Nor All Your Tears (24 page)

My excuse is that it was warm and I wasn't used to sitting down in the middle of the day; had I kept on the go I know that I wouldn't have fallen asleep, but this was not to be. Even in one of the most diabolical items of furniture that mankind has ever devised, my eyes closed and my hold on consciousness relaxed. Doubtless the intrusive yet curiously mesmeric beep of the monitor contributed; doubtless, too, the airlessness of the room played its part.

After a period of uncertain length, I came back from my light, dreamless sleep without obvious or abrupt transition; I opened my eyes and looked directly at Mr Silsby's. He seemed to be perfectly vigilant as his head lay on the pillow; in his eyes I saw what seemed to be awareness. We stared at each other for a moment that stretched into several bleeps of the medical machine to which he was attached; for myself, I was somewhat groggy, yet he seemed to be at once alert, even as he was inert.

He said then, and this quite succinctly, ‘It is so good of you to come.'

At something of a loss, both because I was still slightly befuddled with sleep and because he spoke in an oddly affectionate tone, I said with some uncertainty, ‘It's the least I could do.'

He nodded slightly, his head not rising from the pillow. ‘I am so sorry, son.'

Which caught me slightly by surprise; he had been a regular although not frequent visitor to my work premises, and through all those years we had hardly got to know one another, except in a purely professional, detached kind of way, so that we had never until that moment got beyond the polite formalities. Certainly we had never reached the point of using forenames, let alone vernacular terms like that one.

‘Are you?' I enquired pusillanimously.

‘I taught you differently from this.'

I twigged. Arthur Silsby had had a son, an only child, who had been killed in the Korean War. I can only imagine how horrible that must have been for the Silsbys to experience, but neither of them had ever done any more than mention it in a purely informative, matter-of-fact way. They were, indeed, a stoical couple. ‘Mr Silsby?' I said tentatively, hoping to disabuse him of his delusion.

It still seemed that he was looking directly at me, and doing so with perfect lucidity, although clearly he was seeing something else. ‘I should have stamped it out . . .'

‘Mr Silsby,' I repeated.

‘I couldn't believe it, you see . . .' I began again to shake him from his delusion, then stopped, suddenly aware of what he had been saying. He shook his head and frowned before repeating the judgement. ‘Absolutely disgusting . . .'

‘What is?'

Unfortunately he was in transmission-only mode, with no incoming messages being processed. ‘I've let you down, and I've let your mother down.'

‘How?'

‘They denied it, you see, and I was so shocked that it could be going on in my school, I chose to believe them. I was a fool.'

I leaned forward in the chair to be close to him, fairly sure that he would not suddenly see me for who I really was. ‘Are you talking about Yvette Mangon and Marlene Jeffries?'

‘Disgusting behaviour . . .'

‘Lesbianism? Is that what you're talking about?'

‘And then that snake came to see me. How did he find out? He wouldn't tell me. He just told me that unless I made him my deputy, he was going to go to the press and tell them that I had condoned it. He wouldn't listen. What could I do, son?'

‘Who was the snake, Mr Silsby? Was it Gillman?'

‘There was nothing else I could do. I had no other way out.'

A thought occurred to me. ‘Did you kill Gillman?' I asked this urgently, my mind running through possibilities. Why was he muttering about how shocking the behaviour of two lesbians had been, if he had killed Gillman? Was it because he thought murder was OK? In any case, I didn't get a direct answer. In fact, I got no more from him; he closed his eyes and after a minute or two, I realized that he was silently crying.

THIRTY-THREE

I
had kept in contact with Max as much as I could during the day; thankfully, she reported no further sightings of Tristan but I knew better than to relax too soon. She had another late surgery so, after a relatively lightly attended evening surgery of my own, I went over to Bensham Manor School; I knew that Dad would be there, because he had got his car fixed more quickly than he expected, and rather fancied he might want to chat about things. He was giving the weeds hell, pulling them out of the ground with vicious determination and hurling them into a wheelbarrow. He was so involved with this that he wasn't aware of my presence until I greeted him from only two yards' distance. He looked up, startled. ‘Oh,' he said. ‘Hello, son.'

Not a good sign, that. He hadn't used that epithet for years, and it had in the past heralded bad news. He would tell me in his own time, I knew, although I thought I could guess something of the problem. He carried on weeding for a while until I asked, ‘How long will you be?'

Without stopping or even looking up he said, ‘About fifteen minutes. I just want to get the lettuces clear. It's amazing how much better they do when you thin the weeds.'

‘I'll go for a stroll,' I said and he didn't reply.

The gymnasium was probably only ten years old and already placed firmly in its architectural time, doomed to remain forever a sharp-angled, grey concrete mausoleum, always cold and always ugly. It was a bastard child of a school of building design that had been born in the post-war years and that had grown too fast, too quickly, becoming bloated and overbearing before the public woke up to the fact that ‘modern' did not have to equate exactly with ‘ugly', ‘cold' and ‘cheap'. It was showing its age in the way that the door and window fittings were soiled and stained, in the cracks high up under the eaves and in the rusting guttering. If ever a building were going to be improved by graffiti, this was it, and graffiti had failed; it still looked like defacement, even if it was defacing something that should never have existed. It was still an outrage to my eye, something that had no intrinsic value – be it as an ‘art' or a means of ‘expression' – and that could have no justification. I could imagine that to a man such as Arthur Silsby, such graffiti would have been a pain almost too much to bear, that he would have waged war on it with extreme vigour, and indeed, there was evidence to suggest this, for it was obvious that the daubing and writing had been in the past expunged, producing a general background of smeared colour. This had been to no lasting effect; the graffiti-mongers had returned. Here, on the back wall of the gym, it was isolated from the rest of the school, and in the dark it would have been the perfect place to begin again whatever nefarious scrawling might come to mind.

If one had to grade graffiti, I suppose one would say that in amongst the chaos there was a small subset of well-executed designs, often abstract; most of it, though, just consisted of cartoons either of human faces or human pudenda, done in a crude, talentless style. Where there was writing, it was what you would expect; mostly insults, a lot of obscenities, and a fair number of messages telling the world about who loved whom. At the back of my mind there formed the question of whether anyone had chosen to hint at the liaison between Yvette Mangon and Marlene Jeffries. I scanned the wall, finding nothing and wondering how Arthur Silsby had found out about it; perhaps it had been fairly common knowledge and he had been bound to discover it sooner or later. To judge from the wall, there was an awful lot of speculation about a variety of liaisons in the area. I counted over fifty announcements of love, almost as if this were a public display board where matches (but not, as far as I could see, hatches and dispatches) could be announced; over the years, there must have been hundreds, I guessed; they would probably have been erased every few months at Mr Silsby's order, only to provide a tabula rasa for yet more messages. It seemed as if every possible combination of names and initials was there.

As I thought this, I saw ‘YM', partially hidden by a downpipe. It was perfectly possible, of course, that there was another teacher or pupil with those initials, but it evoked in me that damnable mistress that is curiosity; I looked more closely. It was not in the most recent application of paint and had been treated grievously by Mr Silsby's cleaning brigade (of which presumably George Cotterill had been chief among their number), so that it was smeared and faint and, as I say, partially obscured, both by the pipe and by subsequent additions to what appeared to be a communal archive of sorts, but once seen it was quite easy to make out and to read the rest of it.
YM loves MJ.
It was followed by the exclamation,
YUKKKKK!!!!
Clearly the author of this datum did not approve. There it was then; almost certainly, Mr Silsby had seen that, ordered it removed probably, and at the same time it had caused him to question them concerning the veracity of what was written on the back of the gym. It had been denied and he, ever the gentleman, had accepted their word. The subsequent discovery of their house and home life – surely to such a man, grotesque and unforgiveable – had been a hard blow, but Jeremy Gillman's overtures had been the final straw. He saw himself as having failed and having been tainted with something he considered, no doubt, disgusting. He had taken an overdose.

That part of the mystery suddenly made sense to me. It didn't throw light on who had killed the three teachers, but it explained Mr Silsby's ramblings and it suggested to me a strong motive for his actions. I returned to Dad, who had finished the weeding and was sitting on a campstool just outside the shed, drinking from a Thermos flask. He had poured something into two tin mugs, one of which he held out to me as I approached. Not wishing to sound ungrateful, but aware that sometimes my father mixed strange combinations for his liquid refreshment, I asked, ‘What is it?' It looked like lemon squash, but you could never tell.

‘Lemon squash,' was the reply. ‘I put some ice in it to keep it nice and cold.' I raised it to my lips and took a swallow of the cooling draught, then caught my breath as strong alcoholic vapour went straight up my nose. ‘I put a splash of vodka in the ice cubes,' he added, looking at me curiously, as if my reaction was most odd.

I put the cup down and, whilst clearing my throat, I thanked him for it most heartily.

Dad wasn't really listening, though. He said ruminatively, ‘After you'd gone the other night, Mike came and picked Ada up.'

‘Oh, yes?'

He made the kind of face that people make when they are completely foxed about something, and think it's jolly unfair. ‘Whilst she was in the loo, we had a chat in the kitchen.'

‘What kind of chat?' I asked nervously. He didn't look as though he had been the victim of GBH, but who knew what wounds lay under his outer garments?

His lips were pursed and remained so for some time. Then, ‘I think Ada's been putting a bit of a gloss on his attitude to our communion.'

‘He's not happy?' I suggested, thinking about the tête-à-tête I had enjoyed not long before with Ada's one and only. I didn't put my hand to my jaw but I was perfectly aware of it nonetheless.

‘He's very protective of his mother . . .'
Tell me about it
, was my thought, although I kept shtum. ‘Which is, of course, a good thing.' I must admit that I wondered if he was entirely sincere as he said this.

‘Dad . . .'

‘Yes?'

It was difficult to know how to phrase the question, but I reckoned it had to be asked. ‘He didn't
threaten
you, did he?'

A lot of consideration went into his reply; that and a good swig of doctored lemon squash. ‘He
warned
me,' he decided judiciously and charitably. ‘As he put it himself when he was waving his finger in my face, he thought it necessary to make his views on the subject of my relationship with his mother quite plain and beyond dispute.'

I sighed. ‘I'm sorry, Dad . . .' And I was; I should have warned him when Mike Clarke had taken a pop at me that he was a little bit on the angry side, but I hadn't wanted to spoil his friendship with Ada.

‘He's extraordinarily jealous, you know, Lance. I should have realized that a few months ago when she told me that he discovered that Joanna was seeing a boy, one of her classmates. I don't think it was anything too serious from what Ada says, but Mike apparently took exception to it.'

‘What did he do?'

‘He went berserk – not at Joanna, but at the boy when he came to pick her up to go to the cinema.' It didn't sound too bad. At least no violence had been perpetrated, I thought, but Dad had yet to finish. ‘A couple of days later, the boy was set upon after dark. Quite badly beaten – ended up in Mayday with a broken nose and cracked ribs. No one knows who did it.'

The last sentence was one of those that I think can only exist in English – what are they called? – when the meaning is the exact opposite of the words. This news caused me to swig some more lemon squash, despite my earlier resolution not to touch any more. Dad said. ‘Michael told me in quite strong and fruity language that he would never see his family hurt, and that he didn't look kindly on my intrusion.'

‘Ouch,' I winced.

He looked at me. ‘Yes, it wasn't very pleasant.'

‘You should have told me straightaway.'

‘Thanks, but he didn't hurt me or anything; I was just taken a bit by surprise. I'd known he was difficult but, as I told you, Ada felt sure she could bring him round. Now, I'm not so sure.'

‘No,' I concurred. ‘That does seem to be the case.'

He sighed but remained for a few moments silent. Some sparrows bathed themselves in dust among the beetroots. After a while he said in an almost pained voice, ‘Was it me, or was Ada slightly “over the top” the other night?'

I held my breath; my father was always asking me questions like that, ones that required a lot of thought before I could answer them in a suitably anodyne manner; and even then I felt in constant danger of upsetting him. I replied after a pause, ‘A bit.'