Young, Gifted and Deadly

by William Stafford

  “Hardly,” Abbott frowned. “As I told you previously, I went to Priory High. Except it was not known by that name back then.”

  “The Grammar?”

  Abbott let out a bitter laugh. “Sadly, alas, no. By the time I got there, the grammar school days were over. Actually, I was one of the first intake the year Dedley Grammar became The Dedley School - an astounding lack of imagination on the part of the people who name schools, I must say.”

  “You seem - remorseful - is that the word?”

  “Resentful, I think you’ll find. Do you know, I was! I was altogether convinced I would have passed the Eleven Plus examination and earned my place among the grammar school boys. I suppose I resented missing the chance to prove my mettle. I mean, after all, anyone can get into a comprehensive.”

  He pronounced this last word with a visible grimace of distaste. He watched Pattimore make a note.

  “But this is ancient history; what has any of this to do with your murder investigations?”

  “We’ll get there,” said Stevens. “Hold your fucking horses.” He grinned to see the educator bristle at his bad language. “We’ll fucking get there all fucking right.”

  Abbott’s lip curled. “Then I wish you would get a fucking move on.”

  Stevens was gobsmacked. “A teacher! Swearing! Just wait until I tell the lads at playtime.”

  “You work in the same school you went to,” Pattimore observed. “Bit weird, isn’t it?”

  “How so? Perhaps at first. Some of the old masters were still there - and I had thought them ancient when I was their pupil! To have them as colleagues was a little strange, I admit. Those old grammar school buffers insisting I call them Roger or Martin. They would always be ‘Sir’ to me. They became my mentors. Got me through my first year. The school may have changed, they said, there may be girls here now, but there is no reason to let standards slip. We may be a comprehensive school now but there is no reason why we should not be the best damned comprehensive in the borough.”

  Pattimore scribbled further notes. “So, Dedley Grammar became the Dedley School but now it’s called Priory High. When did that happen?”

  “In 1989.”

  “Why?” said Stevens.

  Abbott looked downcast. “Despite our best efforts, the school was failing. The old grammar staff were all retired or dead or both. We were slipping in the league tables. The school was put into so-called special measures and rebranded as a ‘specialist Science college’. We got a new Science block out of it but little else.”

  “But you stayed?” said Pattimore. “You didn’t move to a better job in a better school.”

  “Young man, one does not abandon one’s preferred football team when it goes through a rocky patch. There is such a thing as loyalty.”

  Pattimore nodded.

  “So,” said Stevens. “What do you think about the school’s impending academy status? Does that piss you off?”

  Abbott’s lip curled. “Academia has nothing to do with it.”

  “You don’t sound too happy about that.”

  “No one who cares a jot for education would. They don’t work. Well, not in the interests of the students.”

  “In whose interests do they work, then?”

  Abbott tapped the side of his nose. “Follow the money, Detective Constable.”

  At that moment, Chief Inspector Wheeler burst in.

  “Hoi, Bobbsy Twins! A word.” She burst out again.

  “Excuse us.” Pattimore got to his feet. Stevens followed him to the corridor where Wheeler was waiting. She had been listening in and was far from happy.

  “What the fuck is all this shit?” she gestured angrily at the interview room door. “I don’t want his fucking C.V. or a history of education in the fucking town. Pin him down on the fucking star thing.”

  “I’m leading up to it,” said Pattimore.

  “We got him to swear,” boasted Stevens. “He said fuck.”

  “Then let’s throw the fucking key away. Think! Why would a man of his experience be against this academy business? Eh?”

  “Um... he sees it as a decline in standards...” Pattimore grasped for ideas.

  “And that might lead him to kill? Three people? I fucking doubt it. Think! He’s spent most of his life in that place, man and boy - although not necessarily in that fucking order.”

  “His job!” Stevens cried. “He thinks he’s going to lose his job!”

  “Hooray!” Wheeler applauded. “I’ve been boning up - don’t snigger! These academies are notorious for getting shot of their most senior staff.”

  “Why?” said Pattimore.

  “Like he said,” Wheeler nodded at the door, “Follow the money. Senior staff are expensive. Much cheaper to get somebody fresh out of training.”

  “Is it enough?” said Pattimore. “Enough to turn him into a killer?”

  “That’s what we have to establish,” said Wheeler. “Let’s hang on to the fucker for a bit. Check his whereabouts at the times of the murders. Seems to me that school has been his entire life. He just might resent being elbowed out of it - And what the fuck are you giggling at, you lanky wanker?”

  Stevens wiped his eyes and pressed an arm against his aching ribs. “He said fuck.”

  “Get him talking about the star,” Wheeler directed her instructions to Pattimore. “What can he tell us - might prove useful - Also, how does he know? He might let something slip.”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  “Give that lanky wanker a minute to pull himself together then get back in there. I’m warning you, Stevens: grow up or I’ll kick you so hard your bollocks will come out of your fucking nose.”

  She strode away.

  “Have you finished?” Pattimore sighed.

  Tight-lipped, Stevens nodded. Then a snort escaped him and he was off again.

  ***

  “I like what you’ve done with the place.” Brough was standing in Miller’s living room. “Looks like an explosion in a sports shop.”

  “It’s Darren’s,” Miller called from the kitchen. “Coffee?”

  “Mineral water, if you have it,” Brough called back.

  “You can have tap and like it.” Miller joined him while the kettle boiled. She looked around at the heaps of tracksuits and exercise equipment. “It’s only temporary. He had to give up his lock-up. Damp, apparently.”

  “Hm,” said Brough. Using his finger and thumb as pincers, he removed a jockstrap from the sofa so he could sit down. “Are you sure he’s not taking advantage of you, Mel?”

  Miller hooted. “Every night and weekend mornings.” She laughed to see Brough shudder.

  “You must be getting serious.”

  Miller grinned. “We’m on the right track, yes. It’s nice to have somebody I can trust and who trusts me, you know? Darren’s a keeper - and I don’t mean up at the zoo. And I’d still got some money left after I sold my mom’s house, so...”

  “Miller...” Brough growled. “What have you done?”

  “It’s just a loan! He’ll pay it back; I know he will.”

  Brough sighed and shook his head. “Oh, Miller. How much?”

  “That’s none of your-”

  “How much?”

  “Ten.”

  “Pounds.”

  “Yes. Ten thousand of them.”

  Brough was aghast. “Oh, Mel; you haven’t known him for five minutes. You won’t see that money again.”

  “You don’t know that! You don’t know him like I do.” Tears sprang to Miller’s eyes. Brough was just jealous - she didn’t want to believe he might be right.

  Brough gave up. “Just make the drinks, Miller and then try Donald Phillips again.”

  “I’ve left oodles of messages.” Miller comp
osed herself.

  “Leave oodles more.”

  “Yes, sir.” She withdrew to the kitchen. Brough’s phone rattled in his pocket. A video call was coming through. From Oscar.

  “Hey!” the film star’s voice crackled. The image on screen froze and juddered. “David! Hope this is a good time - Can you see me?”

  “Yes,” said Brough, keeping his voice low in case Miller was earwigging. “I thought we were doing this later.”

  The famous lips pouted. “That’s just it, baby. Later’s no good for me. Got to do a whole bunch of reshoots. We’re behind schedule big time.”

  Brough groaned; he guessed what was coming. “No,” he said.

  “Afraid so, baby. I’m not going to make it over for your big day.”

  “No!” Brough snapped. “Don’t say it!”

  “But...” Oscar flashed his toothy grin and wiggled his eyebrows. “I do have an alternative...” He waved an envelope at his webcam. It filled the screen but was too out of focus for Brough to read.

  “Is that...”

  “I’ll get it couriered over right away, sweet cheeks. In plenty of time for your big day. Now, I gotta go.” He blew a kiss. “Bye, baby.”

  The call disconnected. Brough became aware that Miller was standing in the doorway with a mug of tea and a glass of tap water. He blushed.

  “Oscar?” she asked, affecting innocence. Brough nodded curtly and put his phone away. “All right, is he?”

  “He’s...well, you know... busy.”

  “That’s show business, I suppose.” She offered him the glass. “Must be hard.”

  Brough crossed his legs.

  “Being apart so much, I mean.” She perched on the arm of an armchair that was currently accommodating a huge, silver exercise ball and a tangle of skipping ropes. “At least my Darren’s within reach.”

  “Well, his stuff is,” sneered Brough. “Keep trying to get Phillips.”

  He got to his feet and handed back the glass of water. “Bathroom through here?”

  “Take a left at the exercise bike and mind the rowing-machine.”

  “Honestly, Miller...” Brough picked his way out of the room as though traversing a minefield. Miller poked her tongue out at his back.

  “Honestly, sweet cheeks,” she grumbled.

  12.

  Alfred Abbott settled back in his chair. “Actually, it’s something of a coincidence.”

  “What is?” said Stevens.

  “All this business with the pentagrams.”

  “This business, as you put it,” said Pattimore, “is the murder of three individuals.”

  “Quite. I am not being dismissive. I just find it curious that the stars are appearing now, right at the time when I am about to launch my blog.”

  “What blog?” said Stevens.

  “I have written, gentlemen, the definitive history of the school. Alas, so far I have been unable to arouse the interest of a publisher.”

  “You don’t fucking say,” said Stevens. Abbott ignored him.

  “And so, rather than taking the vanity route and publishing the book myself, I am putting it out there, into the ether, so that it might attract a global audience. When I approach the publishers with the figures - how many ‘hits’ I’m getting, as I believe the phrasing is, they will be falling over themselves to make me a deal.”

  There was a light in his eyes, a mixture of passion and delusion - and perhaps pound signs too. Pattimore and Stevens exchanged sidelong glances.

  “Go on, then,” said Pattimore. “Tell us. Tell us why the stars are so important to the school.”

  Alfred Abbott pursed his lips. He relished the opportunity to speak of his favourite subject.

  “Are you sitting comfortably, gentlemen?”

  “Oh, just fucking get on with it,” said Stevens.

  ***

  The school was founded in the middle of the sixteenth century in a modest, wooden hut on the hill overlooking the priory. Up until then, the education of the town’s boys had been the preserve of the resident religious order, who selected the sons of the well-to-do - boys who were never destined to toil in the fields or to scrape a living from the open-cast mines. Some of the boys stayed on, taking holy orders while others furthered their studies at university.

  But then, Henry VIII decreed that monasteries, abbeys and indeed priories were to be disbanded and in most cases demolished. The prior at the time submitted an appeal, a stay of execution, if you will. He argued that the building should be allowed to stand and his order to continue its important work as educators.

  It might have worked, were it not for the emergence of one man, one Baxter Emmanuel, ironically himself a former student of the priory. Freshly returned from Oxford and a grand tour of Europe, he saw which way the wind was blowing and built his hut on land leased from the Earl of Dedley. With his new-fangled, puritanical ways, he lured the sons of the merchants away from the priory with the promise that there was no risk of the boys ending up as monks or friars. He would educate them in the ways of the world and in commerce - especially commerce.

  The intake grew. The hut was extended, then rebuilt in brick and stone. Meanwhile, at the foot of the hill, the priory was being sacked and looted and its inhabitants driven out. The prior went to see the headmaster and pleaded for employment. He had the knowledge, he argued, the skills and the expertise, to be a valuable addition to the teaching staff.

  “And will you renounce your robes?” Baxter Emmanuel asked. “Will you forsake your papist ways?”

  “Aye,” said the prior. “For we have never been an ostentatious order. Living frugal lives and eschewing the pomp and ceremony of high church.”

  For a time, it worked. The former prior taught the boys Latin and penmanship while the status of the headmaster grew around the town and beyond.

  Rather than pay fees for their sons’ education, the merchants were encouraged to make donations to the school fund. Seeing the headmaster parade around in cloth of gold and ermine, the former prior began to suspect that not all of the school fund was being spent on the building or on the boys.

  Matters came to a head - so to speak - when the Latin master petitioned for new thatch for the roof of his classroom.

  “There simply is not the money,” Baxter Emmanuel sighed. “What funds we have are spent on teaching the boys. Now, if you were to agree to a reduction in salary...”

  “You mean pay for the roof myself!”

  “It would be in the interests of school spirit.”

  “Good day to you, Headmaster.”

  The Latin master stormed from the school. His angry strides took him to the recently ruined priory, where he fell to his knees and wept. Once he had had direction in his life, and purpose. Serve God and civilise the boys of Dedley so that they too might serve the Lord. As prior, he had been a stone dropped in a pond and his work the ripples, stretching out, reaching farther and farther. But now that pond was stagnating - or something of that nature - he had not fully realised his metaphor.

  He reached inside his shirt of coarse cloth and closed his fist around his wooden crucifix.

  “I have done nothing but in service of thee,” he spat, “and you bring me down thusly. Each man must have his trials - this much I know - but that, that hypocrite would surely drive Job to distraction and dark thoughts of - of...”

  His voice trailed off. He tore the tiny cross from his neck and hurled it across the rubble. From his pocket he took another amulet, a pentacle fashioned from silver, his only possession of any material worth.

  I could sell this... it occurred to him. My schoolroom could have its new roof and there would be enough for cakes for the boys come Lammastide...

  The metal star grew hot in his hand and seemed to sting him like a wasp.

  No.


  A murky thought surfaced from the deepest recesses of his mind. This star has other uses...

  He held it to the sky so that it framed the sun. Then he inverted the amulet. One point down, two points up...

  “Very well,” the former prior resolved. “I shall serve you instead, my Lord.”

  ***

  Stevens was on the edge of his seat. Alfred Abbott, gratified by the effect he had had on his audience, took a sip from a cup of tea, tepid now from neglect.

  “So,” Stevens spoke animatedly, “the old prior turned to the dark side and - and - what? Bet he gave that stuck-up headmaster what fucking for.”

  Alfred Abbott smirked. “Not exactly, but I believe that what happened next will be more directly pertinent to your investigation...”

  13.

  Stuck in traffic in Miller’s car, Brough leafed through The History of the Occult in the Black Country, reading out the juiciest titbits, while Miller tried her best not to swear at the slowcoach driver ahead of them or the impatient wanker behind.

  “It says here, Miller, that in the 1970s, Dedley was a bit of a magnet for Hell’s Angels.”

  Miller huffed. “What have a load of bearded bikers got to do with the whatsit - the Occult?”

  “Our Donald Phillips doesn’t say. I think he’s clutching at straws to fill a few pages.” He flicked through to a different chapter. “Apparently, if you go out on the twenty-eighth of March, you’re in very real danger of running into the hell hounds of Halesowen.”

  “Ooh,” said Miller. “I like dogs. Just because he puts ‘hell’ in front of something, doesn’t make it satanic.”

  “Spot on, Miller. But there’s an interesting section here concerning our old mucker Baphomet.”

  “No friend of mine.”

  “Quite. It seems there was a spate of grisly deaths in the mid-sixteenth century. A few local merchants, aldermen of the town, people like that. And,” he shifted in his seat, “get this, Miller: one was garrotted, one was immolated, one was hanged and another was-”

  Angry honking blared from behind.

  “The light’s green, Miller; you’re allowed to proceed.”