by Alice Castle
The whole work thing was so tricky these days, she reflected. She knew she wasn’t alone in struggling to make ends meet.
It was all very well that her roster of little freelance jobs could now be dignified with the title of ‘portfolio career’. It sounded glamorous, but in her eyes, this was how employers justified paying a pittance. She’d stuck it out because, as a single mother, it made sense for her to work from home, giving her the flexibility to be around when Ben needed her. And she had little choice. In theory, the dribs and drabs of money she made – editing a website, contributing copy to a local magazine, selling the odd feature to a newspaper – just about added up to a normal salary. On a good month.
Sometimes she didn’t sleep. Worries crashed in on her in the early hours, and only deep breaths and natural optimism kept her going. The Wyatt’s post was going to make a difference. It was a job with regular office hours, which already felt grown-up. All the other work, she’d decided blithely, she would keep on and just cram into weekends or evenings, when Ben was tucked up in bed.
She still felt pretty thrilled that she’d landed the job at all, despite her lack of any specific archive experience. There must have been better qualified candidates among the fifty or so applicants they’d had. It was quite a mystery. But then, she loved solving puzzles, from crosswords to deciphering Ben’s shocking handwriting. And she’d be very well placed to solve both conundrums: why they’d hired someone without much archive experience; and why the archives were in such a mess in the first place. In the meantime, they’d obviously seen something in her. She was going to repay that faith by giving it her best shot – no matter what her boss was like.
That jolted her back to the present. The archives door was swinging open. Jenkins was shuffling off back down the corridor after pressing the unpleasantly warm key into her hand, and Beth walked into the room alone. Immediately, something tickled her nose. All that paper. It was a fusty smell, true, but she had always liked the soft powdery scent of age. It was a small room – a box, really – with floor to ceiling shelves. Cartons were stacked everywhere, obstructing what space there was. One small window, high in the wall, let in a little light on this fine spring day. A desk was positioned beneath it, already strewn with a mass of papers, a brown old apple core (probably the source of some of the smell), some sweet wrappers, and a muddle of coffee mugs. Positioned behind it, amidst the sea of boxes, was what looked suspiciously like a fold-up card table, of the type Beth’s grandparents had used for games of Bridge, and a basic steel-framed chair.
The contrast with the spacious, welcoming plushness of the school’s Reception desk couldn’t have been more marked, but Beth smiled. This suited her better than a lot of swanky furniture. Besides, aesthetics was neither here nor there. She was interested in the contents of all these boxes, the information, the time and the secrets they contained, not their surroundings. My kingdom, she thought to herself. But what, exactly, was she supposed to be doing in it, she wondered?
Though she had talked airily at her interview about various kinds of systems, and there had been some vague mention from Jenkins of indexing certain records and the huge care and precision this would take, she had been expecting a bit of direction. Presumably, Jenkins had a plan, and work that he specifically wanted her to do? Otherwise, why hire her in the first place?
She pulled out the chair and sat down at the green felt-covered table, realising as she did so that she was squashing the envelope Katie had given her, still in her coat pocket. She stood up, slipped off the coat, looked around in vain for somewhere to hang it, and slung it over the back of her chair. She smiled at the wobbly writing on the envelope, and opened it up. It was a card, featuring a bunch of yellow daffodils with Spiderman looming menacingly above them. The daffs had been dashed off, but the Spiderman was lovingly worked. No prizes for guessing which theme was at Katie’s urging and which was Charles’s unique contribution. Inside, it said simply, ‘Good Luck Beth, love Charles and Katie X.’
Charles was Ben’s partner in crime, and Beth was touched that he’d spared a few moments from Minecraft to make her this offering – or, rather, impressed that Katie had managed to unplug him from the game and bribe him into doing something so thoughtful, especially involving flowers. Ben, she was sure, wouldn’t recognise a daffodil if he trampled on one, let alone consent to draw one. She propped the card on her rickety workstation, and switched on the laptop.
She was glad to see that this, at least, reflected the swishness of Wyatt’s public face, and not the state of its archives. Within a few seconds, she was connected to the school’s intranet, and could see timetables for every class and a run-down of all the important staff meetings of the day. What she couldn’t see, and had no idea about, was the whereabouts of Jenkins. Shouldn’t he be here, showing her the ropes? She wasn’t yearning for his presence, mind you. She’d just get on without him.
Right. First things first. The inbox, towering to the side of the laptop. There was a huge clutch of letters referring to Wyatt’s boys who’d served in the First World War; there was a lot of correspondence with the other Endowment school, either requesting documents or explaining why they couldn’t be lent. There was a fascinating, if crumbly-looking, piece of parchment right at the bottom of the pile. It was, she rapidly decided, all the stuff left behind by her predecessor because it was either too difficult or too fiddly. Well, she liked a challenge. And fiddly was no problem at all.
It was nearly three hours later when she looked up again. She’d been quietly working away, making some progress with getting all the First World War documents into date order, taking careful notes of questions to ask Jenkins when he reappeared, and she’d been through the emails. But now, she realised, she was starving and also needed the loo. Jenkins hadn’t thought to show her where the nearest ladies was, and she might as well seek out an early lunch while she was at it.
Carefully shutting down her computer, she collected her bag, remembered the key Jenkins had grudgingly entrusted her with, and locked up the archive office. For the first time, muted playtime shouts could be heard from outside, where it sounded like the sixth formers were already letting off steam. She rattled quickly down the metal stairs. It was a lot easier getting past all the sports supplies without Jenkins lurching too close to her.
Shutting the door firmly behind her and checking she had the all-important swipe pass to get back in, Beth made her way back across the asphalt to Janice and the Reception desk, dodging clumps of children as she went. As she walked, it struck her how odd it was that Jenkins hadn’t returned. Well, she knew nothing about his working methods. Maybe he considered it good practice to leave a brand-new colleague completely alone for half the day? She should count her blessings. It wasn’t as if she was desperate to have Jenkins sitting cheek by jowl with her anyway.
She caught sight of a sudden flash of fuchsia pink jumper to the side of her, behind the sixth form centre. It had to be Janice. Maybe she had decided not to have lunch with her, after all? Beth felt a stab of disappointment. She had enjoyed the solitude of her morning’s work, but she could certainly do with a bit of socialising in her break. She wondered whether to follow the pink, but then reasoned Janice couldn’t be the only person wearing that colour today. It was a big school, as the secretary herself had pointed out.
She turned the corner, only to run slap into a huge bear of a man coming the other way. They whirled round as he fought to get his balance, ridiculously grabbing her shoulders briefly, as though to steady his six-foot-plus bulk on her tiny five-foot-not-much frame.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said – the automatic English response to someone else tripping over her and then using her as a Zimmer frame.
‘Do excuse me…’ said the man, releasing her and managing to get himself upright.
Oh God, it was only Dr Grover, the headmaster.
‘Ah, it’s our new archivist, isn’t it? Miss Haldane? May I call you Beth?’
Dr Grover, like all teachers, see
med to have an amazing knack for remembering names. They had only met for five minutes, as part of her courtesy tour of the school on her interview day, though of course she had already known all about him. Every Dulwich mother did – especially those dying to get their children into Wyatt’s. While no-one could pretend that Wyatt’s had ever been failing, it was true that the school’s star had burned still brighter since Thomas Grover, with his double first in English from Cambridge, had breezed in. His trademark dove grey, chalk-striped, double-breasted pinstriped suits, worn with primary-coloured Hermes ties, were hardly radical fashion statements. But in a sea of sober lawyer and banker daddies, Grover stood out as that tiny bit more flamboyant… a touch more ‘Wyatt’s’. And his magnificent height and stature – think of a very tall Winnie the Pooh – made him seem almost Falstaffian.
The fact that he was popular with staff and children alike helped, as did the searing intelligence plotting an effortlessly upward path for the school. Depending on which schools’ guide you were reading – and in Dulwich, they were pored over much more often than any Booker prize winner – Wyatt’s was now either in the top 25 or top 50 of schools in the UK.
‘Dr Grover, good to see you. Yes, well, I’m the assistant archivist…’ Beth started, then flushed as she realised it was hardly politic of her to correct the headmaster on their second meeting, and particularly not when he’d accidentally promoted her.
‘Splendid, splendid, great to meet you again, and let’s schedule a proper chat soon, talk to my secretary, must dash now but have a great first day, and welcome to Wyatt’s.’
With that, Grover was off, striding purposefully. He seemed to be heading towards the spot where Beth had caught that tiny glimpse of pink a few minutes before. She collected herself, then decided to press on and see whether Janice was in Reception after all. But was she still going the right way? Being whirled bodily about by the headmaster, of all people, meant she had lost her head for a moment.
She hurriedly glanced around. There was a narrow passageway here, between the Sixth Form Centre and the Science Block. Yes, that must be a short cut. She’d just nip along it… Blast! She realised it came out almost back where she had started, at the big rubbish containers which flanked the perimeter fence, leading back to the archives outbuilding.
She paused for a moment, taking stock and looking around, deciding she had to seriously regroup if she was ever going to get any lunch, with Janice or alone. Then, as she turned, something caught her eye. Something she could just see jutting out from one of the wheeled bins. Something which really shouldn’t have been there.
It was a foot.
Or, to be more precise, a leg, ending in a sock, an inch or two of exposed very white flesh, and a sturdy black shoe, poking out from under the bins. Not quite believing what she saw, she walked forward a little, to get a better view. Was someone under the bins? Was it some kind of prank? Maybe the children playing a strange trick… But there were no children anywhere near this area. She could still hear muted break-time sounds, but a long way off. She craned forward more, then stopped abruptly. It couldn’t be!
But it was.
What she could see was a body, crumpled between two of the dumpsters. She couldn’t see the face; it was in shadow, and there seemed to be a cloth over it. But she could see the jacket. It was tweed, and a horrible, and horribly familiar, mustard colour. Except where it was stained and stiff. With dark red blood. There was more blood, the colour of a fine wine, pooled lavishly around the body, too.
It was Alan Jenkins, her boss.
Chapter Two
No wonder Dr Jenkins had never come back to the office, was Beth’s first, ignoble thought. If he had ever needed an excuse for his cavalier behaviour towards a new colleague, the Universe had given him a permanent ‘get out of jail free’ card.
Then, crashingly, she felt the shock of the situation. He couldn’t really be dead, could he?
But it seemed that he could.
She stood, frozen in horror. Dr Jenkins was equally silent and still. The blood around him was like a dark mirror, reflecting the clouds in the spring sky, the only things that moved in the scene.
Beth was conscious of that feeling of hyper-realism that you get when catastrophe has struck. She seemed to be seeing colours more clearly – especially mustard yellow and wine red – and the seconds ticked by, in time with her heartbeat, which she could now hear pounding in her ears. She didn’t realise she was shaking until she saw her own hand reaching for her phone. But who should she call? The school? The police? She pressed every button before realising the battery had died.
Now she was really in a state of panic. She thought she should probably check whether Jenkins really was dead or not before doing anything else, but she knew better than to disturb the body or mess up the crime scene. She edged a tiny bit closer but then gave up the attempt. She couldn’t face getting any nearer to the splayed form and, besides, his preternatural stillness and the lake of blood on the ground around him were telling their own grim story.
She reached out a hand towards his foot but couldn’t face actually touching it, feeling all the time that she would be violating his privacy, his dignity, and probably all kinds of CSI laws about DNA transfer. Part of her was also waiting for a roar of angry disapproval from the prone figure. She didn’t know whether she would have been more terrified or relieved if he’d suddenly sat up and started shouting. But there was no reaction, no moaning, no movement at all. Just a deep and ominous silence. The phrase ‘dead as mutton’ came to her. He was as inert as anything in the chilled cabinet at the big Sainsbury’s in Dog Kennel Hill.
Beth knew someone was supposed to stay with the body, but she couldn’t do that at the same time as relaying the news. She considered shouting for help, but what if some of the children came to investigate? She’d hate them to see this. Just as the slightly pointless dilemma threatened to overset her in a way which the actual death hadn’t, salvation came lumbering round the corner, complete with a squeaky wheel.
‘Wossisen?’ said a stout woman in a blue overall, pushing a trolley laden with a large urn, cups, saucers, and covered plates. The trolley shrieked to a halt as Beth struggled to make sense of the dinner lady’s words, which were made all the more exotic by the Silk Cut clamped to her lower lip. Pushing the heavy trolley was a two-handed job.
‘Wossappened?’ The woman persisted. Clumps of fierce red hair were bursting out from her white catering hairnet, and she narrowed her eyes suspiciously at Beth.
‘Um, well… I’m not sure…’
‘Fark!’ the woman shouted suddenly, catching sight of the spreading pool of blood and skittering sideways with the trolley. There was a clatter of china and the cigarette fell from her lip, coming to rest about a metre from Dr Jenkins’ inert foot. It said a lot for the dinner lady’s respect for the dead that she didn’t immediately pick it up and pop it back into place. ‘Well ee’s a goner, innee? Fark me sideways.’
No thank you, thought Beth primly. But the shouting had brought her back to herself. The best thing was for her to get help at the main school building as quickly as possible, now that there was someone to stay with the body. She’d aim for Reception. There would be people there who knew what to do, including the lovely Janice, and it was also probably the only spot she could reliably find in her current state.
‘Can you stay here, please, while I go and call the police?’ she asked the woman.
‘Whotcha, mad? Nah. Not stoppinere on me own. Yegorrabe jokin. Ang on. Ear!’ The woman yelled out deafeningly across the playing field.
A figure in the far distance – one of the grounds staff, Beth guessed – started running towards them. Then a lanky boy in jeans and a T-shirt came round the other corner and stopped short, his face blanching as he took in the odd assembly of Beth, the dinner lady, the distant groundsman and, last but not least, Dr Jenkins. He yanked an ear bud out and said, ‘Wow’; eyes round in a face that suddenly looked absurdly young.
�
��Gappy, innit?’ said the dinner lady, accurately sizing up the newcomer as one of the gap year students who helped out at the Junior School before heading off to uni. He nodded silently, and swallowed, his eyes skittering nervously to Dr Jenkins, the blood, Beth, and rapidly away again.
Beth got him to promise to stay put with the dinner lady, and the groundsman arrived, panting. She left the trio firing up a medicinal Silk Cut each, and standing awkwardly like guests at a truly lamentable cocktail party.
***
An hour later, Beth was ensconced in one of the back offices behind Reception, hands clamped around a cup of sweet tea produced by a wan but still efficient Janice. She closed her eyes, and immediately a vision of red-splattered yellow tweed rose up. If her hands hadn’t been holding the cup, she knew they would still have been shaking. Dr Jenkins was a stranger, and on their brief acquaintance she hadn’t warmed to him, but she was near to tears. He had looked so ungainly, stuck there between the bins, like some forgotten rubbish himself. Poor, poor man. Beth shook her head. He surely hadn’t deserved that. Had he?
‘All right, love?’ said the police constable sitting opposite her, painstakingly transcribing her statement. She nodded briefly, but she wasn’t all right. Not really. This had to be the worst ever start to a new job. She knew it wasn’t all about her – a man had died, for goodness sake – but part of her was rueful. From the moment she’d run into Reception, pale, wild-eyed, and gibbering about a dead body, all the Wyatt’s staff had been eyeing her curiously. She’d wanted to make an impression. But not this one.
Yes, there had been sympathy. And Janice had been wonderful and given her a hug, then sat with a cosy cashmere arm around her as they waited for the police to arrive. But Beth was conscious that a great calamity had come to Wyatt’s – and she was somehow stuck right in the middle of it.
