by Alice Castle
‘I kept thinking, that afternoon, that he might come home after all. I was so glad when he didn’t,’ said Mrs Jenkins, a faint smile on her face.
Beth was chilled to the bone. On one hand, Mrs Jenkins sounded stark, staring mad. On the other, she was utterly composed and in command of herself. One thing puzzled Beth.
‘What about those burglaries? What were you looking for?’
Mrs Jenkins chuckled slightly. It was rather a nice sound, like a cosy hen clucking. ‘That was more of that detective nonsense. I had Alan’s office key, and I found your spare house keys in the desk. You should be more careful. I just wanted to make it look like the killer was hunting for something, that Alan had some dirty secret. Which of course he did, but nothing that you lot would be interested in.’ Mrs Jenkins looked up at this, as though she had suddenly become aware of what she was saying, and to whom. Her eyes were suddenly sharp and assessing, narrowing on Beth consideringly.
‘I won’t say a word to anybody,’ said Beth quickly. ‘Your secret is safe with me.’
‘Secrets, this has all been about secrets,’ said Mrs Jenkins, then she seemed to come to a decision. ‘Just stay there for a moment, dear, I’ve got something to show you.’ Abruptly, she got up and left the room.
A moment later, Beth heard the sound of a key turning in a lock. She went to the door and rattled it in frustration. Locked in. She needed to phone. She patted her pockets, then checked her bag. Nothing. She ran back to the sofa, got down on her knees and grabbed at her phone, lying where it had fallen when Mrs Jenkins had lobbed the poker trophy at the table.
Within seconds she was jabbing at the number for Inspector York. It rang, twice, three times… ‘Come on, come on,’ she muttered, under her breath.
Suddenly it connected. ‘I’m not here at the moment, please leave a message…’
Beth nearly shrieked in annoyance, but left a garbled, whispered message, rang off, and was just tapping out the third of three nines when Mrs Jenkins stepped back into the room, a small knife in her hand.
Beth involuntarily took a step back, and came up against the hard edge of the sofa, then flopped down heavily. The leather sofa protested in its usual fashion.
‘It’s nothing against you personally, dear. I don’t really like you but I don’t like anyone these days,’ said Mrs Jenkins in matter-of-fact tones. ‘Alan did that to me, too. I used to be the life and soul, I loved a party,’ she said, reminiscing. ‘But having to keep all these secrets, all these nasty little secrets, it changes you. I just want to be on my own now. It’s easier that way. You don’t have to watch out to make sure people don’t guess. You don’t have to worry in case someone lets something slip.’
‘It must have been such hard work,’ said Beth as sympathetically as she could manage, bearing in mind that the woman she was attempting to empathise with was a killer advancing steadily towards her with a knife. ‘You did such a good job.’
‘I didn’t. I let her down.’ Mrs Jenkins’s face fell.
‘Who? Ellen? But you tried to protect her.’
‘Not Ellen. Rachel. Oh, never mind. You’ll never understand.’
Beth realised that was true. A secret like this corroded all those who came into contact with it – from the man who had generated its evil, to the woman who had appointed herself its guardian. She, thank God, would never understand either mindset.
‘Look, Mrs Jenkins, you’re free now. All this can be forgotten. Rachel is fine, Ellen is fine. You don’t have to worry about the secret coming out any more.’
‘No I don’t. Because the one person who knows it, outside the family, is going to be dealt with.’
Ooops, thought Beth. Said the wrong thing there. She shrank back in the chair as Mrs Jenkins approached, the razor-sharp paring knife bright silver in the gloomy cold room.
‘I’m not going to say anything. I wouldn’t tell anyone, your secret is safe,’ Beth said, her voice rising to a shriek as Mrs Jenkins came closer and closer.
‘Yes, it’s safe. Or it soon will be,’ said Mrs Jenkins, with a reassuring smile – the kind she bestowed on Ben when he was doing well with a difficult word.
Beth looked around for a weapon, or something to protect herself with. She picked up a square scatter cushion, a chilly pale green silk, and held it in front of her. ‘Don’t spoil your lovely cushion, Mrs Jenkins,’ she squeaked.
Really, this was going to be the most ignominious death, she thought, if she couldn’t head the older woman off. But she was younger, and fitter. All right, neither of them had been exactly assiduous with their yoga lessons, but Beth must have the edge – she was 30 years younger.
She slid along the sofa, away from Mrs Jenkins, and tried to get to her feet. The other woman lunged, and the pristine shot silk of the cushion was suddenly rent in two, curled white feathers leaking from the slash.
‘You’re ruining it,’ said Beth, shaking the cushion at Mrs Jenkins. A cascade of feathers flew out, and suddenly the other woman sneezed. Beth seized the opportunity, leaped up and ran to the door – which was locked. The key was in Mrs Jenkins’ pocket. Beth didn’t fancy getting close enough to fish it out, not with the knife still shining brightly in the older woman’s hand.
She ran to the windows, flung aside the dusty curtains, and tried the sash. Stuck tight. But there was the huge crack right across the window pane, where the poker trophy had been hurled. The velvet curtain had stopped the glass from breaking outright, but Beth was going to put that right now. She wrapped a handful of the dark green cloth around her arm, shrouding it in the thick fabric, then plunged at the window with the best running Downward Dog Dulwich had ever seen. Thank God, the pane gave with a satisfying shatter.
In a trice, she had knocked out the jagged remnants of the window and had scrambled over the sill, and into the unloved back garden. Being Dulwich, it was maintained to a certain standard, so the lawn was clipped and there was nothing out of place. But there were no flowers, which hereabouts was tantamount to saying you hated Alan Titchmarsh, Gardeners’ Question Time, and all the other gods of suburbia. Just seeing this sterile garden should have shrieked to the neighbours that there was something seriously awry in Gilkes Crescent.
Unfortunately, the fences were all intact, with no handy side gate giving onto the outside world and the madwoman-free streets of the rest of Dulwich. Beth looked around the highly desirable mature garden, mainly laid to lawn, in despair. Just then, she heard scrabbling at the window and, as inexorably as a zombie in a Day of the Dead movie, Mrs Jenkins’ iron-grey coiffure peeked out into the garden, shortly followed by her rotund, dusty blue body.
Beth, darting glances this way and that, weighed up her chances. Should she just rush the woman, and hope to wrestle the knife away from her? The only trouble with that idea was that Mrs Jenkins was deranged, desperate, and had form as a murderer. That left only one option. Beth hurled herself at the mid-point of the fence bordering with the Jenkins’ neighbours. It immediately started to sag.
‘What are you doing? That’s our property you’re damaging!’ Mrs Jenkins shrieked at the top of her voice.
In Dulwich, these were the magic words. Immediately, the back door rattled open in the house next door. Mrs Jenkins’ neighbour rushed out into the garden, protecting his land against imminent devaluation, like a knight of old defending his lady’s virtue.
‘Are you trying to bring that fence down, young woman?’ said the elderly, silver-haired gentleman in shocked consternation.
‘Yes, I am,’ yelled Beth. ‘But she’s trying to kill me!’ She pointed to Mrs Jenkins, who was advancing rapidly with her knife poised to thrust into Beth’s jugular vein.
They were about the only extenuating circumstances that could possibly excuse an outright attack on a perimeter fence in Dulwich.
‘Elizabeth, call the police!’ cried the silver fox, shouting over his shoulder to his wife and winning Beth’s eternal gratitude.
Chapter Sixteen
‘So, what on eart
h happened to Mrs Jenkins?’ said Katie, on the edge of her seat.
Luckily, they weren’t in Beth’s favoured café, the Aurora, or the chair would probably have collapsed.
Both had thought Jane’s café – always packed to the gunnels – was a bit too public for this post mortem on the dramatic events of the past week. So, they had compromised on Romeo Jones, a dinky little deli nestled next to the beauty parlour, like a chick under a particularly well-groomed mama’s wing. Though tiny, it had a few tables inside and some outside as well, for the rare occasions when it was warm enough to bask in South London sunshine.
Today, with a blustery wind seeing off the last of the magnolia petals and riffling through the fresh new lilac buds, Beth and Katie had decided to squeeze inside. They were seated more or less under the cake counter, which was proving extremely distracting to Beth, though Katie seemed impervious to the sidelong glances of a delicious-looking carrot cake.
‘Well, they dragged her off kicking and screaming, basically. I’ve never been so pleased to see anyone as I was when the police turned up. Thank God Harry had already decided he needed to question Mrs Jenkins again – if he hadn’t shown up, I would have been stabbed, for sure.’
‘Harry?’ said Katie, her eyebrows arching.
‘Oh, you know, Inspector York,’ said Beth, suddenly finding that she needed to stir her cappuccino very urgently.
Katie said nothing, but Beth was well aware that her friend would file this nugget of interesting first-name-terms information away somewhere. She was relieved when Katie’s next question was back on track.
‘Wouldn’t the neighbour have stopped her?’ she asked. Beth, palpably relieved to be on steadier ground, laughed.
‘You must be kidding. He probably would have killed me himself, if I’d done any more damage to his fence. It was his wife rushing out when she did, waving a broom, that did the trick and frightened Mrs Jenkins off. Turns out, they’d absolutely hated each other since they had some dispute about where to put the wheelie bins back in the 1980s. Mrs Jenkins had run back inside and was packing her stuff when the police broke the door down. God knows where she thought she was going.’ Beth shivered. She might be able to laugh about it now, but it hadn’t been funny at the time. Sometimes, in the dead of night, she still felt as though she were in that chill green room, the vines on the walls writhing as the family’s deadly secrets threatened to choke her.
Katie had to rush off to yoga, so they finished up their coffees secure in the knowledge that there would be plenty to mull over in the months to come. The whole of the village had been agog over the details of the killing. And Beth’s standing, she was amused to see, had risen considerably at the school gates; even Belinda McKenzie was now smiling fondly at her and beckoning her over to chat with the select few.
She hadn’t told Katie, but all this chumminess was in stark contrast to her last interview with York. He had been predictably furious that she had chosen to meddle, once again, instead of calling in the professionals. But she’d been able to point out she had tried to call him, and that he had given her the final clue – pointing irrevocably, in her view, at Mrs Jenkins – when he’d told her the urine sample was definitely female. Anyway, just as well that the case was over now and their paths would never cross again, since he was so angry, she thought with a tiny pang which she carefully decided not to explore.
She had thought that even if York had given her up as a bad job, at least the powers that be at Wyatt’s would be rather thrilled with her for clearing up their little murder mystery – and proving that the whole murky business had nothing to do with the school after all.
But, of course, Beth had also managed to present them with an equally horrific crime that couldn’t have been more linked to Wyatt’s if it had tried – the centuries-old slave-dealing of their founder, the dashing Thomas Wyatt himself.
To give the upper echelons at the school their due, the full board of Governors and the Bursar and Head had immediately entered an enclave ten times more serious than that charged with electing a new pope. When they eventually emerged, it wasn’t white smoke which was sent up into the cloudless Dulwich skies, but a new protocol.
Beth remembered well the summons to the Head’s office, to hear what had been decided. She had been certain, from the queasy pit of her stomach to the suddenly lank flop of her fringe, that this was it. She was finally going to be sacked from her beloved little sinecure of a job. Wyatt’s had got round to noticing the inescapable fact that they really didn’t need an archivist.
Frankly, Beth thought, Janice the school secretary was perfectly capable of doing the few minutes’ extra filing a day which would keep the archives up to date and stop them being silted up again with every bit of paper the school produced. Given her close – very close, if Beth’s suspicions were right – relationship with Dr Grover, it was surprising she hadn’t already been given the job.
In a way, it would have been a perfect fit for Janice, and it would also guarantee that she could spend even more time with Dr Grover, whose divorce had just been announced. By a not-so-strange coincidence, it turned out that Janice, too, had just consciously uncoupled from her husband, and she and Dr Grover were permitting themselves small smiles at each other in public and doing a lot less shouting at each other behind the scenes. Time would tell whether this micro-scandal would dent Dr Grover’s dashing reputation and whether Wyatt’s mothers would disapprove – or feel miffed.
As far as Beth was concerned, it explained away that baffling flash of fuchsia she had seen on the morning of Dr Jenkins’ death, and also showed why Dr Grover had been so flustered when she’d bumped into him and nearly been sent flying. It was a little absurd, she supposed, that two grown people were conducting assignations behind the bike sheds. But with so many Dulwich eyes upon them, she supposed she couldn’t entirely blame them.
So, if they did do away with her archivist job, thought Beth, they would surely destroy the ridiculous, rickety shed in the playground, and the last few reminders of a grim chapter in the school’s history would be closed forever. She’d just have to go back to her existing freelance clients, and try her utmost to drum up a few more. It wasn’t an enticing prospect, but she and Ben wouldn’t starve. Not immediately, anyway, she thought bleakly.
It would have been wrong to say that Beth had been shaking in her boots as she stood outside the door, where many thousands of pupils had nervously waited to hear their fates. After what she’d already been through with the school, the Head and, most of all, with the Bursar, they held no real terrors for her any more. She was braced.
But to her enormous surprise, everyone was all smiles when she timidly cracked open the door and trotted in.
‘Ah, Beth, take a seat, take a seat,’ said the Head, his tie today particularly flamboyant in yellows and bright pinks.
Even the Bursar smiled at her jovially, his leg ceasing to jiggle for a moment as she sat down slowly. Janice, who was sitting next to her, gave her a reassuring grin, too. Beth looked at the headmaster, who spread his hands wide.
‘Now, Beth, I can’t pretend you haven’t brought us a bit of a… Well, shall we say, conundrum? Slavery. It’s a shameful chapter in our history.’ He paused to bow his head, and the Bursar and Janice did, too, like obedient nodding dogs.
‘But, as you know, we’ve consulted with the Board of Governors and all put our heads together.’ Beth realised this was no idle figure of speech. There must have been an enormous amount of deep thinking going on, by some of the brightest minds in the country. ‘And we’ve come up with a strategy,’ said the Head, his hands now outstretched to welcome the collective brainwave.
‘We’re a school, so we are going to make this an educational experience,’ he said, and Beth suddenly realised that this was the beginning of a spiel Dr Grover would be giving many times in the months to come – to the pupils, to parents, and above all to the media. Immediately, he reinforced the impression by getting to his feet and addressing his words, not
to the colleagues in the room, but to an imaginary audience right at the back of the room.
‘We cannot deny what happened,’ he said, his head bowed again. ‘Our founder made a fortune on the back of his workforce. His workers were slaves.’ Then Dr Grover looked up, gazing above the heads of the three onlookers, but staring his imaginary audience right in the eye. ‘Today, we are ashamed. Ashamed of the fact that we are here because of slavery. But, lest we forget, in those times, it was standard practice. Many fortunes, and many great educational establishments, are founded on these shameful beginnings. These are facts, and we can’t change them. What we can do is apologise, unreservedly, for the suffering that was caused by our founder, and pledge that we will never forget that this magnificent institution, which has educated some of our finest minds since the 17th century, has its roots in this appalling trade.’
Dr Grover paused briefly, before progressing to the denouement of his speech.
‘We will, at Wyatt’s, therefore be setting up a research institute into the issue of slavery – a topic which will be studied by all pupils, with a special prize issued every year on Founder’s Day, for the best original project on the subject. We will also be removing the portrait of Thomas Wyatt from the Grand Hall,’ said Dr Grover thunderously, as though delivering his ringing peroration to a packed hall. ‘Although, in fact, we haven’t quite decided if we’re actually going to do that or not,’ he said, glancing at those who were actually in the room.
He sat down again and turned his attention to Beth. She shuffled a little in her seat.
‘So, Beth, you can see where we’re going with this, can’t you?’ he said, smiling kindly at her.
This was it. The axe was going to fall. Well, Beth told herself, it was only what she’d been expecting.
Dr Grover studied her gravely for a moment, then spoke in his most serious tones. ‘We’d like you to head up the research institute. Of course, in a way, it’s just your old job with a different title… but we’re hoping you’ll step up. We’ve been impressed with your, er, skills during these difficult weeks at Wyatt’s. And we like to reward loyalty,’ said the Head, with a magnanimous smile.