized apple with a cartoon worm crawling from a bite.

  ‘Do you think it was inevitable? You know, that he’d end up this way?’

  ‘Not inevitable, no. He got mixed up in some dangerous business, that’s all.’

  He swung the kiln door closed, fastened it, then turned to face his head of department.

  ‘I wonder where Denis is now,’ Charlotte considered, a faraway look glazing her eyes. ‘Maybe he’s looking down on us this very moment.’

  ‘I don’t believe in an afterlife.’ What was more, Patrick thought it unlikely the boy could have developed a soul all of a sudden.

  ‘I thought you were a Christian, Patrick.’

  ‘God, no,’ he said, aware of the ironic invocation in this very denial. He pressed some digits on the kiln’s temperature gauge. ‘All that magic app
le, talking snake and missing rib nonsense. I’m not four years old.’ Patrick’s father hadn’t bothered with religion, even when under the heel of chemotherapy, had never turned to Jesus or Mohammad or Krishna. He never talked about death in those final days. He just got on with the business, the art, of dying.

  ‘I wonder if he knew who killed him.’ Charlotte tried another tack. ‘What would make someone do that? Take someone else’s life? It’s disgusting. You may not believe in heaven but I hope there’s a hell. And I’m praying Denis’ killer goes there.’

  The silence which followed this comment was broken by a student walking past, blaring hip hop through a mobile phone.

  ‘I better go,’ Charlotte muttered. ‘Thanks for that, Patrick. It’s not often we get to talk, is it? Not so deeply anyway.’

  Once she’d hurried to her classroom, and he’d mentally rewound their one-sided exchange and hunted in vain for anything that might constitute ‘deep’, he swept his arm across a table of art materials, screamed, and smashed it all sideways, sending charcoal, pencils and canvases spinning to the floor. The mess this created was nowhere near satisfying enough so he grabbed two bottles of poster paint and squeezed a few Pollockian arcs of blue and yellow atop the debris.

  His head whining, Patrick slid over to the window to watch Highfields’ kids streaming into the estate. No child seemed to be managing an even line; these were not the straight migratory patterns of wild creatures seeking warmer waters, but the random bearings of domestic pets, pampered creatures on their way to Xboxes and YouTube videos. Patrick straddled their world for a while, all-seeing, as the sun skimmed down behind the jagged skyline. Jenna’s accomplice had survived another day.

  He considered resigning, but knew it would look suspicious. His blood pressure might benefit, but there was more at stake than his reputation as a teacher, which he admittedly considered a hilarious oxymoron: he had his innocence to prove. Jenna and he shared a terrible secret, it was true, and yet he needed to keep her on a long string, let her exist in her own, separate purgatory while remaining on speaking terms, at the very least, with her mother. His line of work was a legitimate point of contact with the Moris/ Ellis household.

  A light cough signified a presence behind him and Patrick checked the reflection in the window to see, framed in his doorway against the dirty orange streaks of sunset, a shadow in a padded police vest. The kiln-chewed gun in Patrick’s pocket trebled in size, burned, and made a profound thud as he span round and its barrel struck the front table.

  ‘Hello… Mary, was it?’ he asked, breezily. ‘Caught the bugger yet?’

  ‘What’s this on your door?’ the beauty-spotted Murder Investigation Officer asked.

  Patrick walked over to take a look.

  ‘PEEDO’ was sprayed a metre high in blood red letters.

  ‘But… that’s impossible…’

  He stared in disbelief at the vandalism. Denis was dead. He was dead. Who was doing this? The CCTV camera in the corridor had brewer’s droop.

  Officer Haynes peered into the classroom, then wandered in to inspect the strewn drawing materials, the sweeps of paint on the floor.

  ‘Someone really hates you.’ She poked at the chaos with a toecap. ‘I’ll come straight to the point, Mr Owen. We’re both busy professionals. I was wondering why you never mentioned the gun or cannabis Jenna had been storing under her bed.’

  ‘The gun… and…?’ It took all of Patrick’s strength to remain upright.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I guess… I’ve been protecting them.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sarah. And Jenna. I thought it implicated her and… You know.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t, Mr Owen.’

  He croaked the words. ‘Sarah and I… We didn’t know whether to tell you or not. She was keen to safeguard her daughter and I was keen to… safeguard Sarah, I suppose.’

  There was a hint of a smile on the officer’s face. Suddenly, Patrick missed DCI Meadows. ‘Well that’s very noble of you. Fortunately, Sarah came to her senses before you did. The child’s at the station now, incidentally, clarifying any little matters her “safeguarding” adults were too nervous to disclose. Anything else I’m going to discover through another source that you might as well just come straight out and tell me about? Think carefully now.’

  THREE

  Patrick closed one eye, sighted his target. He took a deep breath and, keeping his guiding left hand still, applied the merest touch with his right.

  His cue poked the white ball a quarter of the table’s length, but pushed the targeted red over its intended pocket. Christophe laughed unconvincingly and bent for the same red, sank it. He then potted a nifty pink with side before powering home a straight red along the cushion. ‘Can’t normally get those,’ he admitted.

  Friday night had arrived, and with it mediocre snooker and tolerable ale. Sliding his colleague’s points along the scoreboard, Patrick wondered how much time he had left.

  It was the not knowing that ate at him. There was no way he could escape his limbo by contacting Jenna and asking whether she’d stuck to their ‘deny everything’ agreement. His paranoia worried whether it was wise to even contact Sarah, in case her phone had been tapped or his every move was being monitored.

  ‘Alright?’ Christophe asked.

  ‘Sorry. I was miles away.’

  ‘Like your shots.’ He tapped the table with his cue. ‘Your turn.’ There were six balls fewer.

  With little to go for, Patrick attempted a safety off a red on the bottom cushion. He messed it up but was lucky with the result, spinning the cue ball up behind the spotted green.

  ‘Jammy bastard.’

  ‘I’m not at my best today. Tired, I guess.’

  ‘Seen your bit-on-the-side recently?’ Perhaps Christophe considered himself astute enough to blame a man’s poor sporting prowess on a woman, or perhaps this was finally the start of an inquisition which would unveil the real reasons for his ‘high priority’ summons.

  ‘Yesterday, briefly.’ He could already feel the first, high-risk flushes of drunkenness.

  Christophe lined up his escape from the snooker. ‘I reckon they’re close to catching the killer.’

  ‘Really?’ Patrick failed to keep his voice stable. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I spoke to Meadows earlier at the school. He wouldn’t say what he looked like but apparently a figure was caught on CCTV the night Denis was killed. Did you see him?’

  ‘I didn’t see anything,’ he replied in an instant. Then, realising his mistake, added, ‘I mean, Mary from the Murder team popped by, but nothing about CCTV was mentioned.’

  ‘The police are calling for any witnesses who might’ve seen someone in the estate at the time of the murder. The net’s closing on him, that’s for sure.’

  Patrick didn’t like the searching look Christophe threw him.

  ‘Have they announced what this person looks like?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Maybe they’re waiting to see if descriptions match up.’

  ‘Mary Murder didn’t tell me any of this.’ Patrick kept his expression cool, stared at the mess of balls on the table. ‘If they’re not releasing a description, how can they expect identification?’

  ‘I’m sure there’s a reason. But they need to find him soon. What if Denis was just his first victim? What if he’s one of those serial killers?’

  ‘What makes you think it’s a he?’

  ‘Are you joking? Ninety-three point three percent of murders are committed by men.’

  ‘You scare me.’ Patrick struck the white too hard. The red went down but he messed up position on the blue and, though he potted it, missed the next red. With six points, he’d made his highest break of the evening.

  ‘The popular bet’s Sean Keane,’ Christophe continued. ‘You know he hasn’t been seen since his flat was set alight?’

  ‘You’re putting two and two together and coming up with cinque, Chris.’

  �
��Perhaps but, be honest, there’s a connection, isn’t there? I mean, there just is.’

  Patrick watched him clear up the balk colours, until a lazy foul on the brown, but the point of no return had long been reached and Patrick was happy to concede.

  ‘Shall I get the drinks in?’ the Frenchman asked.

  ‘Loser’s privilege, surely.’ Patrick headed to the bar and let his colleague rack up the balls for the next frame. On a whim, he ordered a double whisky and smashed it back without Christophe noticing. It was essential he kept his mouth shut and his head clear, but he needed to unknot himself; what Jenna said, or was saying, at the police station was out of his control. He couldn’t stop looking at his shattered watch.

  Christophe was refining his aim at the table when Patrick returned. ‘Those guys are looking over,’ the French teacher said, nodding to the far end of the snooker hall. Patrick’s paranoia went into overdrive and he span round to face the cops. But they weren’t cops. Just two kids, barely older than school age. Patrick was getting recognised in public again.

  He bent forwards to take the break-off shot, fired the cue ball into the triangle of packed reds, sending them fizzing out across the table. One plopped in.

  ‘Nice pot.’

  ‘Yeah, watch your back.’ Over-confident, Patrick missed an easy black off its spot. ‘This game’s impossible. I’m losing to a guy with arthritis.’

  ‘I don’t need to do much with my hands. They stay in more-or-less the same position.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Chris.’ The drink was already talking. ‘Seriously. It must be painful.’

  ‘They’re not causing me too much of a problem at the moment,’ was said knowingly enough to set off incendiary devices in Patrick’s mind. If Christophe was getting his grass from Sean Keane, or via sources connected to him, the flat fire meant his supply would soon be drying up, if it hadn’t already.