“Rotten cow . . .”
“Are you now coming, please, Katie?” Heidi called out to her in her singsong voice.
Kate watched Mr. and Mrs. Spencer drive away. Then she got in next to the au pair.
She wanted to talk to her parents that evening but when she got home, there was a note on the kitchen table. They’d gone out to dinner and wouldn’t be home until late. She went to bed with her own thoughts and that same, nudging sense of fear.
IV.
Nothing more happened for about a week. The evenings got darker and the weather got worse. The interference continued but Kate got used to turning the transmitter off during French class. If she was reading or writing, she didn’t need it, and she could lip-read . . . even though it was next to impossible in French. It was when they had oral work that she was forced to turn the thing back on and put up with whatever came her way. And it was during one of those lessons that the voice came again.
They were reading a book, each taking a turn to read the words out loud in French and then to translate them. It was Kate’s turn. She was standing with the book open in front of her.
“Bonne-Maman arrivait toujours en taxi et ne donnait jamais de pourboire au chauffeur,” she read.
Mr. Spencer looked at her with his watery, dark eyes. “I’m going to kill her,” he said.
Kate faltered, then went on. “Elle était petite . . .”
“I’m going to kill her . . .”
“. . . et paraissait rapetisser un peu plus chaque annee.”
“Nobody will know.”
“Elle avait des cheveux . . .” Kate was suddenly aware that everyone was looking at her. One or two of the other girls were giggling. She stopped, blushing without quite knowing why. There was a whine in her ear. She waited until it had died away.
“Didn’t you hear me, Kate?” Mr. Spencer asked. He was staring at her, puzzled.
“I’m sorry, sir?” Kate sat down. The classroom was beginning to spin slowly around her and she wondered if she was going to faint.
“I asked you to translate.”
“Oh. Right.” Kate tried to concentrate on the book.
“I’m going to murder her!”
“Murder?” Kate repeated the word. At least, the word slipped out of her lips before she could stop it.
Something glimmered in the French teacher’s eyes. “What did you say?” he demanded.
“Mother . . . I mean grandmother!” Kate gazed at the black-and-white pages of the book, trying to bury herself in them. “Grandma always came by taxi,” she began. “And she never gave the driver . . . she never gave the driver . . .” She had stumbled on a word.
“Pourboire,” Mr. Spencer said. “I’m going to murder her tonight.”
Hands were going up around the class. He had asked them if they knew the word pourboire. That was what he had said. But that wasn’t what Kate had heard.
“With a kitchen knife.”
“Does it mean ‘a drink,’ sir?”
“No.”
“A tip?”
“Yes. Well done, Nicholas. I’m going to stab her with a kitchen knife. Nobody will know.”
Kate got to her feet. She had knocked her chair over behind her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t feel well.”
She ran out of the room.
V.
The school nurse said it was flu. But the nurse always said everything was flu. There was a joke in the school that if you went to the nurse with both your legs chopped off and a spear in your neck, she’d give you a half an aspirin and tell you to come back the next day. Fortunately, it was a Friday afternoon. The nurse told Kate to have plenty of rest over the weekend and to stay indoors. She didn’t even give her the half aspirin.
Kate did two things that weekend.
The first was to visit her doctor and arrange for a new hearing aid to be sent to her. But somehow she knew she was wasting her time. The hearing aid worked in every class except French. It worked at home and it worked at the doctor’s. Try as she might, Kate couldn’t think of any reason why it should act up when she was close to Mr. Spencer. Could there be something in Martin’s ridiculous story about the filling? Could Mr. Spencer have a false tooth or something that was interfering with the signal? But, no. Kate knew that she was dealing with something different, something that had no easy explanation. She kept on thinking about what she had heard. The words had been so vicious, and so deliberate. They echoed in her head, even when she was asleep. The worst thing was, she still wasn’t sure where they had come from. They couldn’t have come from Mr. Spencer himself. She had never actually seen them cross his lips.
And so, on Sunday, she tried to tell her mother what had happened. Tried and failed. It was a bad time of the year for Caroline Evans. She had just set up a complicated computer system for a chain of organic supermarkets. As always, there were teething problems and the moment anything went wrong, she was the one who got the blame. When Kate came into the sitting room after breakfast, her mother was already in a bad mood. The fax had been spitting out pages all morning. Mangoes in Manchester and leeks that had failed to arrive in Leeds.
“Mum . . .”
Caroline Evans looked up from her laptop, a cigarette halfway to her lips. She always smoked when a new system was coming online. The rest of the year she spent trying to quit. “Yes, darling?”
“I need to talk to you about something that’s happening at school.”
“What is it?” Caroline was genuinely concerned. That was the thing about her. She did worry about Kate—when she had time.
“It’s this teacher. And my hearing aid . . .” Kate began, but then the telephone rang and it was the IT manager from the supermarket, and suddenly the conversation was all bytes and modules and ten minutes later Caroline was still arguing on the phone.
At last she hung up. “I’m sorry, darling,” she said. “Now what was it about this teacher?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Kate said. She had decided. She would handle this on her own.
And on Monday, she went back to school with the same resolve. There was a simple solution to her problem. She would talk to Mr. Spencer himself! She would explain the problem to him and between them they would work out what was causing it.
But Mr. Spencer wasn’t at school on Monday.
As soon as she arrived she knew something was wrong. The first class had been canceled and instead there was to be an assembly in the school auditorium. She saw one or two of the teachers looking shaken and upset. As she made her way across the school yard, Martin hurried up to her. “Have you heard?” he whispered. But before he could tell her, Miss Primrose, the music teacher, had stepped between them and Martin could say no more.
There were three hundred and twenty children at Brierly Hall and it was a tight squeeze inside the auditorium. They sat, shoulder to shoulder, while the staff took their places on the stage. Then the principal appeared. His name was Mr. Fellner and normally he was a lively, humorous man. It was said that he was the most popular principal that Brierly Hall had ever had. But today he was grim-faced and serious.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news for you,” he said, and there was something about the tone of his voice that made everyone know that he was about to tell them the very worst news possible. “I would have preferred to tell your parents before I tell you, but unfortunately that won’t be possible because it will be on the television news tonight and I would prefer you to hear it from me first.” He paused. “As some of you may have already noticed, Mr. Spencer is not with us today. The reason for this is that something awful has happened. His wife has died.
“You may be wondering why this should be on the news. Well, I spoke to the police this morning and although it’s a very shocking thing and I’m sure many of you will want to talk about this with your homeroom teachers after this assembly, it would appear that Mrs. Spencer has been murdered.”
A whisper that quickly rose into an excited buzz zigzagged its way through the row
s of children, but for Kate it was as if she had been snatched out of her seat and sent spinning into outer space. Murdered!
“I’m going to kill her!”
It wasn’t possible. Murders happened in books and on television shows. You read about murders in the newspapers or heard about them on the news.
“I’m going to murder her!”
The voice had told her it was going to happen. It had warned her. And she had refused to listen.
“There is no need for any of you to be afraid,” Mr. Fellner was saying. “Geraldine Spencer lived in Stanmore, which is quite a long way from here. As far as we know, from what the police have told us, she was attacked while she was out walking on Stanmore Common. She was attacked . . .”
“With a kitchen knife.”
“. . . with some sort of knife. Possibly it was somebody wanting to rob her. I will of course give you further information when I have it.
“But right now I think it would be appropriate if we put our hands together and prayed. Mr. Spencer has only been with the school for a short time but even so he is still part of the family, here at Brierly Hall. I spoke to him on the telephone briefly this morning and of course he’s completely devastated. He’ll be away for the next few weeks at least, possibly until the end of term, but I’m sure it would be of comfort for him to know that our thoughts are with him. Let’s start with the Lord’s Prayer . . .”
And the school prayed. But not Kate.
She was sick, frightened, confused. A whirl of images flashed through her mind. There was Mr. Spencer, walking down the corridor for the first time. There were his hands with the dark hair reaching almost to his fingers. And again, outside the school, dropping the books while the woman waited for him in his car. With a thrill, Kate realized that she had actually seen Mrs. Spencer, the wife who was now dead, killed with a knife while she was walking in the park. The two of them hadn’t seemed very happy at the time. How could they have known that it was going to be one of their last days together?
How could they have known?
Could they have known?
Could one of them have known?
Kate fainted—and that was something else she thought happened only on TV shows. The room took one lurching spin around her and then jerked away as she collapsed off her chair and onto the floor. Later on, of course, the other children would tease her. Trust a girl to faint just because there’d been a murder. But of course, none of them understood.
Mr. Spencer had murdered his wife. And only Kate knew.
VI.
Strangely enough, it was Martin who first mentioned the word telepathy. Martin didn’t have that many four-syllable words in his vocabulary.
He was talking to Kate the next day after they had all heard the big announcement. By this time, the murder had indeed been reported on the television news and had also appeared in all the newspapers. Most of them had carried photographs of Geraldine Spencer and there had been pictures of George Spencer too in the Daily Mail and the Telegraph. At school, of course, nobody had talked about anything else and it was getting harder and harder to distinguish facts from gossip, gossip from rumor, and rumor from fantastic lies.
But Kate knew this much.
Geraldine Spencer had been stabbed at four o’clock on Saturday afternoon while she was walking her dog, a poodle, on Stanmore Common. The police hadn’t yet found the murder weapon. According to the senior detective who was leading the inquiry, this would be a vital clue if it ever turned up. There had been no witnesses. Geraldine Spencer had been forty-two years old and had been married to George Spencer for seventeen years. There were no children. Surprisingly, Mrs. Spencer was a wealthy woman. It turned out that her father had run a chain of hotels and she had inherited a lot of money a few years before. All this money would go to her husband.
George Spencer was the prime suspect in the murder. He had been interviewed by the police . . . once, or several times. It depended on whom you believed. But it seemed that he had an alibi. He had been at the movies that afternoon. Without the murder weapon, there was absolutely no evidence against him. He was now at home. Alex Burford, who was in Kate’s class and who actually lived near Stanmore, said that his mother had seen Mr. Spencer at the funeral, sobbing uncontrollably and at one point even trying to throw himself into his wife’s grave. But nearly everything Alex said was untrue and nobody believed him now.
Although Kate had been teased nonstop for fainting during the assembly, she had said nothing. At least, not the first day. But by the end of the second she’d had enough, and after the last lesson she’d taken Martin to one side and described everything that had happened—not because she thought he could help but because she simply had to get it off her chest.
At least Martin hadn’t laughed at her. Nor had he refused to believe her. He had listened in silence, scratched his head, and then finally given his opinion.
“This voice you heard,” he said. “If it wasn’t the radio and it wasn’t what he was saying, you don’t think it could have been . . . sort of, what he was thinking? Like telepathy or something?”
“Telepathy?”
“I saw this show on television once. It was about that man who can bend spoons and stuff. Anyway, he did this trick where someone drew a picture on a sheet of paper and sealed it in an envelope. And then he drew the same picture. He said he could read the other person’s mind. He actually did it! Because he was telepathic.”
“But, Martin! I can’t read people’s minds!”
“No. I know. But maybe it has something to do with . . . I don’t know. But the moment you met him you said your hearing aid went all screwy. So maybe for some reason you can’t hear what he says but you can hear what he thinks.”
“That’s crazy . . .” Kate regretted the words the moment they were spoken. Martin looked glum and she realized she’d offended him. Martin knew he was thick. He’d often said as much. But he didn’t like it when people treated him as if he was thick. She reached out and put a hand on his arm. “I mean, it sounds crazy. But . . . I don’t know . . . !”
And the more she thought about it, the more she began to wonder if Martin hadn’t somehow stumbled on the truth.
George Spencer didn’t love his wife. That much Kate knew from the brief sight she had had of them together. The voice had said he was going to murder her, stab her with a kitchen knife. And that was what had happened. Martin was right. The only time the hearing aid acted up was when Mr. Spencer was near. So maybe, impossibly, it had transmitted . . .
... not what he was saying.
What he was thinking.
Kate lifted the receiver out of her top pocket and stared at it. The little silver box seemed so small, so ordinary. Although she depended on it every day of her life, she had never really given it much thought. It was just a machine.
Martin stood up suddenly. He had seen his mother draw up in her BMW convertible. Martin’s parents were divorced, and as he often liked to tell Kate, his mum had gotten the house, the car, the money . . . everything, including him!
“You know,” he muttered,“I hope for your sake you’re not telepathic.”
“What do you mean?” Kate asked.
“Well, if Mr. Spencer did bump off his wife, and you know what he’s thinking, what are you going to do when he comes back?”
VII.
Mr. Spencer came back two weeks before the end of the term. The principal made another speech at assembly the day before he arrived.
“Mr. Spencer has asked to come back before the end of term because he wants his life to return to normal as soon as possible and I am sure that all of us here at Brierly Hall will do everything we can to help him. As I’m sure you all know, the police have been unable to find the wicked person who attacked and killed Geraldine Spencer. Mr. Spencer has of course been questioned about the death of his wife but it’s important that you understand that this is entirely normal in an investigation of this sort and that there is no question that he was in any way involved
. I must ask you, all of you, to be kind and to be sympathetic. Christmas is just a few weeks away. Let’s look forward to that and put this whole dreadful business behind us.”
And there he was, suddenly, almost as if he had never been away. Mr. Spencer was thinner and some people said there was a touch more gray in his hair. He walked more slowly and when he spoke there was a softness, even a sadness, in his voice that hadn’t been there before. There was one other thing that was different about him. He had bought himself new clothes; a new jacket and black shiny shoes that squeaked a little when he walked.
For Kate, French was the first class of the day—and she was dreading it. As she streamed into the classroom with the other children, she saw Martin holding one hand up, two fingers crossed. Even now, she wasn’t sure if he really had taken her seriously. Martin loved science fiction and Marvel comic books and Kate sometimes wondered if he knew where real life ended and fantasy began. Everyone took their seats. Mr. Spencer was standing at the blackboard, writing out the conditional tense of aimer. He turned around and spoke to them.
“I got away with it. I killed the old cow, and the police couldn’t touch me!”
Sitting in the front row, Kate let out a stifled cry. The teacher’s dark eyes were suddenly on her.
“What is it, Kate?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“I’ve got her money. I’m rich! And I’m free of her.” The hearing aid whined.
Kate writhed in her seat. Everyone was looking at her. Mr. Spencer too. She could see the puzzlement in his face. Worse, she could hear it.
“That girl again! What’s wrong with her? Does she know something? No! That’s not possible. But why is she looking at me like that?”
Kate forced herself to look away.
“She’s looking away! It’s almost as if she knows what I’m thinking! No. Don’t be stupid. She doesn’t know anything. The police don’t know anything. The knife! They haven’t found the knife. They’ll never find the knife.”
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