A GINA GRAY MYSTERY
DROWN MY BOOKS
Penny Freedman
Copyright © 2016 Penny Freedman
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Matador
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ISBN 9781785896255
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
This book is for the people with whom I have read and talked about books over the past thirteen years:
For Mary, Janet, Jane, Sue, Robert, Sarah, Rosie, Jonathan, Joyce and Jan.
For Chris, Jan, Rose, Judy, Sally, Ann, Joan, Shelagh, Gloria, Celia and Jill.
And for Jan Dawson and the Warwickshire Super-readers.
My thanks, too, to the volunteers and readers in Studley, who introduced me to the pleasures of the community library, to Jan Sewell, who set me thinking about a murder in a book group, to Mary Wells for research trips and to Melinda Wells for willingly modelling Freda.
PREAMBLE
The events I record here happened early in 2014. You will be reading about them later, through the prism of events of 2015, the daily horror of thousand upon thousand would-be immigrants – many from Syria – dying in the seas of southern Europe. These deaths produced a change, of sorts, in the UK government’s attitude to Syrian refugees. In the first half of 2014, however, only 24 Syrian refugees were admitted to Britain under the government’s programme for the relocation of vulnerable refugees. In that competition, my student, Farid Khalil, stood very little chance.
Gina Sidwell
Contents
PREAMBLE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Headings
Chapter One
THE SEA
Tuesday 28th January 2014
When people ask me – and they certainly do ask me – how I come to be living here, I tell them that in the course of a single week I lost my mother, my job, my lover and my home. That usually shuts them up. My answer is disingenuous, of course. I did lose my mother; she died, quickly and quietly, while sitting in her chair one summer afternoon. The job, the lover and the house, though, were less straightforward: the job was a question of jumping before I was pushed, and the lover likewise, really. As for the house, well, with everything else gone, there really seemed no point in holding on to that.
I don’t tell people all this, nor do I add that when your life is all washed up, there is nowhere better to find its concrete metaphor than in a scabby little house so close to the sea that when I step out of my front door my mobile phone sends me a message welcoming me to France.
I had an image of the home I was seeking – the Platonic ideal of a seaside refuge – but I’ve had to lower my sights, of course. I have the sea-bound cottage I was looking for but without the picturesque isolation I had envisaged. My gimcrack little house sits squeezed into the middle of a cliff-top terrace in which one house or another invariably sports overbearing scaffolding. The economical and ecological driftwood fire I saw casting its soft, flickering glow has been downgraded to an electric one since a surly chap called Gary told me my chimney would need a total rebuild – arm and a leg job if I wanted to do anything as reckless as light a fire in my grate. I am too much of a snob to go for coal-effect so mine is an uncompromising two-bar fire with no flickering glow, soft or otherwise.
The dog and the cat don’t mind, anyway. They are stretched out on the hearth rug now, as the rain hurls itself at the window and the sea boils beyond. I promised myself a dog as part of my new life and I’ve been as good as my word, though I don’t really like them much; their neediness gets on my nerves. Fortunately, Caliban doesn’t ask for much and doesn’t pretend to any great affection for me. He is a lugubrious, heavy-jowled beast whose default manner is weary acceptance of whatever life throws at him; the occasional gesture of affection from me is met with wary indifference. Having started on the Tempest theme, I had to call the cat Ariel, of course, though she is no airy spirit. In the course of sixteen months, she has gone from being a weightless ball of fluff to a solid beast with the shoulders of a wrestler and the facial markings of a gangster’s mask. The dog is terrified of her.
If they don’t mind the two-bar fire, nor do I. I’m happy enough with my experiment at living poor. When my daughter, Ellie, first saw this house she looked round in open dismay and asked what I was punishing myself for. Annie, my younger daughter, won’t come here at all; she has not forgiven me for selling her childhood home, even though she is living in London with her boyfriend and has no need of said home. Freda, my granddaughter, reacted best. ‘It’s like a caravan, Granny,’ she said, ‘only with an upstairs and no wheels.’ You can trust Freda to get to the heart of the matter.
I don’t think I’m punishing myself; testing myself maybe, yes. I was shocked, you see, after my mother died and I sold her London flat and took ‘voluntary’ redundancy from my job and sold the family house in Marlbury, which had appreciated absurdly in value with the introduction of a fast rail route between Marlbury and London. I was shocked to find myself rich, the possessor of wealth in the region of a million pounds. The discovery was deeply unsettling. I didn’t know what to do with it. It was not that I feared I would run amok and fritter it all away on yachts and designer shoes, but that I feared becoming a different person. I had always been short of money: a job in the public sector and two children to bring up alone meant that life was always a bit hand to mouth even if we were some distance from the actual breadline. An eye for a bargain and the feeling of not being among the privileged has always been part of my sense of identity, so faced with all this money I had an insane urge to give it away to a good cause and pretend it had never happened. I was stopped, of course, by the girls, who cornered me and demanded to know my plans. Forced to admit to my confusion, I was marched off by them to seek help from a most unlikely source.
They took me to see the Rev
Peter Michaels, the vicar of St Olave’s church, Lewisham, who conducted my mother’s funeral. The girls got to know him and like him when they were organising the service, and they were convinced that he was the man to help: spiritual enough to understand my qualms but worldly enough not to let me throw away their inheritance in a quixotic panic. They were quite right, as it happens: he sent me in the direction of ethical investments and I deposited the lot once I had forked out the peanuts required for my current hovel. I still worry that one of those ethical companies will turn out to be employing trafficked children or keeping slaves in mines but I have done my best. And since interest rates are at rock bottom, I get very little income from my money. I am quite satisfactorily poor.
I have found it surprisingly easy to be poor. Without children, who grow out of their clothes, need three square meals a day and require endless handouts for sports equipment, school trips, dental treatment and the latest must have without which teenage life is insupportable, without a job that requires respectable clothes and regular haircuts, it is amazing how little one needs. I have turned the garden over to vegetables. They are not a great success since the ground is chalky and the produce salty and windblown. I have done quite well with root vegetables, though, even if my parsnips seem to have taken their inspiration from Hieronymus Bosch. I buy up bargains in the Co-op and drink cheap plonk. I brought with me only clothes for slobbing about in (except for one silk suit which will have to do for any remotely smart occasion – there have been none as yet) and I have no intention of buying more. What makes it easier is that everyone in St Martin’s-at-Cliffe is poor, really, so expectations are low. The name is deceptive. I know – it’s that ‘e’ on the end of ‘Cliffe’ that does it, evoking a quaint Agatha Christie charm that it entirely lacks. It is, in fact, nothing more than a bedraggled outpost of Dungate, a seaside town going rapidly to seed with the decline in popularity of the windbreaks-and-sand-in-the-sandwiches English holiday. It is a straggle of battered dwellings, clinging to a crumbling clifftop, with a hinterland of boxy 1980s housing, one shop, an unwelcoming pub, a primary school that teeters on the edge of closure and a library abandoned by the county library service. So you can see that it suits my purpose admirably.
In keeping with my new austerity, I brought the minimum of furniture with me but my living room still feels crowded since I weakened in the matter of books. I brought about two thousand with me and they throng my walls. My intention was to have shelves put up but Gary – he who advised against an open fire – also advised against overtaxing my flimsy walls, so freestanding IKEA bookcases jostle for space all round the room and I am supposed to be living up to my intention of rereading every book I own. This has turned out to be quite the most difficult thing about my new life, though, because I had reckoned without my need for the simple excitement of wondering what is going to happen. I started off all right, singling out books the plots of which I had actually forgotten, but then the need for novelty became urgent and I was rescued by the library. It was closed by the local authority three years ago but it is run now by a team of devoted volunteers, including me, and it is in some ways the hub of my new life. It will loom large in the story I have to tell you, so more of that later.
This afternoon the book on my lap is The Tempest because soon the doorbell will ring and Theodora will sidle in for her twice-weekly session of A level English coaching. These sessions, and those I do with one other student, constitute the only paid work I have and you may be wondering why, as a well-qualified and experienced woman of fifty, I don’t get myself a proper job. You have a point and I can only say that I have worked all my adult life, even when my children were babies, and I am enjoying the break. I shall work again when I feel like it. I hope that will do as an answer, and while we are addressing the questions you might like to ask, I will add that if you are wondering why, with the world my bivalve mollusc, I opted to settle hardly thirty miles from Marlbury, the town I was escaping from, my answer, quite simply, is Freda, and I am not prepared to say any more.
Dora, as she is generally known, is punctual to the minute, as usual, and slips into the house with an apologetic duck of her head like a nervous cat. She contrasts nicely with Matt, my other student. She arrives on time and anxious, wearing her school uniform and carrying annotated texts and a neatly labelled file of notes in a rather old-fashioned leather briefcase; her latest essay will be presented to me in a clear plastic folder. Matt appears anything up to fifteen minutes late, panting and cheerful, in a sweaty tracksuit and toting a huge sports bag on his shoulder, from which he will rummage a suspiciously pristine text; his essay will often be produced, folded and damp, from a pocket of his tracksuit. He is a county-level athlete and he wants to study Sports Management. He needs a pass in A level English to go with his C in Business Studies. It is hard going. Dora, on the other hand, wants to do European Studies at Marlbury University and needs a B; she could do this easily if only she was not so afraid of expressing an opinion. She knows the texts inside out but resorts to immaculate retellings of the plots in her flight from the dangerous possibility of getting something wrong.
Today I usher her in and offer her a cup of tea, as I always do, and she declines, as she always does. She is the daughter of a Greek Orthodox priest and I assume that she thinks builders’ tea with milk is a barbaric concoction. The presence of a Greek Orthodox church and priest in St Martin’s is a touch of the exotic quite at odds with the blandness of this dull little Anglo-Saxon settlement, but here they are right on my doorstep. The church, you see, is actually in this row of cottages, just three doors along from me, an English seafront cottage with two pillars and a pediment bolted onto its façade and its upper window given an ecclesiastical arch. Perhaps that was what brought me here: I came to the church once for the baptism of a Greek student’s baby and it stayed with me as a surreal experience – the salty wind and grey northern sky and wailing of the gulls outside and the deep, rich, guttural roll of the language, the candlelight and the heady scents of the Aegean within.
The church is here, I gather, because it was once the home of the chairman of the committee that decided that a place of worship was needed for the Greek Cypriot restaurateurs and café owners who were beginning to gather along this coast. Originally they simply met in his front room but, as the congregation grew with the influx of Greek students at Marlbury University, he moved out and the whole building, small as it is, became the church. Dora and her father don’t live there; they have a flat on the estate behind us, as bland and characterless as those around it. Disappointingly to me, there is talk of a move. Negotiations are in hand to buy a small church in Dungate which the Methodists have given up on. The Orthodox congregation has been swelled of late by Romanians, Bulgarians and some Poles and Ukrainians working in the hospitality business, so the little house can hardly contain it. What is more, it has become quite famous. It has, for years, held a Theophany ceremony on the beach at Dungate, attended colourfully by Orthodox bishops, and even the odd archbishop, as well as lay dignitaries of various kinds and an enthusiastic crowd of the faithful. The archbishop throws a cross into the sea and hardy young men hurl themselves in to retrieve it. I went to watch it last week and couldn’t help worrying about them in a mother hen sort of way. It is January, after all, and though I know there are hardy Brits who swim on Christmas Day, they are the products of generations of sinewy, leathery types, inured to the cold over many lifetimes. These young Greeks, I felt, don’t have the genes for this kind of enterprise; they have sunshine in their DNA. Their mothers really ought to stop them.
Dora certainly feels the cold. She looks pale and pinched and is regularly dressed, as she is today, in an oversized school jumper with the sleeves pulled down over her hands and a scarf wound several times around her neck. My two-bar fire, it seems, does little for her. I have been teaching her since September but she is still not relaxed with me. She is quiet, polite and attentive, she writes down almost everything I say, she
smiles dutifully at my jokes but she isn’t enjoying herself and she’s not comfortable. I have tried to modify my usual teaching style. My normal approach is to bounce quiet students into life by relentless good humour and jokes. If they won’t express opinions, I put forward opinions of my own so outrageous that they have to argue with me, but that just terrified Dora. She became paler and quieter until the point where I said that the problem with A Passage to India is that it’s all about sex but Forster has to do it in code, and her eyes filled with tears. After that I reconsidered and we have been taking things very gently ever since.
I have some hopes for The Tempest. After all, she is an only daughter, living alone with her father; she must have some views about Miranda, stranded with her father on a desert island, mustn’t she? I don’t care for Prospero myself. The play has been in my head a lot since I moved here. I quite fancied myself as Prospero, betrayed and rejected, brooding here in my cave, looking out over the lonely sea and plotting my revenge. I even have a beguiling role model in Helen Mirren, who plays a fetching ‘Prospera’ in a 2010 film version, but aspiring to be Helen Mirren is, frankly, asking to be disappointed – especially when one can’t afford a decent haircut – and, to my surprise, I find I can’t do the revenge. Even the vice-chancellor of Marlbury University, who engineered my losing my job, can’t stir me to vengefulness. Partly, I can’t be bothered; partly, I know that some of the fault was mine. And this is where I part company with Prospero. Of course it was wicked of his brother to usurp his dukedom and put him out to sea with his daughter in a leaky boat, but Prospero was a bad duke: he spent all his time in his library and didn’t do his job. He ought to think about that and not fixate on getting his revenge. What is more – and this is my real beef about him – he never really forgives. He has shipwrecked his brother and the brother’s cronies, terrified, tantalised and tortured them, but that is not enough for him. He cannot give us the moment of forgiveness, the heart-filling moment that Hermione, Cordelia and even Isabella give us. He says the words, I forgive, but they are words only. He is obdurate and cold-hearted to the very end. I can’t believe that Shakespeare intended us to like him.
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