Death in Dulwich

by Alice Castle

  ‘Well, in my case, it was… death. So, it means I do understand. Exactly how you feel,’ said Beth, tentatively reaching out a hand across the table, where Mrs Jenkins was fidgeting with the small lace table runner, her wedding band gleaming against the dark oak.

  The more that Beth’s fingers extended, the more Mrs Jenkins retreated, taking the table runner with her and pulling the oval platter of biscuits across the table. Beth gave up the effort and Mrs Jenkins stopped dragging, leaving the biscuits mercifully still on the table.

  ‘You don’t understand! Nobody could. How on earth could you think that you do?’ hissed Mrs Jenkins in a low voice. She was now pleating the lace runner in her restless fingers, creasing it badly then attempting to smooth it out. ‘All those years… year after year after year… with Alan,’ she finished.

  ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to…’ Beth didn’t quite know how to apologise, because she wasn’t sure how she’d offended. Mrs Jenkins, once again, seemed to be metres deep in some sort of murky past that only she could see.

  Beth wondered how on earth she was going to get the subject round to Monday, and Mrs Jenkins’ whereabouts at the crucial time when she should have been performing Sun Salutations with Judith Seasons.

  Now that she thought about it, the women didn’t seem very well-matched as yoga partners. Seasons was willowy and athletic, while Mrs Jenkins was of a more comfortable build. More importantly, Judith Seasons was every inch a modern woman who might be sixty-something but wasn’t going even into middle age without a massive fight, let alone embracing a comfortable retirement. Mrs Jenkins, meanwhile, seemed to be firmly mired in the past, from the dated décor of her home to her attitude to family life.

  Beth looked at the woman, who’d now picked up a Rich Tea and was mechanically munching her way through it, transparently miles away. It looked like something she did many times a day. She was pretty sure Judith Seasons would not have been seen dead with a biscuit, even one as cheerless as a Rich Tea. But having radically different attitudes to carbs didn’t mean the women couldn’t be friendly, she supposed.

  ‘I could easily call Mrs Seasons…’ Beth mentioned her again and hurried on before Mrs Jenkins could protest. ‘I know you usually see her on Mondays, but you didn’t see her this week, did you? Were you busy on Monday?’

  ‘I was at the school… Meetings. It’s always meetings now. Strategy, targets, you name it… ridiculous. And they change the name about once a week, too – special needs, learning support. Children used to be fine, or they were plain backward. At least we agreed on that. Alan and I,’ Mrs Jenkins clarified.

  Beth paused, suddenly realising that Mrs Jenkins had unceremoniously dumped her own Ben in the ‘backward’ bin. She wasn’t happy with that. A slight reluctance to read, which the school had assured her would be ironed out in months, was not the same as being ‘backward’. She could feel her hackles rising, and knew she was going to find it very hard, now, to stop herself from heartily disliking Mrs Jenkins. Anyone who disparaged Ben wounded her to the quick. It was also rather horrifying that someone working in this sensitive department should have such outmoded ideas. But, Beth supposed, at least Mrs Jenkins had had that in common with her husband. They both seemed to be dinosaurs, in their own different ways.

  Beth marvelled that, all year, she’d thought this woman was such a lovely teacher and a really nurturing figure for Ben. There was none of that on display here, only a decided coldness and a frightening kind of deep, rather sinister depression which worried her – for Mrs Jenkins herself, and for all the children in her care. Mind you, she was at home, which Beth supposed meant that either Mrs Jenkins or the school itself had signed her off, realising that tackling lively nine and ten-year-olds was not the best thing for her at the moment. That was a relief, at any rate.

  It didn’t really seem a good idea to leave Mrs Jenkins alone with her sombre thoughts, much as she was beginning to dislike her. Beth was just wondering what on earth to do when the doorbell rang. Mrs Jenkins now seemed utterly sunk in gloom, so Beth trotted to the front door herself and opened it.

  On the doorstep was the beautifully blonded Judith Seasons. Her hair shone in the spring sunshine and seemed blinding against the darkness of the hall. ‘Oh, it’s you – the girl from yoga, isn’t it?’ Judith said, visibly taken aback. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘I just dropped some of Dr Jenkins’ belongings round… from the office, you know, at Wyatt’s,’ Beth said. Lowering her voice, she added, ‘I’m glad you’re here. I don’t think Mrs Jenkins is in a good place.’

  ‘Well, of course she’s not,’ said Judith Seasons, shaking her head at the girl’s stupidity. ‘Her husband has just died, you know. No doubt you have to get on,’ she added pointedly, looking back at the still-open front door. ‘I’ll take care of her now.’

  Beth loitered in the hall for as long as she could, hoping to hear some significant interplay between the women, but the most she got was a slightly distant, ‘Oh, it’s you, Judith,’ from Mrs Jenkins.

  ‘Yes, dear, I’ll just put the kettle on. And I don’t think we need any more of these biscuits, do we?’ bustled Judith Seasons. Beth felt genuinely sorry for Mrs Jenkins.

  ***

  Back in the archive office later, and doing a desultory sort-out of the contents of the carton she’d emptied earlier, Beth reflected on two things. First, no-one had noticed her absence from her post at all. She could have been elsewhere all day long and she wasn’t sure that anyone would have found out, or even cared. Secondly, her meeting with Mrs Jenkins hadn’t been completely wasted. She had at least established where the woman was on the crucial morning. And Beth was quite proud of the way she’d managed to talk her way into the gloomy, oppressive house and then get some answers.

  This led Beth to an important conclusion. She’d had her doubts about pursuing her own investigation into Dr Jenkins’ death, and she hadn’t forgotten York’s warning last night, about the possible consequences of meddling. But she had a very good reason to persist. She was still number one suspect, as far as she could see.

  Today had also taught her the important lesson that she had the liberty to carry on investigating. No-one could call her job exactly pressured. At some stage, she imagined, either the Headmaster or the Bursar was going to decide to remember she was there and do something about her role. But until that happened, there didn’t seem much to stop her pootling about as much as she saw fit.

  This made her feel guilty, as she was taking the school’s money (not that she had been paid yet) and, so far, could not be said to have earned it. It went against the grain. Beth was a hard-working person and really enjoyed getting her teeth into something. She resolved that she would definitely do some proper archive-type work tomorrow. But until then, she was going to concentrate on the mystery right in front of her.

  First of all, she had to establish whether Mrs Jenkins really had been at a meeting at the infants’ school. It was easy enough to say something like that, just to put everyone off the scent, but had she actually turned up? Beth supposed the police were able to check things like this in a matter of moments, and normally she’d have a very difficult time following in their footsteps. But handily enough, Beth had a good excuse to call in on the Learning Support department after picking up Ben that afternoon.

  She was privately still fuming about Mrs Jenkins’ description of her son as ‘backward’. Although the woman hadn’t directed this harsh definition entirely at Ben, Beth was finding it very difficult not to take it personally. But she didn’t want him to fall further behind with his reading. So, it made perfect sense to pop along and double check that he’d be getting his session next Thursday, even if it wasn’t – and she really hoped it wasn’t – with Mrs Jenkins. How hard was it going to be to drop some sort of question casually into the conversation which would nail down the other woman’s whereabouts once and for all?

  So, at the Village School that afternoon, Ben sulkily scuffed his new shoes
in the playground while Beth went about her mission. She wished fervently she were either sheltering behind a nice, official uniform, or that she was a more outgoing type. If she had been, say, an uber-Mummy like Belinda McKenzie – the terror of the school gates – she would have thought nothing of coming right out and cross-questioning Miss Griffin, the slightly bumptious head of Learning Support. As it was, Miss Griffin deployed her usual shiny imperviousness to all Beth’s approaches, honed by years of fobbing off anxious parents desperate to get to the bottom of their children’s issues. The more you defined the problem, the more people expected you to solve it. Therefore, Miss Griffin was all about ducking and diving, avoiding naming names, and swerving away from concrete pronouncements.

  This partly stemmed from the fact that, when Miss Griffin had studied psychology at Sussex in the 90s, ‘ology’ subjects had been seen in some circles as a bit woolly. She had learned to be defensive about her hard-won qualifications. But she was now cresting a wave of newfound tenderness and sympathy for children who were on the autistic spectrum, had processing issues, were dyspraxic, dyslexic, or suffering from dyscalculia. The reason was not a million miles away from the fact that these children now got up to 25 per cent extra time in exams.

  It hadn’t taken the pushy parents of Dulwich, or the high-performing feeder schools that served them, much time to connect the dots and there were now vast numbers of children trooping in and out of special needs departments at all the local schools, while the exam results were zooming ever upwards. Twenty-five per cent more time didn’t correlate to 25% higher marks – but it certainly didn’t hurt. Miss Griffin wasn’t about to let this pleasant upswing in her department’s popularity change by allowing too much light to fall on its inner workings.

  ‘There is an issue of confidentiality surrounding all staff meetings, as I am sure you are aware, Miss Haldane,’ said Miss Griffin with a rubbery smile, a necklace of brightly coloured wooden beads bobbing on her bony chest as she spoke. ‘I’m really not at liberty to say whether any of us attended at all.’

  ‘Seriously? There was a meeting but you can’t say whether anyone attended it? What sort of meeting would it be with no-one at it?’ Beth smiled, willing Miss Griffin to share the joke.

  Miss Griffin, who thought a meeting with only herself present would be the ideal time-saving scenario, did bend her lips upwards, but only the most charitable of observers would have defined what subsequently happened to her face as a smile.

  ‘I’m not sure why you are so interested in a discussion which didn’t involve your son or any issues to do with him?’ The lilt at the end of her sentence made the words, in themselves quite harmless, seem more pointed.

  Beth thought furiously but she could not come up with a single justifiable reason for Miss Griffin to divulge any information at all. Luckily, just as she was cursing herself again for her lack of Sherlockian cunning, Miss Griffin’s phone pinged. She read the text and immediately got to her feet. ‘Excuse me for just one moment, Miss Haldane, this is urgent,’ she said importantly, bustling out of the room.

  Beth didn’t waste a second, but shot out of her seat and peered at the other woman’s laptop, quickly jogging the cursor to make sure the screen didn’t go dark. She was in luck. A still-open window showed the minutes of the Monday morning meeting. One of Miss Griffin’s ways of making sure everything went smoothly was to assume command of all such tasks. History is written by the victors, after all.

  Sure enough, there was a list of attendees, and Miss Brown, aka Mrs Jenkins, was on it. But, more importantly, at the top of the document it said in bold: Learning Support Meeting, Monday 16th March, 9.30am to 10.45am.

  Mrs Jenkins had had a meeting, yes. But it hadn’t started until 9.30 and she’d been free from 10.45 onwards. Yet she’d told her friend she was busy all morning, and missed their usual lunch, too. The Village School was, what, seven minutes’ walk from the gates of Wyatt’s? Ten minutes, if you were hopping. Five minutes, if you were in a hurry.

  Mrs Jenkins didn’t have an alibi either.

  Beth collected a disgruntled Ben from the playground and left the school just as Miss Griffin bustled back to her office to find it empty. ‘Well!’ she said. These parents. They were as bad as their children, half the time.

  Beth, meanwhile, was meandering home with Ben, wondering if she’d ever get to the bottom of all this. She now had Mrs Jenkins vying with her teacher Prime Suspects for the post of murderer. Was anything she was doing making things clearer, or was she just blundering about, muddying the already dangerously opaque waters?

  Chapter Nine

  Just as well she had resolved to get down to some proper archive work at last, Beth thought the next morning, as she sat on the floor surrounded by piles of documents. Some of the stuff that had come out of the box she’d used for Jenkins’ belongings had looked quite interesting, but she’d promised herself she’d clear some of the central floor space first, just to make it easier to get around her lair. She was deep in an old ledger, which seemed to show nothing more exciting than who had supplied Wyatt’s with provisions after 1921, when there was a knock at the door.

  Even if she hadn’t been immersed in her reading, Beth would probably have jumped a mile. It was the first time anyone had come to the door… apart from Inspector York, of course. For some reason, he didn’t count as a threat. She leapt up, brushed a bit of dust from her jeans – her outfits had become steadily more casual as she’d realised how little scrutiny she was under – and she hurried to the door.

  To her astonishment, there on the threshold of the archive office was the deceptively cuddly figure of Mrs Jenkins, looking a little like Mrs Tiggywinkle in a capacious-looking mohair coat. The only thing missing was the cheery twinkle in her eye. She was carrying several of those supermarket bags for life – from Waitrose, of course – and was looking grimly determined.

  Beth fell back to allow the older woman to pass. ‘Mrs Jenkins, it’s good to see you again so soon. What can I do for you?’ she asked, but faltered when she found herself addressing Mrs Jenkins’ back as the woman barged in without waiting for an invitation.

  She threw off her coat, covering up Beth’s own jacket which had been slung on the back of her chair, and got to work. She clearly knew exactly what she was looking for. She started to move cartons around, trying to reach, Beth realised, Jenkins’ old desk – now her own workstation.

  ‘Um, Mrs Jenkins, if I could just give you a hand. I brought all the stuff from your husband’s desk round to your house, don’t you remember? You’ve got everything already.’

  Mrs Jenkins wasn’t listening at all. By now she had reached the desk, and started flinging open the top drawer, taking out several pens, a packet of tampons and some paracetamol that Beth had stashed there, and dumping the lot unceremoniously on the floor.

  ‘Actually, that stuff is mine?’ Beth’s voice was rising as she tried to get through to her extremely determined visitor. Mrs Jenkins took not the least bit of notice of her and stuck her hand right to the back of the drawer, rooting around, before moving inexorably onto the next.

  ‘Could you just tell me what you are looking for?’ Beth asked helplessly, as a couple of her notepads and some sheets of A4 joined the mound on the floor. Honestly, the place was in enough of a shambles as it was, without Mrs Jenkins trashing it even more. Beth edged through the cartons towards her and put her hand on Mrs Jenkins’ arm, today clad in another cuddly sweater, this time in a dusty rose shade. Her light touch seemed to do the trick. Mrs Jenkins stopped sorting through the drawer, and slowly turned to face Beth.

  Her expression, which had been strangely blank, suddenly took on an alarming vehemence. ‘Where have you put it? You’ve hidden it, haven’t you? Where? Where?’ Beth let go of the woman’s arm immediately and started to back away in fright, but Mrs Jenkins lunged back and grabbed at her by the lapels of her linen jacket. ‘You know, don’t you? You know all about it.’

  Beth was just stammering out a denial and b
rushed the clawing hands from her jacket when there was a brisk, flourishing rat-a-tat-tat at the door. Normally, Beth couldn’t stand people who couldn’t do a straightforward knock but had to personalise things with their own little tattoo. At this moment, she positively loved whoever was at the door, and would smother them in relieved kisses when she got half a chance.

  ‘Come in, please come in!’ she yelled out, just as Mrs Jenkins lunged towards her.

  The door opened and suddenly the older woman backed off, becoming once again a cuddly Mrs Tiggywinkle lookalike.

  Indeed, she looked so shattered by her exertions that when the Bursar burst jauntily through the door, he immediately said, ‘Beth, get Mrs Jenkins a chair! She looks as though she’s about to pass out. What on earth is going on in here?’ he added, belatedly taking in the chaotic scene.

  Beth, who was already hastily revising her plan to cover her unexpected caller in kisses, wasn’t surprised that he was taken aback. There were papers and boxes strewn everywhere. So much for the new archivist getting the place in order. And what on earth was the Bursar doing here, anyway? She’d been pretty much ignored all week. Now, all of a sudden, it was like Piccadilly Circus in here.

  ‘I think Mrs Jenkins has been a bit… distressed,’ said Beth, trying to be reasonably diplomatic yet at the same time keen to apportion blame where it was due. All right, the room hadn’t looked great before Mrs Jenkins arrived, but it looked a hell of a lot worse since she’d started throwing stuff around with bizarre abandon.