Crime in the School

by Catherine Moloney

  Burton’s interview with Matthew Sullivan had yielded nothing tangible. The drama teacher simply admitted an infatuation with Ashley Dean, confirming that his feelings were unreciprocated and that it ended badly.

  ‘I got the feeling he was holding out on me, sir.’ Burton had been unsatisfied with the outcome. ‘As though he was protecting someone. But, whatever it was, I couldn’t get him to open up.’

  Markham wondered if Olivia might have had more success with Sullivan. But he wasn’t prepared to risk her safety. As things stood, Sullivan was an unknown quantity with a motive for murder.

  Then there was JP. Markham understood the head was due to attend Audrey Burke’s funeral at the Methodist Church in Charnley Road later that morning. There would be an opportunity for watching his behaviour and catching him with his guard down. Assuming, that is, he could prise Palmer away from Helen Kavanagh who would no doubt stick to him like superglue.

  ‘I want you to get down to Bromgrove Library,’ the DI instructed Noakes and Burton.

  ‘I’m a member, sir,’ Burton informed him proudly.

  Markham carefully avoided catching Noakes’s eye.

  ‘That’s excellent, Kate. You and Noakes can check out the archives.’

  ‘What’re we looking for, Guv?’

  The DS sounded less than enthralled by their assignment.

  ‘Anything to do with Hope.’ Markham paused. ‘Or other schools in Bromgrove, for that matter.’

  He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘Bromgrove Secondary, Charnley Technical College, Cothill House, Ferndean, The Elton Partnership… Stick with the secondaries for now – state and independent – and go back a couple of decades.’

  The DI raked a hand through the dark hair that was starting to curl below his collar. It gave him a faintly piratical air that struck an incongruous note against the sharp lines of his impeccably cut pinstriped suit.

  ‘Jim Snell had something on the murderer. Knew something about him.’

  Something nasty in the woodshed.

  ‘What sort of thing?’ Noakes asked phlegmatically.

  Markham lifted his hand deprecatingly. ‘Some scandal or secret. That press cutting you found in his office suggests he went to the trouble of doing research.’ His face darkened. ‘Maybe Audrey knew the secret too.’

  ‘So, Snell was a blackmailer, sir?’ Burton’s tone was bleak.

  ‘Yes, Kate. I think he intended to trade his knowledge for silence. Provided the price was right.’ Markham shivered as if a rabbit had run over his grave. ‘The poor fool thought he was in the driving seat … had no idea what he was up against …’

  For a moment, he stood lost in thought, overwhelmed with revulsion for his job and filled with a longing for Olivia which was almost painful in its intensity. In that dark subterranean world where he toiled like some accursed troglodyte, condemned to sift through the vices and passions of mankind, Olivia was a beacon. All the rest just degradation and damnation.

  He became aware that Doyle was speaking.

  ‘… maybe Audrey saw something and clocked it as suspicious. She could’ve let something slip to Snell …’

  Markham gave himself a mental shake.

  ‘That’s more than likely what happened, Constable,’ he said approvingly.

  The tall gangly PC hopped from one foot to the other in gratification. Like a little kid wanting to spend a penny, thought Noakes disapprovingly.

  ‘Snell was a hate-filled pygmy,’ Markham declared. ‘He hoarded gossip and secrets. Seized hold of anything scandalous and jumped on it.’

  Navigating Hope’s murky slipstreams like a crocodile. Until he met his leviathan.

  ‘He was a horrible man, but he didn’t deserve to end up like that.’ Burton’s eyes were suspiciously bright.

  ‘No, he didn’t, Kate.’ Markham’s voice was very gentle.

  There was a brief silence, before he resumed in a tone of grim resolution.

  ‘The killer’s unravelling. Snell was tortured and Audrey ended up stuffed down the back of a piano. Whatever void Ashley Dean’s murder was designed to fill, the act itself was a downer. He – or she – needed to kill again. We’ve got ourselves a serial and we’re running out of time. I give it forty-eight hours tops before the DCI’s back on the blower threatening to hand this one over to Mr Nicely-Nicely.’

  The gloom on the others’ faces deepened at this caustic allusion to Superintendent Bretherton, or ‘blethering Bretherton’ as he was more popularly known.

  ‘Doyle.’

  The PC practically clicked his heels.

  ‘You’re with me. We’ll pay our respects to Audrey and see if anything useful comes our way from JP and Kavanagh. There’s bound to be other staff there as well, so we can take a closer look at Uttley, Sullivan and the rest of them while we’re about it. The killer has to be suffering a reaction after Snell … the strain of Audrey’s funeral could bring it all to the surface.’

  Noakes looked as if he wished he could swap assignments.

  ‘Er, libraries aren’t really my bag, Guv,’ he ventured.

  ‘High time you expanded your horizons then,’ the DI responded with the ghost of a smile as he followed Doyle to the door.

  Despite himself, Noakes was rather taken with Bromgrove Library, an imposing colonnaded Victorian building in the town centre.

  Burton, of course, was oohing and aahing over everything like some silly sixth former on a day out. Typical snowflake.

  Determined not to appear impressed, the DS nevertheless fell under the spell of the main reading room. The place was like something out of a fairy tale, he thought, taking in its circular interior with the domed ceiling and wrought iron spiral staircases leading to rows and rows of old oak shelves. Just seeing the regiments of books lined up behind gilt balustrades gave him a feeling of veneration for learning. Looking round at all the silent scholars hunched over vast tomes under a huge ormolu clock, it was all vast and echoey, like being in church. You’d be afraid to blow your nose in case the sound disturbed someone.

  It was with a feeling of some disappointment, therefore, that Noakes followed Burton through the reading room to an undistinguished linoleum-floored modern complex signposted Local Records whose airlessness, the DC explained earnestly, was down to the archives needing to be temperature-con-trolled. Like sodding Center Parcs, he thought crossly.

  His stomach gave a rumble.

  ‘’Appen I can leave you to get started,’ he said with his best winning manner, observing the way his colleague was rapturously drinking in her surroundings. ‘There’s a Costa Coffee back there an’ I missed out on elevenses.’

  ‘OK,’ came the surprisingly amiable response. ‘I’ll ask Miss Todd to set us up on the microfilm readers.’ Burton gestured to a desiccated looking woman with cropped hair and a dreary plaid skirt who was eyeing them with a gimlet stare.

  ‘You do that, luv,’ he said effusively. ‘I’ll be back in a tick. Once I’ve fired up the old carburettor.’

  With any luck Miss Congeniality over there would give them a hand. She looked the upright citizen type. In the meantime, he’d have a cuppa. They’d likely be here most of the day and the DI wouldn’t want him going under for want of sustenance. Maybe there’d be time for another peep at that reading room too. Just cos he hadn’t been to college didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate the finer things in life.

  Noakes sidled towards the door.

  ‘Glad you could join us, Sergeant,’ said Miss Todd on Noakes’s return some three quarters of an hour later. She sounded distinctly nettled.

  Time to pour oil on troubled waters.

  ‘Lost track of time looking round the reading room, luv. Hadn’t realized it was such a treasure trove. That History of Magic display’s champion.’

  Bingo. The battle-axe bestowed an approving smile upon him.

  ‘Well, our younger visitors were always commenting that the architecture reminded them of Harry Potter, so it seemed appropriate to offer something about local t
raditions and tales from the past. We’ll be doing Food Through the Ages next.’

  ‘Right up your street, Sarge,’ Burton observed with a knowing look.

  Noakes hastily changed the subject.

  ‘How’s it going with the trawl, then?’ he enquired, gesturing at a pile of printouts.

  Burton wrinkled her nose.

  ‘Thanks to Miss Todd’s indexing skills, better than I’d hoped.’

  The librarian retreated to a discreet distance, clearly well pleased with this encomium.

  Lowering her voice, Burton continued, ‘I’m pulling any school stuff that sounds vaguely juicy – sacked teachers, staff on the fiddle, cheating, bullying … whatever dirt I can dig up, basically.’

  Noakes looked warily at the microfilm reader next to Burton’s. Following his glance, the DC grinned.

  ‘Nah, Sarge, I’ll be quicker doing it myself. But why don’t you have a look through the printouts – see if anything jumps out. You’ve got more local knowledge, so you’ll likely join the dots quicker than me.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Noakes assumed an attitude of poker-faced impenetrability, as befitted a custodian of community secrets. Settling his ample buttocks on a low-slung leather chair to the side of the microfilm readers, he began to scan the pile of perforated sheets.

  For a while, silence reigned in their corner of the room, broken only by the soft whirr of microfilm reels and an intermittent juddering of the printer. From time to time, Burton cast an amused glance at Noakes who, increasingly absorbed in his task, looked for all the world like an earnest amateur historian.

  ‘Lift a few stones and you wouldn’t believe what crawls out.’

  The DS sounded genuinely outraged.

  ‘If it’s not pervy teachers screwing around with students, it’s kids dealing drugs or topping themselves cos of bullying,’ he sputtered. ‘All I can say is I’m glad my Natalie’s done with education.’

  Noticing Miss Todd’s sudden air of alert attention, he lowered his voice a fraction.

  ‘Seriously, though, it makes you think. My schooldays were like something out of Enid Blyton compared with this lot.’

  Despite the attempt at nonchalance, it sounded curiously like a cry for help.

  ‘Maybe if they focused on the three Rs instead of fannying around with all this trendy nonsense …’ the DS grouched, gesturing impotently with the sheaf of papers.

  ‘Too late to stuff that genie back in the bottle, Sarge.’ Burton spoke mildly, surprised to feel an unexpected spasm of pity for her cantankerous colleague under whose feet the tectonic plates were shifting.

  The DC leaned back in her chair, trying to ignore the nagging ache in her lower back.

  ‘Anything in particular grab you?’ she enquired.

  ‘Well, there’s a couple of stories about bullying at Cothill,’ Noakes replied, thumbing through the stash. ‘I noticed them cos me an’ the missus almost sent Natalie there. Went to Open Day an’ all.’ He looked belligerently at Burton as though daring her to challenge this. ‘We could afford it,’ he continued defensively, ‘but it just didn’t feel right. Very swanky, but the kids were right snotty an’ the head … well, he was a real poser … megawatt smile – the mums loved it – but dead insincere underneath.’ He clenched his jaw. ‘I caught him sneering at Muriel when he thought she couldn’t see. But I saw him. I don’t mind anyone having a pop at me, but no-one laughs at my missus.’

  Noakes should have sounded ridiculous but somehow didn’t. Seeing only respectful sympathy in Burton’s face, he added more temperately, ‘One of the stories about Cothill says there was a seventeen-year-old student who killed himself. Single-parent family an’ the kid was there on a scholarship. It was down to bullying. The lad left a diary an’ it all came out. The form tutor turned a blind eye, apparently.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Oh, there was an investigation but the school decided no-one was to blame.’

  ‘Very convenient.’

  ‘Yeah. But get this,’ Noakes’s voice swelled with admiration, ‘the lad’s mum wasn’t having any of it. Got up at the inquest and called the form tutor a douchebag. Really went for the whole lot of ’em, the poor cow. Said that if the head wasn’t so busy ass-kissing, he’d have noticed what was going on.’

  ‘Good for her.’ Burton knew which side she was on. ‘When did all this happen?’

  ‘About fifteen years or so. There was a follow up when the mum died suddenly. A relative told the Gazette she died of a broken heart an’ the staff at Cothill had blood on their hands.’

  ‘God, how awful.’ Burton’s face looked pinched and drawn at the grim recital.

  ‘Yeah.’ Noakes nodded solemnly. ‘Ferndean’s pretty gross too. Three teachers struck off in the last five years for,’ he air quoted savagely, ‘inappropriate relationships. An’ before that there was a hoo-ha about the head having it off with one of the governors. Turned out he’d been giving her money out of school funds. An’ that’s not all—’

  Burton interrupted before Noakes could embark on a litany of iniquities.

  ‘Anything in there about Hope, Sarge?’

  Like a witch-finder baulked of his prey, Noakes abandoned the indictment against Ferndean with some reluctance.

  ‘Nowt to speak of,’ he replied. ‘Just summat about when an exams officer lost a set of GCSE papers an’ the parents were creating about it.’

  Burton’s eyes throbbed with squinting at microfilm slides. A blinding headache was just around the corner.

  ‘C’mon,’ she said wearily. ‘I’ll just do this last batch. Miss Todd said she’ll run some checks too if we don’t get finished today.’

  Noakes’s nose was already deep in the pile of printouts. At some level, reflected Burton, she and the DS had bonded over their abortive auto-da-fé.

  Perhaps, she concluded with a rueful smile, that was precisely what Markham had intended.

  By five o’clock, the team had reconvened in their office at Hope. Outside it was getting dark, a chill wind wuthering mournfully around the building.

  The DI looked all done in, Noakes thought as he watched his guv’nor from over the rim of an outsize Bart Simpson mug. Burton was wolfing nurofen tablets like smarties, while Doyle flicked desultorily through a notebook between picking his blackheads.

  Markham was recalling Audrey’s funeral service. Crenellated and gothic from the outside, the church’s long narrow interior was cheerless as a barn with just one stained glass window at the far end. A vaulted ceiling in lurid vermilion, crisscrossed with white rafters, failed to suggest celestial realms to Markham, being more evocative of hell fire.

  Unlike the huge turnout for Ashley Dean, the congregation for Audrey had comprised a dispiriting huddle in the front three pews. And of these, most appeared to be her colleagues from Hope. It was so cold that their breath hung in the air.

  Matthew Sullivan had held aloof from Markham, but the DI noted that Harry Mountfield appeared to be propping him up. The drama teacher’s eyes seemed to look inward at some private agony, so that it felt like a violation to spy on him.

  JP’s appearance too seemed testament to some deep-seated anguish, his eyes bloodshot behind the heavy black-rimmed spectacles and the scrawny body more tadpole-like than ever. The number two haircut was dank with sweat and an ill-fitting Man at C&A suit failed to disguise the fact that he had lost an alarming amount of weight. Was it grief or remorse that had wreaked such havoc on the man, Markham wondered. Helen Kavanagh shadowed Palmer like a prison warder, leaving no opportunity for conversation after the service. Depressingly, the rubicund officiating clergyman referred to Audrey as ‘Anne’ throughout, delivering a boilerplate address which served only to highlight the tenuousness of the connection between minister and congregation.

  Markham and Olivia, attended by Doyle, both followed the little cortege to Bromgrove South Crematorium, a tiny mouse-hole of a building which somehow suited the inoffensive character of the deceased. Their bouquet of violets was one
of just two floral tributes.

  As the still, silent coffin inched towards the archway which led to the furnace and the chimney, Markham bowed his head. I’m so sorry, Audrey, he said over and over, I’m so sorry.

  There was no wake. After dropping Olivia back at The Sweepstakes, Markham and Doyle proceeded to the Newman and an endless round of interviews.

  Pointless. All utterly pointless. But enough to keep the gold braid mob at bay.

  Markham dragged himself back to the present. ‘Anything useful in the archives, Noakes?’

  ‘Burton did well, Guv,’ came the gruff response.

  The DI’s lips quirked disbelievingly at this indication of détente, but all he said was, ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, she got most of the school stuff out of the library database or watchamacallit.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘We’ve picked out a selection of articles for you, sir.’ Burton took over, her headache forgotten. ‘The biggest headlines from the last twenty years or so.’

  She handed Markham a sheaf of papers with sections highlighted in different colours.

  As she did so, he felt something like a swift electric shock.

  The DC looked up at him wonderingly.

  ‘We’re going to stop this evil in its tracks,’ he said. ‘I want you to go home now. But be ready to meet here tomorrow at eight o’clock sharp. I’m going to look at these archive records tonight, and we’ll review them tomorrow. It’s half term next week, so no students underfoot, but staff will be in and out from Monday. We’ve got the weekend to come up with something.’