The Last Girl

by Casey, Jane

  ‘What were you trying to teach them?’ I asked.

  ‘Maths and physics.’ He grinned, showing white, even teeth. His face was so thin that the effect was more death’s head than Hollywood, but once it might have been the latter. ‘You know, maths and physics aren’t exactly crowd-pleasing subjects at the best of times. They’re also not that popular to teach, which was why I was able to get that job in the first place. I had experience and a good reference from my old school, so the head was willing to overlook what she called “teething problems”.’ He pulled a face at the phrase; I guessed it had been understatement of the century. ‘I used to love my job but I didn’t miss it when I left. I wasn’t sorry, even though I ended up being signed off work for months because I had a breakdown. The good old welfare state came to the rescue, with not quite enough to live on for not quite as long as I needed it.’

  ‘At least you had something coming in.’ Derwent didn’t sound terribly moved.

  ‘I had a bit, but it was a struggle to make ends meet. Not like now. Now I’m doing really well for myself.’ He smiled at the expression on my face. ‘It might not look like much to you, but this place even has a bathroom I don’t have to share. It’s all mine.’

  ‘Going up in the world.’ Derwent leaned forward, his eyes narrowed in concentration. Hunting. ‘Tell me more about the students you teach here.’

  ‘Worried for their safety? Afraid I might be molesting them?’ Blacker was looking wary, a pulse jumping in his throat. ‘You’re all the same, aren’t you? Give a dog a bad name.’

  ‘It’s a reasonable question.’

  ‘It’s a question you’d ask if you were concerned about their safety,’ Blacker said harshly. ‘It’s something you’d be curious about if you thought I was guilty.’

  ‘It’s habit,’ I said. ‘DI Derwent likes to know everything about everyone.’

  Blacker gave me a look that showed what he thought of that particular line: not much. But it had taken his mind of Derwent for a moment, long enough for him to recover his temper. He fixed his eyes on the wall just above Derwent’s head. ‘I teach students here, but I’ve got rules. The first one, and the most important, is no girls, ever. No students here on their own – they come in twos, or I go to see them at their house with a parent in the same room with us at all times. If one of them doesn’t turn up when they’re supposed to be here, I go to the library or one of the local coffee shops with the other one. We stay in public at all times. I make it clear from the start I’m not prepared to be alone with them.’

  ‘Doesn’t that raise people’s suspicions?’

  ‘Mostly they’re glad I’ve said it first. They don’t want to look paranoid, but they’re protective of their kids. Rightly so. There are plenty of weirdos out there.’

  ‘And plenty of students in need of extra tuition?’

  ‘I usually have about six boys to teach – more coming up to the GCSEs and A levels, obviously, but I also do special tutoring for the Oxbridge entrance exams. I advertise locally, but most of my business is generated by personal recommendations. I am a very good teacher and I don’t hate tutoring, especially when the boys get good results. I make enough money to survive. What else do you want to know?’

  ‘Got a girlfriend?’

  ‘Not at the moment.’

  ‘Since you went to court?’

  ‘There have been women. Casually. Nothing serious.’ He ran his hands through his hair, frustrated. ‘Women, Inspector. Not girls.’

  ‘She was pretty.’ Derwent’s comment was something of a non sequiter, but neither Blacker nor I had any trouble with following his train of thought.

  ‘Isobel Sairey was fourteen at the time we were supposed to be having an affair. I haven’t been attracted to a fourteen-year-old since I was fifteen or there abouts. She was a pretty girl – she probably still is. But I didn’t see her that way. She was just one of my students. If I thought about her at all before she made her allegations, it was just to wonder whether she’d understood the answer when she asked me a question.’

  ‘You must have been aware that your presence in a girls’ school could cause trouble. A nice-looking fellow like you, and young, and all those teenage girls with their hormones raging out of control.’

  ‘I was a member of staff. I wasn’t there to act as a focus for their emotional confusion, or whatever you’re suggesting.’

  ‘That was what happened though, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I couldn’t control what the girls thought or how they expressed it.’ Blacker seemed to have shrunk into himself. His voice was fainter, as if he was losing his hold on the conversation.

  ‘You couldn’t help it.’

  ‘I don’t think I could have, no.’ The brown eyes were fixed on Derwent’s. Look, I have nothing to hide. ‘I never talked about my private life. I never asked any of the girls about theirs – I didn’t even ask if they’d had a nice weekend, mainly because I didn’t care about the answer. I kept it about the work. I was pleasant to them when they behaved in class and did their homework, but I would never have been someone they would have wanted to confide in. I left that kind of thing to my female colleagues and counted myself lucky that I didn’t have to think about it.’

  ‘But you should have been thinking about it.’

  ‘Yeah, in retrospect I was naive. I don’t have any sisters. I went to a boys’ school. I did have girlfriends, then and later, but I probably didn’t realise how highly strung teenage girls can be. I’d just never been around them enough to know what they were like.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘If you’re expecting me to be bitter about what Isobel Sairey did to me, you’re going to be disappointed. She was young and confused, and she didn’t understand the consequences of her actions. I made peace with that a long time ago. When she’s older, she’ll realise what she did, if she doesn’t already. I wouldn’t want to have that hanging over me.’

  ‘You don’t blame her for the fact you had to give up your job?’ I said, surprised.

  ‘Not directly. She was completely innocent. There was nothing malicious in what she said or did. She got out of her depth very quickly and I think she would have liked to stop everything long before it got to court, but once she was in the system the legal process had to carry on, regardless of what she would have liked. Believe it or not, I felt sorry for her at times.’

  ‘But not all the time.’

  ‘No. Sometimes I wanted to kill her.’ He gave me another grin and I saw the easy and unconscious charm that had led a student to fall head over heels in love with him. ‘Not literally, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously. You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t angry with her.’

  ‘I’ll admit, I didn’t think too fondly of her when I couldn’t pay my mortgage and my flat was repossessed. And when I was convicted I really wasn’t thinking too much about her well-being. I was far more concerned with my own. Then, to compound the country-and-western doom and gloom, my girlfriend dumped me while I was inside.’

  I couldn’t help being amused. ‘Did your dog pine for you and die?’

  ‘I didn’t have a dog. Shame, really. Otherwise I might have got the full set.’

  ‘But you, in your Christ-like wisdom, forgave her for her sins,’ Derwent drawled.

  ‘I am a Christian. So what?’

  Derwent chuckled. ‘I should have known. Did you catch it in prison?’

  ‘I was already a practising Christian. God was part of my life. He became more important while I was inside, but it wasn’t a new thing for me.’ He didn’t sound awkward or embarrassed when he talked about it – more matter-of-fact. For most people I met, talking about religion made them far more uncomfortable than talking about sex.

  I wouldn’t have put it as crudely as Derwent, but I was slightly surprised that a young man like Christopher Blacker, with his experiences, had a faith strong enough to stand up to Derwent’s scorn. I looked around the room again, trying to see any clues. No crosses on the wall, no theological books in the
bookcase, except for C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters and it was shelved with the Narnia books so I was inclined to give myself a pass for having missed it.

  ‘I can’t say I’ve had the same blessing. I’m an atheist myself,’ Derwent said. And proud of it, I filled in silently. ‘I may be wrong, but I thought the whole thing was about forgiveness.’

  ‘That’s a big part of it.’

  Derwent let me ask the obvious question. ‘So why weren’t you able to forgive Philip Kennford for what he did or didn’t do on your behalf during the trial?’

  ‘I’m a practising Christian. I didn’t say I was a good one.’

  ‘All this and a stand-up comedian too.’

  Blacker sighed, losing interest in humour. ‘Look, the trial was a classic he-said, she-said thing. I had the truth on my side and not much more. I had character references and as much in the way of alibis as I could scrape together, but Isobel was too vague about the details for me to be able to contradict her directly. And character references mean fuck-all in a room full of people who’ve already decided you’re a predator who took advantage of a teenage girl. Not to mention the tabloids. Je-sus. They had me convicted long before the jury got around to it.’

  ‘From what I’ve read, the prosecution case was mainly based on her allegations,’ I said, knowing that Derwent hadn’t bothered to look at the papers properly. ‘There wasn’t a lot of evidence to corroborate what she said.’

  ‘That worked against me, unfortunately. It seemed straight forward to me – if there was no evidence it was because what she was saying wasn’t true. It hadn’t happened so there were no witnesses; there was no paper trail. The prosecutor made it look as if I’d been too clever to leave anything they could trace – no text messages, no emails, nothing that could be recovered and produced in court. It didn’t seem to occur to the jury that I’d never sent her any texts or emails and that was why there weren’t any for them to see.’

  ‘So it came down to her telling stories. That should have been easier to contradict.’

  ‘You’d think so, but it wasn’t. The prosecutor struggled with it, but not as much as I did. We both had our hands tied because she was so hazy in her evidence. You couldn’t prove what had happened either way. She said something had happened. I said it hadn’t. One of us had to be lying.’

  ‘And your barrister didn’t push her to be more specific in her account, so you’d have a chance to prove you weren’t there at the times she suggested you were?’

  ‘Kennford sat on his arse and let her spin a fairy tale. He didn’t seem to think it was his place to intervene.’

  ‘There are limits to what they’re allowed to do,’ I said. ‘It’s not like American law shows where the witness gets interrupted every two seconds by the defence lawyers objecting to something or other.’

  ‘I know that. I do have some experience of the legal system in this country now.’ He rubbed his face again. ‘He had an opportunity to take her on when he cross-examined her. He could have taken her through her evidence and shown the places where it just didn’t add up. But he didn’t bother.’

  ‘Did you ask him about it?’

  ‘Of course. As soon as we left court for the next break, we met in an interview room nearby and he told me I had to trust him. He said I had to let him do his job and wait to be released. He said if he put Isobel under any pressure, she’d snap, and he’d look like an arsehole in front of the jury. “We need them on our side, Mr Blacker. We need them to think we’re honourable, decent men. Gentlemen, if you like. And being tough on Miss Sairey isn’t going to help our cause.” Bullshit.’ The word exploded from him, genuine anger in his tone.

  ‘You said yourself that she was an innocent. Vulnerable. He might have been right about how the jury would have felt about him attacking her.’

  ‘There are ways of showing that someone is lying without accusing them of it outright. There were questions he could have asked her that would have told the jury a lot, even if she didn’t realise it. He didn’t have to crush her; I wasn’t asking for that. I could see the sense in not upsetting her too much. I mean, she had everyone on her side from the start without even trying. I was the one who had to prove my innocence, whatever they say about being innocent until proven guilty. She was giving evidence by videolink and the judge kept having to ask her to speak up, but it wasn’t put on. She was genuine, you know? Not affected. Not looking for attention. Mortified by where she was and what was happening, but that made it all the more effective. Either she believed what she was saying or she couldn’t bring herself to back down with her parents there in the public gallery and the police sitting in court, waiting for her evidence to put me away. Even though I knew she wasn’t telling the truth, I was almost taken in a couple of times.’

  ‘But you’re sure it wasn’t malicious.’

  ‘As sure as I can be. There was no reason for her to be malicious. It wasn’t a case of getting revenge on me for being hard on her because I hadn’t been. I hadn’t singled her out for attention in any way, in fact. When two police officers turned up at my house one weekend to tell me about the allegations, I couldn’t remember who she was at first.’

  ‘Maybe that was the problem. No one likes being ignored.’

  ‘Do you honestly think she’d accuse me of having an affair with her just to get me to notice her?’

  ‘It’s possible. Haven’t you ever considered that?’

  ‘Not seriously. I wouldn’t have thought even a teenage girl was capable of that.’

  ‘If this job teaches you only one thing, it’s that people are capable of anything.’ For once, Derwent’s mordant cynicism suited the mood.

  ‘Well, by the time she got to court I’d definitely noticed her, but I don’t think she was enjoying herself too much. I thought she was going to collapse a couple of times during her examination-in-chief, even though the prosecutor couldn’t have been nicer or more gentle with her. She got over the nerves in time. She had this elaborate fantasy about the two of us, incredibly detailed, and she genuinely loved the opportunity to talk about it. I mean, it was insane, the things she said we’d done together. What I was supposed to have said to her. According to the prosecution I got a kick out of controlling her. I was supposed to have spun it out, this seduction process, so there were only two or three incidences of actual sex in her account. The rest of it was all handholding and swearing undying love. I don’t know where she got it – pure Mills and Boon, most of it – but she was so sure of herself. Kennford just let her talk. His cross-examination was useless. And Isobel had two completely idiotic friends who worshipped her. They were willing to swear that she was telling the truth. I think they believed it too. I’d just come out of court every time and go into this horrible little room, this overheated hole, and listen to my solicitor and Kennford tell me what a bad impression the witness had made on the jury and how the whole thing was working out exactly as they’d planned, and I knew. I knew they were fucking it up and I was in real trouble.’

  ‘But you didn’t get anywhere when you tried to say that.’

  ‘No. Like I said, they just told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. I can still see it.’ He looked into the distance, a wry smile twisting his mouth. ‘It was January. Bleak as you like outside, rain or sleet every day. Inside it was worse. Someone had forgotten to take down the Christmas decorations in that room, and there was a bit of tinsel above one of the pictures that stuck up at an angle. It annoyed me. But it helped, too.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Every time Kennford ignored what I was saying or told me I didn’t know what I was talking about and I just had to trust him, I’d stare at the tinsel instead of at him. I didn’t want to have to look at his smug face. I just concentrated on the decorations, hating them, particularly this bit of tinsel.’ He laughed. ‘I’d promised myself that at the end of the trial I’d go back and get it. Save it as a souvenir. Not that I would really want or need any memories of the trial, but I wanted to have the
satisfaction of ripping it down and stamping on it, or whatever, just to let off steam.’

  ‘I take it that’s not how it panned out.’

  ‘No, in that I wasn’t allowed to leave court after I was found guilty. The judge sentenced me there and then. He’d already heard all the character evidence during the trial, he said. All about my personal circumstances. He didn’t need to know anything else about me to know that he was going to throw the book at me.’

  ‘But Kennford would have had a chance to reply. There’s always mitigation.’

  ‘He was able to talk about the offence, but not about what a great bloke I was. That was a bit awkward because I was still saying I hadn’t done it, so he was trying to talk about how the girl wasn’t harmed by her experiences and how it was a far less serious crime than proper rape because she’d been a willing if naive participant, and I was sitting there shaking my head and saying “no” as loudly as I dared until the judge got tired of it and sent me down.’

  ‘But if he’d already done the character evidence during the trial, there wasn’t a lot else he could say. Especially if the judge was predisposed to be hostile.’

  ‘He did a crap job. It was half-hearted at best. His junior told me afterwards he’d been preparing for another trial during the speeches at the end so he hadn’t paid too much attention to which way the wind was blowing. He thought we couldn’t lose.’

  ‘That was foolish of him.’

  ‘Wasn’t it.’ Blacker matched Derwent’s tone, flatly ironic. After a second the inspector grinned. He liked Blacker, I realised, and he believed his story, which was more important. So did I. Blacker had deserved better than to end up in a hovel teaching sums to well-off dunces and privileged high-fliers.

  ‘So you did a year.’

  ‘I got four years, which meant I’d be looking at applying for parole in two. So I effectively served half of a sentence I didn’t deserve.’

  ‘You must have started preparing for the appeal the minute you got sentenced.’