Weep a While Longer

by Penny Freedman

  He stands watching me as I grovel around picking them up, and doesn’t speak until I’m back on my feet again.

  ‘Mrs Gray,’ he says. ‘I was hoping I might bump into you.’

  Is this a joke? Mrs Gray doesn’t suggest that he is in a joking mood – I’m Gina when he’s feeling genial. I decide to be upbeat anyway.

  ‘Well, you have your wish,’ I say, dusting myself down. ‘That was quite a bump.’

  He doesn’t smile. ‘If you’re going back to your office,’ he says, ‘I’ll walk with you.’

  I can do nothing but trot along beside him, clutching my slipping files and thinking furiously. Was he actually waiting for me outside my classroom door? I think he must have been. He must have got Janet to find out where I was and then came over and hovered around. Hovered for quite a long time, actually, if he arrived at the end of the lesson. The vice-chancellor hovering outside a classroom door; what is going on? Was he listening in to Paula’s interrogation? Did he know about that? If so, how? Was that why I got the email summons? What is so urgent that he has felt compelled to seek me out?

  He waits until we are upstairs and I am fumbling for my office key before he starts talking.

  ‘Since you haven’t had the courtesy to respond to my request to see you,’ he begins, raising a peremptory hand to stop me as I open my mouth to start with the excuses, ‘I’m doing you the courtesy of coming to see you.’

  I have the door open now, we step inside and I offer him a chair, which he disdains. Not a cosy chat, then. We stay on our feet. I look at him. He is a choleric man, given to ill-temper and sudden rages. He used to have an alarmingly high colour that spoke of high blood pressure as well as choler, but this has subsided in recent months, dashing the expectations of the many who hoped to see him felled by a stroke at any moment. Mrs vice-chancellor, the lovely Lynette, has taken him in hand, we assume, and though the belly shows no sign of diminishing, he is either off the booze or on beta-blockers. So it is disconcerting to look into his face and to find it unnaturally pale. All the fury is there but no pulse throbs dangerously at his temples. I stand beside my desk and I wait.

  ‘You’ll get official notification in due course,’ he says, digging his hands into his pockets to give himself an appearance of relaxation and ease, a ploy at which he fails signally. ‘We’ve been considering ways of rationalising – restructuring – making ourselves a slimmer, sharper operation. We have a number of plans, one of which is to amalgamate the English Language Unit with Student Learning Support.’

  I have to work hard to stop my mouth from dropping open in inane astonishment. ‘But—’ I manage before he cuts me off.

  ‘You cover much of the same ground. You’re both giving weaker students extra help with writing essays and so on. It really makes no sense to hive off the foreign students into a separate unit just because they’re foreigners. I’m not sure, in fact …’ he adds, as though this is a clever thought that has only just occurred to him, ‘… I wouldn’t be surprised if it counted as discrimination.’

  I allow myself a single hoot of derisive laughter. ‘They are taught in the English Language Unit,’ I say, ‘because they need help with the English language. They’re not there because they’re foreigners but because they’re not native English speakers. The USLS is for students with poor study skills. Many of our overseas students have excellent study skills – they’re very bright.’

  ‘Splitting hairs,’ he says. ‘You both help them with writing essays, don’t you?’

  ‘Among many other things.’

  ‘Well then.’ He starts to move towards the door.

  ‘You can’t make staff economies, you know,’ I say. ‘Teaching English as a foreign language and supporting dyslexic students, for example, are two completely different areas of expertise.’

  He shrugs. ‘We’ll see,’ he says.

  ‘And what about assessment?’ I ask. ‘We teach units on a lot of degree courses. USLS doesn’t do any assessed work.’

  ‘A detail for you and Margaret Jones to sort out, I would have thought.’

  He’s on the move again, his hand reaching for the door knob.

  ‘The job of running this new, amalgamated … thing,’ I say. ‘Presumably that will be advertised as a new post?’

  He turns. ‘I’ve obviously not made myself clear. This isn’t so much an amalgamation as the ELU being subsumed into the USLS. We’re obliged to advertise it as a new post, of course, but Margaret is the obvious candidate to take on the wider responsibility.’

  ‘And in that case, what happens to me?’

  ‘There will still be teaching to be done. I’m sure Margaret will keep you busy.’

  ‘But I shall have no administrative responsibility?’

  ‘Won’t be necessary.’

  ‘As director of the ELU, I have senior lecturer status. I shall need to do something to earn that, shan’t I?’

  Now he allows himself a sharky smile. ‘That’s an area,’ he says, ‘where we’re looking to make efficiency savings.’

  ‘What about assessments … exams? Margaret has no experience of running assessed courses. That’s a huge amount of work, which I shall need to continue with.’

  ‘We can all learn, Mrs Gray,’ he says as he pulls open the door. ‘We can all learn.’

  I stand rooted for a moment as he disappears. Then I run to the door and shout at his retreating back, ‘Do you know what the students call the USLS? The Useless Unit! No-one ever calls the ELU useless!’

  He doesn’t falter or turn. I watch him till he is out of sight.

  After that, I sit down because my legs are feeling odd and I try to make sense of the idiocy I have just witnessed. This amalgamation makes no sense on any strategic level. The ELU is a major money-spinner; thousands of students take our courses, pay inflated overseas students’ fees and leave with qualifications moderated by us. The USLS – useless or not – makes no money; it is a branch of pastoral care, really, offering one-to-one or small group help to students who feel that they are drowning. I don’t actually think it’s useless – I’m sure it saves some students from going under – but the staff there can’t possibly do what we do. The overseas student market is a highly competitive one; any university that doesn’t employ highly qualified, specialist English teachers will soon lose out, and the VC must know this. So if there is no prospect of saving on staff – apart, possibly, from the pittance gained from docking my salary – what is this really for? At the moment, the only answer I can come up with is so absurdly egotistical that I blush to acknowledge it. I can only conclude that the VC is proposing this ridiculous piece of restructuring as a ploy to get rid of me.

  Well, maybe later I can come up with something more sensible by way of an explanation but for the moment I’m going with this one and its very absurdity gives me hope. I shall apply for the new job and I shall get it. It’s not in the VC’s gift, after all. There will be a proper appointment panel and I can’t have made so many enemies on the campus that the panel can be stacked with them, can I? Prejudice aside, I am plainly a better candidate than Margaret. We are the far bigger outfit and the money-spinners; my relentless schmoozing of Far Eastern universities has given us a healthy stream of postgraduate students to swell the coffers; I know how to handle the International Office, Student Accommodation and the Border Agency. I have put sweat, smiles and sleight of hand into all this and Margaret Jones will never manage it. Her clothes alone are enough to doom her: flat brown sandals and lumpy pleated skirts worn winter and summer. Who could possibly take her seriously?

  I’m all right now. I see a fight ahead and I’m ready for it. And Freda is coming for the night. The thing about spending time with a four-year-old is that it’s impossible to think about anything else. At times, obviously, this is quite annoying but this evening I welcome it as an alternative to obsessive brooding.

  *

  Ellie drops Freda off at about six, and we make pizzas for supper, starting from scratch with Delia’s
scone pizza dough and distributing flour and tomato juice liberally across the kitchen table. After supper, we retire to the sitting room, where we eat strawberries and macaroons and watch a wildlife programme. This wouldn’t be my first choice – I have a preference for human interaction – but Freda likes it. We both have to cover our eyes when a gazelle gets eaten by a cheetah, though. This is supposed to be entertainment? And before the watershed? We shall be bringing back public hangings next.

  When the wildlife is finished we play dominoes. Freda has discovered them in the old toy cupboard in Annie’s room and is delighted with them largely, I think, because – unlike most of her own toys – they involve no screen, no battery and no moving parts. The great thing about dominoes is that it lends itself to match-fixing. Freda is satisfied with a three–nil whitewash and we go upstairs. Here I am put in my place. When I go to help her undress she pushes me away. ‘I’m starting big school soon, Granny,’ she says. ‘I don’t need you to help.’

  I am unreasonably put out by this. Usually I welcome and encourage these signs of independence but not today. ‘Well,’ I say more snappily than I intended, ‘are you going to read your own bedtime story too?’

  She considers me judiciously. ‘You can do it today,’ she says, ‘but soon I shall do it myself.’ She returns her attention to unbuttoning her cardigan.

  So that’s me then: already redundant as David’s significant other, I am now redundant as director of the English Language Unit and will soon be redundant as a grandmother. Useless.

  *

  Freda goes off to sleep instantly; I watch Silent Witness and then start an elaborate process of sedation designed to secure me a night’s sleep. I take a long bath, scented with something that claims to soothe and relax; I drink warm milk laced with brandy; I creep into bed beside Freda in the dark and plug myself into my MP3 player so Martin Jarvis can read PG Wodehouse to me. And I stay wide awake all night, lying rigid in my concern not to disturb Freda, compulsively composing job applications, convening possible interview panels and interviewing myself into gibbering irrelevance. When Freda prods me and demands breakfast, I am delighted.

  13

  25.07.12: 09.45

  Outside Sources

  ‘So, if the niqab woman was actually a man, all my probing at the university and upsetting the people in HR was pointless, wasn’t it?’ Paula Powell said, getting up from her chair in David Scott’s office. ‘This “woman” doesn’t work at the university and she isn’t anyone’s grandmother. So where do we go from here?’

  ‘We’ve got two lines, haven’t we?’ Scott said. ‘If this witness, Jamilleh Hamidi, is right about it being a man – and we’ve only got her word for it – then there is the possibility that he’s the killer. I doubted whether the dog incident was related to our case at all, and it’s still a long shot, but now it seems more likely. So we need to pursue that angle. Your work at the university isn’t necessarily wasted. The guy had to get the niqab from somewhere. We still need to look for households where the niqab is worn and there’s no Islamic community in Marlbury other than that associated with the university, is there?’

  ‘HR say they have no-one on the staff who wears a niqab and Student Records said they couldn’t give me names of Muslim students.’

  ‘Couldn’t or wouldn’t?’

  ‘Said they didn’t categorise students by religion.’

  ‘Which is fair enough, I suppose. I think I’ll approach the chaplaincy.’

  ‘The chaplaincy? How’s that going to help?’

  ‘It isn’t just dog collars. They’ve got a multifaith centre there. Someone must look after the Muslim students. Anyone with access to a niqab must be pretty devout, surely?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Traditional, anyway. It’s a start. Unless you’ve got a better idea?’

  She shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘OK. So, I’m taking you off Islamic duties for the moment and sending you to tread on some other sensitive toes.’

  ‘You’re too kind. Whose?’

  ‘The Samaritans. You know what Malcolm Burns told me. Go and find out who else talked to Karen Brody. I’ve asked Steve to get dates and times of her other calls to the Samaritans from her phone record. Find out, if you can, what was said. Check them all in their log – the call to Malcolm included. Find out if they make notes about the calls they get. If so, ask for them.’

  ‘And if they refuse?’

  ‘Use sweet reason. Point out that Karen is dead, so any secrets that may be revealed can do her no harm. Try to keep Malcolm’s name out of it if you can. I don’t want to get him sacked if we can help it. They’ll pass your request on up to the director, I’m sure. If she’s difficult, threaten her with a search warrant and a possible subpoena. I have every respect for the work the Samaritans do but this is a case where being obstructive is just pointless.’

  *

  On the university’s crowded campus, he was directed, at the third time of asking, to the multifaith centre and found it to be a small and characterless room tucked away behind a room with blackened windows from which the beat, thump and shuffle of a vigorous dance routine could be heard. Distracting for the faithful, he thought, imagining those sweaty, half-naked bodies just next door. The room, he realised, was characterless precisely because of the multiplicity of faiths it was designed to accommodate. No artwork, no emblems, no fixtures, no books, even, could be guaranteed offence-free, so there was nothing. This wasn’t a room designed for the meeting of faiths but for keeping them apart. Scott found this vaguely depressing.

  More depressing for him was the notice on the wall which gave the times of different services but said that the chaplains were to be found in the chaplaincy office, room 135b in the registry. Cursing, he got back into his car, threaded his way across campus, picked up signs to the registry, parked in a space labelled Reserved for the Deputy Vice-Chancellor and went inside to enquire for room 135b. As he made his way up to the first floor, Scott reflected that there was no shortage of character here. The architect had let his imagination roam free, designing a fancifully round building of mildly oriental appearance, a building that nonchalantly denied the dullness of the bureaucratic workings within.

  Room 135b had obviously been carved out of room 135, a slice taken just big enough to accommodate two desks. A youngish man sat at each of them, both wearing jackets and ties, both looking up with professionally welcoming smiles. Scott addressed the older and swarthier of the two. ‘I’m looking for the Muslim chaplain,’ he said.

  ‘And you’ve found him.’ The man stood up and offered his hand. ‘Rashid Malik,’ he said.

  ‘David Scott.’ He fished in his pocket with his free hand. ‘Marlbury CID.’

  If Rashid Malik was taken aback he didn’t show it. ‘Have a seat,’ he said. ‘How can I help you?’ His accent was educated and slightly patrician, his manner relaxed. A man who could be comfortable almost anywhere. Scott revised his approach; he would need to be more open with this man than he had intended to be.

  ‘It’s a delicate matter, I’m afraid,’ he said, glancing at Malik’s colleague. ‘Maybe we should—’

  ‘Don’t worry about me. I can make myself scarce.’ The younger man stood up. ‘Things to do, you know,’ he said, gathering up papers.

  ‘Thank you, Michael,’ Malik said as he left.

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve inconvenienced him,’ Scott said.

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s a regular routine. We often have students in here wanting to discuss personal matters, as you can imagine. The shared office isn’t ideal.’

  ‘How many chaplains are there?’

  ‘Six.’ He looked round the little room. ‘We box and cox.’

  ‘My issue,’ Scott said, ‘is this. We have had a report of someone in full Islamic dress – the niqab specifically – on the premises of the university day nursery, unaccompanied by any family members and not apparently connected to any of the children.’ Malik was about to speak but Scott continu
ed, ‘In itself this is not a police matter, of course, but one witness at least believes that the person was a man.’

  Scott saw the muscles tense in Malik’s face but his voice was quiet and his tone even as he said, ‘These stories go around, you know. One actual incident begets a hundred rumours.’

  ‘I know. But the witness concerned is a Muslim woman, if that makes any difference.’

  Malik nodded. ‘Does she think she knows the man?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How do you think I can help?’

  ‘We have to take this seriously because of children being involved. I’m sure you understand that.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The other thing is …’ Scott hesitated. He had not intended to talk about the murders but this man’s calm gaze changed his mind. ‘You will know about the murders – the mother and child – last week. The person in the niqab was attacked by their dog in the garden of the day nursery shortly before they were killed. The dog was killed too.’

  This time Malik did look shaken. He pressed his hands to his face for a moment and closed his eyes. ‘The newspapers have said nothing of this,’ he said.

  ‘It’s information we’re not releasing.’

  ‘No. Well, I’m glad of that, of course.’ He looked into Scott’s face. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘We need to identify men who have access to a niqab. Is there any way that you could identify such people?’

  ‘There are people I can talk to. I shall need to go carefully.’

  ‘But not too slowly.’

  ‘No. Have you thought that a man might have purchased the niqab?’

  ‘Could a man do that? It wouldn’t seem odd?’