by Alice Castle
‘Mmmm, you mean a casual labourer? Or a kitchen supplier?’ she said, brightening up considerably. This was the perfect solution – someone who hadn’t breached the defences designed to keep the Wyatt’s children safe, and wasn’t part of the inner sanctum either. A hired hand who could well be mad, bad or dangerous to know, without besmirching Wyatt’s recruitment policies.
Beth sighed. ‘Why would they stab Jenkins, though? Don’t they say victims usually know their killer? The Bursar didn’t seem to have any problem thinking someone had a reason to kill Jenkins, did he?’ One look at Janice’s suddenly blank face showed how hard Beth was going to have to work to get her to discuss the Bursar’s fruity language, let alone the possibility of a perpetrator with a motive other than mental illness.
‘I suppose we have to remember it wouldn’t be right to cover anything up, just for the sake of the school’s reputation, would it? There is such a thing as justice?’ Beth tried.
Janice nodded, but it was clear that she was unconvinced. Abstract notions came a poor second to the interests of Wyatt’s. ‘I think Jenkins was probably just in the wrong place, at the wrong time.’
‘Talking of timing, I actually bumped into Dr Grover just before I found…. Dr Jenkins,’ said Beth, a little tentatively.
‘Oh, did you?’ said Janice blandly. ‘He’s amazing, isn’t he? Such a brilliant head, so inspiring. Probably wanted to check you were doing all right on your first day,’ she said.
Beth smiled politely, marvelling at Janice’s diplomacy. She’d been yelling at Dr Grover just a couple of hours ago, not showing the faintest sign of finding him amazing. ‘And I thought I saw you just before I saw him,’ she continued.
‘Oh, maybe, I’m always pottering about somewhere, running errands, for my sins,’ said Janice airily. Hmm, thought Beth. Which of your sins exactly? Short of getting out the thumb screws, she couldn’t see how to push this further.
She resigned herself to getting nowhere and set about her delicious sandwich instead. Say what you like about Wyatt’s, they did make a lovely lunch.
Chapter Five
By the time school reopened on Wednesday, Beth felt that she was an old Wyatt’s hand. Nothing fazed her any more about the place – buildings, children, or even the parents milling around the grand entrance gates. Thank goodness, there was no sign of reporters anywhere in the village now. ‘Murder at posh school’ had dominated the headlines for a couple of days, but terrorists in Europe and a Tory minister entangled with a dominatrix had hit the news since. And in the fickle word of the media, new stories trumped old every time, particularly when developments stubbornly refused to occur.
Beth had left work shortly after her rather fruitless lunch yesterday, and had immediately been plunged into Ben-world. There hadn’t been a minute during the usual treadmill of homework-supper-bed, and by the time all that was done and she had polished off a bit of neglected bread-and-butter work for her other clients, her own bed was calling her relentlessly. She now felt the weight of unshared information dragging her conscience to the ground. She needed to see Detective Inspector York and tell him about Dr Grover and Janice. She wasn’t sure if she needed to tell him about her indiscretion yesterday over the cause of Dr Jenkins’ death, though. She’d play that by ear.
Her business-like stride across the playground faltered a bit as she spotted the Bursar charging towards her across the netball courts with an old rugby-player’s determination. He was still number one suspect in her book, and she hadn’t forgotten the visceral loathing with which he’d spoken of Jenkins yesterday. She managed a watery grin, though, and he smiled heartily in return.
‘Ah, Beth, glad I caught you,’ he said. ‘Just wanted to say, there’ll be a staff meeting at lunchtime. Just to run over a few of the issues brought up by… recent events.’ She looked into his slightly bloodshot blue eyes but he appeared quite nonchalant about equating grisly murder with the resolutely bland word ‘events’. ‘There’ll be sandwiches, of course,’ he added as he swerved away, as though that made it all right.
The one thing that worried Beth about going back to work, really worried her, was passing the spot where she’d found Dr Jenkins. But, as she came near, she realised that nothing lacks an aura of menace like a well-tended children’s playground. There was no scene-of-crime tape anywhere, and the bins had been relocated to some other distant corner of the extensive grounds. There was not a drop of blood in sight, thank goodness. The place looked utterly nondescript. In fact, if she hadn’t been pretty sure the crime had been committed within a stone’s throw of the back of the archive building, she couldn’t even have sworn she recognised the spot.
In a way, it was pitiful that such a significant event could be effaced so effortlessly. There was no lingering atmosphere at all, no Jack the Ripper-like sense of dread enveloping the chain link fence; the smooth grey tarmac, and the playing fields stretching out, beautifully green and flat, beyond. Good, she decided, and turned away to find the archive door pass. She jumped a mile as a hand descended on her shoulder.
‘Jesus,’ she said, clutching her throat. Her handbag crashed to the ground, scattering possessions far and wide.
‘Here, let me,’ said Inspector York, bending to help. He was wearing dark chinos and a navy linen jacket today, all the better to blend in with the smartly dressed teachers, she supposed. His soft-soled shoes explained why she hadn’t heard him coming up behind her. Scary, given the murder. She definitely needed to be more aware.
She immediately dropped to her knees, scrabbling for her scattered things, knowing there’d be horrors she didn’t want on display. Sure enough, as well as a confetti of crumpled tissues and till receipts, he passed her a shaming jumble of Twix wrappers and shrapnel-hard Haribo. ‘Kids,’ she tried to make a joke of it. He raised his eyebrows.
‘Could we have a word inside?’ he asked.
Her hand shook a tiny bit as she swiped her card, and she led on silently through the store room and up the ringing metal stairs. She fished out her key and got the door unlocked on her second go.
The small office smelt more strongly than ever of paper. And if there had been no trace of Jenkins outside, here – in what had so recently been his kingdom – his presence was everywhere. An old jacket swung from the hook on the back of the door, the mouldering apple core she’d spotted on his desk so long ago – was it really only on Monday? – was busily composting itself, and the whole masculine, neglected air of the room screamed of Jenkins. His computer had been taken away and there was a film of fingerprinting dust over everything, including the apple core.
She was relieved to see her own laptop was still in place, though there was powder over that, too. She gazed about her, trying to work out what else had changed, if anything. She didn’t know the room well enough to be sure. The towering piles of papers and boxes of folders looked much the same as when she had last seen them, but she had the vague sense that something was missing.
In some ways, having a second person in the small office did a lot to dilute reminders of Jenkins. It also made Beth all the more aware of the Inspector’s height and muscular presence. She supposed policemen had to be fit, for chasing people and so on, but there was no need for him to be this large, she thought illogically. He was making her feel very small and also very out of shape. Once they were both seated – she taking Dr Jenkins’ larger chair, because it was closer and she didn’t want to edge past him in this confined space; the policeman perching incongruously on the little typist’s chair, its castors creaking in protest – there didn’t seem to be room to breathe.
Beth looked expectantly at York.
‘Look, we’ve been through the initial stages of the enquiry. As you can see, we’re checking Dr Jenkins’ computer. Now, you had only just started here, hadn’t you?’
Beth nodded.
‘We felt on balance there was no need to take your laptop away. Our tech guys had a look and it seems clean.’
Beth wasn’t surprised. She hadn�
�t been in the job long enough to work out how to bypass the school’s firewalls and break out into the Internet, though she suspected every teenager in Wyatt’s could do it in seconds. On Monday, she had just been pootling around on the school’s intranet, which couldn’t have been more anodyne, while trying to work out what on earth she was supposed to be doing. The poor IT worker who’d had to check on her browsing history, used to a diet of extreme porn and terrorism, must have died of boredom exposed to the term’s cricket fixtures.
Finding out what her job entailed, though, was going to become much more of a problem, now that she was the school’s only archivist and had no-one to tell her what was needed. She was going to have to make some big decisions. On her own. It was actually going to be fun. She would genuinely be gaining quite a lot from Jenkins’ death. Unless, of course, the school decided she was woefully underqualified for the job and got someone else in.
‘Did you happen to get a glimpse of Jenkins’ working methods? See the kind of sites he was accessing?’ York brought her back to the matter in hand.
Beth was surprised. ‘I told you. He didn’t even come into the office with me. He just unlocked the door, gave me the spare key, and that was it. That was the last I saw of him – until, erm, later. He didn’t explain what I was supposed to do, or how I was supposed to do it.’
York and Beth silently glanced around at the wall of boxes bearing down on the space.
‘This must be pretty daunting,’ York conceded.
‘Well, it is, to tell the truth,’ said Beth. ‘But it’s quite… an opportunity, I suppose you could say. I’m hoping to talk to the Bursar about it later. He was involved in the interview process, so I’m thinking that may well mean he knows what I’m actually here for,’ she said wryly.
‘There’s plenty of stuff to sort through, isn’t there? I suppose I’m asking you to flag up to me if you find anything you think might be… relevant,’ said the Inspector.
‘Relevant? To the murder? You think the motive might be here somewhere?’ Beth looked around her again. She picked a stapler up from the desk, absently brushed the fingerprinting powder off, and started to fiddle with it. It was an alarming thought that the key to the murder could be lurking here, not least because it was going to take her a long time – who knew how long? – to unearth everything concealed in these boxes. But it was most certainly in her interests to find anything at all that hinted at a reason why Jenkins had to die. After all, if she couldn’t offer the police an alternative, and if they didn’t stumble across anything themselves, they were left with her as the most obvious candidate for the unwanted role of killer. She clacked the stapler open and shut while her mind raced.
***
York looked at Beth, reached over and took the stapler out of her hand. He could do without that clicking while he was trying to think. You didn’t have to be a mind-reader to see that the woman was worried. Her nails were bitten. And her bag had been full of the kind of junk wrappers which indicated someone too anxious to eat properly. It was quite possible that she thought they were going to arrest her at any second. But looking at the situation objectively, she had hardly been in the place five minutes, and there were no immediate indications that she’d known the victim beforehand.
True, she could be an opportunist psychopath. Or she could be a stalker, and they might be about to find that her bedroom wall was papered with covert shots of Jenkins she’d snatched with a long lens – but York doubted it. That reminded him: he’d better ask if they could pop round to her house. This afternoon right after work would be ideal, giving her less of an opportunity to rip down the shrine before they got there, he thought, smiling to himself.
York carried on, as he sometimes did on a case, dreaming up possible motives. Maybe she could have engineered all this, the job, the proximity, in order to bump off Jenkins for some reason lodged deep in both their pasts. But it was a bit baroque. It must be clear to her, and everyone else, that so far the police didn’t even have a ribbon of evidence, let alone enough rope to fashion a decent net.
She might just, quite sensibly, be twanging with anxiety because there was a killer around and it wasn’t her. He’d post a constable round the back here, near where those damn bins had been, he decided. She was a bit off the beaten track in this archives shed, or whatever they called it, and until they knew what the hell was going on he didn’t want to take any chances. He didn’t want the only observant and helpful person he’d met so far in this stupidly plush school to come to a sticky end. It wasn’t chivalry, he told himself, looking at the small figure, anxious eyes peeping back at him from behind her long fringe. It was expediency.
Beth, meanwhile, was noticing that she hadn’t been corrected when she used the word murder. ‘So, it’s definite now, is it? Dr Jenkins was actually murdered?’
York inclined his head. ‘Yes, it’s officially a murder enquiry. Ok, I’m going to leave you to it now, but here’s my card,’ he said abruptly, getting to his feet and trying to stretch a bit. His legs felt cramped, thanks to the folding chair. ‘I want you to call me if you remember anything that might be useful, or if you find anything I need to know about.’
‘That reminds me.’ Beth shifted uncomfortably on her seat like an anxious schoolgirl. ‘I keep meaning to mention the fact that I saw two people, well, maybe two but definitely one, just before I, er, came across Dr Jenkins.’
‘Really?’ said York, sitting back down heavily on the flimsy chair, which creaked even more ominously. ‘Why didn’t you say before? Tell me who you saw.’ His tone was sharp and he leant forward impatiently.
‘I’m really sorry, it went right out of my head after everything… well, you know.’ She looked more anxious than ever, her cheeks faintly flushed.
‘Look, don’t worry. It’s good that you’ve remembered now. Just tell me everything, right from the beginning.’ Beth darted a look at him and he smiled reassuringly, while inwardly sighing that he was going to be held up here when there was so much else he needed to get to. Nothing for it, though.
‘Well, it was when I’d decided to leave the office. As I’ve said, it was around lunchtime, I was hungry and I needed… Well, the loo. Strange how that went completely out of my head when I found the, the body,’ said Beth. ‘I was just outside the office here, and I was sort of wandering around trying to get my bearings. It’s a big school and my first day, as you know, so I wasn’t completely sure which way Reception even was. I don’t have the best sense of direction,’ she confided. York smiled reassuringly at her. ‘I’d been walking for about five minutes, vaguely in the direction of the, you know, bins, when I came round a corner and ran right into him.’
‘Who? Dr Jenkins?’ said York.
‘No. Dr Grover.’
‘The headmaster?’ York was surprised. ‘Did he speak to you? How did he seem?’
‘Oh, he was, you know, fine. A bit rushed… He’d nearly knocked me over, barrelling round the corner, and then he almost fell himself. It was a bit… awkward. After that, he just wished me luck on my first day, stuff like that. He even remembered my name,’ said Beth, still impressed at the memory, her shy, pretty face flushing a little.
I bet he did, thought York a touch sourly. ‘What was his manner, though?’ he asked. ‘Did he appear agitated? Breathless? Sweaty?’ York just managed to stop himself from asking if the man smelt, and tried to get his subconscious under control. However annoying he might suddenly find the debonair headmaster, he had to remain rigidly professional. ‘Anything else at all you can remember?’
‘Well…’ Beth cast her mind back. ‘It was only a few days ago, but it was what happened next that I remember. I knew I should mention to you that I’d seen Dr Grover but it really didn’t seem hugely significant… though I remember being a little bit surprised that he was in the playground at all. He must be so busy, and it was lunchtime, as I said. I suppose I imagine he’s always hob-nobbing with school governors or having really high level meetings, not rushing around near the pl
aying fields.’
‘You’re sure he was rushing?’ York asked.
‘I think he must have been; we both were, otherwise we wouldn’t have winded each other so much when we ran into each other. Oh, and before I forget, I think I saw Janice just before that.’
‘Janice, the school secretary? What on earth was she doing there?’
‘Well, I’m less sure I really saw her. It was just a flash of the really bright fuchsia pink colour that she was wearing that day, in the distance.’
‘In the distance? Could you say where exactly?’
‘I think it was over by the Languages department, but it was just for a second,’ said Beth. She seemed unsure, looking at his expressionless face, whether the information was relevant or not. ‘I hope I haven’t wasted your time with all that,’ she added.
‘No, no, course not. No information is ever wasted in this sort of enquiry. Thank you. And if you think of anything else, you’ve got my card,’ he said.
‘Um, yes,’ she said, searching fruitlessly on the desktop.
He handed her another with a sigh, wondering how she could have lost it in such a short time. She wasn’t the only one. He got through boxes of cards every year. Just as well he kept being promoted, so they were constantly being reprinted. ‘And good luck with… all this,’ he said, taking a last look at her cluttered workspace as he exited. ‘Oh, this is yours, I think,’ he said, turning back to place the stapler carefully back on her desk. It would never do for the police to start filching office supplies. And it looked as though she needed all the equipment she could get to do this job.
***
Beth, alone now with the entire contents of the Wyatt’s archive, looked about her, too. Where on earth should she start? It was hard to get motivated, especially with so much on her mind that was nothing to do with the archives at all. Had she done the right thing, mentioning Dr Grover? She felt a little stab of guilt, particularly at having said she might have seen Janice. She didn’t want to get the woman who was rapidly becoming her best, no, only friend at Wyatt’s, into trouble.
