by Tim Weaver
Beth smiled bravely. ‘I was born ready.’
They headed out into the night.
22
Unable to sleep, I got out of bed before the sun was even up, put on some coffee and made myself breakfast. As I was finishing up, Richard wandered through.
‘Morning,’ I said. ‘How’d you sleep?’
‘Good, thank you.’
I dumped my plate in the sink.
‘Listen, Richard, I need to run out and do a couple of things this morning, so make yourself at home here. There’s food in the cupboard, Netflix on the TV, and if you finish This Perfect Day, there’s some more Ira Levin in the spare room.’
‘Oh. Right. Do you need a hand with anything?’
‘If I do, I’ll phone you.’
He paused. ‘Okay.’
He seemed disappointed, or maybe offended, or maybe both. Or perhaps he was worried about being alone again. Whichever it was I’d have to accept it for now. I’d made some calls on the way home the previous evening and tried to set up a meeting with Jacob Howson, the Red Tree department head I’d seen pictured with Naomi Russum in the society magazine. I’d been told he would be out on a trip, so I’d made do with the school’s headmaster instead, and I wasn’t about to take Richard Kite along with me until I figured out if he had a connection to the school, where the murdered woman fitted in – and how all of it connected back to Russum.
When the doors of the Tube eased open at Cannon Street, it was like a bough breaking, a sea of suits washing towards the exits. I held back a while, letting the crowd thin, remembering why I’d always hated the rush hour, and then rode the escalators up, the pale autumn sunshine winking in the glass panels at the station entrance.
Haggerty’s, the florist’s, was in a building at the corner of Upper Thames Street and Queen Street Place. When I got there, a woman in her forties with a green apron on was arranging a display out front.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
The florist wiped her hands clean on her apron front.
‘Good morning,’ she said, smiling.
I went to my pocket and passed her a business card.
‘My name’s David Raker,’ I said. ‘I’m hoping you might be able to help me. I’m trying to find someone who may have a connection to your shop.’
She studied the card for a second, a frown forming, and then mild panic set in. I could see it in her eyes. But it wasn’t the panic of the guilty, a liar trying to devise another half-truth, it was the opposite: it was the reaction of someone worrying about what she may have done wrong. Good people got anxious about things like that when investigators turned up out of nowhere, asking questions.
‘Don’t worry, you’re not in any trouble, I promise.’
She relaxed instantly. I felt a moment of guilt, as I always did, at how easy it was to convince people – without having to even say anything – that, because you were an investigator, you were part of the police, and they were duty-bound to help you in the same way, but then I moved on: ‘Can I ask your name, madam?’
‘Lorie.’
‘Hi, Lorie.’ I smiled. ‘I’m trying to trace someone who I think comes in here relatively regularly to buy flowers. Their usual choice is twelve carnations.’
She frowned again.
‘That doesn’t sound familiar?’
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. She wiped her hands on the front of her apron again and gestured inside the shop. ‘Thing is, I usually work weekends – I’ve got young kids – but I’m helping out this week because my manager’s just had a shoulder op.’
‘Okay.’ I glanced beyond her to the door. I could see a counter with a cash register on top. There was an old PC sitting next to it and some kind of ledger adjacent to that. ‘Do you think it’s something that might be on the system you have in there? I mean, if this person’s a regular, maybe your boss has their name written down somewhere – or maybe they’re in the diary so she knows what day to prepare the carnations for.’ I thought back to what I’d found on the railway line the previous night: a lot of the flowers had died, or were going that way, but two or three bunches looked newer, fresher. That meant whoever kept returning to the scene had been to Haggerty’s in the last few weeks.
‘I can check for you,’ she said.
‘That would be fantastic – thank you.’
I followed her into the shop and waited while she began looking. After a minute or so, she looked up. ‘I might have something.’
Onscreen I could see what looked like a spreadsheet. It was full of words and numbers that I was too far away to read, but I could make out a title in bold at the top: REGULAR ORDERS. She placed a finger against the screen.
‘Monday 17 October,’ she said. ‘Twelve carnations.’
‘Does it say what colour the carnations were?’
‘Red, pink and yellow.’
I felt a shot of adrenalin.
‘That’s the person I’m after.’ I took a step closer to her. ‘Would you have a name there, Lorie? An address?’
But she was already shaking her head.
‘I’ve only got a first name, I’m afraid.’
‘Okay. What name have you got?’
‘Jacob,’ she said.
23
Sunlight streamed into the foyer at the Red Tree, the glass doors casting pale rectangles across the marble floor. It was a large room with high ceilings and oak-panelled walls, trophy cabinets, paintings of the school as it once had been – no cars, no surrounding buildings – and artistic photographs of the building as it was now. A staircase wound up to a mezzanine level where older students were working on laptops, and the reception desk was tucked into the space beneath it. There were also three doors, all of them open, each one with signs pointing the way to various departments.
I made a beeline for the front desk, told the receptionist I had a meeting with the headmaster, and she smiled robotically in return and asked me to take a seat. The truth was, I wasn’t really interested in the headmaster, I was interested in Jacob Howson – even more so now – but Roland Dell would have to do for the time being. If nothing else, he might be able to fill in some background on Howson. As the head, he’d also be able to help me understand what Naomi Russum’s relationship was to the school, and why it was she had access to the building. If I got really lucky, he might even recognize Richard Kite.
As I waited, I watched people pass the school, the trees outside shivering in the wind, and realized I didn’t have much of a plan for the next fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, hour, however long it took. I wanted to get inside, to have a look around if I could, or something more surreptitious if not, but mostly I wanted to talk to Jacob Howson. Whether I did that here or cornered him somewhere else would depend on how the morning went. But plan or no plan, it wouldn’t have quite allayed the sense of unease I felt. What I’d found at the railway line, what I’d found written on the cards, the fate of the woman in the photograph, the spyware on Richard’s phone, the fact that three days after our first meeting I still knew next to nothing about him – it was all building like a pressure behind my eyes.
‘Mr Raker?’
I looked up. A good-looking man in his late thirties was standing next to me, dressed in a charcoal-grey suit and a mauve tie. I stood, we shook hands, and he introduced himself as Alexander. He told me he ran security at the school and handed me a visitors’ log to fill in and sign.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I know it’s boring.’
‘No problem.’
Once I was done, he tore part of the form away, folded it in half and slid it into a plastic wallet on the end of a lanyard.
‘Just pop that around your neck,’ he said.
I did as he asked.
‘Great,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’
As we walked, he started filling the space between us with polite conversation about the cold weather, about how he loved autumn days like these. The more he talked, the more I could hear a slight accent – central European; Ge
rman or Austrian, or possibly Czech – but it was faint and, at times, hard to even detect. He led me along a central corridor that fed into other hallways, a maze of classrooms and libraries and labs and IT suites, talking about what wonderful opportunities the kids had here, how the sports facilities were amazing, and how one of their alumni had won gold in Rio. And then he told me why it was necessary to have security on-site: because they had kids at the school who were the daughters of oligarchs, the sons of Saudi billionaires, the children of celebrities and Premier League footballers and high-ranking politicians. ‘We don’t want to be paranoid,’ he said, ‘and we don’t want to scare the students, but our number-one priority is their safety.’
I spent the journey only partly listening, especially as we headed past a couple of classrooms that were clearly being used to teach English. Subtly, I tried to look inside, to see if Howson – as head of department – was in either of them, but I couldn’t see him, and I remembered he was supposed to be out on a trip. The next minute we’d reached a door marked HEADMASTER.
Alexander knocked twice.
‘Come in.’
He pushed the door open and Roland Dell looked up.
‘Ah,’ Dell said, coming out from behind his desk. He looked pretty much exactly as he did on the school website: late forties but good on it, an athletic build, blue eyes, a full head of black hair slicked back from his face in a wave. The only difference now was that he’d begun to grow a beard.
He held out a hand.
‘Mr Raker, is it?’
‘David. Thanks for seeing me.’
Dell waved it away. ‘Not a problem. Would you like some coffee, David?’
‘That would be great.’
He looked to Alexander. ‘Can you get Sandra to bring some in, please?’
After Alexander was gone, Dell directed me to a chair and returned to his. The leather breathed as he sat, and – with his eyes still on the door – he said, ‘I hope you didn’t mind Alexander coming to meet you.’ He paused, seemed embarrassed about it. ‘He’s very good at his job and feels it’s important to know who’s on school premises at all times, and I admit that is important. But I’m old-fashioned, I suppose. I’m not a great fan of visitors being met by security staff. It makes it feel like you’re about to enter the Pentagon.’
I smiled. ‘Honestly, it’s not a problem.’
‘Okay, thank you. So, to be doubly rude, would you mind if I just finish the rest of this email I was writing?’ He rolled his eyes. ‘School governors.’
‘No, that’s fine.’
As I waited, I took in the room: filing cabinets, books, a window looking out over a small but attractive courtyard, and on one of the walls closest to me, a framed article from an education supplement. There was a big photo of Dell and the headline RED TREE SCHOOL TOPS A-LEVEL TABLES FOR THE FIRST TIME. I leaned in a little closer to it, starting at a paragraph midway in.
Everyone in the independent schools sector knows the story: after working in state education for four years, and gaining a reputation as a progressive and innovative thinker, Dell was hired by the Red Tree City of London School in 1995 to head up their history department. In 2000, aged just thirty-two, and after the retirement of long-time head Bryan Austin-Smith, he was the surprise choice of school governors for headmaster. So began Dell’s sometimes controversial but ultimately hugely successful re-imagining of the Red Tree as a co-ed school, with a focus on core subjects and sporting excellence. In just three years, Dell improved GCSE and A-level performance by almost a third, with over 70 per cent of all results either an A or A*. By 2008 the Red Tree had taken its place as the top independent school in London, and this year it had the best A-level performance of any school in the country.
‘Sorry about that,’ Dell said, and when I turned to face him again I could see he wasn’t referring to the email he’d had to send, but to the article in the frame. ‘I generally find people who frame articles about themselves to be bores, so it took a lot of soul-searching before I could bring myself to put that up.’
‘It sounds like you have plenty to be proud of.’
‘Thank you,’ he said.
I reached across the desk and handed him a business card, told him what I did, and then started talking to him about Richard Kite. The more I watched him, the more I could see what was coming: he didn’t know Richard – or, at least, he didn’t know the name – but he was fascinated by his condition. I didn’t blame him necessarily, but it showed the difficulty in getting people to focus on less interesting elements of the case when all they really wanted to know was how a man could forget everything about himself.
‘So he recalls nothing?’ Dell asked.
‘Small things, but it’s difficult to say if they’re directly relevant.’
‘How awful.’
‘Yeah, it’s tough on him.’
‘And you think he may have a connection to the school?’
‘It’s possible,’ I said, unwilling to give too much away until I figured out how the Red Tree fitted into Richard’s life. ‘But, equally, I’ve got no evidence that that’s the case. I think he may have been associated with, or involved in, education in some way, possibly in this part of London, which is why I’m visiting as many schools in the area as I can. Or all of this could just be a dead end.’
There was some element of truth in that, though not much, but it seemed to satisfy Dell, so I shuffled forward, removed a photo of Richard and set it down on the desk in front of him.
He picked up some glasses, slid them on and studied the photograph.
‘Could he have been a teacher here?’ I asked.
Dell immediately shook his head. ‘Not one I’ve employed.’
‘Maybe he was a student at one time, then?’
‘Well, you said he’s – what? – in his mid thirties?’ He took a long breath. ‘If that’s the case, and he was a student here, he would have attended the school somewhere between ’93 and, say, 2000, 2001. I started here in ’95, but it’s a long, long time ago.’ He paused again for a moment, thinking to himself, and then set the photograph down and went to one of the filing cabinets. Pulling one of the drawers out, he started going through a few of the files. ‘Just give me a second.’
As he was standing at the cabinet, his PA walked in, carrying a tray with two mugs of coffee on it. She placed them on the desk without saying anything and, soon after she was gone, Dell slid the drawer shut and seated himself.
‘That’s a shame,’ he said, taking a long, frustrated breath. ‘I’m not a Luddite, I promise, but I’m a big believer in paperwork, so I tend to keep hard copies of old documents – but I don’t have anything that goes back that far. We don’t keep records of all the students that ever attended the school for obvious reasons – not only is it inappropriate and borderline illegal, it would also be an administrative nightmare. I’d need much bigger cabinets than these.’
He picked up the photo of Richard again.
‘But I don’t recognize him at all,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a lot of students pass through these doors during my time here, but as we’re an independent school – and a small independent school at that – I’d at least like to think I would remember most of them. Or their faces, anyway.’
I took the picture back from him and got out a second one: the photo of the woman on the bench in Regent’s Park.
‘What about her?’ I asked. ‘Do you recognize her?’
He took the picture from me.
‘Yes,’ he said, but just as I started to feel a charge of electricity, a moment of hope, a concerned frown formed on his face. ‘That’s Corrine.’
‘Corrine?’
‘Corrine Wilson. She was a teacher here.’
‘When was this?’
‘She joined us in September 2009 and she resigned …’ He was trying to remember. ‘It must have been end of October or beginning of November 2014.’
The month her body was found on the railway line.
He looked up fro
m the picture, the same expression on his face: puzzled, surprised. ‘Have you spoken to her, then? I’d love to know how she’s doing.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I haven’t spoken to her.’ I felt bad for not telling him the truth, but I pushed on all the same. ‘I found a photograph of her among Richard’s things.’
‘So does he know Corrine?’
‘If he does, he doesn’t remember.’
Dell nodded, his eyes returning to the picture of the woman.
‘You haven’t been in contact with her since 2014?’
He shook his head. ‘No. Not a peep. I mean, it was all a bit strange, really. She was one of our best teachers: the kids loved her, were totally engaged with her, the staff here all thought the world of her. It’s so rare to find that natural talent, that ability to just switch kids on immediately. I told her loads of times that she had a very bright future at the school, and then I came into work one day and found a letter – here.’
He tapped a finger against the desk.
‘It was a resignation letter?’
‘Yes.’ He frowned again. ‘I never got a hint from her that she was even remotely unhappy, that was the weird thing. I tried calling her, I sent her a few emails, seeing if it was something that we’d done – that I’d done – but she never picked up the phone and never responded to any of my emails. Normally, we ask our teachers to give us a term’s notice if they intend to resign, but I couldn’t get hold of Corrine to argue the point. Even Jacob didn’t know where she’d gone.’
I stopped. ‘Jacob?’
‘Sorry. Jacob Howson. Her boyfriend.’
I felt another stab of electricity.
‘He’s the department head in English,’ Dell went on. ‘Corrine was an English teacher too. That’s how the two of them met. Anyway, after I found the letter, I asked Jacob to come and see me to find out what was going on, and he told me he had no idea. He said he would talk to her that evening, but the next day he came in and said he’d got home and also found a letter. Like a “Dear John” kind of thing.’ Dell grimaced. ‘He said Corrine told him not to try to contact her.’
