Dying Fall

by Judith Cutler

  Invigilating has all the charm of watching the stubble grow back on your legs. Any ordinary day I’d have marked, but now I was too sleepy to do justice to it. I could feel myself drifting off. Even I would regard dozing in front of a class as unprofessional and the Principal might well regard it as a sacking offence. So I hauled myself to my feet and prowled round, peering over the students’ shoulders to see what they’d written and even, if I felt generous, to dab a finger on more obvious mistakes. Apostrophe errors abounded, and some spelling was so original it verged on the dyslexic. Then there were odd sentences to enjoy. ‘Clym wandered about the countryside exposing himself at intervals.’ Sean should enjoy that. And then – who says great literature is not applicable to every generation? –‘the trouble with Clym is pathetic phallusy’.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Tina’s young man and his unlikely van took me back to Tina’s flat. In fact, the young man himself seemed less and less ordinary: I didn’t expect to see Russell’s History of Western Philosophy tucked into the door pocket. And when he whistled under his breath, it wasn’t pop or rock but Bach. Apart from his whistling – he took us straight through the Fourth Brandenburg – and my occasional a capella contributions, there was silence. I was too tired to speak. Tina might have been too bored. Or too pissed off with me for singing along with her bloke. If he was her bloke. I didn’t know.

  I longed for a hot bath to ease the bruises and ache and gravel rash and singed hands. A bath, a cup of cocoa and Persuasion but Persuasion was at home. At this point I believe I might have started to cry. But I didn’t. I swore instead. Who should be sitting in the middle of Tina’s living room, a particularly severe expression on his face, but Chris Groom?

  I’d hardly sat down – circumspectly – before he started asking me questions. When Tina and the whistling philosopher sat down on either side of him, it felt like the start of the Inquisition.

  Particularly when the boyfriend took out a notebook.

  There was only one way to deal with this: so flippantly I wouldn’t cry.

  ‘We have met,’ I said to him. ‘But we’ve never been formally introduced, have we?’

  He blushed: it was good to know I could still produce a satisfactory twirl of teacher’s sarcasm.

  ‘Thought I’d told you,’ said Tina.

  ‘No. And since you never address him by name –’

  ‘OK. Seb, this is Sophie: Sophie, this is Seb.’

  I held out a social hand. He pulled himself up – only an earthquake would have shifted me from my chair – and offered a reasonably firm grip.

  ‘How do you do?’ I pursued. ‘And what do you do, Seb?’ Joyce Grenfell would have been proud of me.

  ‘Can’t we get on with this?’ Chris said, roughly.

  ‘With what, Chris? I’m just making Seb’s acquaintance – isn’t that quite important? All I know about him is that he’s interested in philosophy and may have perfect pitch. What I want to know is what a nice young man like him is doing in a place like this.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Tina muttered.

  ‘Taylor’s in undercover work. Isn’t it obvious?’ said Chris.

  ‘Isn’t the whole point of undercover work that it shouldn’t be?’ I asked sweetly. But I was too tired to play the game any longer. I started to sag.

  Chris must have noticed. He sat up authoritatively. ‘There’s just a few details I want to go over, Sophie, if you don’t mind,’ he said.

  ‘I do mind. I thought I’d made that clear.’ But I was too stiff to rise with dignity from an armchair as squashy as Tina’s.

  ‘I said I needed to talk, Sophie.’

  Vertical at last, I was perceptibly swaying. I didn’t care.

  ‘I believe,’ I said, ‘that you are all sitting on what is meant to be my bed.’

  ‘For God’s sake, woman.’ But he stood up too.

  Seb and Tina retreated through an open door.

  ‘I’ve not slept since yesterday morning. I want to now.’

  ‘Mrs Thatcher says she only needs two hours a night,’ he said.

  ‘Look what happened to her.’

  ‘We’re investigating – in case it has slipped your memory – two murders. Which are undoubtedly tied up with attacks on you. Don’t you think a little cooperation might be useful?’

  ‘Tell you what, we’ll have a meeting tomorrow.’

  ‘Nine?’

  ‘No. Teaching at nine. Teaching all day, come to think of it. And a meeting at lunchtime I can’t miss.’

  With a bit of luck he’d wake me up by exploding.

  ‘What do you suggest, then? Eleven o’clock next Sunday?’

  ‘How about breakfast tomorrow?’ I’d had enough of this round, too.

  He stepped towards me, half-smiling. ‘You mean –’

  ‘Breakfast,’ I said.

  If the meeting had been minuted, I should think about a page would have covered everything. As it was we went all round the Wrekin, to use the Black Country expression, and got nowhere at all.

  Accents: we chewed them over for a while.

  Motorbikes: those too.

  Computers: a prolonged discussion which would have amused Phil no end. The police were so short of manpower (gusty and ironical sigh from Sophie) they’d not yet come up with anything in the computer project.

  Banks: the police team were notably reticent on the matter of ICB, so I threw my threepennyworth of rumour in. Chris was not amused.

  Then things got more frightening.

  Names of possible suspects:

  1) Iqbal: the cousin had temporarily interested them, but had been eliminated on two grounds: he was left-handed and the murderer was right-handed, or vice versa, and he’d been helping the police with their enquiries into quite another matter – cheeking the constabulary.

  2) Tony: unfortunately he’d got an unshakeable alibi, too, for the time of Wajid’s death, but they were glad to say that for George’s death he hadn’t—

  ‘I beg your pardon? Did you say glad? Tony’s my friend. My oldest, dearest friend.’

  But that wouldn’t have been minuted.

  3) Jools: I could vouch for her being in the pub. And – news to me – Stobbard swore he’d watched her leave the building by the front door.

  4) A.N. Other: my choice. But I couldn’t identify him or her. Someone at the bank? The man without a job title? Chris favoured someone from the Asian community – anyone – but hadn’t found anyone to pin it on, hard as he’d tried. (That wouldn’t be minuted either.)

  Motive: (‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Now we’re talking. Shouldn’t we have done this first for the victims? And treated them separately?’

  ‘We’re only brainstorming,’ Chris said defensively. ‘But maybe you’re right.’

  ‘How can we treat them separately?’ Seb put in. ‘Ms Rivers is involved with both.’)

  How would that work out if officialese? ‘It was pointed out that determining motivation for the murders might be instrumental in discovery of the murderer. So far as was known, Ms Rivers was the only common factor.’ Something like that?

  a.Wajid Akhtar: no known enemies, within the Asian community or outside it. Popular at college. But suspected to be involved with computer fraud.

  b.George Carpenter: no known enemies. But his knowledge of the members of the orchestra and their affairs might have made him dangerous. There is no question that he might have been blackmailing anyone.

  ‘So why,’ asked Seb, ‘encourage a man carrying his bassoon case on to a building site and whack him on the head with a scaffolding pole?’

  A O B: Ms Rivers’s burglary. Police confirmed that the security lights and the burglar alarm had been left inoperative by what appeared to be professional thieves. A neighbour had reported seeing heavily built men getting into a parked Transit. No ID yet.

  The meeting was adjourned sine die. It was time for college. Tina jiggled her car keys at me, Seb consumed the last of the toast, and Chris stared at his coffee mug as if he
’d never seen one before.

  ‘Tell me, Chris,’ I said, ‘how you propose to guard me tonight. I’ve got a ticket for the Music Centre – I’ve had it for months. Brahms, Mozart and more Brahms.’

  ‘Skip it. Listen to it on the radio.’

  Tina’s eyes widened in horror.

  ‘Tina’s hi-fi can only get Radio WM,’ I said.

  ‘But –’ And then he realised it was a joke. He blushed very easily for a grown man. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said at last.

  ‘Hi, girl,’ said Philomena, ‘how your boyfriend, then?’

  Tina, a little breathless from the stairs, asked, ‘Which boyfriend?’

  ‘Oh, she got plenty, our Sophie.’ Philomena laughed. ‘The one what sent you roses, Sophie.’

  ‘Rose. Just the one.’

  ‘No. Roses. You want to see your desk.’

  ‘I don’t. It’s a mess.’

  ‘What’s new, eh?’

  Even the very best minder needs to go to the loo at one time or another. With Philly beside me I saw no reason to follow Tina. In fact, I had every reason not to. I wanted a little help from Phil, which Tina would be happier not knowing about.

  ‘I’ll be up in ten minutes, Sophie,’ she assured me a minute later, winking luxuriously. And then, for public consumption, ‘You go look at that desk.’

  ‘Sophie,’ someone’s ill-formed handwriting said, ‘have tried endlessly to reach you. All I get is your answering machine. Are you all right? Please contact me to let me know I’m forgiven. S.’

  And there were a dozen roses this time, as Phil had said.

  I’d already opened the cellophane wrapping when Tina returned. I looked at her ironically.

  ‘Ah,’ said Tina. ‘Flowers.’

  While she went off to fill an old jug we keep just in case a grateful student says it with flowers – and a surprising number do, bless them – I dug swiftly in my files and shoved the photocopies of Wajid’s project in an envelope. The scrawl which constituted the address would have done credit to an old-fashioned GP. I’d just had time to slide some stamps on when Tina reappeared. While we arranged the flowers and brewed a celebratory cup of tea, Philomena came in unobtrusively, removed the envelope from the corner of my desk and strolled out. If assorted police computer experts couldn’t crack it, we’d see what one whizz kid could do.

  When the phone rang in the staff room during our lunch break, Tina was the only one whose mouth was not too full to answer it. She passed it to me, with an ironic lift of the eyebrow. It was Chris, in his far-from-official voice, offering to guard me. Somehow he’d managed to wangle tickets for a pair of seats.

  ‘Is Gorgeous Bum conducting?’ Tina demanded when I put down the phone.

  ‘No. An equally lovely Frenchman,’ I said. ‘Stobbard’s carving in Liverpool –’

  ‘Eh?’

  I waved my arms about. ‘You know – carving. He was already booked there before he picked up Peter Rollinson’s schedule. Don’t worry – we’re not in for the clash of the Titans.’

  ‘Thought it was the cymbals!’

  On impulse, and to stop myself screaming, I offered my original seat to a nearby History lecturer.

  ‘It isn’t your usual seat or anything, is it?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I sit anywhere I can get tickets. Why?’

  ‘Wouldn’t want to get blown up, that’s all,’ he said cheerfully.

  I wasn’t surprised when Chris didn’t use the underground car park: there would be far too many places for people to lurk. He found a slot in a crowded, brightly lit shoppers’ car park and we walked bunching in with other pedestrians as much as we could. Then we had to cross the wide spaces of Centenary Square. In the daytime, the trees offer an oasis of green amid the city grey. Now they were little islands of shadow. It was all I could do not to reach for Chris’s arm. Perhaps the events of the last forty-eight hours were catching up with me. And I was still tired: I hoped to God that I wouldn’t fall asleep during the concert. But it was no thanks to the conductor that I didn’t.

  ‘Don’t glower,’ Chris said, as we pushed our way out two hours later.

  ‘I’m entitled to glower. Waste of time and money. God, to think he made Brahms sound boring!’

  ‘That overture always takes me back to when I was a kid. My brother singing it: “Gaudeamus igitur, luvenes dum sumus. Bombs shall dig our sepulchres – bigger bombs exhume us.” D’you reckon Brahms would have approved?’

  ‘Moot point, isn’t it? The man admired Bismarck, for God’s sake! But I love his music,’ I added, inconsequentially and unnecessarily. ‘Was your brother part of the protest movement?’ I asked. I ought to make some effort to be sociable.

  ‘Yes. Very much so.’

  ‘What does he do now?’

  ‘He’s a priest in inner-city Glasgow.’

  ‘Priest? Are you a Catholic too?’

  ‘Yes. But don’t worry: I’m one that believes that contraception should be used in every conceivable situation.’

  I would not pursue that: flirting is all very well when your heart is disengaged, but the evidence of the past weeks was beginning to suggest that Chris’s was not.

  ‘Do you believe in God, and the Trinity and everything?’ I asked instead.

  He was silent. We were retracing our way across the square, and our separate sets of footsteps rang out, mine roughly twice to every one of his.

  ‘Well,’ he began, diffidently, ‘I certainly agree with Hamlet, that there’s more in heaven and earth than in Horatio’s philosophy.’

  And at that point I saw George. Shortish for a man. Heavy-shouldered. A flat-footed walk. I gripped Chris’s arm and pointed. I couldn’t speak. The figure, carrying not a rectangular bassoon case, but a cylindrical one, moved under a street-lamp. Then it approached the parking rank reserved for motorbikes.

  We said it together: ‘Jools!’

  He wanted to ask me all sorts of sensible questions, of course, but I couldn’t form the words, my teeth were chattering so much. As she roared away, I let go of his arm, only to find him taking mine.

  ‘Supposed to be brandy for shock,’ he said. ‘Only I know a pub where they do a very mean single malt.’ He dropped his hand and we walked in companionable silence.

  I’d never liked him so much: I could feel his effort not to intrude on a renewal of my grief for George. But that wasn’t the only thing I was thinking about, and I was glad when we reached a pub I’d never ventured into. For all its dirt and the horrified silence when I walked in, there were twelve or thirteen malts behind the bar. I settled with lamentable lack of enterprise on Laphroaig. He followed suit. The silence deepened agreeably as we swished the whisky round to release the peaty fumes.

  He raised his head to look me full in the eyes. ‘How are you getting on with Mayou?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Mayou. How are you getting on with him?’

  ‘Tina’s told you about the roses,’ I said, accusingly.

  ‘Uncommonly romantic.’

  ‘Probably the floral equivalent of “have a nice day”,’ I countered.

  ‘Or night?’

  ‘You know what time of night I was shot at. Hardly time for Khalid’s Montego to turn back into a melon.’

  ‘Are you going to see him again?’

  I slammed my glass down on the table. I was up and out of the door, without looking back. Only a couple of hundred yards to Centenary Square and the taxi rank. I’d get home that way.

  Only I couldn’t go home. I had to go to Tina’s, to her incessant music and her Oldbury accent and her whistling boyfriend. Except he probably wasn’t a boyfriend. When he stopped whistling there’d be Ian and his cottage-pie-cooking little wife. And Chris.

  I was profoundly angry. He never stopped manipulating me. If I’d liked him half an hour ago, I hated and resented him now.

  I like teaching my students about bathos. Don’t confuse it with pathos, I tell them. It’s what you call it when moments of high
drama come to a ridiculous conclusion. That’s how my evening ended. I’d reached the taxi rank before Chris caught up with me. I’d got in and was leaning forwards to tell the driver to go to Tina’s. But I couldn’t remember the address – I don’t think I ever knew it, to be honest. So I had to wait for him. But at least I went alone. He wasn’t leaving the city centre without his new car and I wasn’t leaving my taxi.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I had not been at my best on Friday, even for my favourite group. They had reacted to the presence of Tina with some distrust, and refused to contribute with their usual delightful enthusiasm. In fact, the whole session had all the charm of wading through cold porridge. Then there was a lunchtime meeting on some college policy I knew from experience we’d discuss endlessly and never truly implement. This time Tina’s presence made the wordy even more verbose, to the point where most of us were yawning, and Tina was quietly but literally asleep. Then there was the usual tussle with my Beauty group. There were only two bright spots in the day – I saw Aftab going into class, still with his surgical collar but at least back on course, and there was a note from Manjit. It was waiting for me on my desk after my attack on the beauticians.

  I was confused at first: the writing on the carefully sealed envelope was the counsellor’s. I’d know Frances’s scrawl anywhere – thick, confident strokes in black, italic felt pen. Stylish but illegible. Inside, however, was another envelope, addressed in small blue-biro letters, with the legend PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL in red. At least the envelope was too thin to be another bomb.

  It was from Manjit. She was staying in a refuge on the far side of the city, she said. They were hoping to fix her up at another college, maybe not in Birmingham at all. Would I try to see Aftab and tell him she was all right? If he wanted to write, Frances would pass on a letter. If I wanted to write, she’d pass on a letter for me, too. But she didn’t want me to tell anyone where she was. Since there was no address on the note, I could scarcely do that anyway.

  Poor kid! Giving up her family, her friends, at sixteen. Goodness knew what she’d been going through at home to drive her to that. I’d write her a chatty letter at the weekend, and try to persuade Tina to take me shopping to buy her a couple of gifts something both nice and practical. And I’d make sure, next time I saw him, I said something positive and private to Aftab.