Dying for Millions

by Judith Cutler

  Chapter Ten

  I seemed to have taught for an eternity, though my watch insisted it was only ten-thirty. Break! I got back to the office to find Ian Dale sitting at my desk, drinking a cup of tea and inspecting a pile of photographs. Shahida was at her desk, which was next to mine, actually sitting down – a most unusual posture for her, since she was usually on her feet running wherever it was she was heading. They looked up and beamed when they saw me. I gestured to Ian to stay where he was, made a mug of tea for myself and joined them, admiring the latest snaps of what was my sort-of-god-daughter. Since Shahida and her husband were Muslim, and I was a distinctly lapsed Baptist, the spiritual side of the baby’s development wasn’t going to figure high on my agenda, but I was keen on most other activities, especially bath-time and feeding ducks.

  ‘There you are again, Sophie – I’ve never seen so many pictures of you,’ Ian said.

  ‘No, they’re photos of the baby with me in them,’ I said. ‘I’m just the supporting cast. Hey, isn’t that the bear I gave her?’

  ‘One of them,’ Shahida said.

  ‘Like that, is she? Doting?’

  ‘I don’t dote!’

  ‘Not much she doesn’t! This is one of two identical bears, Ian, so that when one gets sicked on it can go in the wash, but Maria doesn’t miss him because she can cuddle his twin brother.’ Maria is a Muslim name, too – the stress goes on the first syllable.

  Ian gave one of his rare smiles of approval. ‘Neat, that. I remember my favourite teddy had to be thrown away. Never found another like him. Still,’ he sighed heavily, ‘I suppose that’s life.’

  Did I dare? Did I dare buy Ian a teddy bear for his birthday next month? Chris would say I couldn’t possibly, that the whole idea was absurd and outrageous – but then I probably wouldn’t consult him.

  We nattered through the rest of the photos, my colleagues and students washing in and around us as if we were a sandcastle defying the tide. At last Shahida gathered the photos together, and set off to her next class.

  Ian raised an eyebrow. ‘Anywhere we can talk?’

  I snorted. ‘You know as well as I do there isn’t! We’d better try and find a classroom – it’s the best I can do unless you can requisition somewhere better.’

  ‘Only want to give you some news, Sophie. No need for you to be so touchy.’

  ‘Sorry. Had a late night last night,’ I explained as we walked along the corridor, and told him about the airport visit. I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t got a sentence out of Gurjit since that didn’t begin, ‘Do you think Mark would …?’ Neither did I tell him that Mark had been on the phone to me at well before nine to thank me for arranging everything so well and asking if I had Gurjit’s home number so he could ‘arrange a few details’ with her. Since I couldn’t oblige, he’d entreated me to dig her out of class as soon as she got in to ask her to phone him. Her class had proved to be on the third floor. I was so knackered I might have permitted myself to use the lifts today – except that handwritten notices were stuck on three of them announcing that they were out of order. You can imagine the crush to get into the fourth.

  ‘No wonder you’re looking peaky,’ he said. ‘After all the business at the weekend – ah! Is that room empty?’

  Until we went in, it did indeed appear to be. Only the steady, rhythmic rocking of a bank of filing cabinets which concealed the corner hidden from the corridor suggested otherwise. Groans of what sounded like pleasure reinforced the suspicion.

  ‘Shouldn’t you do something? Report them, or something?’ Ian demanded as I locked the door behind us.

  ‘Let me see … We’d have to go and identify whoever it is, cough to announce our presence, witness their embarrassment – not to mention ours – wait while they got dressed, report them formally, go to a disciplinary hearing as witnesses …’

  ‘OK, OK. All the same—’

  ‘All right.’ I fished a Post-It out of the depths of my bag and wrote: Please do not use this room for this purpose again or there could be serious consequences. Then I unlocked the door again – just, by the sound of it, at the crucial moment – stuck the note where it could not escape notice, and locked up once more. ‘There. Nicely ambiguous, don’t you think?’

  ‘Humph,’ said Ian, peering through another door; this room was occupied by a History teacher and a pile of marking.

  At last we found the Geography room empty. Ian prowled round, apparently looking for something: since we’d spent five minutes looking for a room and I was due to teach in a further five, this time on the fourth floor, I found the delay irritating, but it never did to hurry Ian – not if you wanted the fully-rounded version of whatever he was prepared to impart.

  ‘Brent Knoll,’ he said at last, prodding a relief map. ‘Contour maps of Brent Knoll – that’s what we did in Geography. Some rubbish at the end of a glacier. And now it’s a service station with a fancy name. Sedgemoor. Why not Brent Knoll? In memory of all of us who did Geography all those years ago. It’s probably not even called Geography any more. Environmental Studies, or something.’

  I waited.

  ‘Well, they found something in that young man’s body. Helleborin, that’s what they think it is. Affects the eyes. And other things. Heard of it?’

  I shook my head. ‘In what way affects the eyes?’

  He flicked open his pad. ‘Photophobia and visual disturbances. Also causes vertigo and tinnitus.’

  ‘Just the thing you want to take if you’re Andy and performing at a pop concert.’ Then I started to feel sick. ‘Were there any traces in Andy’s flask, by any chance?’

  ‘Still testing at the forensic science lab. But they’ll be shifting on that, now we have the pathologist’s report. If it was Chris in charge, we wouldn’t still be waiting.’

  I made an effort to concentrate. ‘You did say Stephenson’s in a difficult position.’

  ‘Not in the pub, she isn’t. One of those women who has to be tougher than the toughest man. The amount of whisky she sinks! Rough stuff, too. She’s prepared to drink any bloke under the table. And her language! I thought you were bad enough, but she’d out-cuss you any day.’

  That was the ultimate condemnation. I glanced at my watch. ‘Look, I’ve got a class. Anything more you can tell me while we walk down the stairs? Like, where you found Andy’s flask? I didn’t get a chance to ask on Saturday.’

  ‘Behind that drum kit. Absolute tip back there. You’d never have known –’ he paused, while I locked up – ‘that those fellows had only been there a few hours. All sorts of muck. Disgusting. Half-eaten sarnies, cups half-full of cold coffee … Worse than your staff room, and that’s saying something.’

  ‘It is indeed. So what’s going to happen now? How did he get hold of helleborin, whatever it is? Is it some sort of magic mushroom?’

  He looked at his note book again. ‘Plant extract.’

  ‘Hallucinogenic, as well as all those other things?’

  He shook his head. ‘No idea. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

  I wouldn’t rush him. I mustn’t rush him. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘That this bloke took a bit of something, overdid it, and Bob’s your uncle. Right?’

  ‘It was a no-drugs tour.’

  ‘Well, perhaps he took something that no one’d know about.’

  I shook my head. ‘Look – some of them smoke pot, and one or two snort coke, especially the youngsters. But they get the push immediately if Jonty finds out. And no one in his right mind would take anything if he was going to be stuck up that gantry. You wouldn’t expect a steeple-jack to have a quick fix, would you?’

  ‘Ah, but these musicians—’

  ‘Musicians, my foot. Electrical engineers. Computer experts. Family men, most of them – well, you saw at the party. That guy – did he have a wife and kids?’

  ‘A partner. Male.’ Disapproval oozed from Ian’s every pore.

  I wouldn’t react.

  ‘Who says Pete never t
ook anything except marijuana.’

  ‘Did they find anything else – on him? At his place?’

  ‘You sound more like Chris every day!’

  We reached the room where I was scheduled to teach. Outside my class was seething round, moaning loudly. When I peered at the door I could see why.

  ROOM OCCUPIED.

  GO TO ROOM 1504.

  I don’t like to think what expletive passed my lips.

  ‘Problem?’ asked Ian.

  ‘None at all. Except that only one lift is working and that Room 1504 is back on the fifteenth floor. Would you call that a problem?’

  At lunch-time I wanted simply to put my head down and go to sleep, but there was a Board of Study meeting I had to attend. Since the Board’s intention was to make me a scapegoat for the ongoing lack of success of the work experience programme, I drank strong black coffee beforehand and flourished sets of figures. My colleagues were normally tolerant, kindly people, fraught with the same stresses as I – but put them in a room and call them a committee and they became steely-eyed and officious. However, my impressive lists convinced them that I’d done all I could to find placements in an period when employers were besieged with requests; and that my in-college campaign to persuade students to take up the meagre supply of placements had failed because of the students’ apathy, as personified by the student rep on the committee.

  ‘Waste of time, innit,’ he said. ‘I goes to her, I goes to Sophie, there’s no work to go to, innit? And she goes to me, she’s trying. But I goes to her, I goes, she don’t find the right places anyway, innit – I mean, ought to be with lawyers or accountants, innit.’

  The Head of English sighed audibly – and I knew I had been reprieved. Student literacy might well appear on the agenda for the next Board meeting: I might even chime in myself, with an observation on the use of the verb ‘to go’ as a verb of saying.

  Late for my one-fifteen class, I still found only a quarter of the usual complement there. Their serious faces and plethora of textbooks told me I had promised them a test; naturally I postponed it until I could trawl a bigger catch, and set instead a comprehension exercise that would take them for ever. While they read it through and listed words they didn’t know, I leaned on the window sill, trying to stop my heart pounding as though I were in a race. Pete Hughes and helleborin. Visual disturbances. Auditory interference. No trace of any substances on him or at home … There had to be a message from Ian waiting for me back in the staff room. Had to be. And it would tell me that they’d found helleborin in Andy’s flask. The suspicion that had nagged so strongly on Saturday – the one Griff shared – must be proved a fact: one I didn’t want, now it came to it, to face. There would be poison in Andy’s flask because it was Andy for whom it was meant.

  At break, over the phone, Ian’s voice, normally prosaic and flat, alternated between excitement at what seemed to him a new development and concern for me.

  ‘The trouble is, love, we need to talk to Andy and he seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. Get him to come back to Brum, just for a couple of days, will you?’

  ‘Can’t. Don’t know where he is.’

  ‘Come off it, love. This is serious.’

  ‘It’s my bloody cousin, and someone wants to kill him, and you tell me it’s serious! Of course it’s serious! But I don’t know how to reach him. He’s in hiding, Ian.’

  ‘Don’t tell me he didn’t tell you where he was going.’

  ‘I – what is it? Can’t you see I’m on the phone? Just one second, Ian.’ I covered the mouthpiece. ‘I’m busy, Karen. Wait a minute, please.’

  ‘I can’t. It’s so important?’

  ‘Two minutes. And wait outside. This is personal.’

  ‘Is it Andy? Sophie, tell him—’

  ‘Outside!’ I watched her almost stagger from the room. What on earth was wrong with the girl? ‘Ian, I’m sorry. Look, John Griffiths – his minder – left me his card. I can get him to contact Andy, make him contact you. That’s truly the best I can do.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘You’re telling the truth, aren’t you? You really don’t know.’

  It was the first time in thirty-five years I didn’t. He’d always carried my name on his dog-tag as next of kin: now he would have Ruth’s.

  ‘Give me Griff’s number, will you, love?’ His voice was distressingly kind. ‘Thanks. Now, Val’s trying out that lamb casserole recipe you gave her – how’d you like to come round this evening and see how she’s got on with it?’

  ‘Love to, Ian,’ I lied. ‘But I’ve got to do another work experience visit on the way back, and goodness knows how long it will take.’

  In fact I had to go and see Naheeda, the student who’d alleged misconduct against her temporary employer. It was an assignment I was not looking forward to, but anything was better than Ian being tactful. I picked my way through the late afternoon traffic to Hockley, nosing through increasingly mean streets to the two-up two-down house. I rang gently, knocked gently; then did both less gently. At last an old man emerged from the house next door, wearing a round fleecy cap, black waistcoat and white pyjama-like shirt and trousers of a thin cotton fabric. My heart bled for him: he must have been in danger of hypothermia.

  ‘I wanted to see Naheeda,’ I said, turning in to the wind to face him, pulling strands of hair from my eyes and mouth.

  ‘Naheeda gone,’ he said, making a palms-down scissors movement with his hands. ‘Gone Pakistan.’

  ‘Pakistan! But she goes to college!’

  ‘Naheeda gone Pakistan. Marry.’

  ‘But she’s only seventeen!’

  ‘Marry in Pakistan.’ He infused a frightening note of satisfaction into his voice. ‘Gone.’ A final scissors movement with his hands, and he was gone too, his sandals flapping on bare feet. I found myself hoping he’d get chilblains.

  Back on the road again, I missed my way and found myself heading into the city rather than round it. Cursing my stupidity, I tried to work out which possible route might have the fewest jams, and decided to surface on Great Charles Street, so I could leave the city on Broad Street. Then I could choose – if the Five Ways Island was solid I could risk the underpass and the Hagley Road. There would be plenty of time to decide. The traffic had slowed to breathing pace – a combination of cars turning right and others illegally parked. It was fortunate that it was then I decided to test the Renault’s front bumper.

  I saw Andy, you see. Nipping across the pedestrian crossing by the Music Centre.

  I apologised profusely to the Volvo driver in front, who’d inspected every last centimetre for possible damage – though even my little bumper was unscathed, I’d touched so lightly – and when I at last found somewhere to park, Andy was nowhere to be seen. Of course. I told myself, as I fastened myself back into the Renault, that my eyes must have deceived me, that in the dazzle of the lights and the gentle sleet I couldn’t have recognised anyone. That from the back Phiz looked like Andy – and so, with a wig, did Griff. So, probably did hundreds of men. That Andy was somewhere safe in the north. That no one with any sense would return from a safe house to a place where someone was trying to kill him.

  But I knew those shoulders, the set of that head, that walk, better than I knew my own.

  Chapter Eleven

  Trying to prise information out of Griff was predictably tough. He insisted that Andy – he referred to him only as ‘our friend’ – would be where he was supposed to be. When I floated as the merest possibility a journey south, he tried very hard not to tell me to be a fool; while he censored his words, he couldn’t quite control his voice. Since I could scarcely spell out exactly whom I had seen and where, lest there be any unwanted listeners, I tried hard not to blame him. At the end I wrung from him a grudging promise to talk to ‘another friend’ – his contact, presumably – and call me back.

  It naturally became one of those evenings when all your friends phone expecting a long natter. I’d never qui
te got round to having BT signal another caller, and so my enjoyment was spoilt by the constant suspicion that someone with vital information was being denied access to me.

  So I heard all about the problems Aberlene was having with her new bloke, who seemed to resent her being the leader of the Midshires Symphony Orchestra while he was only a back-desk second violin. All about them. I managed after half an hour to suggest we should meet to discuss it – a girls’ evening at a nice restaurant. There was a little, hurt pause.

  Then I remembered that itinerant musicians saw more restaurants than the rest of us.

  ‘Or how about a meal here?’ I suggested.

  We found a date and wrote solemnly in our diaries.

  Carl next: why he hadn’t contacted me at work goodness knows. His wife had suspected that we were lovers years before we actually were, and presumably still regarded me with suspicion, though I’d given her no grounds for nearly two years now. So why should he take the risk of phoning me? Was it simply to enrage a not-very-nice woman? All he wanted to talk about was our ‘expedition’ – his word, not mine – up the River Severn. He read out the instruction leaflet he’d prepared, asked me what I thought of his checklist of essential items, speculated on the likely state of the weather, and generally irritated the socks off me.

  My hand was poised to phone Griff when another call came through, this time from college. College? One of my colleagues, an historian, had found this student in tears outside the staffroom …

  It had to be Karen. Surely she hadn’t been waiting there all that time … No, don’t be silly, Sophie.

  ‘She says she has to talk to you. She says – I’ll put her on, shall I?’

  ‘OK, Mags – but don’t tell her my number!’

  ‘Sophie? Sophie? I’ve got to talk to you, I really have. Sophie, it’s about Andy … Have you sent him my letters?’

  ‘No. You asked me to destroy them.’ I didn’t mention that I hadn’t yet got round to it.

  ‘But Sophie – I need – he must –’