Holy Terrors

by D M Greenwood

  Theodora nodded. She wasn’t sure whether she believed Clarissa or not. She looked at the barely visible contours of the triangular face with its tongues of fair hair framing it. ‘I wondered, I believe you were a friend … you knew Jessica Stephanopoulos.’

  There was no eye-contact. Clarissa ran the back of her hand across her brow. ‘I wonder, do you think I could possibly have some more cold water?’

  Theodora looked round for a glass. She realised she was going to be made to pay for any information she obtained. ‘It’s important we get some sort of notion of who she knew, who her contacts were.’

  ‘Why?’ Clarissa asked.

  It was a fair question but also, Theodora felt, slightly manipulative, Truth would be the only rock, any manoeuvring with such a one would only result in shipwreck.

  ‘My own intuition is she had some sort of premonition, or fear that something was going to happen to her, and she may have shared that feeling with someone close, a friend, perhaps here.’

  ‘Why me? I’m not in her year.’

  ‘You were both members of the art club, Mr Cromwell’s club.’

  Clarissa did not deny it. She sipped her cold water and then turned on her side, cradling her fair head on her hand. The chaise-longue effect was almost of someone enjoying valetudinarianism, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

  Clarissa looked at Theodora consideringly. ‘Lady Braithwaite was your grandmother?’

  Theodora nodded.

  ‘My grandmother was here too, and both my aunts.’

  Theodora took her meaning at once. ‘That’s just what I mean. It’s a network, isn’t it? And over three generations now. That can’t be too common. If someone was rather insecure – frightened perhaps – within the family setting, it would be easy, sensible almost, to make this institution the place to put your trust in.’

  Clarissa nodded. ‘I think it’s rather a new thing for us, I mean for women to be able to do. My brother, Roderick, he’s ten years older than me. He takes it as a matter of course that he’ll be able to call up all sorts of help from people he was at school with. I suppose we’re just about beginning to be able to do the same thing.’ She stopped short, as though drawn too much along a path she had not intended to tread.

  ‘Was Jessica in need of a network?’ Theodora’s question was quietly put but Clarissa, she thought, looked wary.

  ‘People group by interest here rather than age. Or background. We’re very democratic.’

  Theodora hid a smile. The intellectual sophistication outran, she felt, the social. ‘So what were Jessica’s connections?’

  ‘Well, Cromwell’s coterie was certainly her milieu. She’d seen an awful lot, you know.’ There was a spark almost of animation, almost of envy in Clarissa’s tone. ‘She’d seen the galleries in most of Europe and she’d been to MOMA in New York.’

  ‘So she had some standing in Cromwell’s coterie?’

  ‘I suppose you could put it like that.’

  ‘Was she interested in any particular sort of art?’

  Clarissa considered. Then she gave Theodora the benefit of her rare level eye-contact. ‘Have you considered the possibility of religious art?’ she said slowly.

  For some reason which Theodora could not at all analyse, she suddenly felt like shivering. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think Jessica would have appreciated the icon. I mean she was religious. Cromwell was right, you know. Icons aren’t pictures at all, they are part of religion. Like a rosary or a talisman.’

  Theodora did not consider talismen religious, but she knew what Clarissa was trying to say. She wasn’t sure whether she was amused or irritated by the girl’s didacticism.

  ‘Do you happen to know where the icon Mr Cromwell showed us this afternoon was from?’

  ‘I imagine it’s a slide of something’ – she paused as if uncertain – ‘known to Mr Cromwell. I’m afraid I can’t help you over its provenence.’

  ‘Was Jessica friendly with anyone else? Mr Mere, for example?’

  ‘Oh him. Well she was going to be confirmed, so I suppose she did know him. He certainly likes distinguished families.’

  Theodora got up. ‘You’ve been very helpful,’ she said, gazing down at Clarissa.

  ‘Surely not,’ replied the latter faintly as she reclined further back on her couch.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Night School

  Geoffrey thought how very pleasant the school was when there were no pupils in it. By five minutes past four, the building of SWL comprehensive school was deserted by staff and pupils alike. By four-fifteen the boilers had been switched off and the smell of cleaning fluid replaced that of coke. By seven-fifteen the school had entered its evening role. From somewhere in the area of the hall came the sound of taped music and the high, jolly voices emanating from the women’s aerobic class. A clutch of Open University philosophers chatted with nervous confidence as they rearranged desks in one of the bleak classrooms. A vacuum cleaner droned a couple of landings away. There was a purposefulness, indeed a good temper, pervading the building, which was missing from Geoffrey’s experience of the place in its daytime incarnation.

  Geoffrey had left the Lambretta at home and sprinted the half-mile to the school. He bounded up the stairs. He was beginning to be able to find his way to the head’s office without getting lost. He’d once asked McGrath why the head’s office was three floors up and unlabelled. ‘Gives stroppy parents time to cool off before they can get their hands on him,’ had been McGrath’s answer.

  Springer had called the meeting for seven-thirty. Geoffrey, a punctual man, was surprised to see others there before him. Cherry, the second deputy, sat very upright in her denim boiler suit, next to Springer’s desk. Ralph Troutbeck crouched in the foetal position on a sagging easy chair opposite her. Just inside the door was McGrath, not yet sitting down and looking, in service fashion, as though he didn’t expect to be invited to do so and would be perfectly happy to stand for the next two hours.

  ‘Yah, yah, Ok, I hear you,’ Springer was mouthing into the phone. Geoffrey noticed that a mobile one with a space-age extending aerial had replaced the old corded one. It seemed, however, that Springer had not yet got the idea that the instrument could be used away from his desk. Or else perhaps, Geoffrey thought, he felt his desk was base. He waved to Geoffrey with his free hand. It wasn’t a bad imitation of the powerful executive greeting junior staff. Geoffrey unslung a chair from the stack in the corner, and placed it opposite McGrath and next to Cherry. Springer finished barking into the phone, spoilt the impression of smart office modernity by getting the aerial tangled up in the flex of his desk light, and turned towards Geoffrey.

  ‘I got your memo re. your Miss B. joining us. That’s fine by me. We’ll need someone to take notes.’

  Geoffrey admired Springer’s thriftiness. He’d wanted Theodora to come along because he was going to ask her to do something about getting the Kostas family and Ralph Troutbeck to speak to each other. She’d need to be drawn in if that was to be done in the near future.

  Theodora, arriving three minutes later, found a group clearly not at ease with itself. She all but sniffed the atmosphere. She scented the irreconcilable. She was an old hand.

  Springer consulted his digital watch which told him the time in New York and Canberra and called them to order. ‘I guess it’s time we made a start, folks.’ He turned to Theodora whom he had never met before. ‘Welcome aboard, Theo. This is Cherry, my first deputy. And Jim, sorry Mike, McGrath, our man in the boiler room. What’s your official title Jim, er, Mike? I always forget it.’ He didn’t, however, wait for an answer. ‘And Ralph there,’ he went on with rapid distaste, ‘I think you know.’

  Cherry smiled her warm social services smile, McGrath gave her a neck bow, and Ralph made no sign that he had heard any of this.

  Springer took up his favourite position half crouching, half sitting on the front of his desk. It put his head just a little above anyone else’s in the room, but left his feet
dangling six inches from the floor. ‘First of all, I’d like to thank you all very warmly indeed and very sincerely for giving up your time and agreeing to come along this evening.’

  Theodora wondered if he had made the annual parent-governor meeting his model for this get-together. She imagined you might have to be especially grateful to any parents who managed to tear themselves away from the telly to come to one of those in an area like this.

  ‘What we need to do, what we absolutely must do first,’ Springer was getting into his stride, ‘is to set our parameters. Which are, of course, I hasten to say, negotiable.’ He showed no sign of stopping to negotiate. ‘I can’t think of any better way of doing this than being one hundred per cent open with you and just sharing my thinking with you. Off the top of my head.’ He gave a portion of eye-contact to each member of the group in turn, to assure himself that they’d managed to follow him this far.

  ‘As you know, our numbers will drop if we don’t recruit. Money follows pupils. We can’t afford, we just can’t afford – ’ he looked round sternly – ‘to scare our clients off in this way.’

  Theodora could scarcely believe her ears. Was the man mad? Could he really be talking about the death, the possible murder of one of his pupils?

  ‘The governors,’ he went on, ‘had an urgent meeting this afternoon. They’re very worried, very worried indeed, I can tell you, and rightly so in my opinion, about the school’s reputation. Nothing scares parents away more than…’ Theodora waited. Surely he couldn’t be at a loss for words? ‘Than something like this.’ He shot a venomous glance at Ralph. ‘In matters like this, parental perceptions are all-important.’

  Theodora wasn’t sure whether his attitude was risible or macabre.

  ‘I want it cleared up pronto, tout de suite. Do you follow me? I’d like us to be all absolutely together, shoulder to shoulder, on this one.’

  Theodora decided there was nothing she could do except relax and simply collect the jumble of dissonant attitudes. She glanced across at Geoffrey. He remained impassive. His eye was fixed on a distant part of the ceiling above Springer’s head. She reflected that he knew Springer of old, so perhaps he was inured to his moral oafishness.

  ‘What I’m urging us all to do, what we absolutely must do is,’ he leaned towards them from his elevated position, ‘be totally, one hundred per cent frank with the police. No point in hiding anything. For good or ill.’ He glanced again at Ralph who remained comatose, his head sunk in his chest, his arms tightly folded. ‘For good or ill,’ he repeated, and then surged on.

  ‘I made it perfectly obvious when I saw their top man, their inspector, that he could rely on me, on us all, one hundred per cent. The police investigation, if you can call it that – I wasn’t over-impressed by their methods – makes it absolutely plain, plain as a pikestaff, that it must have been an inside job. It must have been somebody in the know. D’you follow me? Now I’m not pointing the finger at anyone.’ He flung a glance at Ralph. ‘Anyone can make a mistake. But what we must do – you, me, absolutely everybody concerned – we’ve got to put our heads together and come clean over this one. For the good of the school.’

  He paused. He appeared to have come to an end. His audience stirred uncomfortably.

  ‘Hang on a mo, Lance.’ Cherry turned her serious face to her team manager.‘Do we need to do some criminal profiling here? Bronfenbrenner and Bronfenbrenner’s work in the States in the eighties has some really, really interesting things to say about criminal stereotyping in detection. I mean, how helpful is it to say it’s an inside job? I think we need to be very clear on this one. Are you saying one of us deliberately killed Paul Kostas?’

  The uttering of the boy’s name seemed suddenly to strip away the mass of verbiage in which Springer had clad the event. Before he could answer, Ralph Troutbeck uncoiled from his foetal position and ran his hands through his web of hair.

  ‘I’ve had enough of this.’ He leaned forward towards Springer. ‘Stop pointing the finger at me.’

  ‘No one’s pointing any fingers, Ralph.’

  ‘Pointing the finger at me,’ he went on relentlessly. His tone was slurred. Theodora, sitting next to him, felt him sway slightly. She judged him to be just about drunk.

  ‘Well, we have to face it, Ralph, you didn’t control your class. Your parameters.’

  Theodora could feel Springer’s panic. It was being changed into violence and bullying even as he spoke.

  ‘Blast my parameters. No one,’ Troutbeck glared round, ‘no one could control that set of morons. That doesn’t mean I killed any of them.’

  ‘But Ralph,’ Cherry was all sweet reasonableness, ‘you weren’t exactly in a positive relationship with the Kostas twins.’

  Ralph swung round. Theodora noticed that drink made a cliché of his actions as well of his words and tone. He began to stab the air with his forefinger like a B-film actor miming drunkenness. ‘No one, no one at all had a “positive relationship”, as you so preposterously call it – where do you get your jargon from, dearie? – with the Kostases. They were accomplished little bullies together and ruffians separately. They ran the fourth-year mafia quite as brutally as their dad runs the Cypriot mafia from his transport HQ. I might point out he’s just done six months for GBH on one of his neighbours. His boys were just following in Dad’s footsteps. And if it comes to “negative relationships”’ – Ralph turned his blood-shot eyes on Springer – ‘you know damn well you came near to excluding them last term.’

  Cherry, always glad to improve a bad situation, smiled happily at Springer. ‘That’s right, Lance. There was that business with the knife.’

  Springer flushed all over his pale, team-manager’s face. ‘That was a joint decision of the governing body.They have the final say. I was perfectly happy to accept their verdict. Perfectly happy, I said so at the time. I had it minuted. It’s in the minutes. We’re professionals. We’ve got to live with that. That’s what we’ve got to live with.’

  McGrath, who had in the end decided to sit down, folded his arms over his chest and gazed at the warring factions. ‘If we’re looking for people who didn’t like or were downright scared of the Kostas twins, we’ll be here all night. They were tough little bleeders. The point is, who had the opportunity to kill one of them? We’d do better sticking to that.’

  ‘Well, Mike, I guess you’d have to be on that list, wouldn’t you?’ said Cherry. She might have been offering him a box of chocolates. ‘I seem to remember you were in the utility room at the end of the corridor about that time.’

  McGrath was more composed than his superiors.‘Yes,’ he said equably. ‘I was fixing broken chairs in the utility room. As I told the police. I was there from the beginning of break at ten forty-five, to the middle of the third lesson, eleven-twenty, when Kostas was killed.’

  ‘Did you hear anything?’ Geoffrey inquired, relinquishing his eyecontact with the ceiling and turning to McGrath.

  The latter shook his head. ‘I’d plenty to do. These kids don’t just break furniture, they wreck it. I was hammering. There’s always a fair amount of noise from the school. There were drills going from the builders outside. It’s not what you might call – ’ he glanced at Springer – ‘a quiet working environment.’

  Springer suddenly snapped. ‘It’s a perfectly OK environment. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. We’ve identified a lot of problems in that area over the last three years and we’ve met those problems, surmounted those challenges …’ His voice trailed off as though he could find no comfort in his own words any more. He sounded almost tearful.

  Theodora eyed him. He looked to her like someone who took refuge in jargon in order not to have to think. Language was a substitute reality for Springer. You didn’t have to mean anything by it, it didn’t point to anything beyond itself. Hence he’d ‘address problems’ and ‘identify solutions’ rather than look reality in the face. But when real life burst in and would not be denied – as in the murder of one of his pupils –
he could not find the language to evade that reality. Theodora wondered what he thought education was for, if not to provide the vocabulary appropriate to the event.

  ‘I wonder,’ she began tentatively, ‘if it would help to be certain what each of us was doing at the time of the boy’s death.’ Her eye swept over Cherry and Springer, Ralph and McGrath. ‘We do want, don’t we, to find out what happened and who is responsible for this death?’

  There was a sudden flash outside the windows, and the lights went out. There was a moment’s absolute silence, then a sound of doors banging and a hubbub from below.

  ‘What the hell …?’ said Springer.

  ‘These electricians certainly don’t seem too lucky,’ said Cherry.

  ‘Set of clowns,’ McGrath moved towards the door. ‘I’ve got some spare lighting gear in the utility room.’

  ‘I’ll give you a hand.’ Geoffrey leapt to his feet to follow him out. They moved cautiously down the darkened corridor, lit now only by the faraway and often reflected lights from the main road.

  The ladies’ aerobics class could be heard joining the Open University philosophers two storeys below.

  ‘I’ll have to get some lights to them. They’re both keen groups. They’ll want to go on. And of course they pay for the hire nowadays.’ McGrath manipulated the key bunch on his belt. ‘If you’d like to take these back to Mr Springer, sir, I’ll get some of this stuff downstairs.’ He handed Geoffrey a couple of standing lamps and indicated some more complicated apparatus at the back of his lobby. He seemed to know what he was doing.

  It struck Geoffrey they were really rather well equipped to deal with the emergency. Had they perhaps had to cope with this sort of thing often during the rewiring?

  Geoffrey seized the standing lamps and turned to go back down the corridor. As he did so his eye was caught by a pair of gloves wedged into the pipes which ran at shoulder height round one side of the tiny room. They were large and heavy and made of rubber. Geoffrey had seen their like before: they were the sort of insulated gloves that electricians sometimes had occasion to wear in the workshops of aircraft carriers.