Head Count

by Judith Cutler

  To my amazement Karenza merely shrugged and burrowed in her boot. I thought I was prepared for most things, but I didn’t carry a tyre pump operated off the car battery.

  Neither of us really wanted to do any more work in the baking heat, but we decided to update our visit files before we gave up for the day so we headed back to Wray Episcopi. She pulled up in the shade where mine waited about twenty metres from the school, which didn’t have its own lockable car park. Sadly I didn’t see how we could create one, either, without taking land from the already cramped playground.

  Once we’d done all the paperwork, I sent Karenza home. As for me, I would go and visit not another family but the Great House estate: it was time I bearded Matt Storm in his den.

  I followed the huge yew hedge around the outside of the estate, wishing with every pace that I’d opted for the air-conditioned luxury of my car. But I’d started so I’d finish, and I plodded on. I only stopped when I arrived at the gates – serious ones, with an entryphone on my side and a couple of dogs roaming free on the other. They seemed friendly enough, but then they were on their territory and I was still on mine. They nudged up to the gates with curiosity on their faces and very tense tails as I pressed the top button and waited for a reply. None came.

  Wrestling with my conscience – surely there was work I could do while sunning myself in the garden – I’d got perhaps fifty metres back down the lane when a quad bike shattered the rural silence. Mounted on it was a very pretty young man – so young I wondered why on earth a battle-scarred woman like Lady Preston would have chosen him over an equally seasoned candidate, assuming anyone else had applied for the job, of course. Unless she’d fallen for his looks: he’d have looked well as a rustic hero in a soft-focussed adaptation of Under the Greenwood Tree. All the flesh you could see – and for some reason he’d chosen to wear an old-fashioned shirt, with sleeves rolled up and buttons undone to the waist, so there was a lot of flesh to see – was beautifully tanned; his hair was bleached to a Scandinavian blonde. And he was slowing down, saluting me and exposing more white teeth than anyone except an American is entitled to.

  ‘Matt Storm,’ he shouted into the sudden silence as he cut his engine. ‘And you must be our new village headmistress.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said breezily. ‘And you’re Lady Preston’s right-hand man.’

  What had I said to bring a slow flush to his chiselled features?

  ‘She says you want me to mow the wild flower meadow so the kids can trample all over it.’ He sounded as possessive as if he’d been caring for it for the last forty years.

  ‘Not exactly. I said the grass was too long for little legs to run on, and that I thought we’d do more good by analysing the flora and fauna at a suitable time of year.’

  He walked towards me. ‘Did you indeed? Do you fancy stepping inside my office? I make a good coffee. Don’t worry about the dogs. You’ll be all right if I’m with you.’

  I was. But their faces were much more alert and their bodies readier for action than they’d been when I was safely outside.

  He switched on his computer before he turned on the coffee machine, which made the standard disgusting noises and produced an excellent Americano. Very quickly we agreed that March would work, much as I’d have liked to look at what autumn produced. We noted how many children would be there, with what supervision, and what was to be achieved in what length of time. But when we got on to the risk assessments so vital to any educational enterprise, he became bored to the point of brusque. If I insisted, we’d walk the site a month beforehand to clear everything with Lady Preston and the governors. He was careful, I noticed, to avoid precise dates. I was ready to leave when I raised something that should have been keeping me awake at night.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got on file any reproductions of her ladyship’s pictures?’ I asked. ‘I can’t find them anywhere in the school but I thought if I showed photos to the older staff it might jog some memories.’

  ‘Pictures? Not my bag. But there may be something on the computer.’ He looked long enough to make my coffee drinkable. ‘No. Nothing.’

  ‘Thanks for trying. I know it was a forlorn hope: they may have been donated a century ago. She’s not been very precise,’ I added.

  ‘So why does she want them back?’ He leant back in his chair and stared at me quizzically.

  I grinned. ‘There’s an Antiques Road Show at Leeds Castle soon, isn’t there? Perhaps she wants to discover she’s sitting on a fortune.’

  ‘Except it’s not her sitting on anything. It’s the school.’

  ‘Or the lawyers,’ I said, not quite joking, ‘unless we have proof that someone actually gave away the pictures, and didn’t just lend them.’ It was time to go: we both got to our feet and moved into the yard.

  The dogs, which had been lying peaceably in the small patch of shade afforded by the gates, pricked up their ears but looked far from ready to be patted. ‘Would they like some fuss?’ I asked.

  ‘Rumour tells me you’ve lost enough skin recently,’ he said.

  I shot a look at his entirely serious face and said nothing. From serious it became unaccountably angry. I froze – but I could see nothing amiss, and all I could hear was the sound of children’s voices the other side of a high barn wall.

  ‘Her ladyship’s grandchildren?’ I asked.

  But he was talking to the dogs, making them move from the gates with more violence than strictly necessary, and pointing at them while he ushered me out. Only when I was halfway out did he smile. ‘See you around.’

  I was peaceably listening to Radio Three on my way home when a traffic announcement cut in. Maidstone Services were closed because of an incident that the police were attending. Such bland language always alarms me. Sometimes I think officialdom would do better to spell out what the incident is: an armed robbery? A suicide? I’d rather know and face my fears than have murky grey anxieties swilling round my imagination. But at least Maidstone Services were nothing to do with me: all I had to do was inch my car into my parking space and go and perform what for me was a small miracle: with Simon in Durham jail I could safely fling open every window in the house.

  Couldn’t I?

  At least those well above ground level.

  ‘It’s disgusting, showing that sort of stuff on TV. Poor little Wystan couldn’t eat his lunch!’

  The rustic wall that separated my holiday cottage from the one next door might be artfully covered with creepers that gave a total sense of privacy, but it wasn’t soundproofed, of course. I had overheard all sorts of holidaymakers’ secrets I’d rather not have been privy to and, should Pat ever come down here again in any capacity whatsoever, I’d make sure we had any important conversations indoors.

  Meanwhile, the woman next door was continuing to give her unheard interlocutor – she must have been on the phone, of course, going outdoors to get a better signal – tantalising bits of information about what was on the news.

  The scenes I saw when I switched on to see for myself were indeed awful. The media had obviously hired a helicopter to take intrusive shots of the so-called ‘incident’ that was still happening just up the road in Maidstone. Some incident! The emergency services were loading bodies of all sizes and shapes into ambulances, while some – were they the luckier ones or were they even more seriously ill than the others? – were being carried off by the air ambulance. The words across the foot of the screen told the story in the baldest of terms: between forty and fifty people of unknown nationality had been found in a frozen food lorry coming in from the Continent. It was only as he approached Maidstone that the driver realised something was amiss and called the police, who had been there first as a hostile reception committee and then as desperate first-aiders, fighting hypothermia. Men, women, children. The death toll wasn’t clear yet – but it could be high, even allowing for the usual media exaggeration.

  Even the drinkers in the Jolly Cricketers were more subdued than usual. There were one or t
wo less sympathetic souls, or course, suggesting it was time everyone went back where they came from and that we should pull up the footbridge and fill the moat with piranhas.

  ‘I daresay they’ll be flooding into the village school any time now,’ a man said. I craned my head but couldn’t identify the speaker. ‘Talking all these foreign languages. What chance will our own children get? Send them home, I say.’

  ‘Back to Syria?’ someone asked.

  ‘Their problem, not ours. It’s our kids I’m worried about. Not that Her Nibs’ll turn them away. The more kids in the school, the more money heads get. So she’ll be fucking quids in, won’t she?’

  Diane’s voice cut in before I could say anything. She raised a finger in a gesture no one else would register: I was to leave this to her. ‘And if she is? Look how she’s turned round that place. After all that terrible trouble in the winter, too. Her results are as good as anyone’s in the county.’

  The man didn’t react to the dangerous quiet in her voice. ‘But that was before any of these illegals went to the school, wasn’t it? They say there’s a whole lot going to schools round Maidstone and Canterbury, so we’ll get a load here, you can bet on it. Lock up your sheds, that’s what I say; Tom Bird had a ride-on mower nicked last week, didn’t he? Them illegals, that’s who did it, though the police were too mealy-mouthed to say as much.’

  I had a bizarre vision of sad and weary refugees piled on to the mower to head up the M20. I kept it to myself.

  ‘You can’t blame the illegals for wanting to get here,’ another man said. ‘Not the way the people smugglers paint the place. Streets paved with gold, all that shit. Have you seen some of the places where they’re sent? Up north?’ he added, as if it was another country, not a part of the UK I’d lived in and loved. ‘You wouldn’t live in a house like that five minutes. Someone even painted the front doors a different colour so everyone knew they were different. But when they set out, they’re told they’re coming to heaven. Imagine it, herding those poor bastards into a refrigerated truck: it’s like telling people they’re having a shower and shoving them in gas chambers, if you ask me. Crime against humanity, that’s what it is.’

  ‘And a whole lot more drowned in the Med, they say. Three hundred last weekend, they reckon.’

  The first man made a bad mistake. ‘At least they’ll not be coming here.’

  Diane spoke. ‘Sam Wood, if you can’t think clearly, I’d say you’ve had enough to drink. I don’t serve drunks here. So I’ll thank you to leave us in peace. Now.’ She waited.

  Perhaps I’d expected a chorus of protest: it was within his rights to say what he was saying, vile or otherwise. And in their hearts a good many of the older men agreed with his sentiments, if not the way he’d expressed them – I was sure of that. But there was just an uneasy silence, the sort you get in a classroom when the other kids wait to see what will happen to the boy that cheeked the teacher. It was only broken when Sam Wood headed off to the naughty step outside, and Diane stepped forward with a poster.

  ‘There’s not much an ordinary person can do in the face of such suffering, is there?’ she said, as she blu-tacked it to the wall. ‘But we can all spend half an hour at the village hall next week giving our nice British blood to whoever might need it.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  I stirred my breakfast coffee meditatively. Would it help if I actually knelt before the builders I was going to phone this morning, to implore them to take on my rebuilding work? Should I fix a Skype session so they could see me in the act? Or should I just go round and take some photos of the cottage in the kind morning light so it wouldn’t look too big a task?

  Before I could decide, the phone rang. I pounced, as if it were a live builder likely to escape if I gave him a moment’s chance. But it was Lloyd.

  ‘I’m just down the road, Jane, and I wondered if I could pop round for a second. See you in five?’

  I’d barely had time to stow the mug and the rest of the breakfast things in the dishwasher before he arrived.

  ‘It’s not you I want, so much as your bicycle,’ he said.

  ‘And good morning to you, too, Lloyd, and yes, it is another lovely day, isn’t it? It’s in the garage,’ I said, although, in fact, the car and its new little friend lived opposite the cottage in an upmarket carport in the row built in the old stables. Something to do with looking more rural, maybe. No doors. You had to trust everyone or lock everything in place. Guess which I did. I reached for the key to the industrial-grade cycle lock.

  Wystan’s mother – there was no sign of his father – was busily loading their mega 4x4, as if anxious to dust the refugee-sullied dust of Kent from their feet. Or perhaps, more prosaically, it was changeover day. It was all too clear that whatever the reason for their exit, it would not be done quietly, as Wystan had his own vociferous ideas about what he wanted to play with – now! – and what could go into the luggage space. Clearly he had been profoundly traumatised by the sight of all those people being rescued yesterday. Or not.

  So far there were only three deaths, but nine people, four of them children Wystan’s age, were still in intensive care.

  Had Lloyd not been there I might have approached my erstwhile temporary neighbour: the wardens had opened up the church as a receiving centre for clothing and toy donations for the suffering families. In fact, why should Lloyd’s presence stop me? He didn’t need me to hold his hand while he checked out the cycle.

  At first I might have been talking Chinese, but eventually she paused in her irritated pushing at intractable carrier bags long enough to look at me. Surely that was a look of low cunning spreading across her face – it spoilt a set of really good features, come to think of it. She grabbed two polythene sacks. ‘Here. You can take these. It’ll save me having to wash them. And this old thing – it’s time he grew out of it.’

  The old thing proved to be a battered bear.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said, taking the sacks. I even held the bear for a moment. ‘But I can’t take this old chap. It can,’ I said in the serious, brook-no-argument voice I save for troublesome pupils, ‘do terrible psychological damage if you lose something like this. It can cause major and prolonged bed-wetting problems.’

  Narrow-eyed, she seized it. ‘But it’s filthy. And it smells.’

  ‘Maybe if you asked him to help you give it a bath? What do you think, Wystan?’ To be honest I didn’t think much of the creature’s long-term chances of survival, but it settled loosely under the child’s arm.

  I wandered into the garage – as chic in its way as the cottage, security apart – to find Lloyd staring accusingly at the bike.

  ‘It’s very clean.’

  ‘Harry and Doreen – the people who rescued me – left it absolutely pristine. Then it got another polish when it was repaired. Were you expecting to find traces of my life blood?’

  ‘I was hoping to find flakes of paint or even plastic from the guy who ran into you. But it was a long shot.’ He straightened.

  ‘And, come to think of it, strange that they should clean it for me. Their car looked as if you could plant seeds in it. Maybe there were some sprouting in the back footwell, come to think of it.’

  ‘Then they suddenly clean a complete stranger’s bike. You didn’t think it odd?’

  ‘Funnily enough, their house looks just like my parents’ when they took us on our summer holiday. Mum practically spring-cleaned the place. And she made Dad clean the car. Every year. I think her rationale was that if we were all killed by a Cornish earthquake, the grieving relatives would know what a good housekeeper she was when they came to fight over all her belongings. So although I thought it was odd, I just thought they were behaving like Mum, and being kind with it. After all, they were very sweet to me when I was on that hedge. And afterwards.’

  ‘You don’t think that they were deliberately removing evidence?’

  ‘When it was they who wanted me to call the police? No, I didn’t. It didn’t even cross my mind.
’

  Wystan was just being coerced into his child seat when we emerged. But he wouldn’t put up a lengthy fight: one thumb was heading to his mouth, though there was no sign of the bear. A brand-new dinosaur was on his lap. Dinosaurs! After all these years working with kids obsessed by them I still couldn’t see the fascination. ‘Thank you for your donation,’ I said, gathering up the sacks.

  ‘I told you: just old stuff.’

  I waved her off and headed with Lloyd back into the cottage.

  Lloyd might have been grumpy with me but he offered to drop the stuff as he passed the church: it was only a small diversion, after all.

  ‘Let’s just see what she’s donated,’ I said, opening the first sack and touching the side of my nose in a conspiratorial gesture. And then, holding it melodramatically, I tipped the lot into the washing machine. ‘Puke,’ I declared. ‘And worse!’ The sack went straight into the dustbin. I came back in and scrubbed my hands.

  And there was still the other one to deal with.

  Lloyd had filled and switched on the kettle. He was pondering my more exotic teas. ‘That reminds me of when I was younger,’ he mused, ‘collecting for some campaign naively entitled Bread for the World. You know the system: you drop envelopes through folk’s doors and collect them up a couple of days later. And what did I find in six or seven of them I retrieved? Mouldy crusts.’

  We sucked our teeth and shook our heads in unison. He chose a rose-petal-scented jasmine green tea, and dunked the bag first in one mug then in another. Then he dropped it in the recycling caddy. All very domesticated.

  We adjourned to the patio. ‘I don’t think you’d be looking for paint or whatever if you didn’t have something to compare them with,’ I said. ‘Would you?’

  He laughed. ‘I suppose I wouldn’t.’

  ‘And you also find the very absence of obvious paint or whatever suspicious.’