Dying for Millions

by Judith Cutler

  ‘On an income like theirs, they probably have. Ah! Prit! How’s the sonnet?’

  ‘Sorry I’m late, Sophie. Only it’s my dad – he was bad and we had to call in the doctor.’ And Prit would have had to translate.

  ‘His gall-bladder again?’

  ‘Won’t stick to his diet. Or me mum won’t let him.’

  ‘How much sleep did you get?’

  ‘Might have a kip in the coach.’

  ‘Good idea. It’s OK,’ I overrode Carl, ‘we’re only just ready.’ I ignored Carl’s open mouth. ‘In you get.’ I swung into the driver’s seat. ‘Make sure you fasten your seat-belts. Right? Off we go!’

  Where the sun had not yet penetrated, the verges were white with frost; skid marks in interesting places suggested that other drivers had had more faith in road grit than I did. In any case, the minibus was no rally car, and there were all those precious lives in the back. At least I didn’t have to worry about Andy going hell for leather in a car he didn’t know in order to meet up with us; and like it or not, he was probably safer in Rose Road nick than anywhere else.

  All I had to worry about, then, was the icy road and Carl’s emotions. While I was apparently chaperoning the girls, they were also chaperoning me: perhaps his wife realised that. I hoped so. I’d never seen her lose her temper, but it had always seemed to me that she was on the verge of doing so; part of my attraction for Carl was that I had shoulders broad enough to bear all his troubles, blow-by-blow accounts of their rows included. Now I was no longer in love with him, it did occur to me that perhaps he wasn’t blameless, but my own conscience preferred to believe him at least more sinned against than sinning.

  I enjoyed the Bewdley bypass, which was dry and encouraging, and then picked my way through narrow lanes until Carl stopped me: this was the lay-by where we were to park, and that the lane we were to follow. The sun was now warm, but the lane was frosty where it wasn’t muddy: I laced myself into my boots, and considered all those cheap city shoes with cold feet within. Chilblains, that’s what they’d get. Some of them didn’t have gloves; I could hardly suggest they held hands inside each other’s pockets.

  They all had tasks to fulfil, and notes to make. The assignment was on the recreational uses of the river: later in the year they’d go and look at the Severn at Ironbridge Gorge. I appointed myself photographer, because I wanted to keep my distance from Carl; I helped with the odd spelling, but in general maintained a semi-detached relationship with both him and the students. So long as my feet kept steady, my mind was free to wander. We soon turned on to a path through the meadows on the west bank, the river’s edge pitted with little hollows which would be occupied on warm Saturdays by Brummie anglers: another recreational use to add to the Severn Valley Railway already on their list.

  While they wrote, I listened to the swirl and gloop of the river. It was all remarkably peaceful, and when one of the likelier lads attempted to improve nature with an overloud dose of his Walkman, I frowned him down. It wasn’t just selfishness: goodness knows what such a volume directed straight into his ears would do for his future hearing.

  I pointed across the river to some very choice residences. ‘I could manage one of those.’

  ‘I’d rather have a secluded cottage in the woods,’ Carl replied, his voice just missing an embarrassing intimacy.

  ‘They must be pretty damp if they’re round here,’ Pritpal said. ‘Look at the far bank – you can see how high the water must go. Right up to their foundations.’

  Carl beckoned everyone round him for a general discussion on floodplains, and I mooched along on my own for a bit. It was too cold to stand still for long, even if you were as warmly wrapped-up as I was, and the frost crunched under my feet under the trees. I took time to gaze around me – not something I managed to do very often – and breathed a cleaner air than the stuff surrounding William Murdock. The frost had thickened the branches, and they glistened against a deep blue sky. Idyllic. What about a job out here? There were further education colleges in other places than Birmingham, and apart from the choir I had no particular ties. Not any more, it seemed. Yes, I might start looking.

  Eventually the others caught up with me, Carl contriving somehow to fall into step with me on a path barely wide enough for two. I could think of nothing to say: nothing at all. At last, biting back a yawn, and for want of anything better, I started to tell him about my work experience activities.

  ‘There’s a scheme – though I don’t know whether it would apply to us, now William Murdock’s no longer under Birmingham Education Committee’s umbrella – for staff to get work experience,’ he said. ‘I was wondering about applying.’

  ‘What sort of experience?’

  ‘Something that’ll clear the teacher’s head, and also benefit the employer. I could simply do a stint in a pharmacy, I suppose, see if I liked it.’

  There was a pregnant pause. I was supposed to fill it with an enquiry about how long he’d be gone.

  ‘D’you think they might find something for me?’ Damn it, I sounded wistful. ‘English teachers might not be as marketable as pharmacists.’

  His face suggested he agreed.

  Another silence.

  ‘Are those the woods with the cottages?’ asked Prit, bounding up beside us. He galloped off to have a look without waiting for an answer.

  ‘Nice kid,’ said Carl.

  ‘Hmm. Can’t be easy, being a Sikh amidst all these Muslims,’ I said. ‘Oh, shit! You know what this is, don’t you? It’s Ramadan! The poor little beggars won’t be able to have any lunch. Not even a hot drink when we get back to the minibus.’

  ‘So long as they don’t expect us to fast with them,’ Carl muttered.

  I bit my lip: how could anyone possibly eat in front of people who’d not eaten or drunk since daybreak? And shouldn’t we have made some arrangement for them to pray?

  At least it wasn’t me who’d goofed, but I should have thought of it.

  Pritpal came bounding back, gesticulating. ‘Come on – it’s like Sleeping Beauty or something.’

  His face was so full of delight we all speeded up, even the most unsuitably-shod girl.

  ‘There!’ He gestured as if he’d stage-managed the whole thing.

  A row of four cottages, two pairs of semis. Derelict.

  ‘OK,’ said Carl, going into teacher mode but destroying the spell, ‘all of you, work out everything you can. Age – when they were abandoned – everything.’

  Work out the little comedies and tragedies of unknown, long-gone people: just like that. I wandered up to the gates, securely fastened with padlocks and chains. Actually at close quarters they weren’t so romantic. They even had garages, opening on to the track on which we now stood. You could still just about distinguish once-spruce lawns; though which were flower and which vegetable beds no one could possibly tell. A Fairy Liquid bottle stood on a front door step; dead clematis spidered down a tottering trellis.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  I’d forgotten about Carl.

  ‘Ordinary people and their ordinary lives – and it all comes to this.’

  ‘Like Prit said, it’s very damp. Trees on three sides, the river to the front … Inconvenient, too. No buses. You’d have to walk or drive all the way we’ve come, plus some more, to get into the town centre.’

  ‘Not much work either,’ I added, in teacher mode myself. ‘Forestry or agriculture for the men, service for the women. I suppose you’d grow most of what you needed to eat.’ In my mind’s eye I saw neat rows of beans, lettuces, cabbages.

  ‘You wouldn’t want to eat that, though,’ Carl said, pointing to a plant managing to flower despite the cold. ‘Wasn’t it you who wanted to know about helleborin? There you are: winter hellebore.’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘Common enough garden plant. Look, there’s some parsley over there. And those stalks would be mint.’

  ‘Do wish you’d stop talking about food,’ said Halima, a bright girl I was
hoping would go on to university. She flicked back her hair, cut shorter than mine, and laughed. ‘It’s making me dribble.’

  ‘You’ll have to spit it out then,’ said Mahmood, a youth I hardly knew but whose further acquaintance I might possibly forego. ‘In Ramadan you do not swallow even your own saliva. And find something to cover your head.’

  ‘The Holy Koran tells us that purdah is optional.’ She stuck her hands deeply into her trouser pockets. ‘And let me tell you this, Mahmood, I have read the Koran. For myself.’

  ‘What can a woman understand?’ Mahmood responded contemptuously.

  Prit caught my eye, and raised his own heavenwards. I tried and failed to ignore his appeal, but responded more sensibly by remembering I was supposed to be group photographer. I shot off half a dozen more frames, and the expedition moved on.

  The house was properly locked when I got back, and the living-room curtains drawn. So Andy had been back, but was now out again. A new Andy, considerate enough to leave a large note where I couldn’t miss it:

  PLAYING CHESS WITH ONE OF THE ROSE ROAD LADS. C U LATER.

  In the kitchen there was an aromatic casserole and a plate covered with clingfilm. My supper, courtesy Mr Rivers. Pasta. There was also a half-bottle of a soft red Rioja with a note from Ian:

  I RECKON RED’S KINDER ON THE STOMACH THEN WHITE. TRY IT! ID.

  And it was.

  Chapter Twenty

  I’d just parked and was waiting in the foyer for one for the two lifts supposedly in operation when Richard appeared at my shoulder.

  ‘How did the trip go yesterday?’ The tone of his voice suggested he expected at least one death and two cases of beri beri.

  ‘Bewdley? Fine! All the kids turned up, the minibus behaved itself, Carl pronounced himself happy with all the work done and I took photographs of everything in sight.’

  He perked up. ‘Photos? I want to do a display board for Parents’ Evening so perhaps …’

  ‘But that’s tomorrow!’

  ‘You haven’t got the films on you?’

  ‘I thought I might slip out to Five Ways at lunchtime and drop them into Boots.’

  ‘But there’s the Board of Study meeting at twelve!’

  ‘And I’m teaching till five-thirty. So it doesn’t look as if you’ll have any photos, Richard. Sorry.’

  ‘You couldn’t nip off now, I suppose? Leave your bag – I’ll take that up.’ He eyed it with resignation: you didn’t associate Tesco’s carriers with Heads of Division. ‘You should be back by nine, but if you’re not I’ll let your students in.’

  ‘Thanks, Richard.’ Thanks a lot.

  I suppose there was some weather between nine and four, but if there was I didn’t notice it. Whoever designed William Murdock – and those of us who knew and loved the place would condemn the looseness of my verb – made the windows so high you couldn’t see out if you were sitting down, and of course, there were no windows in the corridors or stairwells which formed the inner core of the building. Since Wednesday turned out to be a sitting-down day, and the lights had been on most of the time, the first I knew about the weather being anything other than plain cold and windy was a rush of students to the windows at about three-forty. Snow! Horizontal across the window. I have this fantasy that one day the entire student population will run to the windows and the whole building will collapse outwards, as if a giant banana were being unpeeled: but today was marked by no more than the usual chorus of demands from the students that they be sent home immediately, before the buses stopped running. Unfortunately in these days of charters, they are guaranteed a full working day whether they want one or not, and it would have taken someone with a good deal more temerity than I could muster to let them go. Whispered staff colloquies in corners between classes certainly involved prayers that evening classes be cancelled, but Management had given no such order when I left, feeling a total rat, at five-thirty. True, there weren’t many managers around; Richard’s was the only important car still in the car park.

  The worst part of the weather wasn’t the snow, but the wind which whipped into a frenzy, at the same time making a mockery of my short skirt and thick tights. Mini-kilts might be fun and flirty, but they guaranteed a cold bum.

  I sat in the traffic jam – warm enough now, thanks to the Renault’s heating – and fantasised about the evening. Warmth figured largely in that, too.

  For some reason my central-heating never coped with a north-easterly wind: this would certainly defeat it, just as it was defeating the salt and grit on the roads. Already the three lanes of the Five Ways Island were reduced to two. A childish prayer that tomorrow the roads might be impenetrable and that college would be closed passed my lips. A whole day off!

  But tonight, I had to cook – possibly for two – and sort out the wretched airport papers for Gurjit. I’d better pop into Safeway, just in case.

  In case of siege? Everyone else had had the same idea, and the place was as crowded as if they were giving the stuff away. There wasn’t a single candle left on the shelves: what was everyone expecting?

  Andy was home and busy in the kitchen, scrubbing potatoes. A couple of portions of Christmas-holiday cooked casserole were defrosting on the hob.

  ‘Here,’ he said, passing me a glass of Valdepenas. ‘No, on second thoughts, wait until you’ve eaten. Got to look after that stomach. Anything else need doing?’

  ‘You wouldn’t fancy a real fire, would you?’ How stupid! A fire might be a treat for me, but he regularly had huge, baronial, open-hearthed affairs down in Devon.

  ‘Brilliant,’ he said. ‘Is there still some of Uncle Bert’s smokeless fuel in the shed? I’ll go and get a couple of buckets.’

  And then it was time to start on those papers. I finished the table-clearing Andy and Chris had started on Sunday, and laid everything out, together with a pencil and pad; Andy merely raised an eyebrow, and took himself off the far end of the table. He produced files of his own, and a pad. But his pencil was gold.

  An hour’s work showed me that while consignments of medicine came in from Germany and Switzerland on several nights of the week, the only night they went adrift was Wednesday. There were two conclusions possible: either someone who worked only on Wednesday night was stealing them; or they could only be disposed of on a Wednesday night or, presumably, early on Thursday. So I needed two things: the staff roster and a schedule of outgoing lorries. And planes, on reflection. It was beyond me. This was a job for professionals with time and resources. Dave Clarke, Fraud Squad: he’d walk all over it. His numbers – work and home – were in my diary, in my handbag, beside me—

  But I’d promised Gurjit I’d do nothing.

  ‘What’s the matter? You look – fraught.’ Andy looked at me, all concern. He pushed his papers away and leaned forward, elbows on the table. ‘Tell your Uncle Andy.’

  ‘I wish I could. It’s confidential.’

  ‘You know me: silent as the grave.’

  It was so tempting: A confidant, ready to give advice …

  ‘I’ve got a student on work experience who thinks someone’s defrauding her employer. She’s got these print-outs for me. I think they prove she’s right.’

  ‘So go to the police.’

  ‘She’s sworn me to secrecy. She’s afraid of two quite separate things: either she’s wrong and she could look a fool in front of her boss, or it’s her boss who’s doing it.’

  ‘Evidence?’

  I shook my head. ‘I would say it wasn’t her boss. He wouldn’t steal on Wednesday nights only, would he?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The stuff only goes missing on Wednesday night. No other night, just every Wednesday! Someone’s probably nicking a box even as we speak.’

  ‘And you can work that out just from those print-outs?’

  What on earth was that in his voice? Not amusement or disbelief: I looked up sharply. No matter how he might try to disguise it, his face was troubled. But it couldn’t be. It didn’t make sense.
r />   ‘So what do you propose to do now?’

  ‘Nothing, till the morning. I don’t have the student’s number, and I shouldn’t think she’s made it to the airport tonight, not in this weather.’

  ‘Airport? What, Birmingham International? Surely not! Security there must be absolutely watertight!’

  ‘West Midlands Airport. Out towards Lichfield. It’s mostly freight, including medical supplies – which are getting diverted. On Wednesday nights.’

  ‘Any idea why?’

  ‘I’d guess there’s a bent parcels carrier on that night.’

  ‘Of course! So you’ll—’

  ‘Andy, I don’t want to get involved. It’s nothing to do with me! None of my business!’ I got up dramatically; and sat down sharply as that bloody spear pierced my stomach. I got up more slowly and found the stomach medicine in the kitchen.

  ‘See?’ I said, coming back into the living room. ‘Even my stomach wants me to leave it alone.’

  ‘I should say your stomach’s quite right.’ He got up and came to my end of the table.

  ‘Hey, what are you doing? No, Andy, they’re all in order!’

  He was scooping them roughly together. ‘Burn them. Get rid of the evidence. End of problem.’

  ‘No. It wouldn’t be.’

  ‘You could tell the student she was wrong. She’d be happier.’

  ‘She wouldn’t believe me! She knows what’s wrong. If I don’t help, she’ll talk to her boss – eventually.’

  ‘What’ll you do with the papers?’

  I smiled. ‘That’s easy. I’ve got a little floor safe. After my house was done over, I thought I’d better treat myself.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Start talking to the Fraud Squad. You wouldn’t like to come along with me, would you?’

  ‘What the fuck—’

  ‘Just to protect me,’ I said as lightly as I could; it must be twenty years since I’d last seen Andy so angry. And I had no idea why. ‘There’s this inspector who can’t wait to get his hands in my knickers. Is that the time? I’d really like to watch the weather forecast.’