by Alice Castle
‘I see,’ said the Bursar, shooting a highly disapproving glance at Beth and then treating Mrs Jenkins to his most unctuous smile. No-one looking at Mrs Jenkins, sitting docile and pale as one of the many sheets of paper strewn around, would ever have thought her capable of creating such disorder.
‘Well, it’s perfectly natural in the circumstances for Ruth to be feeling a little overwhelmed. Being back here in Alan’s office must be very distressing, isn’t that the case, Ruth? Perfectly natural. Do take some deep breaths, Ruth, and just rest there for as long as you like, then I’ll escort you out. In the meantime, maybe you, Beth, could fetch her a glass of water, cup of tea?’
It was framed as a question but Beth knew it was actually an order. Instantly, Beth realised she didn’t want to leave either of these people alone with her archives. Mrs Jenkins was looking for something. That much had been abundantly clear when she’d been chucking stuff all over the place. And she had no idea what the Bursar was up to, suddenly ‘popping in’ on her after making it clear all week that the archives office was rock bottom on his action-packed, super-important agenda. All she knew was that she distrusted him thoroughly, and wasn’t any keener for him to be alone in the place either.
Mrs Jenkins came to her rescue, rising to her feet slowly. ‘No, I’d best be getting along. I’ve got what I came for,’ she said, fixing her beady eyes on Beth with a malevolent half-smile. At once, Beth wondered what on earth the woman had managed to pick up. There was nothing in her hands, but as she shrugged the mohair coat back on, Beth noticed the pockets were bulging. Had they been that full before? She just couldn’t say.
Beth resolved to check around and see if there was anything missing, but she knew that was a hopeless task. If this episode had taught her anything, it was that she must get on top of the archives as a priority. Otherwise, people would be able to make off with anything they liked, and she’d be none the wiser.
But what could Mrs Jenkins have been searching for that was so important? It wasn’t anything directly belonging to her husband; all that stuff had, as she’d said, been in the box that Beth had delivered. Apart from the sheaf of bank statements, of course, and those Moleskine notebooks. Luckily, she’d stashed all those over in the filing cabinets, well away from the area that Mrs Jenkins had searched. Maybe the woman was just trying to freak her out, implying that she’d found something vital just to unsettle Beth. Well, it was working. She was definitely unsettled.
‘Well, if you’re sure you’re happy, Mrs Jenkins, then I’m sure the Bursar would be able to escort you out. So useful to have a strong man to lean on if you’re feeling a bit faint,’ said Beth in as sympathetic a way as she could manage.
She was hoping that an appeal to Seasons’ chivalry would mean he felt obliged to escort the woman off the premises, and take himself a long way away from the archive office in the process. It worked. Seasons proffered an arm, and Mrs Jenkins took it tremulously. Beth marvelled at what a brilliant actress the woman was. One minute, she’d been scaring the bejeezus out of Beth. The next, she was frail, harmless, and 60 going on 90. Maybe this was why her initial impressions of the teacher, as the perfect warm and caring support for Ben when he needed a little extra help, had been so off-kilter.
Three dusty hours later, Beth was still pondering whether she should report that morning’s strange encounter to Inspector York. Was there enough there, really, to suggest that Mrs Jenkins had actually been threatening her? Or was the woman just behaving very oddly as the result of her recent bereavement? Beth was not quite sure. She thought she might well end up feeling quite silly if she told York that she’d felt threatened by someone who, half the time at least, seemed a cuddly elderly lady.
While mulling it over, she’d managed to get a huge amount done in the small room, she realised as she rubbed filthy hands on her jeans. It felt as though the dust of, not quite a thousand years, but probably several decades, was all over her. She could feel the grit in her mouth, her eyes were itchy, and her hair was begging for a wash. Even her Shetland pony fringe felt uncharacteristically limp.
But the results were spectacular. She wished the Bursar would rap on the door now, and see the room as it suddenly was. She blushed to think of how awful it must have looked this morning. Now, instead of an obstacle course made up of cardboard, she had a neatly stacked pile of duplicate copies of legions of school magazines, ready for recycling, while one of each edition had been preserved and shelved.
This crazy duplication of what were essentially pretty run-of-the-mill publications had accounted for a surprising number of the boxes, though a phalanx of them did still remain to be sorted through. The cartons that had been satisfyingly emptied had been dismantled and folded flat. She wouldn’t need them all, but she would retain some in case documents needed to be moved again at some point in the future. She was very much hoping this would never need to happen, but if it did, the school would be prepared and wouldn’t have to buy in new materials.
In amongst all this chaff, however, she had found some very promising-looking ledgers, bound in handsome leather, much older than the rest of the contents of the archive and featuring beautiful, though faded, copperplate writing, which she judged dated from the inception of the school. It would take her a long time to decipher the faded, sepia-coloured writing; she might even, she realised with a bit of a thrill, need to get some of those white cotton gloves that real archivists wore. She corrected herself quickly. She was a real archivist, and white cotton gloves were an essential part of her kit. She would get on to ordering some just as soon as she’d made more of a dent on the room.
In the meantime, she had locked the precious ledgers into the filing cabinets, piling some of the most boring school magazines on top as camouflage. They were where she had previously stashed Jenkins’ bank statements and notebooks. These, in turn, she had moved into her own briefcase, ready to take home. She was planning to look through them over the next few days, once Ben was safely tucked up in bed, of course, and once she had got through some of her sorely neglected freelance work.
Looking through Jenkins’ documents seemed a bit intrusive and would almost certainly be quite boring, she thought. But she realised with a thrill of pleasure that she was really looking forward to inspecting the old ledgers. It was the sort of project that she’d thought she’d be involved in all the time when she took the job. That seemed like a lifetime ago. She had to keep reminding herself that less than a week had gone by, and that she would get to her own pet project in good time. There were mountains of other documents that she needed to consult on first, though.
Nowadays, the school’s day-to-day records were all computerised, but in the past huge quantities of information had been kept on paper and it was hard to see how even the most dedicated Wyatt’s fan would want to delve through centuries of this trivial stuff. There needed to be a strategy for what was kept, as well as for what she could let go. She could see that the archives office had become the dumping ground for everything that someone else did not want to make a decision on. Records relating to all school matters, from the suppliers of the prefects’ badges, to every paracetamol currently in the infirmary, to the architect who’d concocted the Grand Hall, and the recipients of bursaries throughout the ages, were lodged here in no particular order at all. Rather like the ‘downloads’ folder on a laptop, the archives office had become the automatic repository of choice. Everything went in. Nothing came out.
But now, both Mrs Jenkins and the Bursar suddenly seemed interested in its contents. She wondered why now, of all times, the archives had suddenly become so fascinating. Had Dr Jenkins been working on something that had stirred up a hornet’s nest? Was that the real reason for his murder?
Beth found it quite hard to find any trace of anything in the archives that Jenkins had actually been engaged on. Almost everything she’d touched today had been covered by a film of thick grey London dust, and although she was no expert, it was much, much more than a week’s worth of the stuff
. The exception, she supposed, might be the contents of the filing cabinets – but most of them had been yawningly empty when she’d looked. What on earth had Jenkins been up to? Well, maybe she’d find out tonight. His papers would tell a story, even if the man himself no longer could.
***
Later that evening, with Ben finally tucked up, Beth ran her fingers through her thick, freshly-washed fringe as she stared exhaustedly at the kitchen table. She was still in her dressing gown, after hopping in the shower the moment they’d got home. What with homework and the rest of the evening childcare cavalcade, she hadn’t had a second to shrug on her clothes, and now it was too late to bother.
She’d arranged the bank statements into thick piles, each representing a year. Jenkins might not have had much of a work ethic, but he was an archives man in one respect – he didn’t seem to have thrown anything away. Lugging this little lot back home had not been easy, and she was glad that Friday afternoon was CCF time at Wyatt’s. She didn’t totally understand the workings of the Combined Cadet Force, except that it gave eager pupils the chance to dress up in uniform and rush about pretending they were members of the army, navy, or air force. Suffice to say, it meant that people not involved got to knock off a little early on a Friday, which was no bad thing in general, and was particularly helpful when you were trying to drag a bunch of dodgy documents home.
She wasn’t entirely sure what the ethics of leaving the school premises with a dead staff member’s private documents were, but she was willing to bet that the Bursar, for one, would be very keen to stop her. Luckily, he was the Grand Panjandrum of the CCF, so he was fully occupied in getting eager small boys to run up and down rugby pitches at the crucial moment when she had sidled out past the porter with two of Mrs Jenkins’ abandoned bags for life stuffed to the gunnels with papers.
Mrs Jenkins, whose home was really not a million miles from where Beth sat, would also be beside herself if she knew what Beth was about to do.
Maybe that was the reason that Beth was hesitating. There was also the fact that reading someone else’s bank statements was such a taboo. It was a total invasion of privacy. But did that count for anything, Beth wondered, if the person in question was dead?
She remembered how awful it had been after James had died, when the bank statements, bills, and even the junk mail had continued to roll in every single day, all addressed to someone who could never, now, read any of it. Each letter had seemed like a stab to her heart. Even when she had eventually been able to rouse herself to send a round robin to all the companies they had accounts with, informing them as blandly as she could of his sudden death – a letter which had cost her rivers of bitter, hot tears – many had persisted in keeping him on their databases. In fact, she sometimes still made decisions about which utilities to choose based on how efficient they had been back in those dark days.
Now, if ever a piece of junk mail did arrive with James’s name on it – and it still did happen – she was actually rather glad. It proved he had really existed, and that somewhere, somehow, he still did – if only in the obsolete memory bank of some cheap, un-updateable, spam-generating computer.
She wondered how it was for people now, when their loved ones died suddenly, leaving such a footprint behind on social media. Facebook histories, showing what seemed like every moment of life, and always (whatever the real truth) featuring laughing gangs of friends. Would it be a comfort for those left behind, or more of a torment, to see them forever suspended in the ether: young, carefree, enjoying plentiful LOLs, ‘liking’ pictures of kittens, and posting inspirational messages?
In some ways, she was glad James had not been that into Facebook. She wasn’t sure how it would have felt, looking over his posts now that she was growing older, while he remained fixed and static. How did the phrase go? ‘They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old.’ It was all too sad. She could feel a lone tear track down her cheek. It fell onto the 2010 pile of Alan Jenkins’ bank statements. She pulled the papers towards her, and slid off the elastic band she’d used to keep the sheaf together. But first, she’d just make herself a quick cup of herbal tea… and maybe just do the washing up…
An hour and a half later, and despite every method of prevarication she could deploy – including a thorough clean of the entire kitchen, sitting room, utility, and downstairs loo – she knew an awful lot more about Dr Jenkins. Notwithstanding the orgy of scrubbing and a swimming pool tang of chlorine bleach in the air, she felt distinctly grubby about this. It seemed so much like prying. She wasn’t entirely positive the dead really had private lives, as such, but Dr Alan Jenkins definitely didn’t now, that was for sure.
The bank account was his alone, so there was probably a joint account somewhere which paid for heating, lighting, the mortgage if they had one, and all the domestic details from food to council tax. But Jenkins had been assiduous about ensuring that all his statements from this separate account, which were delivered to the marital home like clockwork, did not stay there. He took every single one to Wyatt’s and stashed them all at work. There was something here he wanted to hide.
Once she was finally settled at the table with nothing else to distract her, it didn’t take Beth long to make sense of the statements. Rapidly, she knew how much he spent on clothes – a surprising amount for someone she would not have described as well dressed; she remembered that jacket with the now regulation shudder. She knew that he spent even more on wine, mostly claret, and a fortune on cigars. She knew that he made regular, expensive payments to a company which, when she Googled it, turned out to be a Harley Street hair loss clinic. She knew he bought books from several antiquarian bookshops.
She also knew that he had started to buy increasing quantities of DVDs from some very dodgy porn websites. She knew that she really didn’t want to know more about those DVDs. He also had an Amazon Prime account, Netflix, and Now TV as well – surely no-one could be that interested in mainstream films? She was willing to bet he wasn’t watching Disney classics at any rate. She knew that, for the past 18 months, he’d been spending regular, pricey weekends at a swanky Oxfordshire hotel. And, most importantly, she also knew that, as of June last year, he had started to bank regular sums of money. It had started off with a £200 cash deposit each month. By the time he died, it was up to £600 a month.
Now where on earth was that coming from? And why?
She stared at the bank statements in frustration. Five minutes ago, she’d felt as though they were telling her much more than she wanted to know about this man. Now, all of a sudden, the air was full of question marks and the statements were mute pieces of paper with no voice to tell her what they really held. How on earth was she going to find out more?
It was a question which preoccupied her over the weekend. Though she did love these unpressured, schoolwork-free days with Ben – free from the tyranny of the alarm clock, the school run, and the regimented bedtime necessary to achieve everything else – she also felt the lack of a partner more at weekends than at any other time. It was easy enough to slip from day to day during the weeks without thinking too much. Weekends gave her a bit more space to ponder, and that wasn’t always a good thing.
At times like these, she was grateful for her freelance work. It was rarely enough to have her slaving flat out, but there had always been just enough to keep her ticking over, feeling busy and – if she were totally honest with herself – just a little bit important. She needed to matter – not just to her darling Ben, but also to someone else, somewhere in the working world. If there was an impatient editor drumming their fingers waiting for her copy, that meant she counted. Rewriting company reports, gussying up badly-written websites, the odd article for a newspaper if she thought of something clever enough to pitch to one of the terrifying features editors; all these kept the wolf from the door and kept her mind from her loneliness.
But she was lonely. And taking the football to the park with Ben on a Saturday for a proper kickabout brought it home with a
bump. It was always the dads taking the kids to the park. The mums, she supposed, were enjoying a bit of well-deserved quality time with their sofas, while the dads reacquainted themselves with the tiny humans they’d made and then abandoned all week while working. So, she saw dads attempting to post their tiny toddlers into the baby swings, unaccustomed to dealing with so many uncooperative limbs at once. She saw dads struggling with exploded nappies; dads doing their best with skinned knees; dads cheering on the more mobile tinies whooshing down the slides; dads finally relaxing on the benches as their charges grew older; and everywhere, dads retreating behind their smartphones when interaction with their children got too much. Meanwhile, for her, it was business as usual.
She knew that some of the mums at the school looked askance at her, as she was always hanging out at the playground on Saturdays with the dads. To some territorial women, that made her a threat. Belinda McKenzie, the Alpha Mummy, had once joshed to her in a jokey-not-joking way that, ‘if she ever wanted to remarry, she’d have the pick of everyone else’s husbands; they all worshipped her because she was so great with a football’. Belinda, of course, had pronounced ‘football’ as though she were saying ‘rancid slug’, and her implication was that the desperate Beth was only pretending to like the game so that she could snare someone else’s meal ticket man – a foul if ever there was one. Belinda was far too dainty herself to play rough games with her three kids, and besides, it would have played havoc with her nails/hair/pristine white jeans. And she employed an au pair and a husband to do that stuff for her.
As she obligingly kicked, ran, and yelled with Ben, Beth reflected that football wasn’t something she loved; it was just something she had to do. She hadn’t loved nappy-changing or Thomas the Tank Engine or Lego either, and she particularly didn’t love Minecraft or anything that came in a ridiculously expensive PlayStation box. But here she was; this was the boat she and her boy were in, and she’d do her best, and that was that. The time would come – very soon she suspected – when Ben wouldn’t be caught dead kicking a ball with his mother anyway, and she would be happy to retire then, just like George Best and David Beckham before her. Though possibly, without either the alcohol problem or the aftershave and pants deals.