Death in Dulwich

by Alice Castle

  As she walked into the small bathroom, she picked up the towel Ben must have dumped on the floor after doing his teeth, then noticed the loo hadn’t been flushed. Funny. The seat was down, meaning the culprit was not Ben. Despite her years of effort, he still forgot to return the seat to its rightful place more often than not. And she would have automatically flushed the loo – wouldn’t she? Her nerves were so jangled by the evening that she couldn’t quite reconstruct the morning in her head.

  ‘Inspector York?’ she called out.

  He trundled up the stairs. ‘Something missing?’ he said, his voice sounding a little anxious. He coughed quickly.

  ‘Not missing. Added, I think,’ she said, with the first smile she’d managed this evening. She stood in the bathroom, gazing into the pale yellow waters of the loo.

  ‘What is it?’ he said, after a cursory glance around the small, white-tiled room. He stood on an Ikea bathmat in bright blue, then shifted a little, as though conscious of his clodhopping shoes. Sure enough, the mat retained the imprint of his large feet, but Beth wasn’t bothered.

  ‘I think whoever it was came up here for a pee.’

  ‘Really? Are you sure?’

  ‘Well, not a hundred per cent, I suppose. But I always flush, and Ben, who forgets half the time, usually leaves the seat up. So, seat down and loo unflushed is not a combination we ever have. But here it is.’ They both looked.

  ‘Ok, then,’ he smiled, too. ‘I’ll get the SOCOs back.’

  ‘For DNA? Can you get that from urine?’

  ‘It’s not a great source, but it is sometimes possible,’ he said. ‘I won’t bore you with the science, but sometimes there aren’t enough nucleated cells to get a result. It’s diluted, of course. And this sample has been sitting around in water all day. But it’s worth a try.’

  ‘I had no idea you could do that,’ Beth admitted.

  ‘It’s not widely known, and probably the perpetrator would usually have flushed. Maybe they were disturbed, or maybe they were so full of adrenaline that they didn’t go about their usual routines. There’s a high incidence of burglars needing to, ahem, use the facilities,’ said York.

  Beth, despite herself, was fascinated. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes,’ said York, holding up his finger as his phone call to the SOCOs went through. After a terse conversation, he cut the call and turned back to Beth. ‘They’re on their way back. Thrilled, of course. What was I saying?’

  ‘You said thieves often need to… go,’ she prompted.

  ‘Yes, that’s what leads to these cases where burglars, erm, defecate on the carpet in the houses they steal from. It’s not all contempt and an attempt to add insult to injury – some of it is simply a human response to the amount of stress hormone in the body, caused by the tension of breaking in and having to get out unseen.’

  ‘Hmm, well, I’m not feeling very sympathetic to my burglar’s stress problems, I must say,’ said Beth. ‘Will I have to give a sample, to eliminate my DNA?’

  ‘We’ve already got your cheek scrape, I think, from the initial enquiry, so you’re fine. We’ll come back tomorrow and just take a quick sample from Ben, too. It won’t take a moment, I don’t think it’ll scare him.’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ said Beth ruefully. ‘He’ll absolutely love it. At his age, it’s all just a great big adventure.’

  Suddenly, she was overwhelmed again. She wasn’t sure if it was sadness, despair at her situation, or just the comedown from the rage she’d felt earlier on first seeing the devastation.

  He briefly laid a hand on her shoulder. Seconds later, he’d turned to go.

  ‘So, I’ll send someone tomorrow to do the sample. There’s nothing missing, though, as far as you can see?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Beth confirmed. She had a long night of cleaning up ahead.

  Then suddenly, she looked around, startled. ‘Wait a minute, Magpie!’

  York looked blank.

  ‘Our cat, Magpie. She’s black and white,’ Beth explained hastily, rushing for the garden doors in the kitchen. She struggled with the locks but got them open, and York was soon crouching with her in the dark garden, making ‘here, kitty kitty’ sounds, and no doubt hoping his colleagues were well out of earshot.

  It took nearly an hour and, finally, a brainwave from Beth, who abandoned shaking the cat’s bag of dried food and resorted to opening a tin of tuna instead. Once they’d both taken turns to exclaim loudly about the yumminess of tuna, Magpie gracefully unfurled herself from the tree nearest the kitchen window where she’d been enjoying the spectacle, dropped down onto the lawn, and sauntered back into the house.

  Beth was surprised to find herself exchanging with York the kind of tiny, rueful smile that bonds the parents of a wilful child. Magpie, presented with a saucer heaped with her favourite treat, scoffed the lot before settling down to snooze on a pile of strewn papers, with an air of virtuous exhaustion.

  ***

  The next morning, Beth was at the school gates, as usual. But this time she was there to greet Ben, not to wave him off. After a restless night following an orgy of tidying and sorting, she was so pleased to see him that she attempted a hug, but he fought her off good-naturedly. Katie, who’d just been given similar treatment by Charles, smiled ruefully and enfolded her friend in the hug she needed instead. ‘How did it go?’

  Beth had called Katie briefly after York had left, once she had got her emotions a bit more under control. She’d wanted to check on Ben, though she knew full well that he’d be having a fine time and wouldn’t have given her a moment’s thought, which was just as it should be. Beth had fobbed off Katie’s offers to come over and help out, though Michael was happy to hold the fort once the boys were safely in bed. For one thing, the complete mess gave her an opportunity to have a thorough clear-out, and only she knew what could be discarded and what could stay. With her obsessively tidy streak, Beth had found that, though she was still a bit shaky, the whole process was bizarrely therapeutic. She would never have chosen to dump the entire contents of her bookshelves, which covered two floor-to-ceiling walls of her sitting room, right in the middle of the floor. But now that someone had done it for her, she could see the horrifying zebra stripes of dust on the shelves, where books had lain undisturbed for years. She had sometimes worried that her house was too clean – but this was thick, dark, furry proof that it definitely was not.

  Her books were mostly classics, which she had every intention of re-reading at some unlikely point when life gave her months, or maybe years, of undisturbed reading time. And quite a few of them bore James’s distinctive scrawl on the flyleaf. These would never go.

  There was a history section, of course, bristling with Tudors and gold-embossed spines, and then an extensive collection of thick, paperback beach reads, each the size of a brick, which she tended to wedge on top of other, more intellectual tomes. These, she decided, could be heavily pruned.

  Even sifting through the piles of Ben’s books on the bottom shelves felt like a long overdue, positive step. Though there were books here she could not part with – the ones that came bound with memories of feverish bright eyes on the sofa, begging for one more page when her boy was tiny and ill – there were also piles of tatty old tomes that were ripe to go to the great bookshop in the sky, or Oxfam. Whichever was closer.

  Armed with her trusty Flash bleach spray and some jumbo kitchen rolls, and thanking her stars that she had bought these in bulk just that weekend, Beth had set to. The end result had been a neat row of black bin bags outside her house, and a sparklingly clean home. The chlorine whiff of the bleach spray had done much to purge the evil spirits from her house. Once everything was in order once again, Magpie strolled into the sitting room, jumped up onto the sofa, and curled herself up contentedly, shedding black and white fur over the newly vacuumed cushions. Beth wondered if Magpie had seen who had wreaked this havoc on their house. The cat blinked slowly, with a flash of green. If she had, she wasn’t saying a thing.

  Be
th had been physically exhausted by the time she’d got to bed in the small hours, but her mind had still been whirring.

  The questions were by now familiar. Who? And why? She had to find the answers, or she’d be driven mad. And, now that whoever it was had actually had the temerity to set foot in her house, she had to find them, and make herself and her son – and little cat – safe.

  The emergency locksmith had arrived bright and early that morning and supplied new fittings, including a Banham lock for the front door and deadbolts for the kitchen French windows, so at least Beth knew that was done. Though the locksmith had breezily told her, as she handed over vast sums of money, that of course a burglar could get into any house past any defences, if they were determined enough.

  Some of this was in her tired eyes as she answered Katie at the school gates. ‘Well, the mess is sorted. In one way. And thank you so much for having Ben last night. It meant a lot, knowing he was safe and having a fantastic time. I’m so grateful. But I’ve got to find out who is behind this, I just have to. Before things get even nastier.’

  Katie grimaced. ‘It’s too much for you to take on, you should just let the police get on with it,’ she urged. ‘That nice handsome officer can sort it all out for you. Was he helpful last night?’ she couldn’t resist prodding. Beth’s reaction had been interestingly fiery the previous evening.

  ‘He was fine,’ Beth said dismissively, with a shrewd glance at Katie’s innocent face. Katie was an incorrigible matchmaker at the best of times. Her own marriage was so happy that she thought everyone was better off paired up, like the animals in Noah’s ark. But this was not the best of times, thought Beth, and she didn’t need Katie to be getting any ideas.

  Then she remembered York patiently searching the dark garden for her naughty cat. That, surely, had been above and beyond the call of Met Police duty. ‘Well, he was great,’ she acknowledged shortly.

  ‘But on the other hand, the investigation seems to be going nowhere. It’s over a week since the… since what happened, and now there’ve been two burglaries as well. Someone pretty nasty – probably an actual killer – has been in my house. That’s a horrible thought. I just don’t think I can hang around waiting for the police to make progress. I can’t risk it, not when someone has actually let themselves into my house and rooted around in there.’ She lowered her voice. She wasn’t going to let Ben find out that there’d been a burglary if she could possibly help it. It was bound to unsettle him – and one unsettled person in the house was quite enough.

  ‘I wish we could just go and discuss it all over a coffee, maybe we could have a brainwave or something,’ said Katie, wrinkling her brow.

  ‘I’d love that. But the archives are calling. And don’t you have a class, anyway?’ Katie was in her yoga kit – long, dark purple leggings and a zip-up top – but managing, of course, to make the get-up look like elegant daywear rather than a tracky-bottomed mess.

  ‘I’ve got a class at 10. I’ll let you know if Judith comes and lets anything slip. And normally Ruth Jenkins would be there, too, but I don’t know whether she’ll show.’

  ‘Hmm, I don’t know what mourning etiquette is these days. It was easier with the Victorians. She’d be in a heavy veil, black gloves, the whole shebang; everyone would know she was officially a widow. Would she be all right today if she showed up all in black athleisure wear, or does she have to wait till next week, for form’s sake? It’s not like she seems the yoga type anyway,’ said Beth.

  ‘I shouldn’t really criticise any of my clients, but I’ve always got the impression that she just comes along because Judith drags her. She can go through the motions, all right, but she doesn’t look like she’s enjoying it and she never pushes herself. She doesn’t smile much, either. Some of the ones who aren’t that serious just come for a laugh, which is fair enough,’ Katie added quickly, realising Beth herself was firmly in the yoga-as-a-giggle camp. ‘Judith, though, she’s pretty impressive. But she hasn’t been coming as much since the, you know, murder. And she’s quite subdued when she does come.’

  ‘Really? Intriguing,’ said Beth. It looked as though someone at least was still sad about Dr Jenkins’ departure from this life. If not his actual wife.

  Mrs Jenkins, she reflected, was remaining quite a conundrum. Was she the cuddly reading teacher, the slightly psycho widow, or the reluctant yoga student? ‘Do you think you could let me know if Mrs Jenkins does turn up? And would you mind keeping a bit of an eye on her? I know you’re busy with the bending and stuff, but if you do get a chance…’

  ‘Bending and stuff? That’s my life’s work you’re talking about there,’ said Katie, mock-outraged. ‘Yeah, of course, I’ll call you. Now, we’d better get on with it,’ she said, as the school bell rang and the children filed in to lessons. They’d just turned to go their separate ways when Katie looked back. ‘Promise me you won’t do anything dangerous, though.’

  Beth rolled her eyes. ‘As if,’ she said.

  Chapter Twelve

  It wasn’t until she was back in the archive office, with her jacket slung on the back of her chair and her bag stowed under the little table, that she thought of Katie’s words again. She was standing facing the line of criminally dull Wyatt’s magazines that she’d painstakingly reassembled. Interspersed amongst their dreary spines, she could see the faintly gleaming leather of the old ledgers. She slid the first one out and felt its heft in her hands. It was surprisingly heavy, solid, the leather softly grainy, buffed by the years, pleasing to her touch.

  She laid it on her table reverently, and wondered. She felt as though she were on the cusp of a discovery. It was extraordinary the way that books could be like depth charges. This had sat around, in boxes or openly out on shelves, in this very office – or one like it – for years, decades, and even centuries, possibly containing the secrets that had sparked a murder and two burglaries. So far.

  The Bursar, Mrs Jenkins, even the Head, Janice, and the suspect teachers might all have reasons of some kind to do Dr Jenkins harm. But, despite there being no shortage of flesh and blood possibilities, Beth wondered whether the true answer to the mystery lay before her right now.

  She wiped her palms on her trousers, and slipped on the pair of cotton gloves she’d found serendipitously after yesterday’s ransacking. She’d been given them by her mother for Christmas – along with a pot of expensive hand cream as a not-subtle-enough hint about the way she was letting herself go. The idea was to slather on the cream at night, pop on the gloves, and hey presto, in the morning her soft palms would soon find her husband number 2. Well, they might not be the proper archivists’ gloves she’d dreamed of – with one thing and another, she hadn’t got round to ordering those yet – but they would certainly do the trick for now.

  Taking a deep breath, she opened the ledger and the heavy leather cover hit the table with a soft thud. She leaned forward to decipher the title page. A minute later, she’d switched on the overhead light, and then craned her desk lamp until its yellow beam was right over the friable pages. It was a bright day, but the ink she was peering at was faded to a pale, watery brown; the lettering, in a lavishly looped hand, leant far, far to the right, as if being blown by a gale. It was going to be hard to make sense of this.

  Three hours flew by as quickly as the first morning she’d spent in this office. Back then, she’d been trying to work out the archives themselves – the purpose they served, and her place in them. Now, she was trying to adjust her views on nothing less than the very foundations of the school she was sitting in.

  The ledger before her was, to all intents and purposes, a simple record of goods owned by the school in its early years. It wasn’t that different from the endless records she’d already come across, relating to matters as mundane as the suppliers of the school-crested ashtrays – very popular items in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, when probably the staffroom would have been as smoggy with cigarette smoke as any pub, but of little use now. Conversely, Wyatt’s crested USB memory sticks
had appeared from nowhere and were now ordered in huge bulk. Records of all these trends, their development, growth and abatement, were compiled here and would doubtless serve as a sort of social history in centuries to come.

  And that’s what the ledger in Beth’s hands turned out to be.

  So, it was a record of supplies and goods. Nothing extraordinary about that. Until you looked at what the goods, so meticulously noted in such a fine hand, were.

  ‘Negro man, 35, one eye, labourer.

  Negress, 18, and child of two.

  Negro of 15, lame.’

  And so it went on. It was an inventory of chattels owned by the school, but instead of crested tea towels and biros, in the 1700s, the school had owned people.

  Slaves.

  Beth felt her scalp prickling with heat. She was flushed with the shame and horror of the book. She fanned herself with a white-gloved hand, which suddenly, horribly, reminded her of the Black and White Minstrel Show – a ‘family entertainment’ programme which had run on the BBC until 1978. She had never seen it herself, except in YouTube clips watched through her fingers, but her parents’ generation had settled back on their sofas to watch it as a highlight of their Saturday nights. She stripped the gloves off quickly.

  In one sense, what she was seeing written down in front of her was nothing new. She understood perfectly well that British landowners in the Caribbean in the 1700s had owned slaves, and had used this unpaid labour to work the land they’d colonised to enrich themselves. The misery of slavery was the bedrock of many a fortune.

  And she knew, on one level, that the great Wyatt had been a huge landowner. The legend was that, after his rackety youth, he had disappeared off to the West Indies, then eventually returned to found the schools in Dulwich with the spectacular proceeds of his adventures. He had then settled down to be a pillar of the community, lauded even at the time for creating such a successful – and charitable – school.

  Beth pushed her chair away from the table and stood up, feeling a little sick. To think that Wyatt had earned his reputation for charity – a reputation the school still had – at the expense of these people, noted down in the ledger as belongings, nothing more or less than the bushels of sugar cane that filled other columns. It was revolting.