Nor All Your Tears (26 page)

In which case, who was JG?

I looked at it more closely, gradually seeing something odd about it. I backed away from the gymnasium, keeping my gaze fastened to that area; the drain pipe was a problem, and the efforts to erase the graffiti followed by the efforts to re-establish its existence made it difficult to make things out . . .

‘Cooey!' I was startled by the sound, looking around: even as I did so, I knew what I would see. ‘Hello, Lance. Fancy seeing you here.'

It was Ada, about ten yards distant but closing rapidly. Her step-granddaughter was in tow, looking discontented. ‘Hello, Ada,' I said, hoping that my smile appeared full of genuine pleasure, although my heart was unable at that precise moment to locate any of that commodity anywhere.

‘I was looking for Ben, but he's not here.'

I could not argue with this statement regarding the absence of Bens, my father included. Accordingly, I replied, ‘No.'

‘I wonder where he is.'

‘I'm afraid I don't know.'

‘We need to start planning the wedding.' I smiled, feeling unable to comment; clearly Dad had yet to discuss the future with her. She seemed suddenly struck by curiosity. ‘What are
you
doing here, Lance? Taking your turn in weeding and watering? I keep reminding the boys and girls to keep at it, don't I, dear?' It occurred to me that she used my first name like a nail gun, pinning me to her family.

She turned to her granddaughter, who was looking around in that bored way that only modern teenagers seem able to manufacture. She received no reply but didn't seem to mind, so turned back to me. ‘How are you, Lance?'

I failed to respond immediately, taken as I was by her granddaughter: she was heavily made up but slim and attractive, her skirt very short. She was chewing, but even this did not seem to make her ugly. She was holding a brightly coloured, extravagantly decorated, gaudily coloured file folder. There were all sorts of patterns and lettering scrawled on it in felt-tip pen, clearly done during numerous afternoons of stultifying boredom. As I looked at it, I saw that she had attempted a fairly good reproduction of the classic optical trick, the drawing that one moment looks like a young woman's figure, the next like a crone's face in profile.

Ada said, ‘Lance?'

I pulled myself back to her grandmother, aware that I was perhaps appearing to behave peculiarly. ‘Not too bad, thank you.'

She looked at me oddly. ‘Are you all right?'

But I wasn't and when I looked back at the folder and then at the gymnasium to our right, I became even less well. ‘I'm fine,' I lied.

She peered at me. ‘Are you sure, Lance?'

I had to pull myself back once again. ‘Yes, yes.' I was enthusiastic, positive, reassuring: I did not add that I wanted her very much to go.

After doing some more peering at me – she was very good at peering, was Ada – she became at ease with my subterfuge. A curt nod suggested that she was satisfied (but only just) and then she relaxed a little. ‘We have to get back home, don't we, dear?'

Her reward wasn't a word, nor was it even a nod; it was merely a spin on the heels of some outrageously shod feet and some footsteps towards the main gates. Once more, Ada was completely devoid of nonplussment. ‘Goodbye, Lance,' she said. ‘See you soon, no doubt.'

‘No doubt.'

You will never know how hard it was not to make that sound horrified.

Alone at last, I returned to the wall, my head filled with a new perspective. It was so easy to see things in all that chaos of writing, removal, rewriting, smearing and yet more rewriting; in fact, it was too easy. It was easy to see things that were there, and easy to see things that weren't. To see what had really been written required a different perspective, and it was one I now had.

THIRTY-SIX

I
own that I was in a bit of tizzy after that. As far as I could see, I had three immediate problems, of varying importance. The first was that Dad seemed to be AWOL, but I suspected that this was of his own volition and an Ada-related avoidance strategy; the unkind might call this cowardly, but I could sympathize with him, even if he was merely postponing the tricky conversation that was his unavoidable fate. The second was the radio silence of Max; for whatever reason she seemed to be pissed off with me, which in itself was worrying enough, but in the context of a predatory, not to say completely-off-his-trolley Tristan, it was seriously terrifying. The third was my new theory regarding the sequence of teacher-related murdering that had lately afflicted Bensham Manor School; I didn't have everything clear in my mind, and I didn't have any proof, but this time I
knew
I was right. Trouble was, I suspected that Sergeant Abelson would be tricky to persuade, and I had no doubt at all that Inspector Masson would find my hypothesis only marginally less amusing than last year's
Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special
.

Max, though, was the most important problem. I phoned her house and, receiving no response, I took a deep breath and phoned her parents. The receiver was picked up by her father, Henry: Henry was a barrister. Need I say more?

‘Hello? Who is this?' He always answered the phone like that, as if whoever had dared to ring the Christy household was clearly potentially an oik and was going to be treated like one until their bona fides had been established. I had never asked him outright, but I suspected that a few Masonic code words would have worked wondrous miracles at this point.

All I had to give him was, ‘Hello, Mr Christy. It's Lance.'

‘Oh.' Then, lest this should appear somewhat too rude, ‘How are you?' Notice, none of the usual niceties, just straight in with the probing questions. But I was equal to him.

‘Is Max with you?'

‘Max?'

‘Yes.' I decided that he wasn't suffering from some sort of dyspraxia and therefore didn't give him a brief description of the person in question. A silence ensued.

‘Yes,' he conceded eventually. ‘Yes, she is.'

‘May I speak to her?'

Another silence. In my mind, at the other end of the phone line there was during this lacuna a silent charade, with lots of gesturing going on between Henry, Max and Henrietta, Max's mother (yes, really). ‘It's not very convenient at the moment.'

At least he didn't tell me she was washing her hair, or was having a nap. There were times when I was first courting that I had conversations like this with a girlfriend's parents; I didn't much enjoy repeating the experience. I knew he was lying; he knew he was lying; he knew I knew he was lying; and I knew he knew I knew he was lying. Just thinking about it made me vertiginous. ‘Could you get her to call me when it is “convenient”?' I tried not to sound cynical and maybe I even succeeded.

‘I'll tell her.' He didn't sound any too keen.

‘Would you also tell her that I love her?'

Maybe he found that one a little difficult, a little too close to the emotional bone, because his response was reluctant. ‘Of course,' he lied.

THIRTY-SEVEN

W
hatever the reasons for Dad's absence from the scene, I had at some point to warn him that I had just unearthed another potential reason why he should stay at a barge-pole's length from Ada. He didn't have an answering machine, so I was temporarily stymied in that direction. I therefore sought first to apprise the plod of my suspicions.

Unfortunately, no sooner was I sitting in an office with Jean Abelson, wondering how to begin the explanation of my latest brain-straining theory, than Masson walked in. He did so without knocking, but then it was his office, so I could hardly raise strong objections. It brought him up short, though; Jean Abelson got up from behind the desk – his desk, I now appreciated – and went to a much smaller one in the corner of the room. He said nothing for ten long seconds while continuing to stare at me as he sat in the chair so recently occupied by his sergeant; only then did he ask, ‘What are you doing here?'

If outlining my theory was going to be tricky when the aural recipient of my wisdom was Sergeant Abelson, the thought of pouring my sweet nothings into the hairy lugholes of Inspector Masson was a daunting one indeed. I hesitated and he took advantage of this to produce a cigarette packet, shake one of its occupants loose, then place it between his lips. He eyed me with an amalgamation of curiosity, distaste and smouldering resentment as he lit it with a match taken from a box that proclaimed it was ‘England's Glory'. Then, through a lungful of fume-laden air that he expelled with much satisfaction – as if he came from a planet with a distinctly smokier atmosphere and felt liable to continual asphyxiation if there was too much oxygen in the air – he pressed me for an answer. ‘Well?'

Prevarication was no longer an option, I realized. I found that I could not look directly at him as I spoke for I knew that his expression (of impatient disdain) would put me off; I thus had to look at the wall behind his head – it had a photograph of the Queen hanging upon it – as I sallied forth into my story.

‘I think I know who killed Marlene Jeffries.' With which, nothing at all happened. Neither of them reacted, not even to scoff, or to laugh or even to sit back in amazement. The silence, as they say, sat heavily upon the three of us as they both continued to look at me until I asked, ‘Do you want to know who?'

Masson sucked as only Masson could; then he tapped the cigarette to dislodge some ash into an ashtray; one, I noticed, that was made of glass and was a present from Blackpool. I wondered how he had come by it; it was difficult to see Masson paddling in the sea replete with knotted handkerchief on his head and rolled-up trousers. He said, ‘Why not?'

‘A man called Mike Clarke. One of the parents at the school.'

I noticed that Jean had scribbled something down; presumably she was making a note of the name, although I suppose she could have been writing something rude about me. Masson enquired, ‘Why do you think he's our killer?'

As I led him through my reasoning, my misinterpretation of what had been written on the gymnasium wall and how this suggested to me a potential motive for at least one of the murders, I glanced at Jean; she had her head bowed as if she could not bear to witness the tableau, as if she were a sensitive soul and did not care to stare heartlessly at self-immolation. I came to an end; it was much as T. S. Eliot had said, with a lot more of the whimper than the bang about it.

There was silence during which I brought my gaze back to the Inspector's grizzled, not to say grisly, visage. As usual, it had upon it a look of impending anger, meaning I could not tell what he was actually thinking. He had finished his cigarette but, fear not, he had already captured and activated another.

‘That's quite a theory.'

‘Not so much a theory, more of a hypothesis. I wouldn't put it any more strongly than that.'

He waved this modesty impatiently away with a hand that held the cigarette. ‘Whatever you call it,' he conceded, ‘it's quite ingenious.' In case I should accidentally mistake his comment for praise, he went on, ‘For which you have not a single piece of evidence.'

‘Not direct evidence.'

‘Not any kind of evidence.'

‘I think it's quite plausible,' I protested.

He enlisted Jean, a tactic which I think to this day was unfair; of course she was going to agree with him, wasn't she? ‘What do you think, Sergeant Abelson?'

She surprised him, however. ‘It would explain some things about her murder. The extreme frenzy that seems to have been used, for instance.'

Masson stared at her for a moment, as if contemplating the sentence for such insubordination. Then he turned back to me. ‘Yes, it would. How did Mr Clarke find out that his daughter was being seduced by Marlene Jeffries? Did he see this graffiti? The one that says
MJ loves JC?
'

I didn't for one second entertain the notion that I should correct his use of the Italian. ‘I don't know.'

‘And how do you know that
JC
refers to Joanna Clarke?'

Well, I didn't know, did I? It wasn't a fully formed explanation, just a moment of inspiration, albeit one that I was sure was right. ‘I don't know,' I was forced to repeat.

‘And why did Yvette Mangon get sliced to death?'

‘I don't know that either.'

‘And what about Mr Gillman? Did he have something to do with deflowering Mr Clarke's daughter?'

I had hoped not to be in the position of petitioning the Inspector without first persuading Jean Abelson to support my cause; this was exactly what I had foreseen would happen if I waded straight in on the redoubtable senior plod person. I told myself that it was no use getting impatient with him, or reacting to his over-the-top sarcasm. ‘I rather thought you might work out the details of the theory.'

‘Hypothesis,' he butted in quickly and, I thought, with undue nastiness.

‘Yes,' I conceded. ‘. . . Hypothesis.' Out of the corner my eye I caught once again Jean looking upon the spectacle doubtless in much the same way as members of the audience had once watched heretics arguing their case with the Spanish Inquisition; there was a definite touch of ‘I told you so'.

‘Perhaps Yvette Mangon and Marlene Jeffries raped her.'

‘Possibly,' I agreed, and immediately regretted my enthusiasm.

‘And what? Gillman watched? Or did he join in as well?'

I stayed silent on that one, my sensitive nose for these things telling me that he was being facetious. There was a pause which can be most accurately described as ‘brooding', before he asked, ‘And you think I should investigate this possibility?'

Well, yes, I did, so I said, ‘I'm sure you'd be discreet about it.'

‘I'd bloody have to be, wouldn't I? I could upset a lot of people, Dr Elliot.'

‘Isn't that an occupational risk?'