Child's Play

by Alison Taylor

  ‘But why?’ he persisted.

  ‘I hit Therese.’

  ‘You hit Therese?’

  ‘Nicholls arrived in the middle of it. He sacked me on the spot.’ Her eyes glistened. ‘Then he lay in wait for Dr Scott.’ A tremor shook her and her breath came in short, sharp gasps. ‘Oh, but he’s a hard man! A cruel man! I’d heard one of the little ones in the infirmary crying not minutes before, but he wouldn’t let me go to her.’

  He waited for her to regain a little composure. ‘What made you hit Therese?’

  ‘She told Dr Scott she’d thrown nail varnish on Charlotte’s clothes. She was going to lock Nancy in the cellar, too. Nancy’s terrified of spiders and the cellar’s crawling with them.’ She stopped speaking, but her lips continued working. Raising bloodshot eyes, she found more words. ‘After Dr Scott had gone off in the ambulance with Imogen, I went looking for Therese. I shouldn’t have done. I lost control of myself.’ She breathed in deeply, and her lips sucked on the toothless gums. ‘And d’you know what? It was all for nothing! Therese hadn’t done anything to Charlotte’s clothes. She only said she had, to frighten Dr Scott, because she blamed Nancy and Charlotte for Imogen lashing out.’ She shuddered. ‘Thank God she didn’t know then about the overdose — she’d have killed both of them. She’s perfectly capable of it, I’m sure, and now I’ve had time to think, I’m just surprised it didn’t happen sooner. There’s been so much—’ she stopped in mid-flow, surreptitiously glancing at him. ‘Friction,’ she said rather lamely. ‘Friction and bad blood.’ Shaking her head despondently, she added, ‘Far too much of it. I’ve warned Dr Scott over and again, but she just wouldn’t listen.’ Her body shook with another violent tremor. ‘And now look where it’s got her! “Considering her future” indeed! She’s had the sack, too. Well,’ she added, her malice like a live thing, ‘it serves her right! So much for all her fancy ideas, eh? Why wouldn’t she be told?’ Wringing her huge red hands, she stared at him. ‘Do you know? Do you understand? For as sure as God’s in his heaven, I never did.’

  Not understanding her questions, he had no answers, and while her mouth continued working and her face flushed with emotion, he remained still and silent.

  ‘She thought she could control people.’

  ‘Did she?’ he responded.

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded wildly. ‘She thought she could mess about with people’s feelings and get away with it. Well, you can’t. You can’t force people to feel what you want them to, but Freya Scott thought she could. She said people never know what they really want, and it was up to her to show them. She was forever spouting suchlike psychological claptrap, but I’m not sure even she knew what she was talking about half the time. I know no one else did.’

  ‘A little knowledge is often more dangerous than none at all.’

  ‘That’s what I kept trying to tell her.’ Frowning, Matron looked hard at him and, even in the throes of her misery, he discovered her native wit had not deserted her. ‘She tried it on with you, didn’t she? She tried something, anyway,’ she added, when his face betrayed him. ‘That’s why you’re still floundering over Sukie’s death. You were too taken up being bamboozled by Freya Scott.’

  He dropped his gaze and let the silence grow, afraid to meet her eyes in case he caught the knowing gleam in hers.

  ‘It’s not fair!’

  Her outburst broke his tension. ‘Shouldn’t you contact your union?’ he asked.

  ‘I can’t,’ she replied dully. ‘It’s Saturday.’ Gums grating on each other, she leaned forward. ‘Nicholls said it was my fault Imogen overdosed. Do you believe that, too?’

  This was not the time to remind her that she had laid the blame at his own feet only a few hours earlier. ‘If Imogen’s telling the truth about the accident, she must have been under intolerable stress. Something was bound to give, especially after Sukie died.’

  ‘And if she wasn’t telling the truth?’

  ‘She’s still clearly disturbed. I don’t see her overdose as attention seeking.’

  ‘It wasn’t! She meant to kill herself, and she would have done if I’d heeded Dr Scott. She was hell bent on making Imogen responsible for her own medication and told me repeatedly to give her all the tablets. But you see,’ she added, touching his hand, ‘I knew that was asking for trouble. She gets prescriptions for three months’ supply at a time, but I only ever gave her a week’s worth so she never had enough to do herself any real harm.’

  ‘There was always the risk of her stockpiling.’

  ‘Oh, no, there wasn’t! She was in too much pain.’

  8

  Almost shoulder to shoulder, Janet and Martha stood at the foot of the long sloping lawn bordering the Strait, with the noise of two hundred-odd girls clattering around inside the school coming to them in sporadic bursts.

  Martha found the fast-flowing water only yards away quite hypnotic. She fixed her gaze on a racing whitecap and tried to follow its progress. When she lost it she tried another, but lost that, too. They were forever elusive, she thought glumly, like hopes and dreams, and her daughter, who had fled the moment she saw Martha in the refectory corridor.

  ‘It’s a lot cooler since yesterday’s rain,’ Janet observed. ‘I’m not keen on very hot weather. It’s too tiring.’

  ‘Alice prefers cool, windy weather as well.’ Martha shuffled her feet, for the grass was still damp. ‘She even enjoys the rain.’

  ‘Your life really does revolve around her, doesn’t it?’

  ‘That’s why my marriages never worked,’ Martha said ruefully. ‘Maybe marriage and motherhood are mutually exclusive states.’ She paused, then went on, ‘Or perhaps marriage is just the means to the end, although what that end is is anyone’s guess. I thought it was about having a child, but the way my child’s behaving at the moment makes me dread to think what the outcome will be.’

  ‘Alice is in an invidious position,’ Janet pointed out. ‘Her loyalties are split between you and school.’ She smiled. ‘More pertinently, she’s at a notoriously difficult age. Teenagers don’t make much sense, even to themselves.’

  Staring across the water unseeingly, Martha said, ‘Children are yours for so little time before the process of natural separation begins, and you only realise that’s happened after the event, when it’s too late.’ She glanced at her companion. ‘Your mother would know exactly what I mean. I’m sure she’s been moved to tears, too, at times, by the sight of another woman with a small girl in tow, remembering how it was when you were little.’

  ‘She’s never said anything like that,’ Janet told her, surprised by such a personal disclosure.

  ‘She wouldn’t. Mothers learn when to shut up.’ Martha smiled then. ‘Well, some do. I’ve never been able to keep my opinions to myself. But nor can Alice. That’s why the fur flies between us so often.’

  ‘What do you argue about most?’

  ‘Her choice of friends,’ Martha replied, once again staring out over the water. ‘I can’t stand Daisy Podmore and I’m not enamoured of Grace Blackwell, for all Matron’s little wisdoms.’ Her eyes flicked back to Janet. ‘Haven’t you heard her? Whenever Grace is mentioned, she says, “Grace by name, grace by nature” and gives you that sickly smile of hers.’

  ‘I wasn’t particularly taken with Grace,’ Janet admitted. ‘She’s a bit of a prig. But I felt rather sorry for Daisy.’

  ‘Why? Because she lisps so horribly?’

  ‘No.’ Janet shook her head. ‘Because, deep down, I think she’s terribly unhappy, for all her smiles.’

  Martha stared at her thoughtfully. ‘You may be right. And perhaps that’s why Alice is so miserable and moody — she’s being infected by her. But then,’ she went on, ‘everything these girls do or feel affects the others. Your job must be an absolute nightmare, sorting out what matters from what doesn’t.’

  ‘It is.’ Janet fell quiet, mulling over how much she should disclose. Eventually she asked, ‘Have you ever worried that Alice was being bullied?’
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br />   ‘Yes, frequently. By Daisy.’ She paused. ‘I’ve watched them until I was almost cross-eyed, trying to work out what their behaviour says about the way the power falls in their relationship, but I’m none the wiser. One minute Alice is calling the shots; the next it’s Daisy.’

  ‘Where does Grace fit in?’

  Martha scuffed the wet grass. ‘Wherever Daisy will let her, I suppose.’

  On his way downstairs from Matron’s flat, McKenna saw the two women, their still figures like grey daubs on the sweep of lawn. He stood for a moment behind the front door, watching them. What were they talking about? he wondered. Anything and nothing, he decided: ideas, impressions, snatches of this and that, passed back and forth until something struck a chord or made a connection, as ever when women were together.

  Reminding himself he must tell Martha that so far there had been no feedback on the likelihood or otherwise of kidnap, he turned away.

  9

  In the mobile incident room’s cubbyhole of an office, Jack was dozing over the stack of papers on the desk. When Nona rapped on the door the sound, like gunshots in the confined space, catapulted him into wakefulness. Guiltily running his hands over his face, he blinked at her.

  ‘I know how you feel, sir,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, well,’ he muttered. ‘We’re all getting sleep bankrupt. What did you want?’

  ‘I’ve finished going through Sukie’s credit card statements.’ She dropped more paper on the pile. ‘It didn’t take long, though. She wasn’t exactly a big spender.’

  ‘From what her mother told me, there isn’t much to spend,’ Jack commented. ‘They live hand to mouth, albeit in a posh kind of way, but maybe not for much longer in a mansion, as the bank’s threatening repossession.’

  ‘I can’t understand why people should want to spend a fortune just keeping a house going. If I were in their shoes, I’d sell up and buy a little terraced cottage.’

  ‘People like that would rather shoot themselves.’

  Nona frowned at him. ‘I thought you liked them, sir. Lady Hester especially.’

  ‘I do and I feel desperately sorry for them, but I can still recognise them as a breed apart.’ He looked through the statements, his tired eyes making little sense of the facts and figures, although the escalating debit balances leapt off the page.

  ‘I’m really surprised how quickly these turned up,’ Nona was saying. ‘Considering today’s Saturday and we only asked for them yesterday anyway.’

  ‘Once in a while, organisations are not only helpful but actually efficient.’ Jack noticed a bright red asterisk against a name he recognised from the magazines his daughters left about the house.

  Nona craned over the desk. ‘They’re jewellers, sir. Based in Bond Street.’

  ‘I know and I assume the seventeen hundred and odd pounds Sukie spent with them last December was for Imogen’s Christmas present.’

  ‘Probably. It’s the biggest amount by far that she’d ever spent. The next biggest is with a saddler’s, earlier this year.’ She turned to a new page, pointing to another asterisk. ‘See? Just under a thousand. The rest of her money went on magazine subscriptions and stuff for her horse, plus the odd fifty quid or so in department stores, mostly during the Easter holidays.’ Taking a step back, she added, ‘I called the jewellers to find out what she bought, but they can’t say until they’ve looked up their records. They promised to get back, if not today, by Monday at the latest.’

  ‘OK.’ Yawning and stretching, Jack said, ‘You’d better go and search Imogen’s room for the necklace — she may have simply mislaid it, as she said. While you’re there, list her belongings, then get them packed. Whatever happens, I doubt she’ll be coming back.’

  ‘If I can’t find the necklace, we could ask her parents what it looks like. They’ll be here soon, I expect.’

  ‘I’d rather try to find out from John Melville,’ Jack told her. ‘We may interview the Olivers about Imogen’s letter and I don’t want to create any distractions, however innocuous.’

  Nona was barely out of the door when the telephone rang.

  Eifion Roberts announced himself by barking out, ‘Where’s McKenna?’

  ‘Talking to Matron.’ Wincing, Jack held the receiver away from his ear. ‘She’s had the sack.’

  ‘Yes, I know, along with the headmistress. I heard it on the radio.’

  ‘I saw it on early-morning television.’

  ‘Well, then, by now the world and his wife should know, so I wouldn’t be surprised if parents start turning up in droves to remove their offspring.’

  ‘Some might, but a lot of them seem to he abroad, congregating in various fashionable places.’

  ‘Does that include the next of kin of the latest catastrophe?’ the pathologist asked. ‘The kid with one leg who downed enough painkillers to fell a horse?’

  ‘No. They’re on their way here.’ Jack related then the claims Imogen had made in her letter, adding, ‘Is she likely to survive, d’you think? Because if she isn’t around to back up her statements there’s no prospect of taking them further.’

  ‘I can’t say. Depends on how she fares in the next few days.’ Roberts paused, tapping something against his teeth. ‘Most of what she swallowed was washed out quickly enough — in fact, we’ve got the stomach contents here for analysis — but it still had time to get into her system and add to what was already there. The cumulative effect of months taking the stuff, plus a hefty overdose, could result in organ failure.’

  Jack said nothing, feeling the pain of these wasted lives as if the girls were his own flesh and blood.

  Roberts coughed. ‘Tell me,’ he said, rather hesitantly, ‘is McKenna all right?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t he be?’

  ‘Just give me a straight answer!’

  ‘I can’t. He’s not been “all right” for a long time. I sometimes wonder if he ever was.’

  ‘That’s very perceptive of you.’

  ‘Why are you asking, anyway?’

  ‘We had a barney yesterday and, not by any means for the first time, ended up at loggerheads. He wanted me to sympathise because he’s got to shift from that slum he lives in and got into a temper when I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Yes, well, it’s his bolthole,’ Jack commented, uneasy with the direction of the conversation.

  ‘So, perhaps it’s time his friends helped to prise him out of it,’ Roberts replied quietly, ‘even if it means taking the bull by the horns then hunkering down until the storm blows itself out.’ He waited for a moment, before saying, ‘There’s a place coming up for grabs I know he’s always fancied, but it’s strictly a word-of-mouth affair. If he doesn’t get in now, he won’t have a chance.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘That ancient cottage right by the pier,’ Roberts said. ‘No neighbours aside from gulls, cormorants and the odd seal, and some of the finest views going, but until he’s got over his sulks, he won’t be speaking to me, so I can’t tell him. You could, though. I’ll fax over the info, shall I? And you can let him know I’ve got something off Sukie’s body I wasn’t expecting — pressure marks on her neck and shoulders from where she was held down in the water. We may, but only may, be able to lift prints from her T-shirt. There’s also a faint imprint of what looks like a trainer on the seat of her jeans.’

  10

  Nicholls’s beautiful car had still been gracing the forecourt when McKenna crossed on his way to Matron’s flat, but some time within the last hour, both man and car had departed. He walked along the administration corridor, the keys that Jack had taken from Nicholls in his hand, ready to give him access to whatever secrets Freya might have hidden in her study. Reaching her door, he found it wide open, with the deputy headmistress seated stiffly behind the desk.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Miss Knight asked, her face as vinegary as her voice.

  ‘I see Mr Nicholls has gone,’ McKenna said. ‘I thought he intended to address the school.’

  ‘He changed his m
ind.’ She sniffed. ‘The task has been delegated to me.’

  ‘And when do you propose to do it?’

  ‘I haven’t yet decided.’

  ‘I don’t think you should leave it too long,’ he advised. ‘The girls, and the staff, have a right to the facts.’

  ‘I’m perfectly aware of their rights, thank you.’

  ‘I hope you’re equally familiar with the facts,’ he remarked. ‘Please ensure that no one is left with the misapprehension that Imogen killed Sukie.’ Nodding to her, he retraced his steps back to the lobby, where he stood by the double doors deciding what to do next now one set of plans had been thwarted.

  Therese and Justine came into view, from the direction of the stables. Justine’s boots were crusted with sand, Therese’s shapeless jeans and scruffy shirt bespattered with dirty splashes. As they neared the doors, he could almost see the stamp of Matron’s huge hand in the ugly welt on her left cheek.

  They were speaking to each other in German. When he asked Therese if she had been to the stables, unconsciously she responded in that language. ‘Ja,’ she said and began to say more, still in German, before switching to English. ‘I have been grooming. Picking out hooves, washing tails and manes. A child is less demanding of time than a horse, I am sure.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you had one,’ he remarked.

  ‘I do not have a horse here,’ she told him. ‘At home, I have a Hanoverian stallion, but I am not allowed to bring him to school.’

  ‘Why not?’ He fell into step beside them, his nose assailed by the pungent smell of sweating horse that clung to Justine’s clothes.

  ‘There is no stallion pen,’ she replied, giving him a look that questioned his common sense. ‘He would cover the mares if he ran with the others.’

  Justine stopped at the foot of the stairs, her face drawn. ‘Is there any more news of Imogen?’ she asked. ‘Sergeant Prys told us earlier only that she is still alive.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s all we know. But Torrance has regained consciousness.’