by Jill McGown
He ran a comb through his thick, dark, longish, permanently damp hair, and liked what he saw in the mirror, giving it a smile.
The sun, which had perversely arrived just as the school holidays were ending, was warm on his back as he walked from the gym, across what was left of the once-extensive playing fields, to the main school building. Oakland School had started life as a grammar school, with all the facilities that any educational élite could possibly need or want. Now you couldn’t have a decent game of cricket without threatening the windows of half a dozen supposedly temporary buildings through which a second generation of pupils was passing.
Colin’s wife Erica was the school secretary; she had been married and divorced before coming to work at the school, and meeting Colin. He had known, from the moment he had caught a glimpse of her, that she was the one for him.
He had played the field; it had been time to settle down, and Erica—early thirties, slim, elegant, tumbling dark hair—had come made-to-measure. They had been together for three years and had finally married in March.
“It’s over there,” she said as he went into the office.
“It” was his fan-mail. Erica had been impressed by the steady flow of letters in the beginning; she would open them for him and sort them out into bundles.
Kids wanting advice about running, and advice about all manner of other sporting endeavours about which Colin knew little. He would pass the hurdlers and the pole-vaulters and the hammer-throwers on to the appropriate people, and answer the ones about middle-distance running himself.
Kids simply wanting his autograph—he had had photographs taken with a band at the bottom so that he could write a message, which was usually “Yours in sport, Colin Cochrane.”
Kids telling him their problems. If they seemed serious, Erica would find out which organizations they could contact, and write sympathetic letters for Colin to sign.
And love letters, which used to make Erica laugh, until the one that hadn’t. Not all from kids, the last category, but they had made her laugh all the same, even the raunchy ones. Not any more. But it was hardly his fault that females of all ages fell for him.
The mail was always like this after the long summer break. People saw him on television during the summer and wrote to him at the school. Much too much mail for the pigeon-hole in the staff room, which was where it usually went. For the first few days after the long holiday, his pigeon-hole could accommodate only internal mail. Erica had dealt with that too, once upon a time.
Colin was famous. Not for what he had done, particularly; he hadn’t been all that spectacular at what he had done, which was one reason why he had never given up the day job. But he was telegenic. The TV people had liked interviewing him, having him in the studio to discuss the merits or otherwise of competitors at the odd meeting when he was nursing an injury and couldn’t compete.
He had been to three Olympics and had been knocked out in the first round of the fifteen hundred each time, but had reached the semi-final of the eight hundred once, failing to qualify for the final as a fast loser by two hundredths of a second.
Now, he was in his mid-thirties, and he wanted to move up to five and ten thousand, perhaps even the occasional half-marathon, where stamina was more important than sudden bursts of speed. He didn’t really like long distances, and stamina wasn’t his strong point, but he was working on that. Mostly these days he appeared on television, and got very well paid for it.
“Will you be training tonight?” Erica asked
“Yes. Well …” Colin thought that perhaps he ought to be more aware of Erica’s needs than he was tending to be at the moment. “Not if you’d rather I stayed in,” he said.
“No, you do what you want,” she said, her voice cool. “There’s a film on that I want to see anyway.”
“Good,” said Colin. “I won’t stay out too long.”
“It doesn’t finish until ten,” said Erica.
“And you don’t want me coming in in the middle of it and spoiling it?”
She managed a smile, for the first time that day.
Colin smiled back. “I’ll be home at ten, then,” he said. “I’ll make it a long run tonight.” He picked up his unopened mail as he spoke. “I’ll put this lot in the car,” he said. “Get it out of your way.”
The frost was fairly thick in the office, and he went out into the warmth of the late summer day with a sigh of relief. Those who liked to mind other people’s business had suggested that it was a mistake, her keeping on her job at the school after they had got married, but it had been during the summer holidays that things had got sticky, so that seemed to have had very little to do with it. Not that she had to work, but she wanted to, she said, and it made very little difference to Colin one way or the other.
He dumped his mail on the back shelf of the car, locked it up again, and went up to the staff room, taking the stairs two at a time as the others came down.
“Stop showing off, Colin,” said Trudy Kane, the pleasantly plump divorcee, who, if Colin was any judge, fancied him more than a little. He certainly wouldn’t kick her out of bed either, but their relationship had never progressed beyond banter and never would.
He poured himself a coffee in the deserted staff room, opening the dusty Venetian blinds to persuade some of the smoke out of the window. They objected to the smell of sweat, but he was supposed to put up with breathing in their stale smoke. Maybe he should campaign to make the staff room a non-smoking area.
He smiled, and closed the blinds again, absentmindedly trying to straighten the bent slat that had been like that for as long as he’d been there. He didn’t care if they smoked, really, and anyway it was only a couple of them who did, these days.
He studied the timetable, clearly designed to have as many staff and pupils running round in circles looking for where they were supposed to be as it possibly could. He had a free period, then another gym session before lunch. He was looking forward to the afternoon, and the chance to get the older boys out into the sunshine for a double period.
His pigeon-hole had the usual stuff; memos from the head, notes about staff meetings, union business … He saw the envelope and closed his eyes briefly. He had thought—he had hoped—that the letters would have stopped, but they had He opened it, read it, stuffed it into the pocket of his tracksuit top and threw the envelope into the waste basket.
He would dispose of the letter somewhere safer than here.
Erica sat in the office, watching through the window as Colin walked back towards the gym, and the clock showed that it was one minute to the final period before lunch. Colin was never late, never early. He had said he would be back this evening at ten, and that was when he would be back—not a moment earlier, not a moment later. In a way she wished he was unreliable, like Patrick.
She had met Patrick in March, when he had come for an interview at the school, and Colin had been away, as usual, at some indoor athletics meeting.
Despite the fact that she was still practically on her honeymoon, Patrick had made a play for her. She hadn’t let anything happen, of course, but it had been nice, having someone pay attention to her. Colin’s attention had lapsed even then, before he had begun training practically every night and had lost interest in her completely.
Patrick had moved to Stansfield at Easter, though his appointment wasn’t until September. Erica imagined that his decision to leave his previous school had been forced upon him, having got to know him quite well since then. His wife had only just joined him—obviously, she had been doing some serious thinking about whether she was going to come at all.
Erica had been the only person in Stansfield he had known then, or so he had said, when he had come calling, and she had resisted his little-boy-lost act. Then she had found that letter, and Colin had tried to talk his way out of it … It would have been very easy to succumb to Patrick’s overtures after that. But she hadn’t.
Patrick had become a frequent visitor, whether Colin was there or not, and
he had never really given up; she had seen more of Patrick than she had of Colin during the summer. But Colin liked him too; they had become friends. Patrick had, of course, found consolation elsewhere, but that wouldn’t prevent him starting something with her if she would let him. He was engagingly open about it, though she doubted if his wife found it all that attractive a trait.
The season proper had started then, and Colin had been away most of the time. She had still resisted Patrick’s advances, which were by then made purely because it was expected of him. She liked the mild flirtation, but she had not been tempted, not then, because she had thought that perhaps she had misjudged Colin, that there really was nothing to the letter she had found. She had thought that once the season was over, once he’d finished with all the athletics meetings, he’d find time for her again, but that wasn’t how it had worked out.
She wouldn’t have believed it was possible to feel so lonely, but Colin was out practically every night again, doing whatever it was he did, and she was at a permanent loose end.
He had said the letter was just some silly little girl indulging some fantasy. Perhaps it was; perhaps if all those silly little girls who wrote to him knew what it was like to live with their heart-throb, they wouldn’t be so keen. Erica hardly saw him; when he did come home, it was to flop into bed and go to sleep.
She still felt lonely. She still felt unwanted. And she still didn’t really know what Colin did when he was out at night.
* * *
Hannah saw Colin Cochrane too, and watched him until he went out of sight, her thin, pointed face lit with the intensity of her feelings for him. She wore her long dark hair down; it would be a little more comfortable up in this hot weather, but he had once said that it suited her down, and now she wore it no other way.
The others had gone; she would be late for her next lesson, but she didn’t care. Every glimpse of Colin was precious. He lived on Ash Road, in one of the houses set back below the level of the road, behind a bank of trees. A whole gang of girls from school used to go there last term and climb the trees to try to catch a glimpse of him and his new wife and their dog—a weird creature with more skin than it needed when it was a puppy—until he asked them not to because his wife didn’t like it.
Hannah hated Erica Cochrane. Hated her for marrying Colin in the first place, hated her for stopping them going to the house. They hadn’t been doing any harm—they weren’t Erica Cochrane’s own personal trees. So she had carried on going there, until it had struck her that that was just kids’ stuff. From that moment, she had worked hard to put her relationship with Colin on a much more personal footing, one that might break up the marriage, with any luck.
Colin only took the boys for sports, so she didn’t get the chance to talk to him at all during school hours. At least he was still in the drama group, and they were meeting tonight. They would just be discussing possible productions, though, so she wouldn’t be able to wander up and start a would-be-casual conversation; they would be sitting down, talking, like a formal meeting.
But that didn’t matter, because she would see him later on, and there wouldn’t be anyone else around then.
Patrick Murray was spending some of his lunch hour trying to get himself acquainted with the school, which had been built in the fifties to house four hundred pupils and had been extended and added on to and partitioned until it now accommodated eight hundred and fifty. There were several annexes—one was a mile away, across the Green.
The Green was a piece of common land down on Ash Road, too small to be called a common, too unstructured to be called park, that linked the east side of the town, the older, more established part, to the centre of the new town created in the fifties.
Even that older part dated back only to the thirties, when Mitchell Engineering arrived to set up its once-enormous operation. What had been there before was a tiny, one-horse village. It was still there, that piece of the sixteenth century; a little oasis of history in this relentlessly modern desert.
Patrick’s knowledge of the town was much more extensive than his knowledge of the school, which he just found bewildering, even after Colin had shown him round.
Colin was the first friend Patrick had made in Stansfield, or to be more accurate, and more honest, Colin’s wife was the first friend he had made. Colin had left her on her own for hours on end, and Victoria, Patrick’s wife, had been in two minds about joining him in Stansfield. Erica was a very attractive girl, and Patrick would be Patrick. He hadn’t cracked that particular nut yet, but it was fun trying. Sure, what was life for, if it wasn’t to be enjoyed?
And what made Patrick’s life enjoyable was the opposite sex. And snooker, and jazz, and teaching, of course. And tinkering with cars and reading books, and seeing plays … but all these things went down even better with a girl by your side, if you asked Patrick.
It had got him into trouble before, and he was going to have to execute some very fancy footwork if it wasn’t to get him into trouble now. But Patrick preferred not to think too hard about things that might disrupt his enjoyable life.
He had almost forgotten why he’d had to leave his last place—an eminent public school with an impeccable record which Patrick had done nothing as regards his teaching to besmirch—but his close acquaintance with a female member of staff had caused Victoria to create a bit of a scene in front of a group of parents who were looking round the school.
There was no real harm done. They had had their sons’ names down from birth; there was no way they were backing out, even if they had found Victoria’s outburst a bit on the embarrassing side. But the school had very politely asked him if he might not be happier elsewhere, like by Easter. That, Patrick had to admit, had not been the first time they had had occasion to talk to him about his enjoyment of life. It was just the first time Victoria had made a public fuss.
They would be prepared to tell any prospective employer that they were letting him leave before the end of the academic year to pursue private studies, he had been told, but he had to go.
Patrick wandered round, eavesdropping on conversations as the kids took their lunch break, and he thought that it was entirely possible that he would indeed be happier here. There was no class system in operation, either in the school or the town, and that was refreshing, to say the least, in England’s green and pleasant, especially after his last place.
Yes, he could be very happy here. Providing he boxed clever, of course.
Natalie Ouspensky sat on the low wall which ran along the front of the school, eating her packed lunch with a group of other girls, but not taking part in the endless conversations about boys that the others were having. It bored her now, all the boasting and baiting.
“Barry’s dead worried because he thinks I’m pregnant,” Julie said.
Natalie doubted that Julie had ever been with a boy in her life, but to hear her talk you would swear she was on the game. Natalie had been with boys, but they bored her too, with their frantic fumblings and their crude goals, because she had a man. A grown man, who knew what it was all about. She wasn’t interested in what Barry or anyone else had or—more probably—had not done with Julie.
But there were problems with the relationship. There always had been, but they had been on the horizon, and she had shut them out of her mind. She couldn’t do that any more, not now. She was determined not to lose him, and she had to think about what she was going to do.
“There’s Mr. Murray,” said Claire, in a stage whisper.
They all cast covert glances as he passed.
“He’s nice, isn’t he?” sighed Claire.
“Is that him?” asked Hannah. “The new teacher?”
“Yes,” said Claire. “He wrote rude words on the board this morning,” she added, with a blush. “Really rude. We didn’t know who’d done it, but it turned out he’d done it himself.”
“He never,” said Julie.
“He did, didn’t he, Natalie?”
“What?” Natalie looked up.<
br />
“Mr. Murray wrote all those words on the board.”
“Yes.”
“See! I told you!”
“What words?” asked Hannah.
“You tell her,” said Claire to Natalie.
“Tell her yourself.”
“No! They were rude.”
“Oh, grow up!” snapped Natalie.
Claire went into a huff; Kim eventually told them what he had written.
Natalie sighed as the others giggled. All except Hannah, who was merely looking puzzled.
“Why did he?” she asked, but those who knew were giggling too much to tell her, and Natalie was too preoccupied.
They were all so childish.
Detective Sergeant Tom Finch was in the DI’s office, being chewed out. No arrests, no recovered property, nothing except the blame for a useless exercise and a lecture to double-check his informant’s integrity.
“Someone tipped them off, Tom,” she said. “And it obviously wasn’t the purchasers, or they wouldn’t have been there.”
“I don’t think he set us up, guv,” he said. “Something went wrong.”
“Maybe they’re still trying to get through the one-way system in Malworth,” she said, smiling at last.
“You could live somewhere closer at hand,” said Tom, grinning. Everyone knew that DCI Lloyd and his acting Chief Inspector were more than just good friends, though they liked to pretend it was a secret.
Her eyes widened slightly at the remark, and Tom felt uncomfortable. It was a very subtle piece of rank-pulling as a result of unsubtle teasing, and he was being put in his place.
“Well, now that we’ve wasted an entire morning, let’s get on,” she said. “I may as well sign your expenses now.”
Tom smiled.
She smiled back, a professional smile. “Do you have those receipts?” she asked.
