by Andy Maslen
She smiled. Silly bitch.
‘So, you said your article was about how Religious Education is making a comeback?’
‘Absolutely,’ I gushed. ‘My editor is himself a practising Christian and he perceives a definite revival in what you might call the quest for the divine in modern society.’
She beamed and, for a moment, I felt like slapping her to wipe the expression off her over-made-up face. But I controlled myself. As always. I continued. Oh, and by the way? I’m going to give you the full conversation. You need to understand why I’m killing them.
I said, ‘So, Amy, I’ll start with a few easy questions, then we’ll get into the real meat of the interview where I ask you about your new style of teaching. How does that sound to you?’
‘That sounds fine. Whenever you’re ready,’ she said.
‘So, you’re a graduate, with a very impressive 2.1 in Philosophy from the University of Sussex and you did a one-year post-graduate teaching certificate?’
‘Yes. I’d already made my mind up I wanted to teach as a career so it made sense to get started as soon as possible.’
‘And what made you feel that the shaping of young minds was your vocation? Your calling, if you like?’
‘Well, I suppose, partly my faith. You see, I always believed that Jesus’ most important role was as a teacher. And what role is there, really, that’s more important than helping young people grope their way towards the answers to the really important questions we all have to face?’
She blushed and touched her cheek. ‘Oh dear, that sounded a bit pompous, didn’t it? And I’m only twenty-eight, if you can believe it.’
I smiled. ‘Not at all. I mean, it didn’t sound pompous to me, not that I don’t believe you’re only twenty-eight.’ Now it was her turn to laugh.
‘Thanks.’ She smiled, then cleared her throat. ‘OK, next question.’
I looked down, then up at her again. Frowned and winced at the same time, which, by the way, took a lot of practice in my bathroom mirror. Delivered my prepared line.
‘Uh, this is rather embarrassing, but I have a slight tummy upset. I think it might be this weather. Do you think I could use your loo, please?’
She jumped to her feet, clearly only too pleased to help. ‘Of course, you poor thing. It’s upstairs, first door to your left.’
I made an apologetic gesture with my hands then left, at a walking pace. I went upstairs, more for form’s sake, and was gratified that a couple of the steps creaked. I waited for a few minutes then descended.
The doorknob squeaked as I re-entered her kitchen. Amy looked round and smiled up at me. Then I hit her with the hypo. An easy stab into the soft flesh in her neck. Her eyes popped wide for a second then the old eyelids drooped as if she was drunk.
I changed my voice. No friendliness left in it at all. Not one drop.
‘I have one final question for you, Amy,’ I said. ‘What gives you the right to poison children’s minds with your obscene ruminations on right and wrong, good and evil?’
She tried to stand but I placed my hands on her shoulders and held her down. It wasn’t hard. The drugs act very quickly.
‘I don’t—’ she managed to say, as my hands left her.
‘Yeah? Well, I do,’ I said, which is a cool line, if you think about it.
Then I put my overalls on and started work. My goodness, there was a lot of blood! And I cut myself at one point. I know it was careless. But isn’t that what they say about people like me? In the end our confidence lets us down?
76
THURSDAY 6TH SEPTEMBER 10.05 A.M.
SHAFTESBURY
Marcus Duckett was heading down the corridor that led from Monksfield’s chemistry lab to the staffroom. He’d just finished teaching twenty Year Nines how to make bouncing custard and was looking forward to a coffee and a browse through the New Scientist.
Mid-morning sun streamed in through the windows that lined the east-facing wall, giving the corridor the feeling of an abbey cloister, albeit one with student artwork on the walls interspersed with posters advertising outward bound courses and sports fixtures.
He was sweating beneath his shirt and jacket and ran a finger round his collar. Why ties were mandatory he had no idea. Even at a school with a strong Christian foundation, especially at such a school, a little bit of compassion for the heat-intolerant wouldn’t go amiss.
As he passed the door to D5, the classroom where Amy Burnside should be teaching her new Year Nines, he paused.
The noises coming from beyond the pale wooden door did not suggest that she had full control of her students. Which was odd, because she liked to boast of the way her ‘acolytes’ – as she called them – hung on her every word. He could hear the raucous, cracked laughter of adolescent boys and higher-pitched squeals of delight from the girls.
Duckett squared his shoulders, knocked twice, then twisted the door handle and strode into the classroom. Silence fell almost immediately. Students at Monksfield could be as rowdy as any others, but the school instilled a level of respect for teachers that produced the desired effect. But in D5, apart from himself, no teacher was present.
‘Where is Miss Burnside?’ he asked, scanning the room as he tried to dispel the absurd notion that the students had stuffed her under a desk or in a cupboard.
‘Sorry, sir. We don’t know. She hasn’t shown up yet.’
This from a dark-skinned girl in the front row, her face now a mask of concern.
‘What do you mean, she hasn’t shown up yet? Has she gone home sick?’
‘We don’t know, sir,’ said a boy with owlish glasses that gave him a passing resemblance to Harry Potter. ‘She just isn’t here. We didn’t know what to do. Teachers are never late for lessons.’
Duckett recognised the boy. He’d come for hockey try-outs the previous Sunday.
‘Archie, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I want you to go the school secretaries’ office. Tell them Miss Burnside hasn’t arrived for your lesson yet. Say I told you to ask them to call her.’
The boy scraped his chair back and left smartly, closing the door quietly behind him. Duckett looked around with a sinking heart. Bang goes my coffee break.
‘What is Miss Burnside teaching you at the moment?’ he asked.
‘We’re discussing abortion, sir,’ a blonde girl with braces on her teeth answered, brightly.
Oh, great.
‘Fine. Well, I’m not sure I’m really qualified to teach you about… that… so instead maybe you could, uh—’
‘We could organise a flash debate, sir,’ the dark-skinned girl volunteered.
For a disconcerting moment, Duckett imagined she’d said ‘masturbate’ and then reality reasserted itself.
‘Fine. Yes. You are?’
‘Felicity, sir. Felicity Perry?’
‘Good.’ He looked at the nineteen expectant faces. ‘Taking responsibility is part of what we like to instil in you at Monksfield. So I’m going to ask Felicity to organise the two teams. Your subject is…’
He paused, searching for something that might not be perceived as too safe, but without the risk of a student reporting back to Mummy and Daddy that they’d been discussing infidelity or underage sex or whatever Miss Burnside usually felt was appropriate.
Felicity saved him. He was beginning to like the girl.
‘How about animal rights, sir?’
Relieved, he assented at once.
‘Yes. Fine. Should animals have rights?’
While Duckett was supervising the setting up of the debate, Archie was delivering his message to the most senior school secretary.
Mrs Royal was known unofficially throughout the school as The Queen. Partly owing to her name, partly to her years, which, at sixty-one, put her well above the age of almost the entire complement of staff and ancillary workers such as groundskeepers, but mostly because of her regal and often imperious bearing. She listened as Archie breathlessly recited his mess
age.
‘– and he said to tell you,’ he looked down, then back into her sharp eyes, ‘I mean, ask you, if you could call her. Please.’
‘Thank you, Archie,’ she said, not unkindly, but with enough finality to let him know he was dismissed.
Children would do anything to skive off their lessons, even if their parents were paying five thousand pounds a term these days. She saw it as part of her duties to ensure that messengers didn’t use their errand as an excuse to dawdle or waste time.
She called up the staff contacts pane on her database and searched ‘Burnside’. She pursed her pale-pink-frosted lips as she saw the photo in the top-right corner of the record. Vain little thing. Teetering along on those absurdly high-heeled shoes.
Pushing away the thought that young women like Amy Burnside should put a few years in before ‘reinventing’ perfectly good subjects, Sylvia Royal picked up the receiver of her desk phone and dialled the mobile number beneath Miss Burnside’s smiling face.
She tapped a newly sharpened pencil against a clean sheet of paper in her notebook as she listened to the phone ringing. Sighing with exasperation, she realised she would have to leave a message.
‘Hello, Miss Burnside. This is Mrs Royal. You’ve been reported absent by your students and as I have not received notice of a holiday or sickness, I wonder whether you could call me at your earliest convenience. As I think you know, it’s a school rule that staff are either present or accounted for,’ she couldn’t resist adding.
She clacked the receiver down and looked across at one of the other secretaries, who’d been listening with evident pleasure.
‘They need to learn,’ she said, tartly, before picking up the phone again and pressing the first speed-dial button: the headmaster.
77
FRIDAY 7TH SEPTEMBER 8.35 A.M.
SHAFTESBURY
James Haddingley, the headmaster of Monksfield, liked to spend ten minutes or so in the staffroom before school officially started. To chat to colleagues and hear the school gossip.
He was thinking about his new head of RE. Philosophy and Ethics, he mentally corrected himself. He liked Amy Burnside’s approach. She’d brought a refreshingly dynamic presence to the school, which, he felt, had been coasting under its previous headteacher. But the school was strong on discipline, for staff as well as students.
He was waiting for Amy to put in an appearance, hopefully a shamefaced one, so that he could whisk her off to his ‘eyrie’, as he called his third-floor office overlooking the sports pitches, and give her a mild dressing-down. For appearances’ sake.
A fleeting image of Amy Burnside sitting on his bed wearing nothing but a black lacy bra and matching knickers crossed his mind: he dismissed it.
When she hadn’t arrived by 8.45 a.m., he left the convivial surroundings of the staffroom, with its brown-and-orange upholstered armchairs and coffee machine, and paid a visit to the secretaries’ office. Sylvia Royal looked up as he entered, and leaped to her feet. It was a habit he’d been unable to break in her and it always embarrassed him.
‘Please, Sylvia,’ he tried again. ‘There’s really no need. I wonder, have you heard from Miss Burnside this morning?’
Running her hands under her thighs to straighten her tweed skirt as she sat, she answered his question.
‘I’m afraid not, headmaster. I left her a message yesterday reminding her of our staff absence protocol, but apparently without effect.’
‘Yes, well, I’d better go round and see if she’s OK.’
‘You have a meeting with the bursar at ten.’
He checked his watch and smiled.
‘I’ll be back in plenty of time. It’s only a fifteen-minute drive to Amy’s… I mean, Miss Burnside’s house.’
The rush-hour traffic was against him, however, and it wasn’t until 9.30 a.m. that he reached the brick-and-flint cottage where Amy lived.
Noticing that her iridescent-green VW Beetle occupied the single parking space, he parked in his usual spot: a layby a few yards beyond the turning that led to her back gate.
She never used the front door as it opened straight onto the road. He puffed out his cheeks as he left the Volvo’s air-conditioned interior and the hot, humid air hit him.
He pressed the button to the left of the back door, and listened to the cheerful peal of church bells. Amy had told him proudly that she’d recorded them at Saint Martin’s the first Sunday she’d moved in and downloaded them wirelessly onto her doorbell.
He smiled. He was only ten years older than her, but sometimes he felt like Rip Van Winkle.
When she didn’t answer, he frowned. He wasn’t given to anxiety, but something was telling him things weren’t quite as they should be. Amy was a dutiful, conscientious young woman. If anything, he felt she could afford to let her stays out a few notches and still be among the top few members of staff for adherence to school policies.
He raised the wrought-iron knocker, hot to the touch, and brought the fat ring of black metal down against the matching stud in a loud rat-a-tat. Waited a few seconds. Straining to hear footsteps.
‘Hmm,’ he said to himself. ‘Where are you, Amy?’
He was running through the possibilities as he walked around to the side of the house where the kitchen door opened out onto the garden.
Was she ill? In bed with summer flu? Or food poisoning? Had she had an accident? Reaching the kitchen, he pressed his face against the window, shading his eyes with his hand to block out the sun and get rid of his reflection in the glass. Where was she?
At first, he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. Something was sitting at the kitchen table. But it couldn’t be Amy, because this, No, it isn’t her, this thing had no skin. Oh god, no!
The head was the worst, with those pale-blue eyes, I loved your eyes, Amy, streaked across with blood in a ravaged mask of muscle, the teeth bared in a white grin.
The horror battered at the gates of his consciousness, trumpeting its demands to be let in and given residence. And succeeded.
Haddingley screamed, and staggered away from the window. Not wanting to look again, or to leave her there alone any longer, he sat down heavily with his back to the rough flint wall and dug out his phone.
His index finger seemed to skitter over the virtual keypad and he had to try twice before finally hitting the 9 three times.
‘It’s Amy!’ he said, answering the emergency operator in a hushed voice. ‘She’s dead.’
Things moved fast from that point. Stella’s SCAS request meant every SIO in the country knew that a DCI Cole, Metropolitan Police, was interested in any murders of prominent Christian women, especially if they involved mutilation and strangulation.
Stella got the news at 7.30 a.m. the following day. She called Garry, and he picked her up at 8.00 a.m. Using blues and twos as needed, he drove fast out of London towards the M3 that would take them southwest towards Shaftesbury.
They arrived in the pretty Dorset town at 11.15 a.m. As Garry drove through the town centre, Stella looked at the people filling the narrow pavements. Mostly white, mostly prosperous, to judge from their clothes, mostly middle-aged or older, though a few younger couples here and there were fighting gamely to bring the average age below fifty.
She talked Garry through the last few miles until they arrived at Amy Burnside’s cottage, where they went through the usual procedure before being admitted by the loggist. Entering the kitchen, the coppers, thirty-odd years’ experience between them, gasped at the scene before them.
78
SATURDAY 8TH SEPTEMBER 11.30 A.M.
SHAFTESBURY
The room stank.
Stella and Garry had wads of cotton soaked in oil of camphor clamped over their noses. But still, the cloying, soupy smell of putrefaction found a way past these flimsy barriers to coat the insides of their mouths and throats and fill their noses with its unholy stench.
Amy Burnside’s pale-blue eyes stared out at Stella from lidless sockets in a striated mass
of red, weeping muscles, woven over the skull in an intricate pattern of overlapping sheets.
Stella moved her gaze down over the skinned shoulders, breasts and torso, trying not to imagine Amy Burnside’s last few minutes of consciousness, and praying that she would have passed out, or died from shock, before Lucifer had gone far.
Flies filled the room, and Stella had to swat a couple away from her face.
Amy’s arms, now resembling an anatomical illustration, lay on the table, in a wide, shallow pool of blackened blood, around which flies were buzzing noisily.
Stella pointed to what, at first sight, appeared to be bunched, red fabric draped over Moira’s left elbow.
‘The sick bastard’s getting more confident. This must’ve taken hours.’
‘He must have left here looking like an abbatoir worker. Someone must have seen something,’ Garry said.
‘It’s another martyrdom. Just like Peter Karlsson predicted. Which one was it again?’
Garry looked up at the blood-spattered ceiling then back at Stella.
‘Saint Bartholomew,’ he said. ‘Chapter four. They skinned him alive. Karlsson had that picture of the statue in Milan, remember?’
‘Agatha, Sebastian, Lucy, Bartholomew. He’s following Karlsson’s book, chapter by chapter. Oh, God, this is bad, Garry. Which saint is chapter five about? I can’t remember.’
‘Not sure, boss. I mean, not off the top of my head.’
‘OK. Look, can you call them now and get somebody to look it up? I need to let Callie know she’s got another meeting with the beasts to prepare for.’
Garry nodded and left the kitchen.
Finding a corner the spurting blood hadn’t reached, Stella pressed her back into the comforting embrace of the right-angle between the walls and stared, hard, at the scene of almost unimaginable pain and degradation facing her.
