All the Daughters

by Penny Freedman

  As we walk back to the road Ellie says, ‘Well, she’s only missing double art with Eve this afternoon, so it shouldn’t be a problem.’

  ‘Was Doug Fraser the only thing that was crap about your morning?’

  ‘God no. There was the massacre of the Incas too.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Year eight integrated humanities. They’re doing voyages of exploration and I’m supposed to do drama improvisations to help it come to life. Last week we went into the gym and they all climbed the wallbars to be Columbus’s sailors spotting land. It worked really well, but this week I did the arrival of Pizzaro among the Incas and it was nearly a massacre for real. It was supposed to be slow-motion, symbolic, but it turned into a free-for-all and Atahualpa had a nosebleed.’

  I do feel sorry for her but I’m shaking with laughter. ‘The massacre of the Incas! Oh Ellie, what a daft idea!’

  She stops walking, about to protest, and then she starts to laugh too. We stand there giggling helplessly, leaning on each other for support, two women – one old, one young, one small and plump, one tall and slim – legless with mirth in the public street. We pull ourselves together, though, and we’re sober by the time we part in the school drive. As Ellie turns to go inside, she says, ‘She looked so old, Ma. So grey and tired and – adult, somehow.’

  ‘Don’t get in too deep,’ I say. ‘You can’t love them all.’

  As she swipes her card and goes in through the double doors, a man comes out, a man in his early forties with crisply-cut brown hair, a good suit and a watchful expression. Detective Chief Inspector David Scott, a man with whom I have a certain amount of history. For a start, I knew him when he was a mere spotty youth – taught him A-level English, in fact, at this very school, when I was a very new, very green teacher. Then a couple of years ago we bumped into each other again when there was an incident on our campus and the police were involved. We were, briefly, quite close and I think we both hoped more would come of it but things got complicated and I called it off. Well, I just stopped calling him, actually. I was sorry to drop him like that and I’ve always felt a bit guilty about it but it couldn’t be helped. I’ve managed to avoid seeing him since, but now here he is, walking towards me, so I shall just have to be brazen.

  ‘Hello, David. Has there been a crime? They don’t get chief inspectors to investigate bike thefts, do they?’

  He blinks for a moment, and the colour rises in his face. I remember it’s one of the things I liked about him, how easily he blushed. His voice is cool, though. ‘Gina. Hello. I’ve been talking to the A-level people about careers in the police. Tom Urquhart gets me in to do it every year.’

  ‘Of course, you’re a distinguished old boy of William Roper.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  We stand and look at each other. I can think only of stupid, jokey things to say and I don’t want to say them. Eventually, he says, ‘And you?’

  ‘What am I doing here? My daughter teaches here. We’ve just been having lunch.’

  ‘Not Annie?’

  ‘No, no. Annie’s off to Oxford next week. Ellie, my elder daughter. You never met her.’

  ‘I met Freda once, though. In the supermarket.’

  ‘Of course you did.’

  He remembers everything: the names of my daughter and granddaughter, the details of every meeting. Has he puzzled over them, wondering where he made a mistake? Well, I remember everything too: every conversation, every look, every clever-clogs remark I made, everything.

  ‘Well, nice to see you, David,’ I say inanely. ‘I must get back to work.’

  He says nothing – just gives an odd little wave – and I go and retrieve my bike, which has, disappointingly, not been stolen.

  3

  THURSDAY 23rd SEPTEMBER

  09.05. INTERVIEW ONE: THE TEACHER

  ‘This is Marina’s form tutor, Miss Gray – Eleanor Gray.’ Tom Urquhart, the headmaster, ushered a young woman into the room – his room, in fact, since Scott was sitting in the headmaster’s study, at his desk, with Paula Powell beside him.

  ‘Have a seat, Miss Gray,’ Scott said. ‘I’m DCI Scott, and this is DS Powell.’

  He knew who she was, of course. My daughter’s teaching here – Ellie, my elder daughter. You never met her. He had seen her yesterday, in fact, coming into the school as he left it, but he hadn’t paid attention, had just an impression of height, blondeness and youth. He had been too pole-axed by the unexpected sight of Gina standing there to notice much else.

  Tom Urquhart, he saw, had settled himself watchfully in the corner. He and Gina had taught together, he knew, so presumably he’d known Gina’s daughter since she was a child. Scott would have liked to talk to Eleanor Gray on her own but it was difficult to turn Tom Urquhart out of his own office and he didn’t want to make an issue of it.

  He looked at her. Not much of her mother there, he thought, no hint of the mocking smile, the air of finding the world infinitely absurd. Would she turn out to be as mocking, or as spiky, as her mother? At the moment, she had the familiar puzzled look that the basically law-abiding always have when they find themselves confronted unexpectedly by the police. You had to catch them while they were still dazed, before they’d got it together and started editing their story. You got closest to the truth in those early moments.

  ‘I’d like to ask you some questions about Marina Carson.’ She opened her mouth to ask something, but he put up a restraining hand. ‘What can you tell us about her movements yesterday?’

  Her voice wobbled a bit as she said, ‘I gave her permission to go home at the end of the morning. Her mother had had an accident the day before and she was worried about her.’

  ‘And what time would that have been?’

  ‘About one o’clock. That was when I spoke to her, anyway. Has something happened to her? She’s not missing, is she?’

  ’No, she’s not missing,’ Scott said. ‘You didn’t see her leave school, then?’

  ‘No, I – look if you’d just tell me what’s happened, then I can concentrate on answering your questions. You may think it’s clever to keep me in the dark but it really isn’t going to help.’

  Oh yes, her mother’s daughter, Scott thought. That hadn’t taken long.

  ‘Has she had an accident?’ Eleanor Gray asked. ‘Is that it?’

  Paula Powell shot a questioning look at him and he nodded. ‘I’m sorry to tell you that she’s dead,’ Powell said. ‘The family GP found her dead at her home yesterday afternoon.’

  Eleanor Gray made an odd sound, something between a gasp and a cry, and the colour drained dramatically from her face. Scott thought she was going to faint, but she slumped forward and said, indistinctly, with her head between her knees, ‘Sorry. It’s all right. Be all right in a minute.’

  Paula Powell got up and knelt beside her; Tom Urquhart called to his secretary to bring her a glass of water. By the time the water arrived, she was upright again, awkwardly brushing aside their concern, but still white and beginning to shake. Sandra Sheldon, Tom Urquhart’s secretary, cast a professional glance over her and brought in a blanket from the sick room, which she draped around her shoulders. As Eleanor sipped the water, Scott could hear her teeth rattling against the glass. Wrapped in the blanket, she looked, incongruously, like someone who had just been rescued from drowning.

  ‘What happened to her?’ she asked.

  ‘She fell down the stairs and broke her neck,’ Powell said.

  ‘But how? How could she have?’

  Scott interrupted. ‘It’s been a shock for you, of course, and you’ll be able to take in the details later. At the moment, though, we really need to know as much as we can about the circumstances in which she was sent home yesterday.’

  ‘She asked if she could go home and I said she could. That was all there was to it.’

  ‘Did you phone her home at all, either before she left the school or when she might be expected to have arrived home?’

  ‘No.�
��

  ‘Wasn’t that – unusual?’

  ‘Unusual?’

  Paula Powell pushed some stapled pages across the desk towards her. ‘We’ve got a document here which the headmaster gave us. Procedures to be followed in sending a pupil home. Have you read it?’

  He watched the colour rush back into her face. ‘I – don’t know. I may have done. I’ve only been here a couple of weeks. I was given a lot of stuff at the beginning of term but there’s a lot to absorb in a school this size.’ She glanced over at Tom Urquhart, who was looking at the floor, avoiding her eye, Scott thought.

  ‘So you can’t tell me what’s in it?’ Powell persisted.

  ‘Not exactly, no.’

  ‘Then I’ll remind you. There are various categories – suspension, temporary suspension for uniform infringements and so on – but this is the relevant section: Sick Pupils.’

  ‘Marina wasn’t sick,’ Eleanor Gray protested. ‘I sent her home because she was worried about her mother.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem to come under any of the sections here,’ Powell said, pushing the document further towards her. ‘You see if you can find it.’

  Eleanor Gray slammed her glass down on the desk so that the water splashed over onto the polished leather. ‘It’s quite possible that it’s not in there – it was a fairly unusual situation,’ she said. ‘But that was no reason to make her stay in school. She was upset and worried. There was no point in keeping her here – she wouldn’t have been able to concentrate anyway.’

  She was squaring up to Powell but Scott could see tears threatening.

  ‘So, as she wasn’t fit to stay in school, you treated her as being sick?’

  ‘If you like.’

  Her tone, and the shrug that went with it, made her seem suddenly no more than a teenager. Whatever, they said.

  ‘So, let’s look at the procedure.’ Powell pulled the document back towards her and opened it. ‘One: Ensure that there is someone at home to look after the child. Did you do that?’

  Eleanor Gray gave a shaky laugh. ‘This is unreal! She didn’t need anyone to look after her. SHE went home to look after her MOTHER!’

  Powell said nothing and Scott glanced at her. He wondered where she was going with this line of questioning – wondered too whether it was necessary to be so hard on the girl. As if sensing some sympathy, Eleanor turned to him.

  ‘There’s – there was – an odd dynamic in that family. I thought so when I was talking to Marina yesterday. It was like she was the adult and her parents were the children.’ She paused. ‘Anyway,’ she said, still addressing him, ‘her mother was at home of course.’

  ‘Was she?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, yes, she –‘

  ‘As a matter of fact, she wasn’t. If Marina left school at the time you say she did, she’ll have caught the 13.02 bus to Lower Shepton from outside the school. She won’t have got home until one thirty, and her mother had already left to catch the train to London.’

  ‘To London?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But she can’t have done. She fell downstairs and broke her ankle – ‘ She stopped. ‘Oh, that’s weird, isn’t it?’

  ‘Weird?’

  ‘That she fell downstairs too.’

  ‘It’s certainly a coincidence.’ He paused. ‘In fact, it turns out she didn’t break her ankle – only sprained it. She still couldn’t do the show, which is quite strenuous, I gather, but she decided to go and watch her understudy.’

  Wasn’t that an odd thing to do, he asked himself. Why would she do that? To check that her understudy wasn’t better than her, he supposed. No fun for the understudy, though. He knew what happened in a theatre audience when people opened their programmes and those little white slips fluttered out: Owing to the indisposition of Glenys Summers the part of Amy will be played by… Had the star enjoyed the little waves of disappointment as she sat incognito in the audience? Or was that unkind?

  He watched Eleanor Gray. She was struggling out of the folds of the blanket and rummaging in her handbag. She found a tissue and wiped her eyes. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ’It just hit me again that she’s dead. I can’t believe it. I suppose people always say that, don’t they?’

  ‘Quite often.’

  Paula Powell cleared her throat as a preliminary to going back onto the attack. She’d have a few caustic comments to make to him later about his going soft on a witness because she was young and blonde and in tears. ‘So, if you’d followed procedure and rung Marina’s home, you would have realised that she actually had no reason to go home – or at least not the reason she gave you.’

  ‘I don’t believe she was lying to me. I’m sure she was worried about her mother.’

  Powell gave her a long sceptical stare. ‘Well,’ she said eventually, ‘let’s return to this document. Two: The child or parent should phone the school as soon as possible to confirm his/her safe arrival home. I checked with the office and there was no phone call from Marina yesterday. Did you tell her to ring?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Even though it’s standard procedure?’

  ‘I didn’t know it was standard procedure. I haven’t read that thing. It’s a black mark against me at school, I’m sure, but it’s not a crime, is it? Anyway, if you send a sick child home I can see that you want to check they haven’t collapsed on the way or something. But I keep telling you Marina wasn’t sick.’

  ‘A pity, though,’ Powell said. ‘It would help us if we could pinpoint the time she arrived home.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It might help us find out who was in the house.’

  ‘I thought you said no-one was there.’

  ‘We said her mother wasn’t there, but that doesn’t rule out other people. It’s pretty unusual for a healthy young girl to fall like that for no reason. We have to establish exactly what happened.’ Powell paused to let this sink in before she said, ‘We spoke to the deputy head earlier. She said you had raised concerns about Marina being bullied. Can you tell us about that?’

  ‘You think someone pushed her down the stairs?’

  Powell said nothing. Tom Urquhart was watching Eleanor keenly now, and she glanced at him before she took a long breath and said, ‘There were – incidents which I thought amounted to bullying. Her PE stuff was taken, and other things, and someone scribbled stuff on her drama folder. She’d tried to cover it by colouring over it with a marker pen, so I couldn’t read it, but it wasn’t something she’d have done herself. She took a lot of care with that folder. So I reported it to the deputy head and I gathered that there were problems last year too, though she always denied it. But I never thought that she was being bullied physically. I really can’t believe –’

  ‘What you believe really isn’t relevant, is it? Something or someone caused her to go from top to bottom and break her neck. It may have been a game that got out of hand. We don’t know, but I’m sure you can see why it’s important to us to know just what she was doing yesterday afternoon, and who knew what she was doing. And your failure to follow through and check on what happened to her after you sent her home doesn’t help us.’

  Scott intervened, turning to Tom Urquhart. ‘We’ll need the names of any pupils who were out of school yesterday afternoon, obviously. I assume you can let us have those?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Tom Urquhart smiled for the first time. ‘Our card swipe system doesn’t just keep the school premises secure – it gives us an electronic record of when every pupil enters and leaves the school.’

  Scott saw Eleanor Gray’s head go up sharply and she opened her mouth as if to comment but closed it again and looked away. He thought he knew what she had been tempted to say. The kids would have found a dozen ways to evade the electronic system; there was nothing to stop several from exiting on one card and there would be a brisk market in stolen and exchanged cards. The system would be no help to the police at all.

  ‘One more question,’ he said, turning to Eleanor. ‘Could Marina have kept a m
obile phone anywhere in the school?’

  Again she glanced uncomfortably at Tom Urquhart. ‘The pupils aren’t allowed to use mobiles in school. They can keep them in their bags but they have to be switched off and they get confiscated if a teacher sees one.’

  ‘Could she have left one in a desk or a locker?’

  She shook her head and Tom Urquhart said, colouring slightly, ‘There is a theft culture in the school, I’m sorry to say, which we’re addressing but we haven’t cracked it yet. The older pupils have lockers with keys, which are reasonably secure, but the younger ones simply have to carry everything around with them, I’m afraid. If Marina didn’t have a phone in her bag, then I imagine she didn’t own one.’

  Scott and Powell drove back to the station in silence until, finally, Scott said, ‘You were pretty tough on her. You don’t actually hold her responsible, do you?’

  ‘She sent the child into harm’s way, didn’t she? A child she knew was being bullied. I’d like to know what she thought she was playing at. A child died and someone has to take responsibility. And by the way, if this was just an accident, why does it need a DCI leading the case? Why couldn’t I have dealt with it?’

  He shrugged an apology. ‘The public interest,’ he said. ‘Or rather, the interest of the public. Her mother’s a name. The media are homing in on us as we speak. The chief super thought it needed big guns, but I’m happy for you to handle it your way. I can do moral support and the media as needed.’

  ‘Well OK. But I warn you, you may go mushy at the sight of big blue eyes full of tears, but I don’t.’

  4

  THURSDAY 23rd SEPTEMBER

  Youth’s a stuff will not endure

  My mother is in hospital. I learn this when my office phone rings at 9.55, just as I’m about to go and teach. Gillian in the department office says, ‘There’s a Dr Sidwell to speak to you, Gina,’ and then there is my mother’s voice, crisp as ever.

  ‘Virginia? I won’t keep you, I’m sure you’re busy. I’m just letting you know I’m in hospital. Fractured femur. Slipped on the front step. Very stupid. All done and dusted now, though. Jim Samson’s made quite a neat job of it as far as I can tell. I should be out of here in a day or two.’