Nor All Your Tears (20 page)

He then asked me, ‘Is there anything more you can tell me at this juncture?'

I took a deep breath, that familiar feeling of being in the middle of an oral examination recurring. ‘I can't see any evidence of a head injury, and there seems to be bruising around the neck, so my preliminary conclusion would be that he was killed by drowning and that he wasn't alone when it happened. I've checked his pockets, but they're empty.'

‘OK.' I got the sense he was less than impressed with my forensic skills, which made two of us. He waited. I was just about to disappoint him and tell him that there was no more to be had from me, when I spotted something – a speck of dirt perhaps – at the corner of the dead man's mouth. I knelt down to look at it more carefully. It wouldn't come, because it was more than just a speck of dirt; it was attached to something in his mouth. I had to prise the jaws apart – he was not many hours dead but the cold of the water had accelerated rigor in the facial muscles – but it wasn't too difficult. What I brought out was surprisingly large.

It was a frog.

Masson goggled, accompanied in this action by Sergeant Abelson and four uniformed officers who were looking on. After this, which was undertaken in perfect silence, he pulled himself together and called for an evidence bag so that I could be relieved of the amphibian. ‘How did that get in his mouth?' he demanded, as if I had been guilty of a monstrous practical jape.

The Sergeant at least had a reasonable question to ask. ‘Are there frogs in these tanks?'

‘Possibly,' I replied.

‘So it could have swum in there?'

‘His mouth was closed. I can't see that happening.'

‘Perhaps his mouth was open and, after it swam in there, rigor caused the mouth to close.'

She was doing her best, but Masson was less than impressed. He extracted another cigarette from his crumpled packet, applied his lighter to the end, drew in some carcinogens and then asked, ‘How many drownings have you seen, Doctor?'

‘A few,' I admitted cautiously and noncommittally.

‘Remember any that had their mouths closed?'

Now he came to mention it, I couldn't; but then I couldn't remember any that had had their mouths open, in that I was new to the job and actually meant ‘none' when I had said ‘a few'. ‘No,' I said in a sort of truthful way.

‘No,' he repeated, for once mollified by my agreement. ‘Which means I think that the frog was put into his mouth by his killer.'

Sergeant Abelson asked, ‘Why would anyone do that?'

But Masson, having made this monumental deduction, had come to a halt in the detection stakes.

Jean pointed out, ‘It would help if we knew his identity.'

‘Have you organized the house-to-house search? Someone in Mayfield Road may have seen something. Presumably he was taking the dog for an early morning walk.'

‘It's under control,' she assured him.

As far as I was concerned, my job was done. I closed my case. ‘Why don't you ask the school? They'll have his address.'

Has that ever happened to you? You say something that to you seems normal and reasonable, yet your audience treats the words you have said as if you have just come from central office and told them that they're all going to face the firing squad. Masson asked in a gravelly voice that was a good few octaves lower than even his normal growl, ‘You what?'

I looked at the Sergeant, mainly because she represented a far finer view than her superior. She asked in a sweet and light and undeniably controlled tone, ‘Do you know who this is, Lance?'

‘I don't know his name,' I said, sensing wolves gathering.

Masson growled then in a tone that was almost too low for my hearing (I've had dogs who did that, usually when they were just about to try to separate you from your sweetmeats), ‘But you recognize him?'

‘I saw him for the first time a day or two ago.' Why did I feel guilty?

‘At a school? At Bensham Manor School?'

‘That's right.' I felt that I had to justify myself and felt simultaneously that I should not have to. It was only my imagination that he was imperceptibly moving towards me, much as a hyena might do when the prey is dying but not yet completely defenceless. ‘He was having some sort of argument with the headmaster, Mr Silsby.'

‘What about?'

‘I don't know.' While Masson looked incredulous at this, Sergeant Abelson looked only intrigued. I attempted elucidation. ‘Dad and I were in the car. It was early Friday morning.'

Masson looked meaningfully at his sergeant, who nodded and scribbled in her notebook. He then said with a degree of irony that would have thudded to the ground on the Moon, ‘Anything else you'd like to tell us, Dr Elliot?'

I was about to shake my head vigorously, temporarily overcome with a desperate need to be no longer a naughty boy, but then my brain started functioning again. ‘He also seemed to have a bit of a row with someone else. It was outside the school grounds, just afterwards.'

‘“Seemed to have”?'

‘We were a hundred yards distant.'

This, it appeared, was little excuse. ‘Do you know who this row was with?'

It was with some desperation that I fought down the urge to correct his grammar; it was made slightly easier because I suddenly recalled the photo in Albert Stewart's living room. I didn't know what it meant, but I knew it meant something.

TWENTY-EIGHT

M
ax and I were to have dinner that night at my father's house and it was going to be a jolly ménage-à-quatre because Ada was coming too. I hoped, but did not expect, the evening would be easy-going and relaxed, without any embarrassment on the part of anyone. When Dad had suggested it to us yesterday morning, neither of us had been able to raise a particular intense level of enthusiasm but, equally, neither of us wanted to let him down. As Max had pointed out, it would at least provide an opportunity for us to learn a little bit more about my impending stepmother and – more importantly to me – about her apparently testosterone-fuelled son. This was our thinking as we feigned joy-filled acceptance.

As Max was called out at the last moment to attend to a sick gerbil, we agreed that we would make our separate ways to Pollard's Hill, the leafy suburban glade in which Dad lived, as she would be about half an hour late. I rang the doorbell, looking up at the sky and wondering if the storm clouds meant anything, both meteorologically and metaphorically. It was Ada who answered the door, a happenstance that I found unsettling whilst telling myself sternly that I was being silly; she was going to be married to Dad all too soon, and then she would be greeting visitors on a regular basis and a very proper thing it would be, too. Unfortunately, until the nuptials were all done and dusted, it struck me as slightly forward. She had a glass of sherry in her hand as she said through her nose, ‘Ah, Lance. How lovely to see you.'

She proffered her cheek for me to kiss and that sense that I was in the presence of someone who had not only found a safe berth but one who had, in very short order, changed the sheets, redecorated the walls and had taken charge of all the keys. I bent down and conformed to social norms by returning her gesture. ‘Come in,' she said.

We went to the kitchen where the scents of Dad's cooking were working some serious magic on my cerebral hunger centres. He was wearing a plastic-coated apron on which was a cartoon of a curvy, topless female body; looking at Dad's hirsute visage above this made me feel slightly giddy, much as a member of the audience of Victorian freak shows would probably have felt, because fundamental laws of biology seemed to be broken by the spectacle. ‘Hello, Lance,' he greeted me over a loud sizzle of frying onions. ‘Tired?'

‘Not bad. It was quite an easy night. Hardly anything until early this morning.'

‘Lucky chap.' He turned to Ada, who had taken a seat at the kitchen table, nice and close to a bottle of sherry. ‘Lance was on call for the police last night.'

‘Did you have anything to do with Mr Gillman?' she asked excitedly.

That, as far as I was concerned, was a moot point; maybe I had and maybe I hadn't. It was difficult to be exact on the point, since I didn't know who Mr Gillman was. I conveyed this lack of intelligence to the assembled company. ‘He was a teacher,' she explained. ‘Apparently he's been done in, just like those lesbians.' It didn't take much in the way of perspicacity to spot that, from the way she pronounced the last word, she was not of a socially liberal persuasion.

‘Oh, the art teacher . . .'

She looked at me scornfully. ‘Art teacher? Where did you get that idea?'

I glanced at Dad, but he was clearly at a tricky stage in the cooking, since he was looking at the onions with a degree of concentration I have previously only seen on the faces of neurosurgeons when they're hacking around in someone's basal ganglia. ‘I can't think,' I said to her.

‘No, Jeremy Gillman was a biology teacher,' she explained, clearly concluding that I was a simpleton.

Whilst this came as a surprise – given the man's flamboyant, not to say criminally mistaken, dress sense – there was the oddity of the frog in his mouth, which suddenly seemed to make ominous sense, given what had been happening to the teaching staff of Bensham Manor. ‘Was he really?' I asked.

Dad came out of his trance over the onions, saying as he opened a tin of tomatoes, ‘Ada says that there's been a right kerfuffle at the school.' He stirred the cooking, turned the gas down a notch and went to the fridge to fetch two beers – a refill for him, a new one for me. I looked at the label suspiciously, afraid for my intestines; Dolly's Toe-Curler was its
appellation
, although I doubt it was in any way
contrôlée
. There was a colour cartoon of a buxom long-haired, big-lipped blonde on the label, leading me to suspect that I was not about to follow in the footsteps of Escoffier.

‘How strong is this stuff?' I asked, sniffing the bouquet and getting hints of creosote and rose fertilizer.

‘Not sure,' said my father airily, which was his way of dealing with – that is to say, ignoring – that which did not bother him. I vowed to go careful for the sake of the pedestrians I would encounter on my way home. Ada had helped herself to another dollop of Harvey's Bristol Cream and was impatient to tell me what she had to say.

‘The police turned up at about eight thirty, just as a group of the children were assembling for their Cycling Proficiency course. They made a right fuss and caused no end of trouble for Mr Silsby. The girls and I had a really good view because the back of the kitchens look out over the front playground.' The use of the term ‘girls' was, I had no doubt, a tad euphemistic in its implication that the average age of the Bensham Manor kitchen staff was only just beyond adolescence. ‘He was marching around trying to keep the children in order whilst being chased by that funny little policeman.' I knew what she meant by her use of the adjective ‘funny', but I still thought it slightly ill-chosen. She continued, ‘Poor Mr Silsby's been having a torrid time of it recently, what with losing teachers left, right and centre, and I'm sure he didn't need this.'

‘Did he get on with Mr Gillman?'

‘Ah,' Dad exclaimed. ‘That's exactly my line of thinking. I asked you that, didn't I, Ada?'

‘You did, Ben.' There was a sense of conspiracy between them which, in its way, was quite comforting.

‘And what's the answer?'

‘Well,' she said, her voice dropping in volume, ‘there have been rumours . . .'

I waited, but did so in vain. At last I enquired, ‘About what?'

‘People used to say that there was a lot of animosity between them.'

‘Does anyone know why?'

She did not answer this question, saying instead, ‘Mind you, he doesn't get on with many people. Bit of a marionette, is Mr Silsby.' I opened my mouth to correct this malapropism, but then decided against it out of a sense of diplomacy; Dad didn't seem to have heard it. She sailed on, by now clearly well lubricated by sherry. ‘I'm surprised he didn't stop what was going on between Miss Mangon and Miss Jeffries.'

‘Did they make it so obvious?'

Salaciousness came from every pore of Ada, like too thickly applied cosmetic. ‘Well, no one knew for sure, but it was pretty
obvious
.' Dad added some minced meat to the onions and said over his shoulder, ‘Ada says they were like a right old married couple, especially lately. There was a lot of arguing in corridors, all that sort of thing.'

‘At the end, they could hardly talk to each other; it was most embarrassing.' The idea of Ada being embarrassed was difficult for me to envisage, but discretion was the better part of my valour.

The doorbell sounded. I went in answer to it, assuming it to be Max, and I was not disappointed. She was very upset and had clearly been crying. ‘Max? What's wrong?' I bent to kiss her, but she barely made contact with me. ‘What's wrong?' I repeated.

She shook her head. ‘I still don't believe it.'

‘Believe what?'

It took her a moment to pull herself back from tears. I waited, trying to be as patient as possible. I just knew that it had something to do with Tristan.

‘When I got into the surgery, there was a letter waiting for me.'

‘Who from?' I knew the answer, but asked anyway.

She ignored the question. In fact, she was crying again. I was the epitome of tolerance and cuddled her whilst she sobbed. Eventually she calmed down enough to fish in her handbag and pull out a piece of paper. It was lined and had been torn from a notebook; it was written in ballpoint and the pen had leaked here and there. It was from Albert Stewart and addressed to ‘the girl vet'. It was short and the writing was irregular and untidy, making it difficult to read, but it didn't take too long to decipher.