Wicked! (121 page)

‘That was before I analysed your maths results, which could have been better,’ replied Alex coldly. ‘You’re nearly sixty, Biffo, and not cutting it any more. Of course I want you on side, but suggesting Sally Brett-Taylor be allowed to stay on was not helpful. I’d rather you didn’t make suggestions like that.’

Alex speedily assumed the role of head. He’d been running the school for the last two years anyway. Now, like a second wife, he was determined to exorcise every trace of the Brett-Taylors; for a start, ordering the digging up of Sally’s glowing, subtly coloured autumn borders and replacing them with regiments of clashing bedding plants.

Alex knew nothing of the art world, but had recently been putting out feelers for the right person to paint him. At some function, Poppet had met an interesting artist called Trafford, who, responsible for some ground-breakingly obscene installations, had been nominated for the Turner. Trafford, who was coming down for a recce next week, also had some challenging ideas, according to Poppet, about a sculpture to replace General Bagley and Denmark. Everyone knew of Arnold of Rugby, why not Bruce of Bagley? mused Alex.

He was gratified how many of the press were ringing him up for quotes, and now that he was appearing on the box a lot, he’d invested in contact lenses, like his icon Jack Straw, and a new wardrobe. Channel 4 was coming down for a programme entitled ‘Whither Independents?’ – or should it be ‘Wither?’ Alex had quipped to the researcher. They’d be filming outside, so Alex intended to wear a smart new raincoat in fashionable stone, belted to show off his good figure, which he’d acquired in celebratory mood the day after Hengist had been forced to resign.

The new raincoat was hanging in the general office when Dora, who was highly displeased with all Alex’s pointless innovations, wandered in with cups of coffee for herself and Miss Painswick.

‘Why is Tabitha Campbell-Black no longer on the front of the
Old Bagleian
?’ she demanded. ‘She’s an icon.’

‘Equestrianism is regarded as elitist,’ explained Painswick sourly. ‘Mr Bruce is replacing her with a picture of the Science Emporium.’

‘How pants is that?’ Dora was leaning forward to read the list of acceptances for the Queen’s visit, which Painswick was typing out, when Alex walked in, causing her to jump and spill coffee all over his raincoat.

‘Oh bugger, sorry, Mr Bruce.’

‘Don’t swear. Sorry isn’t enough. You will take that raincoat to the dry-cleaner’s, pay for it and return it by tomorrow when I need it. Why are you hanging round here anyway? You should be in . . .’ He pressed a button on the tagging computer. ‘. . . French lit. Why hasn’t Mr Deverell reported you?’

‘Mr Deverell doesn’t need the tagging system because we all love him. No one misses his lessons.’ Dora glanced up at the clock. ‘I’m only a minute late.’ Grabbing the raincoat, she shot out of the office.

Later in the day, Dora returned sulkily to Boudicca. There was no way she was going to fork out for dry-cleaning, so she chucked Alex’s mac into Joan’s washing machine. Next morning, attaching safety pins and a couple of coloured tags to prove it had been dry-cleaned, Dora hung it back in the general office.

Alas, when Alex flung it on to go into the Long Walk with Channel 4, he was horrified to discover it had shrunk to mid-thigh, and wouldn’t remotely button up. Alex was so thrown, he didn’t get half his points across and forgot to plug
A Guide to Red Tape
. After the crew had gone, he summoned Dora in a fury.

‘Those dry-cleaner’s shrunk my raincoat.’

‘They couldn’t have. Perhaps you’ve put on weight.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve weighed eleven stone two since I left Bristol.’

‘You should have flung it round your shoulders like a matador.’

‘Just shut up. Where’s the receipt?’

‘I chucked it away.’

‘Well, find it then.’

‘That Polly Toyboy on the phone for you, Mr Bruce,’ called out Painswick.

Sidling out of the office, Dora remembered there had been a piece of paper with writing on in the mac pocket, which she’d left on her bedside table.

As Cosmo was as anxious as she was to depose Alex and bring back Hengist’s very benevolent despotism, Dora showed Cosmo the piece of paper later in the day. ‘It’s in Mr Fussy’s wincy little writing and it says: ‘“BC Green Dolphin, six o’clock, August 27th”, plus a mobile number.’

‘What’s BC?’ pondered Cosmo.

‘Before Christ – Mr Fussy’s so old; and my God, that’s Stancombe’s number. Engraved on my heart. My mother’s always ringing it.’

Next day, while Painswick was at lunch, Dora and Cosmo checked Alex’s diary.

‘He should have been at an “Against Gender Bias Workshop” in Birmingham at six o’clock on the twenty-seventh.’ Cosmo clicked his tongue. ‘Our Senior Team Leader has been moonlighting.’

Cosmo was a regular of the Green Dolphin, a trendy country pub, two miles from Bagley. Hanging on the walls beside fishing nets, tridents and leaping dolphins, was a mug engraved with his name.

As Lubemir had immediately cracked Alex’s tagging system, Cosmo escaped that evening to the Green Dolphin to chat up his friend Susie the barmaid. Fortunately the place was virtually empty.

‘Your usual?’ asked Susie, getting down his mug and filling it up with a concoction made up of black vodka, Tia Maria and Coke, entitled Black Russian. He was a one, that Cosmo, with his soulful eyes and flopping curls.

Susie remembered 27 August well, because they were all there: ‘Ashton Douglas, Alex Bruce, Rod Hyde, Col Peters (the revolting pig), Russell Lambert (the planning permission king, who allowed Stancombe’s horrible expensive houses on the edge of the village here, blocking out the view from my mum and dad’s cottage), Des Reynolds, smoothie pants, and his lordship, Randal Stancombe. They had a private room and drank buckets of Bolly, obviously celebrating something.’

‘It’s called “engaging with the wider community”,’ said Cosmo, making notes. ‘Strange, or not so strange bedfellows: Randal, Alex and Rod perhaps, but what were Russell and Ashton doing there? I bet Stancombe handed out a few suitcases of greenbacks or Caribbean villas as going-home presents.’

As 27 August had been around the time Stancombe got his hands on the Larks land, Cosmo decided he must try and get into Stancombe’s office. Difficult when he’d treated Jade in so cavalier a fashion – and when Stancombe had changed the locks after he split up with Ruth Walton. Alex Bruce had also put such a lock on his files recently, so Cosmo decided to try and gain access to those of another member of the party: Ashton Douglas at S and C.

There were advantages to having a famous mother. That very evening, Dame Hermione invited Ashton Douglas to a little supper party the following night in her beautiful house in neighbouring Rutshire. Ashton, an opera buff, was in heaven, kissing Hermione’s white hands, almost too excited to eat his lobster pancakes.

Afterwards Dame Hermione sang to the guests, and during ‘Where e’er you walk’ gazed directly at Ashton.

Later, over a glass of Kummel, she told him:

‘My son is obsessed with citizenship, Mr Douglas. He’s taking it for AS level. He has such a feeling for his fellow citizens and the work of the Borough. It would be so wonderful’ – Hermione opened her big brown eyes – ‘if he could do a few days’ work experience in your fascinating office to learn about education.’

‘We’d be honoured, Dame Hermione,’ said Ashton warmly, who had no idea of Cosmo’s capacity for evil and thought he looked fetchingly like a Caravaggio catamite as, back home for the weekend, he sat quietly in the window seat engrossed in a book called
Know Your Town Hall
, which was actually a jacket wrapped round
L’Histoire d’O
.

‘Bingo,’ crowed Cosmo next day to Dora. ‘I’ll get access to Ashton’s offices and find out exactly what’s going on.’

Fortunately, most of the Lower Sixth were out on work experience and Alex was too obsessed with the Queen’s visit to bother about Cosmo’s destination.

‘My interesting news is that my Aunt Lily and the Brigadier are planning to fight the development at Larks,’ Dora told Cosmo, ‘because the builders are endangering natterjack toads and loads of rare wild flowers, which aren’t out at the moment, but which the Brigadier, who is a keen bottomist, recognizes by the leaves.’

‘Ashton Douglas is also a keen bottomist,’ said Cosmo. ‘I’d better wear steel underpants. I might even write a musical called
Kiddy Fiddler on the Roof
.’

125

Paris was in despair, overwhelmed by the misfortune he’d brought on Bagley.

‘You’ve created even more havoc than the Paris who started the Trojan Wars,’ Boffin told him nastily as they came out of prep the following dank October evening. ‘First Theo, then Hengist chucked out; both their careers ruined; Hengist’s marriage wrecked. Artie, Biffo and your dear foster parents’ll be next for the chop. Alex doesn’t like fossils.’

Somehow Paris managed not to throttle Boffin. He’d caused enough trouble already. Bagley had completely lost its charm. Back at the Old Coach House, Ian was not sleeping and his temper grew shorter as Alex delved into every aspect of the school’s finances. There was no Hengist or Emlyn for Paris to have fun with any more and every time he popped in to cheer up Sally, he found her unravelling with despair, and felt hideously responsible.

He loathed Dora and Cosmo having secrets and whispering in corners together. He liked the charming and emollient Artie, but didn’t have the same bond with him that he had with Theo. Where the hell was Theo and how was his back and how was he getting on with Sophocles? And Paris had worries of his own. He’d be seventeen in January and if Patience and Ian didn’t want or could no longer afford to keep him, he’d be out of care and on to the scrap heap, no doubt joining the criminal classes and the homeless, like so many care leavers.

Alone in the dusk, Paris punched the wall of the Mansion several times until his knuckles ran with blood, like Oedipus’s beard after he’d pierced his eyeballs again and again with the brooch pins of his hanged wife and mother, Jocasta. A passage Theo had translated with such terrifying vividness. Paris shuddered. There was still one trail he hadn’t followed up.

On his way back to Ian and Patience’s for supper, having wrapped his hand in bog paper, he dropped in on Biffo to return a maths textbook. He found the old boy plastered in a thick fog of smoke, farts and drink fumes. The fire had gone out; Biffo was three-quarters down a bottle of red; another bottle lay in the waste-paper basket.

‘Are you OK, sir?’ Paris relit the fire, then played a sneaky trick. ‘We’re looking forward to you being deputy head.’

Like an old walrus confronted by an eskimo’s harpoon, Biffo glowered at him. ‘Not getting it.’

‘Everyone thinks it’s a done deal.’

‘Huh, Alex says I’m not cutting it any more. Results not good enough.’

‘You got me through maths, you must be a bloody genius.’

Paris waited for Biffo to nod off, then he grabbed his red leatherbound book filled with the addresses of old boys and other masters. Many entries had a diagonal through them and were marked RIP. There was only a handful of women’s names.

He was half an hour late back at the Coach House. His steak pie had dried in the oven; Dulcie, expecting a goodnight kiss, had refused to go to bed. Ian and Patience were in their coats, waiting to go out.

‘What’s the point of a tagging system if you bloody well ignore it?’ yelled Ian. ‘Alex has been on, demanding where you are. It’s Patience and I who get it in the neck. Have you no consideration? What the hell have you been doing?’

‘Looking for my real parents,’ shouted Paris, running upstairs and slamming the door.

The following evening, Cosmo rang Dora in triumph. He had had a brilliant first day at S and C.

‘I found several references to BC at the Green Dragon and other places. It must be some kind of club. The one on the twenty-seventh of August seems to be definitely celebrating Randal finally buying Larks. They had another get-together the day Hengist was arrested. They’ve obviously been trying to get their hands on the Larks land for ages. There was an email from Ashton to Rod Hyde way back in November 2002 saying – listen to this: “Despite all our efforts, Janna Curtis is not failing as expected. We must also watch our step, as she is accusing us of rigging figures and results and changing boundaries and bus stops.”’

There was a pause.

‘Have you heard a word I said, Dora?’

Dora, who’d been holding her breath like a baby, gave an almighty bellow.

‘What in hell’s the matter?’

‘Paris has run away. He left an envelope with twenty-five pounds in to pay Ian back for not getting history. Then he said he was sorry for all the misery he’d caused and not to try and find him. And worst of all, there was no Hengist to give him a can of Coke and some sandwiches for the journey.’ Dora bawled even louder.

‘What an applause junky. Can’t bear to be out of the limelight for a second,’ sighed Cosmo, then, in a kinder voice: ‘He’ll come back when he’s cold and hungry.’

Alex immediately alerted the police and the social services and, while blaming the whole experiment on Hengist, was desperate for Paris’s return. The last thing he’d wanted was a crisis distracting either the governors when they met next week, or the media when they should be concentrating on the Queen’s visit.