Perils and Dangers

by Peter Turnbull

  "So you didn't meet at university?"

  "Do I look that old?" She smiled nervously. "My husband is quite a lot older than me. I'm in my early thirties, Mr West is forty-eight."

  "Nearly twenty years."

  "Yes, nearly." Another timid, apologetic smile. "We met at school…Mr West's school, I was a probationer, he was then the Head of English. We took up with each other when I finished my probationary year. Mr West decided that I should move to another school so that we could carry on our relationship a little more discreetly." She seemed to Hennessey to be very admiring of her husband, though he was already finding the sycophantic reference to her husband as "Mr West" tiring, in the extreme. "He went to university." She added, "Cambridge. He took an upper second."

  "Yes, I know. I've met your husband."

  "Oh…I only went to college, teacher training college. I'm what is called 'timetable fodder' in the profession. We get the bad timetable, least motivated, most disruptive classes…I'm glad I got out. I married out." She gave another long glance at the children. "A wife and mother with a home to manage, that's all I ever wanted really, right from when I was little with a doll's house." She returned her attention to Hennessey. "And that's what I've got. I'm a lucky woman. A lovely house too."

  Hennessey glanced round the large room. "It's a lovely house."

  "It used to be the parsonage. It's difficult to heat in winter."

  "I can imagine."

  "In winter we hibernate in the kitchen. But in the summer, as you see…it's a lovely house."

  "Your husband is not a Yorkshire man?"

  "No. His family roots are in Bedfordshire."

  "He attended local schools?"

  "Good heavens no…I'm the council brat in this marriage. Mr West went to Taunton."

  "Taunton?"

  "A public school. Not quite up there with Eton and Harrow and places like that…what are they, the nine great public schools in England…but quite pukka just the same."

  "Oh, I'm sure. I went to a council school in Greenwich. It got pulled down to make way for a block of flats. I'm a bit sorry about that I confess, I envy people who can revisit their school, especially when they're in the decline of life. I wasn't particularly happy at school, but when it was demolished I felt as though I'd been cast adrift."

  "I can understand that," she nodded sympathetically. "But, well what do you want to see Mr West for?"

  "Nothing to worry about. Just routine questions. He might be able to assist with inquiries. You only have the two children?"

  "Yes. They're enough really. I wanted more but Mr West said that that would be bad for his prospects…he said a nuclear family looked better…a large family invites prejudice, so we stopped at two. I had an operation…Mr West insisted."

  "You…he insisted?"

  "Oh yes. Mr West is in charge."

  Hennessey said nothing but he was getting a strong feel of the West household. All done on Mr West's terms, all on his say so. A man like that would need a timid creature like this for a partner, so Hennessey pondered, and again, knew why he had enjoyed his career in the police: "it pays nothing, but you see life and it's better than working", as is often heard said in the police club. "But your husband…we need to see him. Where is the gun club?"

  "We?"

  "I have two officers outside."

  "You're going to arrest him!"

  "Oh, I hope not," Hennessey smiled. "But sometimes people are not as co-operative as we'd like…"

  "He won't like you going to the gun club looking for him…he's very particular about appearances."

  "We can be diplomatic."

  "I'm sure he'd rendezvous with you."

  "That would be acceptable. If he's prepared to come to the police station directly…and I mean directly, tear himself away from his conversation or the firing range."

  "I'll phone him." She stood up.

  "I'll phone him." Hennessey also stood. "That's if I may use your phone?"

  "It's in the hall." She sat down again, looking pale and frightened. "The number's in the book under 'G'," she added helpfully. "For gun, you see."

  "Do you have an alibi for Sunday evening last?"

  West didn't reply. He was smartly dressed and reeked of aftershave.

  "Just say 'yes' or 'no' for the benefit of the machine."

  West nodded his head. His eyes were steely cold.

  "For the purposes of recording," Hennessey said, "Mr West nodded his head indicating an answer in the affirmative." He paused. "What is your alibi?"

  "I was at the gun club."

  "All evening?"

  "No…I left early."

  "How early?"

  "I slipped away about nine p.m."

  "Where were you around midnight?"

  "I'd rather not say."

  "Why? Because you were blowing Nathan Ossler's brains out at that moment?"

  "No. I was with someone."

  "Oh…" Hennessey groaned. "Not you as well."

  The duty solicitor shot a disapproving glance at Hennessey.

  "Sorry." Hennessey sighed. "Sorry, I shouldn't have said that…but you're not going to tell me that you've joined an organisation called 'Dangerous Liaisons'?"

  "No," West smiled. "And I accept your apology. I've seen their adverts…I've even sent for information about their service. They're very discreet…introductions for attached people…they can't advertise widely. Some newspapers won't carry their ads."

  "I can understand why."

  "But what's wrong with it? If things are bad at home…why not…we only come this way once…why throw our life passage away on the wrong person?"

  "Why indeed? But it's the underhand nature of the organisation that I find offensive…it would be more honest to leave home and petition for divorce, don't you think?"

  "Perhaps, but there's a distinct advantage to hedging your bets. You run the risk of your affair being rumbled but it turns out you still have the little woman at home to return to. I also have children who'd suffer badly in a divorce. So, it's a risk worth taking, and there's the added thrill of the gamble…but mentioning Dangerous Liaisons…yes, you're on the right track."

  "So who were you with?"

  "A lady called Imogen Salt. You'll have to be discreet."

  "Oh, we will."

  "So you were with her at midnight on Sunday?"

  "Well…no. We had a drink in a pub."

  Hennessey paused. Beside him, Yellich shifted in his chair.

  "The pubs shut at ten thirty on Sunday evenings."

  "Yes," said West. "They do."

  "Did you go somewhere else with Mrs Salt or did you part for the night?"

  "We parted for the night."

  "And the pub was in…"

  "York. We were in the Golden Ball on Priory Street. A lovely pub…tucked away just right for a rendezvous."

  "Yes…yes…so what time did you return home?"

  "About midnight."

  "After midnight, according to your wife."

  West shot a glance, a glare, at Hennessey. "You've been to my house?"

  "Yes. Twice in fact." Hennessey enjoyed the glare he'd received from West. It gave a vivid insight into the man's personality.

  "But today? You went to my home today?"

  "Yes. We were looking for you. That's where I phoned you from. With your wife's permission, of course. So you parted from Mrs Salt at ten thirty in the evening in central York and arrived home at…after midnight. Do you know the location of the village of Strensall, Mr West?"

  "Yes."

  "It's about twenty minutes' drive from your house, would you say?"

  "About. Yes."

  "So you could be in Strensall at midnight and be at your home within twenty minutes?"

  "Yes. I could have been. But I wasn't."

  "So what did you do in the two hours between parting from Mrs Salt and arriving home?"

  "I walked about. It was a lovely evening. I didn't want to go home to my wife, not so soon after parti
ng from Mrs Salt." He eyed Hennessey coldly and held the edge of the table so tightly, so tightly that his knuckles whitened. "We are made for each other, Imogen and I…I needed time to think before I went back to my little wife whom I should never have married. I mean, wouldn't you?"

  "This isn't about me, Mr West. When I called on the school the day before yesterday, we had a brief chat. You told me that you knew Ossler."

  "Yes. Social climber that he is…or was. If you have a touch of class people like that clutch at your shirt tails. You learn to live with it."

  "It was a little more complicated than that, wasn't it?"

  "Was it?"

  Hennessey cleared his throat. He saw the duty solicitor, Mr Crowther once again, glance curiously at Nigel West and he reflected on the curious fly-on-the-wall position of the duty solicitor during P.A.C.E. interviews. "Yes," he said, "it was significantly more than that. Can you tell me if Nathan Ossler perhaps ever described himself to you as a 'professional blackmailer'?"

  West leaned back in his chair and bowed his head. His hands went up to his forehead, first one then the other. All he said was "…Oh."

  "Couldn't go to the police, could you, Mr West?"

  West remained silent, staring at the brown floor of the interview room.

  "You couldn't because every salary cheque you've drawn for the last few years, ever since you invented a degree from Cambridge University has been an act of obtaining money by deception. You know it doesn't really matter if you went to a council school in Bedford and not to a prestigious public school, so long as you don't mislead or profit by that deception. But it does matter, it matters hugely, if you went to Derwent Teacher Training College; where you obtained the minimum qualifications necessary to teach secondary school level as a gym teacher, but invented university degrees sufficient to enable you to take a headship, and then accepted said headship. That's fraud, deception, a criminal matter. You even succeeded in withholding that from your wife."

  West raised his head, but not to look at Hennessey, or Yellich, or to Mr Crowther, but beyond eye level, to the ceiling, as if wanting to be anywhere, anywhere in the world except interview room three in Micklegate Bar Police Station in the City of York. Eventually he lowered his head and looked at Hennessey and said, "I'd like a coffee. Something hot to sip."

  Hennessey leaned to his right and held the on/off switch of the tape recorder and said. "This interview is halted at eleven fifteen a.m. to allow refreshments to be taken." He switched the machine off and the red "recording" light faded.

  Coffee was produced in brown plastic cups from the vending machine. West and Mr Crowther remained in the interview room speaking in hushed tones, while Hennessey and Yellich stood in the corridor.

  "Thoughts?" Hennessey asked.

  "He can kill, boss." Yellich sipped his coffee. "He's got that killer instinct. He's solemn, very, very solemn. He can pull a trigger even if his life or the life of a loved one is not in danger. He'd walk quite calmly up to Ossler's house, get past the dogs with a tribute like a portion of fish and chips or a liquorice stick each, ice Ossler and walk away again. He's solemn enough. He has motive and no alibi…walking around York because it was a nice evening." Yellich smiled. "I mean, he could try the other one, that's the one with bells on."

  Hennessey grinned, he hadn't heard that expression for a few years. "I confess, I'm leaning to that persuasion too, in fact for my money, he's more firmly in the frame than Mr Do-As-He's-Told Hargrave, despite Hargrave's access to firearms. I mean, Hargrave is more frightened of his old lady than he is a prison cell, in fact he's so frightened of the big, bad world, he forces us to lock him up."

  "See, that's what I mean, boss." Yellich drained his plastic mug of the brown, tasteless liquid. "That's not a killer. This guy is. And he's in a gun club…we think that for every handgun that was handed in during the last amnesty, two were not. He'll have access to a gun as well, one of his own that no one else knows about."

  "Well." Hennessey likewise drained his cup and tossed it into the wastepaper bin which sat on the corridor floor by the vending machine. "Let's let P.A.C.E. dictate the pace, see how far we get…softly, softly catchee monkey, as the felons would say."

  Hennessey and Yellich re-entered the interview room, closing the door behind them, and sat down. Hennessey switched on the tape recorder, the red recording light glowed and the twin cassettes began to spin slowly. "The interview resumes after refreshments at eleven twenty-five a.m. I am Detective Chief Inspector George Hennessey, I am now going to ask the other persons present to identify themselves."

  "Detective Sergeant Yellich."

  "Crowther, duty solicitor of Crowther, Walsh, Smith & Chappie of Davygate, York."

  "Nigel West of nowhere in particular. Not any more."

  "Do I take that as a confession, Mr West?"

  "Yes."

  A silence, a tension seemed to be released from the room.

  "How did you do it?"

  "It?"

  "Falsify your qualifications for one. How is it possible? Aren't they checked?"

  "Yes, they're checked, but only once. Human frailties, an absence of built-in safeguards and random checks. It's a system that's open to abuse."

  "As you have demonstrated."

  "And I've been found out. I actually came to believe it after a while." He smiled. "I got to become convinced of my own deception. I went away for weekends to Cambridge, stayed in bed and breakfast hotels and walked about the place until I knew the street layout and each individual college, each quad in each college. Once I had committed myself to the lie, I couldn't unlie; apart from leaving myself open to blackmail, which I never thought would happen, it meant I couldn't move to another local authority. You see, on joining a local authority, you have to show your qualifications, and prove your identity, often by showing your passport, but once in the authority, your identity and qualifications are assumed to have been checked."

  "I see."

  "I started work at a different school as the gym teacher and met the elitism and bullying that goes on in a school staff room. The teacher training college 'oiks' had to sit in the least comfortable chairs near the door, so it was up to us to answer the door each time someone knocked on it, while the graduates who would only talk to each other, walked past us and sat in the comfortable armchairs near the fire at the far end of the room."

  "Got under your skin, I suppose?"

  "Did rather, as did the jokes…in a culture that's orientated to academic success, being the gym teacher is to be the butt of everyone's humour…'gym teachers are useful—they can lift things', 'if you can't teach, you can always teach gym', 'gym teachers always stand up because if they sit down it makes their brains sore."

  "I begin to see your difficulty."

  "I'm glad you understand, Chief Inspector. I'm glad you understand."

  Hennessey remained silent. He did not, in fact, understand the problem as West had seen it. Other people make rewarding careers out of teaching gym, knowing that some children can only find self-expression through sport, others find achievement, others develop the sense of "team playing", so important in a competitive adult world. What Hennessey saw, rather, was the problem of a natural "control freak," so called. He saw the problem that a man who values status and appearance would have in being bottom of a pecking order. That was a problem he could understand.

  "But occasionally," West began to speak more freely, thinking that in George Hennessey he had found a sympathetic ear, "occasionally, one of the graduates would deign to speak to me and I found out that I could hold my own, intellectually speaking—even win arguments. It was then that a notion began to take root."

  "But you still couldn't change your qualifications?"

  "There was a school, inner-city York, going through bad times, children running riot, staff leaving in droves, other teachers were asked to volunteer for posts, I saw my opportunity. Every gym teacher has a subsidiary academic subject which they teach in the last years of their career wh
en they become too old to supervise soccer games in driving rain, which is earlier than you might think—rheumatism and arthritis arrive early in the life of sporty types, all that pounding that their bodies have to take."

  "Or they voluntarily subject their bodies to."

  "If you like. But anyway, I saw my chance. They were so desperate for staff I didn't think they'd cross-refer my internal application with my initial external application and so my teaching certificate from Derwent Teacher Training College became an upper second class honours degree in English Literature from the University of Cambridge. In the very short interview I made all the right noises about 'wanting a challenge' and I got the job, largely because no one else wanted it. I knew that, but upon accepting the job I became a graduate teacher."

  "And of Cambridge University no less."

  "No less. But I was good at it. I lived up to the qualification and I was part of the staff group that turned that school around." West smiled. "You know the irony is that while I may have been obtaining money by deception, I actually earned it nonetheless. The Head of English at my present school became vacant, I applied for it. By then I'd been in the department about fifteen years. I was known, I was well known to be a Cambridge man, my original application as a probationer was well lost…I got the job. A few years after that the headship itself became vacant…another internal application, another interview, a little stiffer this time, but I was offered the post. A permanent post, mine until retirement. All I had to do was to hope that a random or even accidental reading of my file wouldn't expose my true qualifications or that another graduate of Derwent of my year group wouldn't walk into my school. I never thought that a school friend from my own school days would walk into my study and blackmail me."

  "Is that what happened?"

  "Yes." West paused. "Yes, I got a call, a phone call, my secretary put it through because the caller would only describe himself as a 'concerned parent' and would only speak to me. So I took the call and the man said that he was concerned about a matter of grave indiscretion that was being perpetrated by a member of staff at the school. Cunning that. He didn't say 'a member of your staff, but 'a member of staff. That should have put me on my guard but sometimes things are only clear in hindsight."