Death in Dulwich

by Alice Castle

  It was hot, dusty, dirty work, and after an hour and a half, Beth was filthy and exhausted. It was like Friday, all over again. She didn’t know how papers sucked up dust, but they did, and it wasn’t until you moved them that they released it – all over you. It was all very well for miners, she thought crossly, though she was horrified with herself as the comparison crossed her mind. They’d had access to showers after a hard day down the pit. She’d have to walk through Dulwich Village covered in grey smudges until she could take a shower, which probably wouldn’t be until after she’d dragged Ben through the bedtime routine. Meanwhile, she would be judged by every other mother in the district, all of whom managed to remain pristine at all times – mostly wearing the regulation Dulwich white skinny jeans. They all had lovely ‘little jobs’ which definitely did not involve fingerprint dust, policemen, blackmail – and murder.

  One thing she was pleased about, though, was that she’d already managed to persuade the porter to attach a temporary hasp and padlock to the inner archive office door. And she was pretty sure, having seen him take the padlock out of its plastic packaging, that she had the only two keys in existence.

  Better still, she had finally managed to get the filing cabinets upright and opened just before home time. Inside, battered but intact, were the three leather ledgers, exactly where she’d stashed them the other day, and still covered by a wodge of Jenkins’ old cryptic crosswords. Either the layers of yellowing newspaper had saved anyone from even seeing the ledgers, or they hadn’t bothered with the filing cabinets at all because they knew what they were looking for was stored somewhere else. That rather begged the question – what on earth had they been hoping to find? Beth had been turning this over all the time she’d been tidying and clearing. Her money was on the bank statements.

  She fished the big old ledgers out, cradling them carefully in her arms, and cast around the room, looking for somewhere safe to put them. She didn’t want them to be snatched if someone came back for a second go. She was almost tempted to take them home with her. But after this burglary, she realised that someone considered the archives fair game and there was no way on earth that she would even consider bringing that danger close to Ben. The last thing she wanted was to drag her son into all this.

  She’d probably be hopelessly disappointed when she finally got a chance to read the ledgers properly. For all she knew, they could have been an 18th century version of the coma-inducing Wyatt’s Chronicle school newsletters that the school seemed to churn out in unforgiveable quantities, and which had been filed by successive archivists with as much reverence as though it had been a serialised version of Magna Carta. But somehow, their very air of venerable age gave these ancient books a promise and a mystique that was sorely lacking in ninety per cent of the contents of the archive. No, thought Beth, that was unfair. Ninety-nine per cent.

  Yet again, she’d run out of time to see whether her hopes were justified. If she hung around any longer, she’d be late to pick up Ben, and she hated keeping him waiting. Where on earth could she stick these books quickly, where they’d be safe?

  She was racking her brains, eyes darting here and there, when she realised that the perfect hiding place had been under her nose all along. The shelf of unspeakably dreary Wyatt’s magazines. No-one would ever think of disturbing them there. Even her rabidly destructive burglar had shunned the magazines. She slid the ledgers next to some bound copies of the Wyatt Wanderer – a 1930s precursor of today’s Wyatt’s Chronicle – and stood back to survey the effect. Though the ledgers, to her eye, were so much more full of promise than anything else on the shelves, she had to admit that, to the untutored eye, all the tomes looked pretty much of a muchness. Being right in the middle, and squeezed in amongst so many frankly soporific volumes, seemed like the perfect place for them. Hidden in plain sight.

  Despite her best efforts, Beth was five minutes late for pick-up. She ran the last few yards, expecting Ben to be loitering crossly in the playground, but realised he was deep in a kick-about with Charles and a few of the other boys. A straggle of mothers looked on, and she smiled to see Katie among them.

  ‘Haven’t seen you for ages,’ said Katie, giving the regulation kiss on both cheeks, and smoothing a smudge of archive grime off Beth’s face in the process. ‘You look like you’ve had a busy day,’ she laughed.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,’ said Beth, pushing her fringe out of her eyes with a tired hand. She’d had a thorough wash in the loos before leaving work, but maybe she didn’t have Katie’s eagle eye for detail. Her fringe flopped back immediately but she grinned. It was so good to see her friend.

  ‘Come back with us for supper?’ Beth found herself asking on impulse. She wouldn’t normally suggest it on a school night. She knew that Katie had started the rigorous process of tutoring which, in Dulwich, was considered essential before an assault on the Endowment Schools at Secondary Transfer time, but it was so great to see Katie and she wanted to bounce around a few ideas on the investigation.

  ‘No, you come back with us. You’ve been working all day. I’ll cook, you can entertain me,’ Katie twinkled.

  ‘No extra currriculars tonight?’ Beth asked. She knew that Charles was already getting extra tutoring in English and Maths, and Katie had been toying with verbal reasoning coaching, too. This wasn’t like Ben’s little in-school reading sessions with Miss Brown (or Mrs Jenkins, as Beth now had to think of her). Charles was getting heavy-duty grooming for the entrance exams, which Beth privately did not believe he needed at all.

  ‘This is his night off. Apart from piano, of course.’ Katie smiled, but she wasn’t joking. Charles, like Ben, was an only child, and the centre of Katie’s world. By Dulwich standards, he wasn’t being hot-housed at all – he only played one instrument, and he did have this whole day off coaching during the week, for goodness’ sake. But his parents wanted the best for him. In the wildly competitive environs of Dulwich, the best meant squeezing him into Wyatt’s. And the effort wouldn’t stop there. By the time he applied for university, a boy like Charles would have a Duke of Edinburgh Award Gold Medal under his belt; he’d have a certificate saying he’d dragged his lacklustre piano playing all the way up to Grade 8 level; he’d participate in some form of sport at least once a week; and he’d have a cache of work experience stints at blue-chip companies (usually owned by friends of his mum and dad) on his CV. It was an exhausting prospect, for any boy – and any mother.

  And Katie was the most normal mother Beth knew. Beth was dearly fond of both her and Charles. The trouble was that fear was contagious. And the terror that Charles wouldn’t get a place at a good school, and that other boys who were no brighter would because their mothers had forced them through these hoops, was very real. Even Beth herself was now worrying – when she had the time – about whether she was doing poor Ben a disservice by not making him swot away night after night. For the moment, she thought he was doing just fine, and when she was at her calmest, she was certain that he didn’t need extra help at all. But sometimes, it was hard to hold the line.

  Twenty minutes later, Beth had washed her hands lavishly again with Katie’s Neal’s Yard soap in her lovely guest loo, had smoothed away the last traces of dust from her face, and even done a quick detangling job on her hair with her hands. She would have loved a shower, but that would just have to wait until later. She was now ensconced at the breakfast bar of a kitchen straight out of World of Interiors.

  It was a sea of marble, with industrial hints in the bright copper tubing of the barstool legs, and the three copper-shaded pendant lights swooping low over the bleached oak dining table. Even the handles on the sleek line of floor-to-ceiling glass doors fronting the garden were burnished copper. In high summer, the doors swooshed back like stage curtains to reveal the beautifully tended garden which, unlike Beth’s, seemed impervious to football-boot scuffs, bald patches, and weeds. At the end of the garden, two graceful Japanese acer trees, already showing clusters of the red which wo
uld unfurl into flaming leaf in the next month, were backed by the giant chestnut trees of Dulwich Park right behind the house. There was even a narrow door in the fence which led straight into the park. It was probably the thing that Beth most envied Katie for, though the list of possibilities, she was the first to admit, was extremely long.

  The boys had scampered off to Charles’s bedroom, where they were no doubt deep in some artificial world by now. Beth and Katie were peeling and chopping vegetables for the boys to push around their plates later. Beth admired the splashy orange of the pile of organic carrots on her chopping board – itself a beautiful thick slab of olivewood, which chimed so well with the kitchen’s copper highlights. She marvelled at how her friend got all these things right without seeming to try, while Belinda McKenzie, who lived three doors down on this particularly lush and lovely Dulwich street, had got a designer in to do her entire house at vast expense and the whole thing had turned out aching with soullessness.

  ‘Do you see much of Belinda?’ Beth said, idly following her train of thought.

  Katie gave her friend a measured look. ‘Belinda’s ok, you know. Her heart’s in the right place.’

  ‘On the transplant list, you mean?’ said Beth. ‘No, she’s fine, she’s just… So Dulwich. If you know what I mean.’

  ‘No-one’s more Dulwich than you, though, Beth, come on. Your family has been here for generations.’

  ‘True. But we’re, well, low-key people, I suppose. Belinda is more, headline news. I just find her a bit intimidating,’ said Beth, peeling carrots and admiring the vivid orange curls as they piled up beside her on the creamy marble.

  ‘Oh, Belinda’s ok. I don’t see that much of her, I don’t think she considers Charles a great influence.’

  ‘Why not?’ Beth’s hackles immediately rose in defence of Ben’s friend.

  ‘For a start, he’s only doing one instrument. Her three are all playing at least two each.’

  Beth thought silently of the cacophony that must entail. Six musical instruments played in one house, each one no doubt practised for at least the mandatory twenty minutes a night. No wonder Belinda’s husband travelled so much. Beth was still scarred by Ben having had to play the recorder for two terms in Year 3. Sometimes, on a clear night, she thought she could still hear the mangled opening notes of London’s Burning. It would be a while before she could face another instrument, and she was pretty sure most things wouldn’t even fit in the house, unless Ben suddenly got enthusiastic about the triangle, of course. Maybe Belinda’s lot were musical geniuses. Maybe Belinda used earplugs.

  ‘But I want to know about your job,’ Katie was saying as she skilfully sliced up some sweet potatoes. ‘What on earth is happening? Is there any word yet on the… you know?’

  ‘The murder?’ Instinctively, the women lowered their voices and looked around. Neither wanted their boys to be contaminated by such goings-on, though it would have been the one topic both boys were keen to discuss in depth with their mothers, unlike anything to do with school and homework.

  ‘No idea how the police investigation is going. All I know is that I haven’t made much progress yet myself,’ said Beth.

  ‘What about Judith Seasons? That was quite promising, wasn’t it? Any more from her?’

  ‘Last I saw of her was at Ruth Jenkins’ place, when she was shutting the door firmly in my face. She doesn’t seem to want to make my job easier. Have either of them been at yoga?’

  ‘Only Judith, and she’s been quite distant,’ said Katie, reaching into a cupboard for a bowl. Into it she glugged a tablespoon or so of soy sauce and added a matching quantity of coconut oil. She then tipped the strips of sweet potato into the bowl and deftly tumbled them in the rich brown mixture.

  ‘The oddest thing happened on Friday. Ruth Jenkins came to my office and started throwing things about… and then when I arrived today there’d been a burglary.’ Beth took a baton of organic carrot in her hand and munched it thoughtfully. It was sweet and crunchy, but was it any better than a non-organic carrot? She wasn’t sure.

  ‘A burglary?’ Katie looked up, shocked. ‘But that’s awful. Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘Well, nothing was taken, as far as I know. But everything was messed up. I spent the whole afternoon trying to put the place back together. I still feel grimy.’

  ‘That explains the dust on your face earlier. You look fine, though. But that must have been such a shock.’

  ‘It was, after everything else. But someone’s done me a favour, really. I’ve been able to chuck out a whole load of rubbish that would have taken me months to sort out otherwise.’

  ‘Do you think it was Ruth Jenkins? Come back to finish what she’d started?’

  ‘She is the most likely person… and according to the police, the door wasn’t forced, so it was someone with a key. She could easily have got hold of a spare key, if Jenkins himself had a spare one at home – which he might well have done. She could have just borrowed it one day and taken it to that shoe place on Norwood High Street where they do keys, cut a copy.’

  Naturally there wasn’t anything as useful as a cobbler’s shop in Dulwich Village itself. Shopping there was great if you were having a massive cushion cover emergency or wanted to go to a party wearing something Bohemian with tassels, but if you needed a pint of milk you were in big trouble. Even the Post Office had recently closed down, and bets were already being taken on whether the prime village space left vacant would be taken by a chichi café or a bijou boutique. It was rumoured that other types of shop did exist, just not within the hallowed confines of Dulwich.

  ‘What’s Mrs Jenkins actually like, would you say?’ asked Beth. ‘Because I didn’t realise she was the Miss Brown that takes Ben for reading on Thursdays. She told me she stuck with her previous name because it was easier than changing it at work.’

  ‘Oh yes! I hadn’t made the connection,’ said Katie, whose faith in expensive extracurricular tutoring meant she was quite vague about the services offered by the school itself. ‘Brown’s a pretty common surname. I’m not sure I’ve seen her much around the school, just a couple of times. I recognised her from yoga. Thought she might be an admin helper or something, but she could even have been someone’s granny come to pick them up, I never asked. She looks like the grandmotherly type, doesn’t she?’

  ‘I would have said exactly the same thing until this week,’ said Beth, sitting forward in excitement. ‘She seemed lovely. But she’s not. She’s… weird.’

  ‘I thought you seemed pleased with the way she was helping Ben, though, didn’t you?’ said Katie, surprised.

  It said a lot for Katie that she had never once offered any sort of judgement on Ben needing a little help with his reading. Beth herself was reasonably calm about it – most of the time – and took the school’s assessment of the situation at face value. Ben needed temporary help but would soon be up to speed. But at the same time, Beth knew that if Charles had been singled out as in need of support, Katie would instantly have amassed a team of experts who would soon have plunged him back to the mainstream – kicking and screaming, if necessary. Whether this would have ended up denting his self-esteem was a moot point, but Beth appreciated her friend’s acceptance of her own, much more laid-back approach.

  ‘The thing is, I thought I liked Miss Brown – oh God, I suppose I should just say Mrs Jenkins now – when I thought of her as the cuddly reading support lady. But the woman I saw when I went round to her house was a whole different person. And when she came to the archive office, well, she was worse still – like a woman possessed. I couldn’t get through to her at all. It was like I wasn’t even there. She was looking for something and she was determined to get it. If we hadn’t been interrupted by the Bursar, then I don’t know what she would have done. She had a really strange look in her eye.’

  ‘Lord! She sounds like your number one suspect, surely?’

  ‘Well, but she doesn’t have a motive, as far as I can see… and the other thing is that
I made a huge discovery just before leaving today. The Bursar himself had a key to the archive office, too.’

  ‘Hmm, Judith’s husband… he’s quite dynamic, isn’t he?’

  ‘In a bullish sort of way, and I hate the way he’s always jiggling his leg as though he should be running a marathon. I think he’s like a sneaky Labrador.’

  ‘Beth! Labradors aren’t sneaky.’

  Beth had forgotten what a dog person Katie was. ‘Labradors are sneaky when there’s food around. He’s like a Labrador with his eye on your sandwich,’ said Beth.

  ‘Fair enough. I never warmed to him. He’s picked Judith up a couple of times from classes on Saturdays and he seemed fine, but maybe he didn’t want my sandwich.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Katie, everyone wants your sandwich!’ When they’d stopped giggling, Beth added, ‘Seriously, he is the only person I’ve been able to find a good motive for, so far. There’s my Prime Suspects, that’s what I’m calling the teachers and staff who were actually in the school at the time Jenkins was stabbed, which includes the Head and the school secretary. She’s lovely, by the way, but she seems really cosy with the Head. The Bursar is the one who I’ve always felt a bit iffy about.’

  ‘Hmm, it is certainly odd he had a key. Why would he need one?’ said Katie.

  ‘I suppose, in his job, he could have the keys to any or all of the offices and no-one would think it was that surprising. I just don’t know for sure, though. I’m a bit baffled.’

  ‘Well, don’t despair. It’s not like you’re even supposed to be sorting it out, after all. Leave it to the professionals,’ said Katie soothingly, passing over a cup of tea and collecting up what remained of the chopped carrots. ‘That reminds me. I saw a plain clothes policeman outside Wyatt’s earlier. Tall, wearing one of those nice navy jackets. Blondish hair. Rather gorgeous, in fact,’ said Katie, with a sidelong look at her friend.

  Katie hadn’t known James. She’d met Beth just after she had been widowed, but she was well aware that he cast a long shadow. That didn’t mean that Beth had to be single all her life, though.