Not a Very Nice Woman

by John Eider

It was getting dark by the time Sergeant Smith found herself driving to the large and somewhat historic building on the outskirts of town, her passenger the Inspector ruminating in the passenger seat,

  ‘The Tudor Oak Independent School? Nice name – reminds me of the Mary Rose. It can’t go all that way back though, can it?’

  ‘I’m not sure. The building’s old though, from what I remember driving past; and the modern school’s been there well over a hundred years. I think it used to be a convent or something before, and was used as a hospital during the First World War.’

  ‘The name might be a way to gain a bit of that history.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘So how much are you looking at to send a child there?’ Even as he asked he knew it was none of his business.

  ‘About the same as you’d pay to live at the Cedars.’

  ‘Free to those that can afford it…’ he couldn’t help but add. ‘And Brough’s serious, about wanting this for your kids?’

  ‘I don’t know, he has big ideas – you know Brough.’

  At an edge of town so far out it was almost its own district and served by its own shops and set of amenities, they pulled in before an impressive building, the oldest parts of which Grey saw right away might well have been Tudor. It must have pre-dated everything that now surrounded it, built entirely independently of the industrial development of the town and may have once had extensive gardens upon which its neighbours now sat.

  ‘A shame it’s so hemmed in,’ he said.

  ‘They must play sport somewhere else.’

  That was a good point. The school buildings were made all the more dramatic at dusk by the placing in the ground of spotlights that shot up into the air to highlight the walls and windows with their exterior detailing.

  ‘Sarah told me a Miss Oven would be waiting for us in the Juniors’ Hall.’

  (Grey had, at the time these instructions were being relayed to Cori, been issuing some of his own, or rather asking if Inspector Glass, recently appointed head of their station’s uniformed contingent, could place a Constable as promised at the Cedars for the night.)

  ‘She said it was the smaller building to the left.’ The pair walked towards the only lit windows in that direction. As they did so, behind them a hundred rugby boots clattered over the road they had just pulled in off, their field of action obviously somewhere on the other side. Grey remembered how thankful every ex-schoolboy ought to be for there being no one in adult life with the power to commit you to two hours of that torture each week.

  ‘Here’s the Juniors’ entrance,’ spotted Cori, her mind on more practical matters.

  Miss Oven proved to be a genial and reliable host; not far off being Stella Dunbar’s contemporary and evidently as happy in her work as anyone had a right to be. They sat in the centre of the large lit room, its ceiling pointing steeply in the manner of a small chapel. The desks now grouped in little islands Grey guessed had once been in straight lines. At one end of the room uncurtained windows were full of night. The lady had provided tea and biscuits,

  ‘The school secretary asked me to stay behind for you once the after-school clubs had gone. I knew her you see, Stella. We were colleagues for many years, and I hope friends.’

  ‘The secretary told you why we were asking after her?’ Cori sensed the Inspector was leaving this to her.

  ‘Yes, yes it is very sad. But then we all have to go sometime.’

  ‘I’m afraid Stella’s death wasn’t a natural one.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose it was if it brought you here.’

  ‘I’m afraid she was attacked. You’re not surprised?’

  ‘Not really, not when I stopped to think about it. The children went home a while ago, and I’ve been sat here with my thoughts of Stella flooding back after sixteen years.’

  ‘And what we’re you thinking?’

  ‘That she was a woman under a shadow, Sergeant, cursed with seriousness and unable to leave things alone or give others their head. She did much good, I’ll grant you, but she could be so tiring. No battle won would be enough for her, yet fail at the next task and all was lost. I expect you’re going to tell me that when it came down to it she couldn’t let a lad snatch her bag or a burglar take her precious things without fighting back… oh yes, the silver. Was that it?’’

  ‘We think it may have been a little more than that. When did you start at this school, Miss Oven? Was Stella already here?’

  ‘I don’t remember who was first or exactly when I started – I worked at several schools for a while – but we became firm friends, definitely by the time of the centenary: I remember the staff meal, and that was Nineteen Eighty-three.’

  ‘And what form would your friendship take?’

  ‘I only taught in the mornings while my own were at school, but she’d come with me when I went to the shops or we’d go and have a cup of tea before she went back at the end of her lunch hour.’

  ‘Did she have many other friendships here?’

  ‘She was respected more than loved, Sergeant. People here respected her. It all came down to how you took her, and how she took you.’

  ‘You must have made an impression then, to be so regarded.’

  ‘Well I couldn’t tell you why, I never had to make any special effort with her. She must have found something reliable in me, was my best guess.’

  ‘So the question had occurred to you?’

  ‘Oh yes – Stella did nothing by accident.’

  ‘Tell us about your work.’

  ‘Well, I was in the Juniors, she the Seniors and Sixth Form: History and English, but mostly English. She got the best results in the county, sent several down to Oxford.’

  ‘When she started, what was her name?’

  ‘Oh, you mean her surname? Always Dunbar to me; ‘though now I think of it, I’d sensed there was a marriage.’

  ‘Wouldn’t a good friend, as you say she was, have shared such a fact?’

  ‘Not with Stella, no. Odd that, isn’t it? But that was just how she was. I couldn’t tell you one thing about her life before I knew her, or much that happened to her outside of school once I did. Yet she had honesty about her, if she trusted you, if she thought you were good. I remember acts of kindness: a posy on my birthday once, or speaking up for me in a staff meeting. She could leave a real sense of warmth in you; and the rest was her business.’

  ‘A posy. Was that from her own garden? Only we don’t know where she lived when she was first here.’

  ‘Oh, she lived in the Alderman’s Cottages. They’re gone now, called a health hazard sadly. They became attached to the school in its early days, and were used as accommodation for unmarried masters,’ she chuckled.

  ‘When were they demolished?’

  ‘Long after Stella lived there.’

  ‘She lived there all the time you knew her?’

  ‘Yes, until her aunt left her that lovely flat.’

  ‘A single person’s rooms?’

  She nodded.

  ‘But you sensed she’d been married before?’

  ‘Only vaguely at certain times; such as when I spoke about my own marriage, she seemed to understand. She wasn’t like some singletons, professional women who’d treat tales of married life with shock: “Oh, you’d never catch me getting up that early to cook a husband’s breakfast.”’ Miss Oven dissolved into laughter.

  ‘But with Stella it was different?’

  ‘I would talk about Christopher and me and the kids, and she would nod and smile sagely in that way she had, instantly letting you know that she understood you and… maybe I was reading too much into it, but I always thought that she must have once known something of that life herself.’

  ‘Go on,’ prompted Cori, sensing more.

  ‘And there was always the impression of something else in the background, maybe an impression formed from nothing as I say; but I thought she must have had a bad experience in the past to be so against romance now.’

  ‘So
she didn’t have a romantic life?’

  ‘Not while I knew her, no; and she lived on site, so there wasn’t much that the staff wouldn’t have got to know.’

  ‘She lived in the Alderman’s Cottages, where there’d be single men?’

  ‘Well, of course the school was full of men, single and married! Stella was not an unattractive woman, Sergeant, and she received her share of attention, for all her aloofness. Some of the male staff just wanted their wicked way, of course; but not all of them: some were decent, honest, in want of a wife. “Why not?” I’d say. “You’ve got no ties. Why not find someone nice to settle down with?” but she turned them all down.’

  ‘Anyone in particular?’

  ‘No, there was never anything more serious than the usual workplace intrigue. Of course some of them would moon over her for years. You see, academics are not always practical men, they can be carried away – in love with love, as someone put it – and a woman like Stella was meat and drink to their fantasies. She could have a trickery about her, that one, though claimed not even to notice. Still, it’s a shame, she could have made a match with one or other of them, I’m sure.’

  Listening to the warm, open Miss Oven talking of the closed, rebuffing Ms Dunbar, Grey couldn’t visualise two less-alike people to become friends.

  Continued Cori, ‘And when she left the school?’

  ‘Ah.’

  Something in the lady’s tone confirmed to Grey that this was where the bad stuff would start, remarks on her astringency becoming a definite feature of any conversation on the topic of Ms Dunbar. He was gaining the impression that Stella couldn’t have served a glass of wine without a claim by someone that it had been laced with strychnine.

  ‘Well, they do say endings should be sudden,’ continued Miss Oven, ‘and an ending is always a severance, however you dress it up.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Relations broke down with the Head, and Stella was asked to leave.’

  ‘But you said she was successful, got students to good colleges.’

  ‘Oh yes, she did. There’s no denying that.’

  ‘Then what was it down to?’

  She lady considered, ‘Educational differences.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘A new Head had been appointed the year before. He was very popular, and a proponent of child-centred learning, which was an idea that had been around for a while by then, and which was meant to put the student first; whereas Stella held with fact and method being central, and the children somewhat incidental in the whole scheme.’

  ‘Could you break it down for us non-teachers?’

  ‘There were certain age-old ideas that the new Head dropped, and not before time: physical aspects of the classroom, such as the desks being lined up in rows facing a blackboard, and absolute silence being demanded as they worked; silence except for when the students had facts drilled into their heads by chanting them from the board by rote. Meanwhile, new ideas emerged: such as contextual learning.’

  ‘If you could explain.’

  ‘Where a child would be encouraged to understand what it was like to be, say, a sailor in the Napoleonic Wars, rather than just having a list of dates of battles in their heads.’

  ‘The old ways were looked down upon?’

  ‘Yes, and Stella didn’t agree.’

  Grey noticed Miss Oven was hardening as she spoke of those times, interrupting the women at last to ask,

  ‘I would have thought Tudor Oak would have been the last place to have fallen to trendy methods?’

  ‘Trendy is not the word I’d use to describe them; though yes it was pretty much the last place. The old Head had been a stickler: a good man, but years behind the times; and as those trained in the new ideas rose up through the ranks, so even as great a bastion as the Tudor Oak Independent School would one day fall to common sense.’

  ‘So what prompted Stella’s crisis?’

  ‘There was a meeting between her and the new Head. She told me about it afterwards: she said he started right off by saying that he didn’t consider that she was “sufficiently engaging the children’s emotions” as she taught them, and that she “didn’t even know if they were happy in the classroom!”

  ‘Stella replied along the lines that she hadn’t “the first idea of whether they were happy,” but that if it was within her gift to make them so then it was “through giving them the bedrock of knowledge that would advantage them their whole lives through!”’

  Miss Oven chuckled, ‘I’ll give her that, she could stand her ground even when she was losing the fight.’

  ‘You consider that a losing argument?’

  ‘Inspector, you can’t ignore a child’s emotional needs and then hope and pray they turn out fine.’

  ‘And what she said, about knowledge giving them a better life?’

  ‘Without the confidence to use it?’

  ‘In my experience, self-esteem comes from knowing you’re good at something, from having been taught properly, from earning a job you know you can do.’

  ‘That’s the most Dickensian thing I’ve heard in years, Inspector. Is sink-or-swim still your credo? I’m only glad for you that you swam.’

  He threw himself back in his chair in exasperation, leaving the talking again to Cori.

  Miss Oven reminisced, ‘I remember Stella in the staff room once, declaring, “These are the methods that made the minds that ran an empire!” and you can imagine how that went down with the modern thinkers.’

  ‘And so the new Head asked her to leave?’

  ‘It was decided it was best.’

  ‘And how did they work out, the new methods?’

  ‘Oh, I dare say had she stayed that she’d be happier here now than then. Once the state system completely broke down – you’ll remember the Southney School failed its Ofsted report three years in a row? – then traditionalism became a school like ours’ best selling point.’

  ‘You don’t sound sympathetic?’

  ‘I think it was a backwards step; though not as far back as we’d come: I for one won’t take the Juniors back to sitting in rows and intoning from the blackboard. Children like their desks in clusters, it helps them make friends. Stella would say, when we were walking down a corridor and heard a class reciting in unison, oh I don’t know, French verbs or times tables, “Listen to that beautiful sound, the sound of knowledge being imparted; it’s like Gregorian chanting, like Carols at Kings!” I thought it sounded like a chain gang.’

  ‘You were taught rote yourself?’ asked Grey, unable to leave it be.

  ‘Of course I was.’

  ‘Do you wish you hadn’t been?’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that – there are new methods now.’

  ‘That don’t work.’

  Cori cut in, ‘But the parting was amenable? There were no issues of pay, no need for a tribunal?’

  ‘As I say, once the matter had been raised it was settled quickly.’

  ‘And you were sad to see her go?’

  ‘Of course I was, we didn’t fall out at all, it was the Head she argued with. I was just another teacher and not even in her department.’

  ‘Did she say what she’d do next, ever talk of other jobs?’

  ‘She spoke of this being the end for her, that no school could match this one.’

  ‘But she’d be losing her salary.’

  ‘I got the feeling she had money, at least after her aunt died.’

  ‘Big spending?’

  ‘Nothing ostentatious, just a new coat, good shoes; things a woman notices.’

  ‘And I wonder, was there a leaving gift?’

  ‘Oh yes, you mean the silver watch?’

  ‘We found it at her flat.’

  ‘I am glad. I knew she was a collector, you see. I was in town once and called on her, after she’d moved there. I think I disturbed her, but she was very civil: invited me in, made me tea, showed me her pieces. I don’t think she had many visitors. I always hoped th
e watch would make its way into the collection. That would mean I got it right, you see, when I chose it.’

  Cori smiled her most sincere smile.

  ‘And did you keep in touch?’

  ‘No; but you can drift away from even your very best friends, can’t you?’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Oven,’ said Cori and held her hand.

  ‘And thank you for the tea,’ added the Inspector as he got up to leave.

  ‘You know we should have brought Brough,’ mused Cori as they walked back across the almost empty carpark.

  ‘No doubt there’ll be open days.’

  ‘And what a lovely woman.’

  ‘Were we talking to the same person?’

  ‘I might send the children here after all, if Miss Oven’s going to be their teacher. Give them some self-belief.’

  ‘I’m sure if they’ve enough of Brough’s genes then they’ll never want for that.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Grumpy. What’s got into you?’

  ‘All this talk of “child-centred learning”.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with that?’

  ‘I’m only saying, let’s worry about their feelings once they can read and write and add up and find Britain on a map.’

  ‘I’m surprised you don’t ask them to bring back the cane.’ But Cori knew that this bickering would get them nowhere,

  ‘You didn’t say much in there,’ she whispered as they walked back to the car.

  ‘I couldn’t think of much to say. She sounds like a tough woman to work with.’

  ‘Who, Stella?’

  ‘No, Miss Oven – all smiles, until you cross her. Did you notice how she stood back out of Stella’s arguments with the new Head?’

  ‘But she didn’t agree with her.’

  ‘Do you think that’s why Stella buried that silver watch beneath her teaching notes?’

  ‘Yes, that seems quite cold now. I couldn’t have told Miss Oven the truth. We might have to place it in the display case though, if she visits for the funeral.’

  It was after seven as they pulled away.

  ‘You’ve missed their teatime,’ stated Grey, ever conscious of his colleague’s family ties, as Cori drove them back to town.

  ‘It’s okay, we’ve found a good new Polish girl – I think it’s in her training not to say anything that makes me feel like a bad mother.’

  ‘Why don’t you go part time?’

  ‘Because what’s good enough for the rest of you is good enough for me.’

  ‘Oh hell, this isn’t a competition of who has the least to go home to.’

  ‘It’s because there’s too much temptation that I can’t give in to it – once I’m on that slippery slope then leaving an hour earlier a day becomes two hours and then three; and before you know it I’m coming in for desk duty one morning a week.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said after a pause between them in the dark car.

  ‘Don’t be.’

  ‘Long day.’

  ‘Yep. Home?’

  ‘Home; though drop me in the High Street, will you? I want to see if someone’s lights are still on.’

  Each knew that even the most serious case required time away from it, that working around the clock brought diminishing results, that batteries needed to be recharged and evidence stepped back from – that there was only so much data the brain could take on board in a day. They also knew that the big hope now was that their teachers might identify the Southney School girls when they were asked about them by Mrs Foreshore, and that that wasn’t going to happen till the morning.

  In the end, Cori parked with Grey a minute after pulling up opposite and just along from the solicitor’s office visited earlier, the lights of which were still burning in all but their shop window.

  ‘So what’s the beef?’ she asked.

  ‘I think I’ve been bamboozled, told a lot to be told nothing; and it was by was by someone I liked, which doesn’t thrill me.’

  ‘Raine Rossiter?’

  ‘I wish I knew what was going on in there.’

  ‘They’re getting our documents ready for in the morning.’

  ‘Or deciding which ones we see?’

  ‘Then get in there.’

  ‘No, I don’t know what I’m asking yet, or how it affects anything. You know,’ he said suddenly and not necessarily following on from his previous statement, ‘that they are losing five thousand a year on that cheeseplant flat Stella wouldn’t let them sell. Would that be enough for someone on the Committee to see her as a hindrance to be rid of? Especially when there’s talk of wanting to expand and build more rooms.’

  ‘But property costs a lot more now, sir,’ counselled Cori, whose mortgage repayments reminded her of that fact clearly enough each month. ‘Five thousand’s a drop in the ocean.’

  He conceded his theory wasn’t floating.

  ‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ he said; and with that he was off, heading, with only minor detours to pick up his tea, back to his small house on its unobtrusive street ten minutes’ walk from the High Street.

  Chapter 8 – The Hills Estates

  Wednesday