Death in Dulwich

by Alice Castle

  ‘I don’t suppose you two could do me a big favour and just stick around for a few minutes, could you? I have to quickly pick up, er, something, from the suppliers. You can sit in the office, there’s two lovely comfy chairs there. Thanks so much, see you in a minute… or two…’ said Katie, shutting the door behind her.

  It was masterful. Beth definitely owed her friend a big coffee – and a much nicer one than this morning’s effort.

  ‘Well, she was in a hurry, wasn’t she?’ said Beth, shaking her head in mock-astonishment and ushering the other woman towards the tiny office at the side of the exercise studio.

  ‘Let’s make ourselves comfortable. She’ll be back in a second, I’m sure. So, you were saying, you and the Jenkinses are friends? It was so awful, I still can’t believe it,’ said Beth, completely truthfully, as she sat herself down on Katie’s office chair and Judith perched reluctantly on the other.

  ‘I gather you were the one who actually found Alan, er, Dr Jenkins?’ said Judith, curiosity overcoming her obvious qualms. ‘That must have been ghastly.’

  ‘Yes, yes, it was,’ said Beth, swallowing.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask… would it have been quick?’

  Beth glanced at Judith and saw her anguished expression.

  Beth shrugged. ‘To be completely honest, I have no idea. The police haven’t told me anything at all… all I know is what I saw, but I’m sure it would probably have been quick,’ she added, a little unconvincingly.

  She was pretty certain that the large pool of very dark blood meant that Jenkins had lain by the bins, bleeding away quietly, for quite a while. On the plus side – if there was one – he hadn’t seemed to have thrashed about much, as the pool was undisturbed, which probably meant he was unconscious. Beth shook her head to banish the images from her mind.

  ‘How is his family taking it? He was married, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, yes, he was married. His wife is devastated. Poor Ruth,’ said Judith Seasons, but her delivery was formulaic. There was none of the tension in her now that there had been when she’d asked about Alan Jenkins’ death.

  Beth was suddenly alert. Now that she thought about it, if Katie’s husband was suddenly killed, would Beth be prancing around at yoga the next day, or would she be by Katie’s side, handing out tissues, making cups of tea, and offering the few snippets of comfort she could? How good a friend was Judith Seasons? Beth was beginning to think the answer was not a very good one. And could she scent another conundrum, too? Was Judith Mrs Jenkins’ friend, or was she – hard though it was to believe –keener on Dr Jenkins?

  ‘I expect, er, Mrs Jenkins, is being questioned by the police,’ said Beth.

  ‘Questioned? Why would they question her? She wouldn’t have anything to tell them. She had nothing to do with it. He’d had breakfast, then gone off to work like always, and that was… that,’ she said, eyes suddenly glittering with tears.

  ‘Would Mrs Jenkins have been at home?’

  ‘What? No, not on Mondays; she would have been here, at yoga. She works part time, but she has Monday mornings off. The session is at 9, and then we walk round the park afterwards, and we sometimes have lunch… but…’ Judith Seasons had been recounting her normal timetable as though by rote. Then she tailed off.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Beth.

  ‘Well, that’s our usual routine, we’ve been doing it forever. But in fact, Ruth couldn’t make it yesterday. It’s only just struck me. It’s been such a shock, you see.’

  Beth nodded sympathetically, while silently willing Judith to carry on with the story. Obligingly, Judith seemed to shake herself out of her reverie.

  ‘I got a text from Ruth just before the class, saying she was ill – her hayfever had suddenly started playing up. She’s a martyr to it every year,’ said Judith in the bored tones of someone who has never had a reaction herself. ‘She was going to catch up with me in the park, if it stopped. But she never came.’

  Beth tried not to show her excitement. It looked as though Ruth Jenkins was going to join her in the previously horribly exclusive no-alibi club. ‘So, when did you hear the news?’

  ‘Oh, it would have been about 3 or 4pm. Ruth rang me. I could hardly understand what she was saying at first. Then, when I could understand, I couldn’t believe it. Well, you know,’ said Judith, looking bereft again.

  ‘Had you known Dr Jenkins long?’ Beth asked gently.

  ‘Oh, years,’ said Judith, sighing. ‘You know, he was a wonderful man, so scholarly. Brilliant mind. He’d been at Wyatt’s for quite a while, but before that, he’d been doing something quite hush-hush, if you know what I mean. MI5 or MI6, something like that. Terribly important. The Cold War, and all that. He was really high up in Intelligence, you know. But, of course, he never really spoke about it.’

  In that case, how did you even know about it? thought Beth, but she said nothing. Fascinating to think that the leering dinosaur she’d met was the man of mystery she was hearing about now. Move over, James Bond.

  ‘And now we’ll never really know. What a loss, what a loss,’ Judith crooned in distress.

  ‘Awful,’ chimed Beth automatically, but she must have hit a wrong note somewhere because Judith snapped out of her elegiac mood.

  ‘But, of course, I was more Ruth’s friend, really,’ she said quickly, the visceral distress quickly hidden beneath the veneer of the well-bred, leisured lady. She rummaged in her handbag for a calming moment before bringing out a tissue and pressing it carefully to damp eyes. Her immaculate eye make-up had hardly budged, despite the strenuous stretch class and her obvious distress about Dr Jenkins.

  ‘Oh yes, Ruth and I have known each other forever. Our children were at Wyatt’s together, but they’re grown up now, with children of their own.’

  ‘Oh, you have grandchildren? And where are they at school?’

  ‘Wyatt’s, of course,’ said Judith, looking at Beth as though she were mad. ‘Ruth and I both have grand-daughters in Year 2. Our daughters’ children. The prep school is co-ed, you know.’ Her smile was tremulous. ‘Ellen will be broken-hearted about her grandfather,’ Judith added, and tears threatened again.

  But, with a determined movement, she swallowed the emotion. Clearly, if she was going to do any proper crying over Alan Jenkins, it was going to be on her own terms, in private. Whatever she felt was too jagged and raw to be displayed in public.

  ‘Can I get you a glass of water?’ Beth offered, sympathetically. The offer was batted away by a hand heavy with diamond rings. ‘I’m fine, dear. Now where on earth has Katie got to? It’s high time I left.’

  Beth agreed. She needed to get on, too, though she was increasingly daunted by her investigation project. Judith Seasons had shown there was a tangle of generations involved, all probably – save for the grandchildren – with potential motives for bumping off the awful Jenkins.

  And, if he really did have a career as some sort of spy behind him, there could be a whole bunch of oligarchs and assorted evil world leaders champing to get him as well. Though, surely this idea that he was an older, creepier Daniel Craig was madness? True, if he was ex-MI5, he’d need a convincing cover story. Maybe he was a brilliant actor. Beth considered it for a moment. No. She was sure she hadn’t been imagining anything. Maybe he was more careful with family and friends. Or, could it just be that Judith, thirty years her senior, had different expectations of men – and a very rosy, not to say fanciful, view of Dr Jenkins. No doubt he’d loved dropping hints about his own importance – Beth could completely see him doing that, even if genuine involvement in spycraft was stretching it too far.

  At that moment, they heard trainers on the stairs. Two seconds later, Katie bounded into the room, glowing with health and looking like her own best advertisement. Immediately, Judith Seasons’ blonded hair and careful yoga kit looked a little overdone.

  ‘All sorted. Thanks so much for holding the fort, I really appreciate it.’ Katie smiled widely at both women.

  There was a
polite mumble of ‘not at alls’ as Beth and Judith Seasons collected their belongings. Beth tried to be as quick as possible, so that she could follow the older lady out, but by the time she’d changed shoes, the downstairs door was clanging shut on Judith’s retreating form. No prizes for guessing that Judith was extremely glad to get away from her questions.

  ‘Did you get anywhere?’ asked Katie.

  ‘You’re amazing, Katie, thanks so much. That couldn’t have been better organised if we’d planned for weeks. I’m a little bit further. You won’t believe this, but I really think that Judith and the horrible Dr Jenkins could have been an item.’

  ‘No! The perv? And my lovely Judith? Are you sure?’

  ‘Well she didn’t admit anything, but there was an undercurrent…’

  ***

  Beth was still wondering what on earth Judith Seasons saw in Alan Jenkins later that evening, as she sat with Ben at the scrubbed kitchen table. Supper had been cleared away, Ben had been dragged through his homework, and it was the time of day when they usually played a card game together before the bedtime routine kicked in. Tonight, as a special concession for well memorised spellings, Beth was allowing Ben extra screen time. Little did he know that this was because she was desperate to get online herself. She needed to do some serious digging into the life and times of Dr Alan Jenkins.

  There was something horrifying about the ease with which you could find stuff out these days, she thought, as she rapidly compiled a dossier of hard facts to add to all the speculation and wild surmises she’d been making. Once life had revolved around tiny communities, where everyone had known each other’s business. Now, no-one had any idea who their neighbours were – unless they decided to delve. The internet was the modern village well. With a few persistent dips, and a lot of cross-referencing to make sure, you could find out anything about anybody.

  It all boiled down to this: Jenkins was an Oxford graduate who’d had a long career as a civil servant before joining Wyatt’s a few years before. Even James Bond would probably put ‘civil servant’ down as his job when he had to fill in an application for car insurance – unless Moneypenny did that for him – but Jenkins seemed to have eked out his own career in the relative safety of the Department of Education rather than in the wilder reaches of the security services.

  Judith, if she ever decided to Google him, was going to be very disappointed. That’s not to say it wasn’t a distinguished career. He finished up with an OBE and then immediately fell into the Wyatt’s archive job. This was puzzling. Depending on what he’d actually done at the Department of Education for all those years, archive management seemed like a sideways move. But, as his children – and now grandchild – went to Wyatt’s, he undoubtedly knew the school backwards.

  It looked like a straightforward case of Dulwich influence. Jenkins had been friendly with the Bursar’s wife for years – presumably he was close to the Bursar himself as well. It didn’t take a genius to see how Jenkins had snaffled the Wyatt’s job.

  Beth went through the bath, bed, and book routine on autopilot, and thankfully Ben was tired and co-operative for once, without his usual million questions and bottomless bag of delaying tactics.

  As she smoothed his dark hair and then turned out his light, Beth sighed. She couldn’t complain about Dulwich influence herself. The only reason she and her boy were sitting pretty in their own little house in Pickwick Road – a stone’s throw from Ben’s primary and the Endowment schools, and right behind the Village itself – was because the estate agent was a friend of a friend and had tipped her the wink before the property hit the market. There was no way she could have afforded more than the asking price, if there had been the usual Dulwich feeding frenzy.

  These Pickwick Road houses, mostly three bedroom properties (though a few had managed to cram in extra bedrooms with cunning loft conversions), were full of odd angles and tended to be pretty snug, but she loved hers. It was a sanctuary for her and Ben, and she didn’t care if it was the scruffiest house in the road; which it was, by a long way. He had just enough space in the courtyard garden to kick a ball, if he didn’t mind it bouncing straight back at him at high velocity; she had a spare room for her brother Josh’s sporadic visits; and space enough to think and dream. It was everything they needed.

  Probably her own job at Wyatt’s had come about, indirectly, through Dulwich influence, too, she reasoned. Though she had no connection with anyone at Wyatt’s now, and had gone to school herself in nearby Blackheath, her brother had been at Wyatt’s and her mother was still living in Dulwich, playing Bridge with anyone who was anybody, which no doubt included a few Endowment trustees. Anyone looking in at Beth from the outside would say that this south London apple had not fallen far from the tree.

  In fact, Beth knew that few gales had blown through the orchard she was blessed to have grown in. If had not been for the death of her beloved husband, James, seven years ago now, when Ben was a rambunctious toddler, she would have had the cushiest life ever.

  James, James, she reflected. If Mrs Jenkins was feeling a tenth of her sorrow, now, then Beth’s heart truly went out to her. James had been so young and had so much to live for. She still shuddered at the thought that a few headaches and a dizzy spell or two had led so rapidly to his death in a hospice. If only he’d been a bit more of a moaner. If only she had been on the case. If she’d just Googled his symptoms straight away… Who knew a brain tumour could hide its terrible, aggressive strength for so long under such a weedy bunch of ailments?

  But what-ifs were worse than useless. They robbed her of perilously acquired serenity and acceptance, and robbed Ben of the stable, emotionally-balanced mother he needed. If you only had one parent, it had to be a good one.

  Thoughts of James coloured Beth’s world in bittersweet hues and, though her sleep was not too disturbed, she was glad to shake off the duvet in the morning and leap – or stagger, perhaps more accurately – into a new day.

  It wasn’t until she was trailing back home from dropping Ben at school, planning to spend the next few hours on her other neglected writing projects, that she suddenly stopped dead in her tracks. The Bursar. He had a motive. If Judith Seasons had been having an affair with Dr Jenkins, then Tom Seasons, Wyatt’s dependable, reliable, jovial Bursar, had an excellent reason to stab him.

  It was the first time that Beth had come up with a decent motive for the killing. Tangled tales of MI5, oligarchs, and a huge extended family fell away when set next to an easy explanation like jealousy. All right, certain parts of her theory were still so flimsy as to be positively diaphanous – she had no real idea whether Judith was sleeping with Dr Jenkins; it was just her intuition jangling. And she also had no clue at all whether Tom Seasons was the psychotically jealous type. Again, she’d only met him briefly at her job interview, where he’d been as nice as pie, in a steely yet cuddly way. He’d asked searching questions, he’d listened politely to her answers, and ultimately, he’d given her the job. He’d even asked her, at the end of the session, whether she had any questions to ask. She was kicking herself, now, that it had never once occurred to her to ask whether he ever felt a red mist descending, or whether he was unhealthily fixated on faithfulness in a long marriage. Her lame query about car parking permits just didn’t cut the mustard at all.

  Mustard. That made her think, again, of Jenkins’ tweed. If she hadn’t seen the body herself, would she feel such a deep connection to the whole business? But, even if she hadn’t found the corpse herself, she still would have been horrified that violent death had been so close, without her knowing until she stumbled across it or being able to do a thing to stop it. That made her wonder what would have happened if she had left the office earlier that day and run across the murderer herself. Would she have been the one who’d got stabbed, instead of Jenkins?

  The idea sent shivers down her spine, but it only made sense if it was a random murder, a madman roaming the playground searching for a victim. That didn’t seem to be the Wyatt’s w
ay. Everything in the school was thought through, and this murder seemed that way, too.

  If it was personal all along and Jenkins was the intended victim, would she have been killed anyway, just because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time? It was terrifying, and the underlying cause for all her uneasiness. She just had to find the murderer as quickly as possible. Ben could have been orphaned that day. She knew her brother and her mother would do their best to fill the void for Ben if anything did happen to her, but she had a duty to look after herself, for his sake. The murderer was still out there – and she could be in danger.

  That, and the fact that she was without an alibi for the crucial times, had to drive her on. A prison sentence could take her away from Ben almost as effectively as the murderer could.

  If she had died in that playground, either with Jenkins or instead of him, there would have been another suspect, though. Someone else would eventually have stumbled across them.

  Who else had been around? No-one, when she virtually tripped over the corpse. The dinner lady and the gap year student – but they had popped up a safe few minutes after she had. But, yes, she had seen Dr Grover just before she’d made her grim find. She’d run right into him. What had he been doing there? As headmaster, he had a right to prowl the playground as freely as he liked, but she didn’t believe he had time for aimless wandering. The more she thought about it, the odder it suddenly seemed that he’d turned up there, of all places, just before her macabre discovery. And that flash of hot pink in the distance – Janice, surely, in that delectable cashmere sweater?

  Had she even mentioned these two facts to the policeman, Harry York? She wasn’t sure. And they might be crucial. She fumbled around for the card that York had given her. But, like everything in this house, from Ben’s homework to her own front door keys, it vaporised as soon as she started to look for it. Having patted down all her coats and peered in vain through the stack of newspapers – overdue for recycling; a sign in itself that she was slipping from her normal OCD-esque standards of housewifely efficiency – she couldn’t find it anywhere.