My colleagues are not inclined to be analytical. They are determined to have fun. They all have their little anecdotes about hyper-pc imbecility: Birmingham City Council has renamed the Christmas season Winterval; actresses suddenly want to be called actors; a government booklet for nursery school teachers warns against playing musical chairs with the children because it encourages aggression; short people are being described as “vertically challenged”; a government minister is given a warning by police after using the term “nitty-gritty”; a teacher is prosecuted for putting sellotape over a girl’s mouth “even though the girl thought it was funny”. I signal to Marcus that I’d like to come back into the discussion, but I’m ignored.
The next question is clearly for me, but Marcus thinks it will be more fun to leave me till last ‘Have women lost more than they’ve gained by claiming equality with men?’ a girl asks.
The chaps witter on about the break-up of the family, the impossibility of “having it all” and the danger of men becoming redundant. The reverend gentleman bemoans the divorce rate and the loss of the little courtesies that were once shown to ladies; Neil Cunningham says small businesses won’t employ women because maternity leave is such a problem (has he got trouble with the little ASM?); the editor does a little editorial on the horrors of laddettes. Then it’s my turn. I take a deep breath and address the girls in the audience.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘if the young woman who asked the question thinks we may have lost more than we’ve gained, but I have to tell you that we’ve still got a way to go and this is no time to be turning round. When you go out into the world of work, your male colleagues may or may not hold doors open for you but you’ll only get real respect from them if you’re earning the same as they are. Economic equality is the key, and we’re a long way from having that. So don’t let them tell you that it’s all gone far enough when we’re only half way there. That’s the oldest trick in the book and we’re not falling for it.’ I don’t make much impression. The applause that greets my words is merely polite and we move on.
“Is the English language going downhill?” is our next question, and I’m on first.
I’m prepared for this one because people tackle me about this all the time. “You’re an English teacher,” they say. “Doesn’t it drive you mad when people say…?” and then they launch into their favourite linguistic prejudices. So I launch into my usual spiel. I say that language is organic, that it’s a developing and evolving thing and you can’t freeze it in a moment and say, “This is correct and will be for ever more.” I point out how much the language has changed since Shakespeare was writing and that many things he wrote would be judged incorrect by modern standards of grammar. I tell them that modern English grammar was invented by 18th century grammarians who wanted English to be more like Latin, but that English isn’t a Latin language and that’s partly why there are always exceptions to every grammatical rule. On the other hand, I say, I hate sloppiness: I hate language being used carelessly or clumsily. I am outraged when people whose business is words – politicians and broadcasters – resort to tired catch phrases and empty clichés; I hate it when, given a glorious language with the largest, most finely-tuned vocabulary in the world, people restrict themselves to a tiny subset of words. ‘Language change – being creative with language – is to be celebrated,’ I conclude, ‘but language abuse is a serious crime.’
And then my colleagues are off. Marcus fires the starting gun and they’re galloping off in all directions on their individual hobby horses. They denounce dangling participles, greengrocers’ apostrophes, split infinitives and “uninterested” confused with “disinterested”. They deplore research pronounced with the stress on the first syllable and all other Americanisms; they lament the death of “whom” and of the the subjunctive, and they hail text and e-mail messages as the harbingers of the end of civilisation as we know it.
Now, I could happily add to their list of horrors. I hate talk of amounts of people, as though people were an amorphous mass like milk or flour (it’s the countable/uncountable problem again); I hate it when “may” gets used instead of “might” (“he may have died” means we don’t know if he died or not, whereas “he might have died” means he didn’t actually); I hate people screwing up our beautifully complex conditional forms; I hate mixed metaphors because it means people are reaching for metaphors without thinking about what they actually mean. On the other hand, I also know that everything I’ve said this evening about the inevitability of language change is true too, and I hold both attitudes in my head simultaneously. This evening, I’m so irritated by my colleagues’ unthinking fuddy-duddiness – and indeed by the whole atmosphere in this absurdly grand hall with boys and masters sitting there in their gowns – that I raise a hand quite imperiously to Marcus and I enter the fray again.
‘I simply don’t believe that it really pains my colleagues to listen to an infinitive being split or to hear “flaunt” instead of “flout”, or to buy their potatoes with an apostrophe in them, but they like to flag up their outrage because that shows that they know what’s right, that they are members of an educated elite which believes it owns the language. Well, I have to tell them that they don’t. They can hold on to the written language because they can stop people from passing exams if they don’t conform to their rules, but the spoken language is utterly democratic. Every English speaker owns it and can use it as he or she chooses – provided they can make themselves understood to the people they want to understand them. Textspeak is a case in point. My colleagues here hate textspeak, but textspeak is only punning really – you have to be very alert to the possibilities of language to use it creatively. I use it. I enjoy it. But I’m nothing like as good at it as people who are texting all the time – which probably means people who don’t have proper jobs. What the establishment hates is the fact that language change – both vocabulary and accent – happens mainly from the bottom up. It starts among the young and streetwise and it spreads rapidly up and out. It can’t be stopped, and all of you are affected by it, however hard your teachers are trying to turn you into stormtroopers for the establishment. Spoken language is anarchic and that’s why the middle-aged are frightened of it.’
And here we draw to a close. I don’t hang about afterwards. I’ve done my bit, stirred things up, earned my money. I want to go home. I slither back to the common room and get back into snow gear. No-one comes with me; it seems they all have their outdoor gear with them. I finger the DVD in my pocket as I put my coat on. In fifteen minutes, I promise myself, I shall be sitting down with a pot of tea, wearing dry socks and watching this mystery disc. I wind my scarf round my neck and I pull Colin’s hat down over my ears. Then I go out into the icy dark, cut through the streams of boys dispersing to their rooms and walk through to the cloisters. There are two figures ahead of me who are, I suspect, a couple of my fellow panellists, but I don’t hurry to catch them up. Instead I phone Ellie, who is picking me up from outside the abbey.
‘Are you out there?’ I ask.
‘Yup. Parked illegally just outside Pizza Express.’
‘I’ll be with you in two minutes.’
‘How did it go?’
‘I really couldn’t say.’
As I break contact, I hesitate a bit. It really is forbiddingly dark through here. The only light filtering through comes from a pale, cloud-screened moon and I can no longer hear the footsteps of the pair ahead of me. I’m tempted to turn back, to ring Ellie and ask her to go round and meet me outside the school lodge, but that will take more time and I really don’t want to be out any longer than I need to. I pull my scarf up higher and turn off into the little cut though to my left which is known, unappealingly, as Dark Entry.
I will never be able to recall exactly what happens next. There is neither fear nor pain – just the sound of running feet and an extraordinarily violent impact, which knocks the breath out of me before I hit the icy ground and lose contact with the world.
21
WEDNESDAY 17th NOVEMBER
20.50: CALL-OUT
Scott had just put a pizza in the microwave when his phone rang.
‘Paula?’ he said.
‘I’m at Marlbury Abbey School, guv,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a situation. A possible assault. I would deal with it myself but the victim’s asking for you.’
‘What, me personally?’
‘Yes. The thing is, it’s Gina Gray.’
The microwave pinged and he turned it off automatically.
‘What’s happened to her?’ His voice was as level as he could make it but it sounded odd to his ears, and probably to hers.
‘A boy at the school found her unconscious in the abbey cloisters. She’d just left the school, apparently. He went for help and found Dr Fletcher, who called an ambulance. The daughter – the one we interviewed about the Carson case – turned up and called us. A patrol car attended and called the station. The duty sergeant called me. I’ve just got here. She’s come round and she says she has to speak to you. Something about a DVD. She’s not making a lot of sense.’ She broke off and said something he couldn’t hear, then came back. ‘The ambulance is here now.’
‘OK. Are the uniforms still there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you secured the crime scene?’
‘Trouble is, we don’t know if it is a crime scene. It’s quite possible it was an accident.’
‘What’s Gina saying?’
‘She says someone hit her.’
‘Then I suggest we go with that. Tell the uniforms to secure the scene and wait for me. Is the ambulance still there? You go in the ambulance and stay with her. I’ll get to the hospital as soon as I’ve talked to the witnesses.’
‘OK. I’ll see you later.’
She was about to ring off but he stopped her. ‘Paula?’
‘Yes?’
‘Is she all right?’
‘She seems OK. Shocked. A bit hysterical. OK, I think, but you never know with head injuries, do you?’
More snow was falling as he edged the car down his drive and along the ungritted roads of the estate. Once on the ring road, he picked up speed but had to slow to a crawl again in the narrow streets round the abbey. He took his car into the precincts and parked behind the patrol car, in which a uniformed policeman sat with the engine running.
‘Why aren’t you at the crime scene?’ he demanded.
‘We’re taking shifts, sir. It’s brass monkeys standing out there.’
He led Scott through the cloisters to where his colleague was pacing, barely visible in the intense dark, his feet ringing on the flagstones.
‘What do we think happened?’ Scott asked.
The PC shone his torch into a dark little alleyway. ‘A Mrs Virginia Gray, sir. She was found in here by one of the boys at the school. Seems she’d had a blow to the head and there was a piece of scaffolding lying on the ground. There’s scaffolding up the wall there, you can see. The boy went for help and brought a doctor back with him, and a Mr Bright, a teacher at the school. They moved her into the school and called an ambulance.’
‘What time was this?’
The constable took out a notebook and shone the torch on it. ‘About 8.40 p.m. they say.’
‘Who called you?’
‘The victim’s daughter, Eleanor Gray.’
‘How did she know what had happened?’
‘She’d arranged to pick her mother up, apparently. She was parked outside the gates and when her mother didn’t turn up, she came looking for her. She was pretty upset when she called. Said her mother had been attacked and everyone was trying to pretend it was an accident.’
‘Everyone?’
‘Mainly Mr Bright and the headmaster, I think, sir.’
‘Where can I find Mr Bright?’
‘This is his number, sir.’ He tore a page out of the notebook.
‘Good.’
He took the torch and shone it up the wall at the grid of scaffolding, then called DS Andy Finnegan. ‘Andy? I’m sorry to get you out on a night like this but I’m down at the abbey. A woman appears to have been attacked in the cloisters here. Paula’s gone to A&E with her; I’m going to start talking to witnesses. I need you to get SOCOs down here. It’s pitch dark so they’ll need floodlights. It needs to be done now. Can’t wait till morning. Snow’ll blow in and mess everything up. When you’ve got them sorted, come and join me on the interviews.’
‘You’re lucky,’ he said to the PCs. ‘As soon as the SOCOs turn up, you can take a break.’
He called the number he had been given. ‘Mr Bright? DCI David Scott. Where can I find you?’
Marcus Bright came to meet him, carrying a torch. As they walked through the cloisters, the torch light bounced off a pile of scaffolding poles lying on the ground.
‘Have those just been taken down or are they going up?’ Scott asked
‘They’ve just come down. They’ve been working on the stonework up there.’ He flashed the torch upwards.
‘They’ve only got the work in Dark Entry to do now.’
‘Dark Entry?’
‘Where the accident happened.’
‘You think it was an accident?’
‘What else?’
‘The victim thinks otherwise.’
‘The victim had a blow on the head. And she was always inclined to dramatise, I seem to recall.’
Scott looked at him sharply. ‘You know her well?’
‘We were childhood sweethearts, in a manner of speaking,’ Marcus Bright said with a grin.
Too pleased with himself and too cheerful for the circumstances, Scott thought, and surprised himself by the intensity of his dislike of the man. He followed him to the headmaster’s house, where they found Colin Fletcher sitting with Canon Aylmer. They were seated in leather armchairs either side of a log fire and a lad of seventeen or eighteen, in school uniform, was seated rather awkwardly on a sofa nearby. Marcus Bright ushered Scott in and said cheerfully, ‘Here we are. All your witnesses gathered together, chief inspector.’
Canon Aylmer looked startled. ‘Chief inspector? This is hardly a matter for a chief inspector, is it?’
Scott ignored the question and said, ‘Actually, we prefer not to have our witnesses gathered together – it muddies the waters – but since you’ve all presumably discussed what happened, I’m happy to talk to you as a group. Tell me, first of all, what was Mrs Gray doing at the school? She was leaving here when she was hit, I understand.’
‘She’d just been taking part in an in-house Question Time with the sixth form,’ Marcus Bright said.
‘And that finished when?’
‘At eight-thirty.’
‘Did you see her leave?’
‘I didn’t. I wanted a chance to thank her, but she must have nipped off pretty quickly. I thanked the others and saw them off the premises but I missed Gina.’
‘Did the others leave by the same exit as she did?’
‘The normal exit is out through the school lodge and Jeff Gould – the editor of The Herald – went out that way. I don’t know why Gina was going the other way – especially in the dark. Dr Reeve was going back to the abbey so he went out through the cloisters, and the director of the theatre, Neil Cunningham, went with him because it’s a short cut to the theatre.’
‘And you don’t know whether Mrs Gray left before or after them?’
‘Oh, before I would think. I’d have seen her if she’d been after them.’
‘Well, we can check with them whether they saw her.’ Scott turned to the boy on the sofa. ‘You’re the boy who found Mrs Gray?’
The boy half rose, but Scott came and sat beside him.
‘And you are?’
‘Micklejohn, sir. Iain Micklejohn.’
‘Micklejohn,’ put in Canon Aylmer, ‘is our head of school.’ Noting Scott’s look of puzzlement, he added kindly, ‘Head boy.’
‘I see. And how did you come to be in the cloisters, Iain?’
�
�I was walking through to the abbey. Dr Reeve had offered to hear my reading for the end of term service.’
‘It’s not the end of term yet, surely?’
‘No. There’s another two weeks but this’ll be my first service as head of school and it’s the part of the job that worries me most.’ He was a fair boy with a freckled complexion and the colour rose to his face as he spoke.
‘So, tell me what happened.’
‘Well, I nearly tripped over her. I felt myself tread on something just as I turned into Dark Entry. I thought it was a cat or something, but I realised it stretched right across the entry. It was really dark, so I knelt down to feel what it was and then I realised it was a person.’
‘What did you do then.’
‘Well, I spoke to her. Said some pretty stupid things – “Are you all right?” – you know. I thought it might be a drunk wandered in – they do sometimes sleep in the precincts – but I realised this person was – well I thought they might be dead, so I legged it back to school and found Mr Bright in his study, talking to Dr Fletcher.’
Scott turned to Colin Fletcher. ‘And how did you come to be here?’ he asked.
‘I’d come to see a boy in the sick bay.’
‘Wasn’t it late for visit?’
‘It was, but I was concerned about him. I rang and spoke to Matron at the end of my evening surgery and she wasn’t quite happy about him, so I went home and had some dinner and then came round.’
‘Fortunate coincidence,’ Scott said. ‘So, you and Mr Bright went with Iain here, and what did you find?’
‘We found her lying just inside Dark Entry, face down, but she was just beginning to stir.’
‘You had a torch with you?’
All the Daughters Page 19