‘I don’t think so. He picks me up sometimes if I’m very late, but they’ve usually all gone home by then.’
‘So how will we explain his presence?’ asked the headteacher.
‘We won’t,’ Black told him. ‘They’ll assume he’s with us.’
‘Detective Constable Rob,’ he said cheerfully, ‘reporting for duty.’ Jessica’s fiancé seemed to like that idea.
‘And what are we going to say about you’ – the headteacher meant the police – ‘if you’re standing outside the school hall when they’re waiting to file in?’
‘What if I help Miss Pearce with her talk to the pupils about staying safe? Not walking home alone or accepting lifts from strangers, walking in well-lit areas, that kind of thing. Nothing they probably haven’t heard before, but there is a murderer out there, so it won’t do any harm for them to hear it again.’
‘I suppose so, yes,’ said the head, who seemed to be warming to the idea, now that his practical objections were being logically overruled.
‘How soon can we arrange this?’ asked Beth.
‘I’ll need to brief all of the heads of year then cascade this to each teacher. It’s not a simple matter, but I think we can arrange it for tomorrow morning. Could we make it then, to avoid disruption?’
Beth expected Black to kick back on this and was surprised when he calmly accepted the delay. ‘I suppose it can keep till then. And, as you said, there’s no point in causing alarm.’
The head seemed energized by the task ahead. ‘Good, we’ll work out a plan to get all the children out for the identity parade. Leave it with me. Thank you, Detective Sergeant.’
The next morning, there were girls of all heights, shapes and sizes lined up outside the school hall ready for their safety lecture, all of them dressed in the school’s uniform of black skirt and blazer, with a red jumper and a silver-and-red tie with the school crest. The teachers ensured all the girls stood together, so Rob could ignore the boys, who were made to line up on the opposite side of the school hall’s doors, where there was a more half-hearted attempt to ensure their shirts were tucked in and their ties weren’t askew. They were boisterous and noisy, but at least they weren’t in his line of vision.
As Miss Pearce had predicted, some of the girls wore contraband earrings or forbidden make-up and she was able to stall the first class, singling the offenders out for a telling-off. Beth and Black watched as she went along the lines and reminded the girls of the standards expected of them. DC Rodgers was there, too. Black must have asked him to come in as well and Beth wondered why he had felt the need to do that.
All the while, Rob stayed in the background, standing by the door of the school office, directly opposite the hall. The PE teacher looked towards her fiancé and he gave her a slight nod to indicate that he had seen everyone before the girls were allowed to file noisily into the hall. Another class would then be led to the door and the process would begin again.
Once the first batch had taken their seats, all eyes went to Rob, who confirmed what they already knew, because he had not alerted Black. He had not recognized the girl.
Black and Miss Pearce went into the hall and gave a fifteen-minute talk to the pupils about keeping safe, then they answered questions before allowing them to go back to their lessons.
When the school bell rang after morning break, the second tranche of pupils were led towards the school hall. The process of delaying them with minor uniform infractions continued, then they all filed into the hall and everyone looked at Rob again. He seemed embarrassed, even a little panicked.
‘I’m sorry. I … I didn’t …’
Before he could go on, Black said, ‘It’s okay,’ and cut him off to go and give the second talk. When that was over, they all reconvened in the head’s office.
By then, Rob was even more apologetic. ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said. ‘I feel so bad after you went to all that trouble, but I just didn’t see her. I thought I would have spotted her – I was sure I would, in fact.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Black. ‘I knew you wouldn’t.’
‘What?’ asked Beth.
‘It’s not his fault,’ Black explained. ‘She wasn’t there.’
‘How do you know,’ asked Beth, ‘when we don’t even know who she is?’
‘Because someone tipped her off. Someone in this school told her not to come in today because there was going to be an ID parade.’
‘That’s a very serious allegation,’ cautioned the headteacher.
‘Yes,’ agreed Black. ‘It is.’
‘So who knew about the ID parade?’ asked the detective sergeant, and Beth was struck by how calm he was about their failure to find the girl. Had he expected this to happen and simply allowed it?
‘Well,’ said the headteacher, ‘I had to tell the staff – obviously, I did. I mean, we had to prepare, so we could get all the pupils out of every class in the right order and at the correct time so, clearly, I had to tell them.’
‘So any one of those teachers could have contacted that girl and told her not to attend school today?’
‘I suppose so, but to what end?’
‘To cover up their involvement in the death of Alice Teale,’ said Black.
‘But it won’t work,’ said Beth, ‘because we can still find that girl.’
‘There’s a very simple way to do that,’ said Black. ‘We need to see today’s school registers for each class then we can get the names of every girl who failed to attend.’
‘I’ll fetch Mrs Davenport,’ said the headteacher, ‘the school secretary.’
Mrs Davenport was called in then and sent to get the registers. She returned and set them down in piles. They went through them methodically. It took them a little while but, between them, they made relatively short work of the task.
‘Eleven girls,’ said Black, and he turned to the secretary again. ‘How many of them phoned in?’
‘I’ll just go and check,’ she said, and disappeared for a few moments. They sat in silence while they waited for her to bring the information. The secretary returned with an A4 notebook and said, ‘Five.’
‘Let’s start with the girls who failed to call in, because the girl we are looking for won’t want to draw attention to her absence.’ Black turned to Rob and said, ‘You can come with us,’ then, to DC Rodgers: ‘I’d like you to stay here.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I don’t want anyone to leave this room while we’re gone.’
‘What?’ blustered the headteacher. ‘I’ve got a school to run.’
‘Someone tipped off one of these girls, and that could happen again. If you stay here in this room with DC Rodgers, along with Miss Pearce and Mrs Davenport, I’ll know that none of you are in a position to call anyone. That will rule you out if she disappears a second time.’
‘I’m really not happy about this,’ snapped the head.
‘Your personal happiness is not my priority right now,’ Black told him.
47
The first girl was holding a textbook when she answered the door. When she realized Black was a police officer she panicked and began to ramble about being behind in her GCSE revision, so she’d ducked out of school for a day to catch up. Black had to interrupt to calm her down, because he wasn’t concerned about any of that. He looked at Rob, who shook his head, and they left the girl to her studying.
The second girl on their list seemed less bothered about her GCSEs, judging by her slightly dishevelled look as she answered the door, after some delay. Over her shoulder, Beth spotted a shirtless boy wandering around in the kitchen. She tried to explain she was poorly and had decided to convalesce at home, presumably with the help of her boyfriend. Once again, Rob signalled that this was not the girl and they left the amorous couple to their own devices.
They called on two more houses. One girl looked genuinely ill when she came to the door and even apologized for not phoning in. Rob once more indicated that she was not the pupil he had seen
. The next girl wasn’t in, but her mother was, and she went on a tirade about her daughter’s apparent truancy. Black was assured she would get ‘the bollocking of her life when I catch her’. They couldn’t leave it at that, though, and he asked the mother to bring a photograph of the girl to the door so Rob could see it. He quickly ruled her out, and they left the mother to plan a suitable punishment for her errant daughter.
At the school, DC Rodgers, the head, Miss Pearce and the secretary had been sitting in the office since Beth and Black had left them there. DC Rodgers reached for his bag and took out a newspaper, which he began to read. The headteacher seemed to take this as his cue.
‘This is ridiculous,’ he told them all, ‘I have work to do,’ and he got to his feet.
‘Don’t,’ Rodgers warned him.
The headteacher flared up. ‘You can’t stop me from leaving this room. What are you going to do, arrest me?’
‘No,’ Rodgers admitted, and went back to looking at his newspaper while he calmly answered the man. ‘But DS Black asked you to stay in here, so you won’t be suspected of tipping off a potential witness in a major criminal case. If you do leave this room, I’ll be duty bound to report it to him. He may then suspect you of trying to pervert the course of justice.’ He turned a page of his newspaper. ‘You can get up to three years for that,’ he said amiably, ‘but it’s your call.’
The headteacher watched Rodgers for a while, as if trying to gauge how serious he was, but the detective carried on reading.
The head sat back down.
The sixth girl didn’t answer the door when they rang the bell. Black knocked as well in case it wasn’t working, then he knocked again, louder this time. As he did this, Beth peered through the window and saw a flash of movement as a figure left the front room and disappeared into the kitchen.
‘Round the back!’ she called, and Black ran.
Black had to sprint past five houses before reaching the gable end of the terrace and rounding the corner, then he dashed to the rear of the houses, into a back street filled with wheelie bins awaiting collection. He’d been hoping to outpace the girl and meet her coming the other way, but his luck was out, because she had chosen to run the other way and he could just see her back as she ran as fast as she could in the opposite direction.
‘Police!’ he called, but she didn’t stop. Black sprinted after her, but even from here he could tell she had too great a head start and was likely to reach the end of the back lane before he could catch up with her. He stared fixedly ahead as he powered after the girl, so he could see if she veered off to the left or right at the end and be less likely to lose her.
There were yards still between them and she was almost at the top of the lane when someone else came sharply into view. Anticipating the problem, Beth had run the other way and must have done so at an impressive speed, because she blocked the girl’s progress now. The girl tried to swerve then dodge past her, but Beth stepped in her way and grabbed her. ‘Got her!’ Beth shouted to Black, but the girl struggled and they whirled round so that Beth was now behind Black and she and the girl were facing in the other direction, just as Rob came round the same corner.
Because he was directly opposite her and up close, he got a good look at the girl’s face.
‘It’s her!’ he called triumphantly, just as the girl lashed out, kicking him hard in the shins.
‘Little bitch,’ hissed Rob, and he hobbled away with a cut on his shin. He was limping and looked angry. Perhaps he no longer liked the idea of being a detective.
‘Fuck off!’ she told him, then she rounded on Beth. ‘And you assaulted me,’ she told Beth, ‘grabbing me like that.’
‘She grabbed you because you ran,’ explained Black.
‘I didn’t know who you were.’
Black hit back, ‘I called “Police!” at the top of my voice, Jennifer. I think you knew who we were.’
‘I didn’t hear you.’ She didn’t seem surprised that he knew her name. ‘And don’t call me Jennifer. It’s Jenny.’
‘Okay, Jenny, now I want you to get into the car and come back with me to HQ,’ he told her. ‘Then you can tell me why you missed the ID parade.’
‘I didn’t miss it deliberately,’ she said, ‘I was sick.’
‘Yet you knew it was happening,’ he said. ‘How? The other pupils didn’t, so who told you about it, Jenny? Who warned you not to come?’
She looked flustered to be caught out like that. ‘I’m saying nowt,’ she told him.
If Black thought that getting the girl out of Collemby and into police headquarters in Newcastle might in some way lead to her revealing more of the truth, he was soon to be disillusioned. For a lass who was barely fourteen, Jenny rebuffed his questions like a pro.
‘That girl has been coached,’ Black told Beth after a fruitless interview with Jenny and her appropriate adult, a social worker drafted in at the last minute to ensure the girl was treated according to her rights when no one was able to trace her mother, who Jenny said was ‘in Spain’ and could not be contacted.
‘Is she refusing to speak to you?’ asked Beth.
‘She spoke to me,’ said Black, ‘eventually, but it’s all denials. She said she didn’t know about the ID parade, even though she’d already indicated she knew about it. She said she was off sick with a bad headache but it had cleared up by the time we arrived and she only ran away because she didn’t know who we were.’
‘What about Rob ID-ing her as the girl dressed in Alice Teale’s gear?’
‘She outright denies it. Jenny says it can’t have been her and he must have it wrong, so it’s his word against hers.’ He shrugged to show how flimsy that argument was.
‘But it obviously was her,’ said Beth. ‘She has guilt written all over her.’
‘It was her all right,’ said the detective, ‘but proving it is another matter.’
‘Does she admit being at the school that night?’
‘She admits to being there after the school day was over but only because she had a detention, which she completed in the punishment block, before Alice Teale was supposedly seen leaving the building. That’s the bit that’s tucked away in the U-bend, set back in the middle of the school,’ he said. ‘It’s basically the only part that doesn’t have any scaffolding on it.’
As soon as he had said that to her, he seemed to reflect on his own words.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked him.
‘Nothing.’ He dismissed it. ‘There’s something I want to check, that’s all.’
Beth wanted to press him further on this, but at that point her mobile rang. The call was a distraction – an irritation, in fact. She wanted to stay focused on the matter in hand. They had Jenny, but she wasn’t cooperating, and now Black had a hunch, but for some reason he wasn’t sharing it with her, which rankled. Beth was tempted to ignore the call but thought it might be something important, so she answered.
The voice on the end of the line was unfamiliar. The woman introduced herself as Pamela Barton and for a moment the name meant nothing to Beth. The caller must have picked up on her hesitation because she said, ‘You called me.’ Then she added: ‘You left a message for me at the school.’
It finally dawned on Beth that this was the teacher who had worked with Keech at a previous school. She’d been away with the kids on an outward-bound holiday so Beth had left her mobile number with the school and more or less forgotten about it the moment she had driven away.
‘Oh yes, Miss Barton. The reason for my call –’
‘Mr Keech,’ she interrupted, sounding testy. ‘You said in your message.’
Beth didn’t need this right now. The woman was obviously narked because Beth hadn’t remembered her and wanted to press home the point. ‘It’s a routine inquiry,’ she told her. Black was looking impatient so she gestured for him to go on and that she would catch him up, then turned her full attention to the call while Black sloped off to his desk. ‘We’ve had a complaint against Mr Keech
involving a pupil, and I wanted to ask if you had knowledge of anything similar occurring during the time you worked with him.’
‘What kind of complaint?’
Beth chose her words carefully. She didn’t want to lead the woman or guide her in any way towards turning something relatively minor into retrospective proof that Keech was something he wasn’t, but she did want to be thorough. If a girl in one of Keech’s classes had complained about him in the past or alleged she had been touched inappropriately, then it would obviously strengthen the credibility of a more recent accusation.
‘No,’ said Miss Barton, ‘there was nothing like that at all,’ and she went on to express her shock that the question had even been asked. Beth had to remind her that this was merely an allegation and had come from one girl, but it still had to be thoroughly investigated, even though, in reality, it probably hadn’t been, thanks to neither the headmaster nor the police having taken it seriously from the outset.
‘I see, well, yes, of course. I did find that Mr Keech was – how can I put this? – close to some of the girls, and perhaps a bit …’
‘A bit what?’
‘One hesitates to use the word “lecherous” …’ But she did it just the same, thought Beth. ‘He was a bit of a sleaze, but so many men are when they reach that age, aren’t they? Perhaps it’s the mid-life crisis or something. Some men buy a sports car or a motorbike, some try to bed every woman they meet.’
‘Why did he leave? Was there a scandal of some kind?’
‘No, nothing like that. I’ve been teaching for a very long time and every school has at least a couple of lechy male teachers who flirt with the girls and make inappropriate comments about them in the staff room. He wasn’t that out of the ordinary.’
‘Did he say why he decided to go?’
‘I don’t remember his reasons. Maybe he just wanted a change.’
‘Maybe.’ Beth’s frustration was growing. She had been convinced that if she just spent the time making enquiries at Keech’s former schools, something incriminating would come up. Now, here she was, talking to a woman who had known him before he left for Collemby, and even she could offer nothing more than the fact that he was a bit of a sleaze. Beth would have to concede the obvious truth. She’d drawn a complete blank. She needed to end this conversation abruptly and catch up with Black, who looked ready to leave without her.
Alice Teale is Missing Page 27
