False Tongues (31 page)

Her plans received their first setback when she opened the fridge and realised there was no bacon.

Jane looked at the clock. There was time to nip out to the corner shop before Brian got home, if she was quick about it.

Unfortunately it had rained overnight, and was considerably cooler than it had been. Jane grabbed an old cardi, along with her handbag, and headed out for the shop.

While she was paying for the packet of bacon, she glanced at the rack of newspapers. The
Globe
headline jumped out at her: ‘ARREST IN TEEN BULLY STABBING'.

On impulse, Jane grabbed a copy of the paper and fished the change out of her purse. She took it home and read the article at the kitchen table while the kettle boiled and the frying pan heated up; Brian should be home any minute now, and he liked his breakfast on the table as soon as he came in.

But Brian didn't come home—not then, and not for another half an hour. By then the tea was stewed, the eggs were cold, and the bacon and sausage congealed in their own fat.

Jane was not amused.

‘Oh, Janey!' Brian said at the sight of his ruined breakfast. ‘A fry-up! What a nice surprise.'

She relented. ‘I'll start over, shall I?'

‘No, don't bother. I don't mind.' He sat down at the table and tucked into the disgusting mess. ‘Sorry I was delayed,' he said, between mouthfuls. ‘Liz Gresham came to the service. I hadn't had a chance for a word with her before now, so I took the opportunity to catch her afterwards.'

‘Oh!' Jane dumped the stewed tea in the sink and switched the kettle on. ‘What did she say?'

‘She's very worried about her boy Tom. She said he's a nervous wreck, but won't talk to her. And you know that the police have questioned him. Twice.'

‘But they've made an arrest!' Jane grabbed the paper and flourished it at him. ‘Liz can stop worrying. They've caught the boy who did it. Someone called Joshua Bradley. So her Tom is in the clear.'

***

‘Sorry I'm late.' Hanna propped her umbrella by the door. ‘My car wouldn't start, so I had to take the bus.' Averting her face from Margaret, she went past her toward her own office at the back.

‘No problem.' Margaret, at her desk, was trying to clear her post before the first session, so she didn't pay that much attention to her secretary's whereabouts.

After a few minutes, though, it struck her as strange that she hadn't had a full account of Hanna's trials and tribulations in getting to work. That would have been the usual thing; clearly something was wrong. ‘Hanna?' she called.

There was no reply.

Margaret got up from her desk and went to the little secretarial office. Hanna was standing by a pulled-out file drawer with her back to Margaret, holding a file. It was, Margaret saw, a personnel file, meant to be confidential.

‘What are you doing?' she asked, more sharply than she'd intended.

Hanna jumped, then turned with a frown. ‘I was…checking something, to be honest,' she said, not meeting Margaret's eyes.

‘Checking what?' She plucked the file from her secretary's hands. It was Keith Moody's file.

‘Mad Phil…Dr Moody's file,' Hanna admitted, still not looking at her. ‘It says he's…single.'

‘Yes, he's single. What of it?'

Her secretary looked down at the floor. ‘It's just that…' Hanna's voice trailed off.

‘What?'

‘Well, to be honest, I promised I wouldn't say anything to you.'

‘Say anything to
me
?' Margaret's voice sounded to her own ears as though it were coming from a long way off. From another room. From another universe, even. ‘Whatever it is, Hanna, tell me,' she demanded. ‘Now.'

***

Neville emptied the pillowcase onto his desk. ‘What the hell?' he said aloud, to himself; Mark, having explained his find, had already gone.

There was a bound exercise book, the sort used for school work. There was a bundle of magazines, and some folded-up bits of paper.

He pulled out one of the magazines. Porn, he suspected—just the sort of thing a teenaged boy would hide in his secret cache from his parents' prying eyes, and from the conscientious cleaning lady.

It
was
porn.

Gay porn.

Neville's jaw dropped. ‘Bloody hell,' he breathed.

He'd seen plenty of porn in his day—of course he had; he was a red-blooded man and unashamed of that—but he'd never seen anything like this. Graphic, both visually and verbally. So much male flesh on show, doing things to each other than in his wildest imagination he couldn't have thought of—and wouldn't want to, quite frankly. ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,' he said as he flipped the pages, not really wanting to look but unable to stop himself.

He reached for his phone and rang Cowley. ‘Sid, where are you?' he asked.

‘I'm with Sally Pratt. We're trying to sort something out for Josh,' he said, resentment in his voice. ‘Guv, do you know how many problems you've caused by delaying the inevitable? Josh's father is screaming, and Sally's having a fit.'

‘Never mind that,' Neville said. ‘Come to my office. Now.'

By the time Cowley got there, Neville had reached saturation point with the porn and had moved on to the exercise book.

‘What's this all about?' Cowley demanded.

Neville looked up. ‘He was gay.'

‘Well, we know that. Although he denies it, of course. Not surprising, with his father ranting and raving about perverts and poofters and sodomites. He couldn't very well admit it, could he?'

‘Not Josh. He is, obviously, but I'm talking about Sebastian Frost.'

That stopped Cowley in his tracks. ‘What? What are you talking about?'

Neville pushed a magazine across the desk with one finger, as though it were coated in a toxic substance. ‘Take a look at this, Sid. And I hope you have a strong stomach.'

Cowley picked up the magazine and flipped through it. His eyes widened; he whistled. ‘Cor, Guv. This is disgusting. Hard core. Where did you get it?'

‘From Sebastian's bedroom. Where it was well hidden, I can assure you.'

‘Maybe he was keeping it…for a friend, or something.'

Neville shook his head and waved the exercise book. ‘It's all in here. Sort of a journal, where he wrote down all of his feelings.'

‘Gay feelings, you mean?'

He dropped the book back on his desk and nodded. ‘To make a long story short, he was in love with Tom. One of his best mates. He knew that was unacceptable, so he used this like an escape valve. He wrote stuff down because he couldn't act on his feelings. He says as much in here.'

‘Tom is straight, I take it?'

‘Very, apparently.' Neville smiled wryly. ‘Sebastian writes about Tom's girlfriend Becca, and how it made him feel when Tom talked about shagging her. And these,' he added, indicating the folded papers. ‘These are letters he wrote to Tom—love letters—but of course he knew he couldn't ever send them. So he kept them hidden with his magazines and his journal.'

Cowley leaned against the wall. ‘Wait a minute, Guv,' he said slowly. ‘Are we talking about the same Sebastian Frost who was shagging Sexy Lexie every chance he got? Who posted such poisonous gay-bashing stuff about Josh Bradley on Facebook? Who sent him text messages calling him every gay slur in the book? And you're saying he was a poofter himself? It just doesn't make sense.'

‘It doesn't,' Neville admitted. ‘Though in a funny way it does. I'm no psychiatrist, Sid. But they would probably tell you that it has something to do with denial. It was the way he could prove to his mates that he was as straight as they were—by leading the attack on some other poor gay kid. They always do say that the most virulent homophobes are people who are afraid of it in themselves.'

‘And he got himself killed for it.'

‘
If
Josh killed him,' Neville said thoughtfully.

‘He's confessed, Guv,' Cowley reminded him. ‘All of this doesn't change that fact. And whether Seb Frost was a closet poofter or not, Josh had plenty of motive.'

‘But it sure does raise a few interesting questions.' Neville leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. ‘One of which is Lexie. And how she fits into all of this. Did she, for instance, know that her boyfriend was gay?'

‘I'll ask her, Guv,' Cowley volunteered promptly.

***

‘Tell me,' Margaret repeated with all the authority of her position.

Her secretary still wouldn't meet her eyes. ‘Dr Moody,' she said. ‘I saw him, just now. In his car. I was on the bus, and I saw him.'

She was worried that Keith was skiving off when he was supposed to be in college? Margaret exhaled a small sigh of relief. ‘Oh, that's all right,' she said. ‘He…notified me that he would be away today.'

‘He wasn't alone,' Hanna said in a low voice.

‘Not alone?' Whatever did she mean?

‘It was the girl. He stopped his car in front of a block of student housing—undergraduate flats. She came out and got in his car.'

‘Girl?' Margaret said blankly. Her brain wasn't working—she wasn't following. ‘What girl?'

‘The same girl. Oh, I did promise I wouldn't tell you!' Hanna crossed her arms and turned her back on Margaret.

Margaret fought back a strong urge to take her by the shoulders and shake her. ‘I don't know what you're talking about, but you had better explain yourself.'

‘To be honest, I thought I should tell you, all along,' Hanna said. ‘I mean, you're the Principal. You ought to know what goes on in your college.'

‘Then
tell
me.'

Hanna turned back to face her and braced her shoulders. ‘Everyone in the college is talking about it, to be honest. You're probably the only one who doesn't know. Mad Phil…Dr Moody. He has a girlfriend. A very young girl, probably an undergraduate.'

‘That,' said Margaret numbly, ‘is a ridiculous lie.' Again her words sounded to her as though they were coming from a long way off.

‘But it's not. I saw them myself, a few days ago. They were hugging. And kissing. Very close, they were. Intimate, to be honest. I could tell.'

Margaret's words were automatic. ‘You must have been mistaken. It must have been someone who looked like Dr Moody. Or…'

‘They were coming out of his house. It couldn't have been anyone else, to be honest.'

‘I don't believe it.'

Hanna gave an anguished little sob. ‘It's not my fault! And I tried to tell you the next day, to be honest. But he came into your office and interrupted me. And then something else happened,' she added. ‘Everyone was talking about it. One of the women in his tutor group found some stuff in his bathroom. Stuff that belonged to the girl. I thought I ought to tell you. Especially when I saw him trying to make a pass at
you.'

Oh, God. Margaret's head was pounding, with the onset of the sort of migraine she hadn't had for years. Zigzags of flashing lights danced in front of her eyes, obscuring her secretary's face.

‘But you promised him that you wouldn't tell me?'

‘No, not him,' Hanna admitted. ‘One of the deacons, to be honest. She said it wouldn't do any good to tell you.'

So everyone
did
know. And it was true, obviously—Hanna was incapable of inventing anything that vile, and why would she?

And people were trying to protect her. Somehow that made it even worse.

‘I have a headache,' she said with as much dignity as she could muster. ‘I'm going upstairs now. Please tell anyone who asks that I'm unavailable for the rest of the day.'

***

When Mark got home to change his shirt, he looked in the mirror and saw that the soot had transferred itself from his hands to his face. That meant a quick shower and scrub, which put him even farther behind. And Mark didn't like being late.

He was to meet Chiara at the Italian Church; the walkers were gathering there and would depart after preliminary refreshments and a briefing.

Fortunately the church wasn't too far from his flat; as he sped there on foot, he rang Chiara's mobile to let her know he was on the way.

‘I was worried, Uncle Marco,' she said. ‘I thought maybe you weren't coming.'

‘I'll be there in five minutes,
Nipotina
,' he assured her.

Her smile, when he arrived, was one of relief mingled with anticipation.

‘Too bad about the weather,' he said, giving her a quick hug.

‘Never mind. We're going to have a brilliant time.' She indicated the refreshment table. ‘Do you want some coffee before we all start off?'

‘Good idea.'

‘And you have to meet my friend and her mum. We're going to walk together,' Chiara informed him.

They were near the refreshment table, so as soon as he'd grabbed a cup of coffee she dragged Mark toward them. ‘This is Emilia,' Chiara said. ‘And her mum. This is my Uncle Marco.'

A pretty little girl, shorter than Chiara, with big brown eyes and dark hair. And her mother, who was much the same: small and trim, with dark hair and eyes, and a nice smile.

Mark stared at her for a split second. ‘Do I know you?' he said, afraid as he said it that it sounded rude. But she was so very familiar…

‘Guilia Bonner,' she said, putting out her hand. ‘I used to be Guilia Trezzi. We were in the church youth group together, a long time ago. I remember you—Marco Lombardi.'

‘Of course!' He took her hand. ‘Guilia—I do remember you. It's been a long time.'

Half a lifetime ago, in fact. When he'd been fifteen or sixteen, he'd thought she was the prettiest girl in the world. It all came back to him now, in a heady rush: long-buried memories of his first—and unrequited—love. A face like a flower, a name like poetry. Guilia.