Crime in the School

by Catherine Moloney

  He cleared his throat, halting Kavanagh in her tracks.

  ‘We’re keeping an open mind at this stage, Ms Kavanagh. All lines of inquiry will be vigorously pursued.’

  The deputy head appeared to be getting her second wind, so he continued hastily, ‘What I want to do today is conduct preliminary interviews with all teaching staff along with DC Burton whom I believe some of you have already met. My colleague DS Noakes will be speaking to support and administrative staff.’ My God, he thought, was that hard-faced harpy at the front with the fearsome nail extensions actually getting out a compact to check her make-up? Wait till she clapped eyes on Noakes!

  The other deputy head, the wimpy one, Dave Uttley, was mumbling about having a room ready for them. The man looked terrible, bad eczema giving him the look of a Pointillist portrait gone awry. There were great dark bags under his eyes which bore a haunted expression. Of course, that could be accounted for by present company. Godzilla had to be the coadjutor from hell!

  Now Uttley was introducing the caretaker Jim Snell. Markham caught a sour whiff of whisky and sweat and decided that he didn’t much care for the man; a shifty, weaselly little customer and no mistake. What was it Olivia had called him? Belligerent of Bromgrove? Well, the fellow certainly had a surly puss on him – he must have hated Ashley Dean leaving him in the dust as he whizzed up the promotion ladder!

  Markham made a mental note to do some digging into Snell’s antecedents, then followed Kavanagh, Uttley and the caretaker along a claustrophobic warren of corridors to a small office. Giving it a quick once-over, he decided it had all the essentials (most important – certainly as far as Noakes was concerned – being a kettle and fridge). Kavanagh seemed inclined to linger, but PC Doyle, catching Markham’s eye, scotched the deputy head’s plan for a cosy tête à tête with the Senior Investigating Officer, politely ushering her out into the corridor. Trailed by her hapless lieutenant and Snell, she left them to it.

  ‘It’s a bit dark and poky, sir.’ DC Burton gestured apologetically around the cramped space whose three desks – two crammed up side by side against one wall with a third jutting out awkwardly from the other wall into the middle of the room – showed signs of having been hastily vacated, piles of manila files and paperwork pushed aside and the odd grungy mug left behind. The one meanly proportioned window looked onto a strip of gravel which bordered some straggling bushes and sparsely planted flowerbeds, their etiolated shrubs contributing to the melancholy aspect. Beyond the flower beds was a stretch of scrubby grass ending in a block of four netball courts. Even these looked tired and unloved, with their faded grid lines and potholed surfaces, festooned with crisp packets and burger wrappers. As Markham watched, Jim Snell appeared, his mouth set in a grim line, heading for the courts with his litter picker.

  All in all, not the most prepossessing billet. Even on the brightest day, the sun’s rays would never cheer it. At that moment, a breeze whipped up outside, sending the thin leaves into a kind of frenzy before suddenly subsiding when it hit the building. As though something about the school struck a chill even into Nature, the DI thought uneasily.

  ‘At least that HR woman knows how to look after visitors. We’ve got tea, coffee, milk an’ chocolate digestives, Guv.’ Noakes, as ever, was focused on the claims of the inner man, plonking his booty down on a tiny, verdigris-encrusted sink at the back of the office to the left of the window. Ignoring Burton’s disapproving gaze, he set about brewing up while PC Doyle disinterred some mugs from a dusty cupboard next to the sink.

  Markham was just resigning himself to the pit stop when there was a timid knock. Dave Uttley’s head appeared around the corner of the door.

  ‘Would this be a convenient time, Officers?’

  Markham nailed an encouraging smile to his face. ‘Of course, Mr Uttley.’

  ‘Dave, please.’ Uttley advanced into the room as though about to face the firing squad.

  Markham noted the sheen of perspiration on the deputy head’s upper lip and his nervous hand-wringing. Once again, he was struck by how ill the man looked. Need to go gently with this one, the DI told himself.

  ‘Let’s have a cuppa before we get started,’ he announced reassuringly. ‘DS Noakes can do the honours.’

  As a manoeuvre to help Uttley relax, the tea-making was useful. The man was so wet you could wring him out, but Markham felt a twinge of sympathy. Working in harness with a ball-breaker like Kavanagh was guaranteed to drain the life out of anyone.

  After some anodyne chit-chat about the ever-changing educational landscape, Markham moved up a gear.

  ‘Would it be fair to say that Ashley Dean isn’t going to be universally missed?’

  A flush worked its way up Uttley’s neck.

  ‘There were some concerns that he wasn’t qualified for the position of Assistant Head, Inspector, because he hadn’t come through the ranks in the usual way.’

  ‘Did you like him?’ asked Noakes bluntly.

  The flush became painful, but Uttley’s gaze was steady and his response candid.

  ‘No, I didn’t, Sergeant. I think he carried baggage from the past which made him treat people quite ruthlessly. He was what you might call a schemer.’ The deputy head paused for a moment and then added bitterly, ‘I was certainly taken in by him at first. He was so charming to my face, that it took me a while to realize he was undermining me behind my back.’ He shrugged. ‘All part of his empire-building, I guess. The head was very taken with him.’

  Markham decided not to beat about the bush. ‘Word on the grapevine is that there was something going on between James Palmer and Ashley, which is why he shimmied up the career ladder in double quick time.’

  Uttley had clearly been expecting this. ‘I’d heard the rumours, Inspector, but there’s no hard evidence for anything like that. Schools are always gossip-mills and it could just have been jealousy. Or maybe the teachers and TAs (teaching assistants, he translated for Markham’s benefit) didn’t like him lording it over them.’

  ‘What with them being professionally qualified, you mean?’ Noakes’s tone made his opinion of academia abundantly clear.

  ‘Something like that,’ was Uttley’s mild response. He ran a finger inside his shirt collar as though it suddenly felt too tight. ‘Look, I don’t pretend to understand the dynamics, Inspector, but speaking personally, I never witnessed any impropriety between Ashley and JP.’

  After they had taken details of Uttley’s whereabouts on the night of the murder – at home, comatose in front of the box with no ‘significant other’ able to vouch for his movements – Markham sent him on his way. As the door closed behind the deputy head, the DI reflected that Uttley’s comments about Dean’s manipulativeness tallied with something he remembered Olivia saying. ‘Ashley had Dave Uttley and Audrey Burke eating out of his hand, imagining they were his new BFs.’

  ‘BFs?’ Markham struggled to follow her shorthand.

  ‘Best Friends. He used and abused them. Took what they had to give and then dropped them. Used private stuff they’d told him as his party piece for staff bashes.’

  The question was whether the dead man had wound Dave Uttley up to the point of no return.

  No, decided Markham, they couldn’t rule out Uttley. Physically unprepossessing he might be, but it did not preclude his being a murderer.

  Hell hath no fury like a deputy head systematically belittled.

  An assertive rat-tat-tat on the door heralded the arrival of the other deputy head. Helen Kavanagh sailed in without waiting to be invited and plopped down into the chair vacated by Uttley.

  ‘I’m sure Mr Uttley will have told you that the next assistant head will have some pretty big shoes to fill, Inspector.’

  Markham blinked. God, that was quick! Back there in the LRC, Kavanagh couldn’t shut up about Ashley Dean being irreplaceable. Now she’d segued smoothly to the topic of his replacement! No-one is indispensable, he thought. Particularly not at Hope Academy. The gleam in the deputy head’s eyes belied her
earlier rhetoric about irreparable loss.

  Markham realized that Kavanagh was quite capable of hijacking the interview. Time to lay on the flattery with a trowel while heading her off at the pass.

  ‘I believe you have a BSc in psychology, Ms Kavanagh. Taken with your considerable professional experience, I’m sure you can offer the police some valuable insights. You’ll appreciate that we have to consider the school environment as well as the wider community, so it would be useful to have your personal impressions of Ashley Dean.’ From the way the deputy head preened, Markham knew that this appeal to her vanity had been successful.

  ‘Ashley was commendably ambitious and proactive. If I had one teensy criticism, it would be that he overextended himself. Facilities management was his area of responsibility, but he was keen to get involved right across the board – behaviour, teaching, PR, staff training, everything really.’ Her expression hardened. ‘Obviously, with his primary remit being maintenance, it was difficult to keep all the balls in the air at once.’

  Markham allowed himself a swift exchange of glances with Noakes. He could read the DS’s mind. Translated from SLT-speak, this meant that Kavanagh thought Ashley Dean was a presumptuous upstart and she hated the way he tried to muscle in on her brief. As far as she was concerned, he was Mr Ronseal and had no business strutting around in pinstripes as if he owned the place.

  Markham decided to stir things up. ‘The head must have seen leadership potential in Ashley.’

  Something like real hatred flashed across Kavanagh’s face, quickly veiled. Dropping her voice by a couple of octaves in the manner of a seasoned tragedy queen, she murmured huskily, ‘Poor JP! Under such pressure, private life a bit of a shambles, and, between you and me, struggling to cope. Perfectly understandable that he became over-dependent on Ashley.’

  Oh, she was quite an operator, thought Markham with reluctant admiration. No vulgarly explicit reference to sexual shenanigans between Palmer and Dean, just the unmissable suggestion that Palmer was having an identity crisis with all that this implied. Try as he might, he couldn’t get anything more out of her. Technically she appeared alibied for the night in question, having been at a meeting until 8 p.m. and then out to supper with two of the governors (sucking up, presumably). Still, he had the very distinct feeling as the interview progressed that Kavanagh wanted to steer them away from Hope. Why?

  ‘What the hell was going on with the head and Dean?’ Markham burst out in frustration after Kavanagh had departed with the smug air of one who had put the police in their place. ‘Was it some dark secret from their past which bound them together? Was Dean playing mind games with the head? Or blackmailing him?’

  ‘Could well’ve been, Guv,’ the DS replied phlegmatically. ‘He was good at holding things over people apparently. Clearly Kavanagh thought he was a poisonous little Johnny come lately.’

  ‘Jim Snell would agree with her there.’

  ‘I’ve checked Snell’s background, sir,’ said Burton eagerly. ‘Two previous for assault, but they were domestics and he didn’t do time.’

  ‘That fits,’ was the DI’s response. ‘Snell looks like a woman-beater rather than the kind of man who’d square up to another bloke.’

  ‘What if he flipped?’ pressed Burton, blushing at her own temerity. ‘Must have hurt losing out to someone like Ashley with movie-star looks and patter to match.’

  Humph, thought Noakes, noting the way Burton drank in Markham with her eyes, her colour rapidly coming and going. She’s got it bad.

  ‘I just don’t see Snell for this, Kate.’ Markham’s brow corrugated as he thought back to the murder scene. ‘Whoever did it was clever enough to have blindsided Ashley Dean and slipped away like a thief in the night. He – or she – is out there now mimicking grief and manipulating the whole situation. Snell doesn’t have that kind of subtlety.’

  ‘Ashley was into power tailoring all right.’ Doyle sounded wistful. ‘His wardrobe’s like something out of GQ. Talk about dressed to kill.’ He gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘Sorry, unfortunate turn of phrase, sir. But seriously, he must have been high maintenance. His flat’s like Bling Central.’

  ‘Hmm, I wonder,’ Markham mused. ‘There’s often a fair amount of “financial irregularity” in schools like this. Which might explain the designer lifestyle.’

  Doyle whistled through his teeth. ‘You mean he had sticky fingers, sir? With Palmer in on it too? D’you think Kavanagh and Uttley wanted a slice of the action?’

  ‘Could well be. We’re going to need to look at the accounts. You can get onto that, Doyle, but for God’s sake be discreet. We don’t want to put the wind up the governors or anyone else at this stage.’

  ‘What about the students?’ asked Burton. ‘They’ll be in tomorrow. What line do we take with them?’

  ‘Softly-softly for the time being.’ Markham paced the length of the stuffy room with the impatience of a man who craved fresh air. ‘The school’s offering them counselling, so we’ll see if that leads anywhere.’ He sighed heavily. ‘Places like this always have backstory. You need to move a few stones and see what crawls out. Sexual irregularities, sackings, employment tribunals, you know the sort of thing. Murder has a ripple effect, so with any luck we’ll get leads from outside the school too.’

  ‘How are we going to divide the interviews, sir?’

  Burton was visibly straining at the leash.

  ‘For starters, I’m going to take the heads of department while Noakes works his way through the office staff. I want you to take the older women in the English department, Kate.’

  Good call, thought Noakes approvingly. She can have a PC love-in with all the lefties. And bloody good luck with that.

  Markham continued, ‘We’ll both have a crack at Audrey Burke if Noakes gets nowhere with her, Kate. That woman’s hiding something.’

  ‘Like what, sir?’

  ‘Hard to tell, but she looked deathly scared when I saw her outside the LRC. Like a rabbit cornered by a fox. I had the feeling that she’d seen something or knew something.’

  Burton snapped her notebook shut. ‘What about the head?’

  ‘He’s on sick leave. We’ll go along with that and keep him on ice for now. The man was certainly in a shocking state, and I don’t think we’ll get anything coherent out of him just yet.’

  Suddenly Markham stopped talking and put a finger to his lips. The message was clear.

  Be careful. Walls have ears!

  6

  Another Body

  SUNDAY PASSED WITHOUT ANY breakthrough.

  ‘Damned with faint praise just about sums it up,’ Markham sighed wearily to Olivia that night as he recounted the events of the day. ‘Nobody had a good word to say about poor Ashley. It was all honeyed malice.’

  ‘ “The evil that men do lives after them.” ’

  Noting Olivia’s tone of reprobation and pity, as well as a certain liquid brightness in her eyes, Markham continued in a mock humorous vein.

  ‘Tracey Roach was especially illuminating.’ His lip curled as he reproduced the HR manager’s simpering prattle. ‘Mr Dean was very popular with the secretaries, apparently – always dropping by. She had to tell him off because she ran a tight ship and didn’t want her team getting distracted. But none of the girls really got a look in, because he was so wrapped up in Mr Palmer – the two of them were practically joined at the hip.’

  Olivia laughed with her usual bird-like modulation. ‘That’s Tracey to a tee. I suppose she was gushing like a geyser over Helen Kavanagh.’

  ‘Yes indeed. A case of “The King is dead, long live the King.” Kavanagh was lapping up all the salaaming. Talk about a match made in heaven!’

  ‘It’s understandable that Tracey was jealous,’ Olivia said thoughtfully. ‘I mean, she pretty much ruled the roost before he came along. One minute Ashley was mopping the loos, the next he was JP’s right-hand man. Knowing Ashley, he probably enjoyed making fun of her to the office staff.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, s
he looked daggers when she mentioned him dropping by the office, so I reckon you’re right about that.’

  ‘But could jealousy have been enough to make her kill Ashley, Gil?’ Olivia’s voice had a solemn cadence, and Markham knew she was seeing that mutilated corpse in her mind’s eye.

  ‘I don’t know, dearest, I just don’t know. Noakes reckons she’s more your smiling assassin type, sniping at Ashley from the side-lines.’

  Olivia smiled sadly at him. ‘“Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.”’

  ‘Well, whoever gave Ashley that annihilating pinch covered their tracks,’ said Markham. ‘No forensic clues.’

  ‘Could a woman even have done it?’ Olivia sounded incredulous.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Doug ‘Dimples’ Davidson, the pathologist, had been clear about that. Ashley Dean had been taken by surprise and his jugular slashed prior to mutilation, so the assailant could have been female.

  Silence fell. Markham was grateful that Olivia asked nothing about the autopsy. It had been one of the most harrowing that he could remember.

  Olivia roused herself to cheerfulness with typically tender concern for her lover’s morale.

  ‘Well, who knows, maybe tomorrow will yield something.’

  Markham reached for her hand and squeezed it gratefully. ‘The students will be back. It’ll be useful to see Ashley through their eyes.’

  ‘Some of them really liked him, Gil,’ she said softly. ‘So, he must have had some redeeming features.’

  Looking at her candid face, Markham hoped it might be so.

  When Monday morning came around, Markham was hard pushed to feel positive. The sea of shrieking students, harsh electric bells and general hubbub constituted an assault on the senses which made him grateful for the sanctuary of his minuscule office. He suspected the rest of the team felt the same way.

  Their command post smelt musty and stale but, after a tussle with the grimy window, Doyle eventually succeeded in letting in some fresh air.