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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Jane Cowan
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
With her abusive ex-husband in prison, Jane Cowan finally has the confidence to accept a new job: head teacher of the primary school in the Kentish village of Wrayford. But her new life is soon disrupted when a mysterious intruder breaks into her school and then later when a child is badly hurt in the playground - only Jane suspects that her fall was not accidental. Are the two incidents connected?After another child suffers life-threatening injuries, Jane must become the pursuer and not the prey if she is to protect the pupils in her charge. However, when the children and teachers alike begin to act suspiciously and Jane finds that she herself is a target, fears and doubts that she thought were behind her begin to resurface.
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Seitenzahl: 413
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Head Start
JUDITH CUTLER
For Adrian Griffiths and Jamie Gisby who transformed the useless bag of pain at the end of my right arm into a functioning hand
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
We might have been reprising my interview, with the solemn faces topping sober clothes. The governors sat in a rough semicircle facing me across several classroom tables pushed together to make one formidable barricade. Richard Morris flicked a friendly wink in my direction but within a nanosecond his expression was as hostile as most of the others’. Only the vicar, a grey man in his late fifties or early sixties called Mark Stephens, seemed disinterested – and, as the meeting progressed, actually uninterested.
As chair, Brian Dawes began the interrogation. He leant heavily forward, supporting his massive neck and shoulders on thick arms. A bull, ready to charge. But his question was neutral enough. ‘How have you found your first week, Miss Cowan?
How indeed?
I am monarch of all I survey.
But I am not a castaway, alone on a desert island – though like Alexander Selkirk I chose to be alone. I haven’t got trees and bays to worry about, but I do want to look into every nook and cranny, so that I can place everything on my mental map. And I can do it in private, at the end of my very first day. Staff and pupils have gone home. The cleaner doesn’t arrive till six-thirty tomorrow. The place is mine.
When I first went to school, thirty-odd years ago, the very sight of the head teacher had me scrabbling for the most obscure corner. I didn’t want even her shadow to touch me. Then she and her iron grey hair and sensible shoes disappeared – I don’t think I’d grasped the concept of retirement – to be replaced by a man who was probably in his forties. Was his name Phillotson? Although he smiled a great deal, soon vague advice to avoid him seeped round the school. No one would, perhaps could, explain why to a naïve little coward like me. Funnily enough it was the feistiest boys and girls who seemed to be most wary of him. None of them wanted to run his errands, and none wished to be sent to him for some petty classroom crime. I still didn’t know, never having been anything other than a well-behaved nonentity, why one week the knots of mothers who always gathered at the playground gate huddled more closely than usual, shutting their mouths tightly when their children appeared, grabbing them and dragging them away.
Mr Phillotson didn’t come in one day. Or the next. But for days, perhaps for weeks, women with stern but kind faces would sit in his office and ask teachers to let one child at a time to come and talk to them. They were told not to tell the rest of us what had been happening. But we soon knew that Mr Phillotson had interfered with several girls and two or three boys – though I had no idea what ‘interfered’ meant. Thereafter we had two more women head teachers, one of whom made everything from spelling bees to changing for PE competitive, while another banned races in case someone came last.
By senior school, I was getting a bit savvier. I knew which teachers you could enjoyably cheek unpunished, and which you had to respect. By the time I went to university I realised it was those you respected who got the best results.
So here I was, on my first day in my own school, a head teacher myself. I wasn’t as young as some of the new breed of superheads, but I was still a couple of years short of forty, with a variety of non-teaching jobs behind me, as well as plenty of classroom experience. I refused to feel daunted, though the head had retired at the end of the summer term and not been replaced immediately. The deputy head was on long-term sick leave, apparently because of stress: was this surprising, if she’d been expected to cover the head’s admin role as well as her own? There was so much to get to grips with I was glad that the supply teacher who’d covered my predecessor’s classes all last term would be continuing till the end of the week in order to teach mine. Time enough to worry about marking and preparation when I’d covered all the other bases, of which there were many, since the school and its hundred and twenty pupils had been without a leader for so long.
The school?
My school.
A typically fierce grey stone Victorian building, it originally had separate entrances for boys and girls, though both were now blocked and a unisex one opened up. The windows were so high that no child could possibly see out of them and the even higher ceilings sucked up any warmth. It had had a sixties extension tacked on, not entirely sympathetically. Actually, not at all sympathetically. But it held the vital assembly hall, which doubled as a gym, and also the kitchen, itself recently extended and refurbished to provide the children with a cooked lunchtime meal, a pair of his and hers loos with just two cubicles in each, and two stockrooms. The car park was on the far side. The old and new parts were connected by a glassed-in corridor, the roof of which was leaking after a day of heavy rain. Judging by the stains on the floor, this was nothing new.
At least it was in a pretty setting, on the edge of the picture postcard village of Wrayford, not far from Canterbury. Many state schools struggle for even playground space; here the pupils enjoyed not just a playground but a playing field big enough to hold a football or cricket pitch with a running track round the perimeter. Currently it had neither, but in time I would make sure it had both. There was certainly equipment for any number of sports, stowed carelessly in as big a stockroom as I’ve ever seen – but see into it was all I could do. One false move would bring down on my head a cascade of boxes and bags and posts and nets and goodness knows what else. The stockroom next to it was equally chaotic; it seemed to be dedicated to old chairs, scenery of long-gone plays, and two or three rails of what looked like rags. And yet more boxes. In the old days a head teacher would have been able to summon a live-in caretaker to deal with it all. Now I was glad to be offered the former caretaker’s house just across the playground at a rent I could manage – there were no affordable houses for sale in this village or any of its neighbours. It was hardly a bargain: built in the fifties, it had metal window frames and a sad air of having been built on the cheap.
The mess was something I’d deal with another day. I still had boxes of my own to deal with, in the house across the playground. Home. It didn’t feel like it yet, of course, since I’d only arrived in Wrayford on Friday afternoon.
Yes, it was time to switch off the hall lights, locking up behind me, and to head back to my office for my coat.
What should I have for supper? No takeaways this far into the sticks, of course. There was a pub at the far end of the village, which I had yet to try; for what seemed like for ever, I’d felt uneasy eating alone in public. Vulnerable. The plus side, I suppose, was that now I could make a meal out of whatever I happened to have to hand – a sort of personal MasterChef, I guess.
So my mind was drifting along the lines of pasta, bacon, courgettes and capers – in other words, I wasn’t doing what I constantly told my pupils and even colleagues they should always do. I wasn’t concentrating, as turning the catch behind me, I moved into the glass corridor.
I wasn’t alone.
I had been. I had locked and double-checked every outer door, and even connecting doors, as I moved along. I know I had. How long was it since I had not taken such an obvious precaution?
I was concentrating now. With every fibre.
The January dusk had deepened into darkness. My bravado in taking this tour had backfired, to say the least. As I froze, the merciless overhead strip lights exposed me like an actor centre stage through all those big windows to anyone outside. I couldn’t see my audience of one. All I could see was palely distorted versions of my own face. Earlier in the day it had worn a confident smile, to match the sharp new hairdo and even sharper new suit – though perhaps in such a backwater the shoes I’d chosen had been a tottery mistake.
Now instead of effortlessly taking charge, I needed to defend myself! A weapon? Where in a modern school would you find anything that if dropped, shaken or even flourished might constitute a danger to a child, let alone a marauding adult? Should I hurl tiny indoor shoes at an assailant? Brandish a forgotten Fireman Sam lunchbox?
Tickled by the absurdity, I was ready to laugh away my terror when I heard a clatter, then a slam. So my intuition was right. When hadn’t it been?
The noises had come from the extension. To investigate I must go back through the hall, and into the utility corridor with the stockrooms. Or I could leave the building now.
The question was answered for me. There was another slam – from the hall this time. A window I had latched myself swung back and forth. I peered out. Someone in jeans and overlarge hoodie hurtled towards the playing field. Male? Female? Within seconds the figure had been absorbed by the darkness. Gone.
Despite the pounding in my ears, the sweat-slippery palms, I checked the rest of the building. Nothing. Except that the stockrooms, which I had left locked, were now unlocked. As far as I could tell nothing had been disturbed, let alone taken – not so much as an underinflated football.
An old-fashioned caretaker could have changed the locks in minutes. But education cuts meant the species was pretty well extinct. A locksmith? On my budget? At least I could take care of it myself – goodness knows I’d had enough practice fitting new locks over recent years.
What I’d not had practice in was wandering round unlit villages. I was a city woman, never realising that street lights were a luxury I’d have to manage without. It was fine for stargazers, this lack of what I’m sure they’d call light pollution; for someone who shuddered at every movement in the shadows, it was a trial. I’d thought of going to the pub, had I? No, there’d be no evening walks for me till I’d got hold of a hefty torch, a hand-held alarm and anything legal by way of a deterrent spray. Even crossing the fifty yards of playground tarmac was enough to have me gasping for breath, clutching my bag and laptop to my chest as if they were a shield. I might have had the foresight to stick my key in my pocket to save the endless search in the depths of my bag, but my hand was shaking too hard for me to slot it in first time. This was like the bad old days, the ones I thought I’d put behind me for ever.
And this house didn’t have a panic room.
The ugly curtains I’d not had time to replace firmly drawn across locked windows, I sat down at the kitchen table to review my situation. Come now, I’d done enough breathing and relaxation exercises to be able to deal with this. Breathe out. Remember that every time you breathe out you relax …
I might repeat the soothing mantra myself, but it took longer to work than the persuasive professional voice at the top of my playlist.
Still wearing my coat, I reached for my iPhone. But instead of conjuring up a recording, my fingers found their way, all by themselves, it seemed, to the phone pad screen. All through the Simon business, the protracted, unnecessary Simon business, when I’d been a battered spouse trying to elude his increasingly brazen attempts to beat every injunction going and to kill me, Pat Webber had been my tower of strength. Originally my police liaison officer, Pat had become a friend, though very much within professional limits. A half-friend, to be honest, since I knew a great deal about much of his professional side, and very little of his personal life, while he knew more than most about my marital problems, and no more than he needed to about the jobs I’d taken in a vain attempt to shake off Simon.
Would he mind a call now? Would he even sound pleased to hear me? Even when things were darkest, he almost managed to persuade me that working to protect me was an honour and a privilege.
He answered first ring. ‘Hi, there, Avo!’
That’s right, Avo. Not Ava. Short for Avocado. Many people wouldn’t want that as a nickname: I liked it. My leathery carapace stopped people seeing the soft, bruised flesh inside. And at the heart was a stone that would refuse to break down in a compost heap but sprout nicely if encouraged. Yes, I was proud to be an avocado.
‘How’s things in Worzel Gummidge Land?’ he demanded.
I could always be honest with Pat. ‘They’d be better with a panic room.’
‘I’m sure they would. But the guy’s locked up, Jane, for the best part of the rest of his life. Key’s lost, if not thrown away. Isn’t it?’ His Wolverhampton vowels were wonderfully unexcited.
‘I know. My head knows. But the bit of my body that squirts adrenalin by the bucket-load doesn’t. Not when I’m locked in an empty building with an intruder.’ I told him my tale of woe. ‘And there are no street lights in the village,’ I added, probably sounding like a petulant child.
‘And no rural police within twenty miles, I daresay. Well, school security is the local council’s responsibility, so long as it’s the children’s safety you’re worried about.’
‘Not any more. Everything comes out of our budget.’
‘In that case, you need to fund a few intruder lights at the very least. As for your house, can you get your landlord to improve your home security?’
‘It’s run by some agency. Even if the owner eventually agrees it’ll take for ever.’ My voice rose in a lamentable wail.
His came flat and sensible. ‘I’m sure you could “lose” your keys and have to fit new locks. If you had internal shutters fitted, you’d have to take them down at the end of the tenancy and make good any damage, but I can’t imagine anyone arguing if they knew your recent history.’
‘They know very little. Not even the governors know everything.’
‘You’ve got used to the new name?’
‘And the new nose and hair. I’ve changed everything about my appearance, even wearing some stupid killer heels to alter the way I walk. Simon’s in the nick, but I bet he’s got friends who aren’t.’
‘Hmm. I suppose by the nature of things solicitors know all sorts of low lifes.’
‘It’s a shame I’m so ambitious.’
‘Why? What’s ambition got to do with the price of coal?’ he demanded.
‘It’s easier to be anonymous in a backstage job. Ordinary classroom teacher. But no, I have to stick my head above the parapet.’
‘It’s not exactly Eton you’re running,’ he pointed out dryly.
‘It’d be a first for womankind if I was. Enough about me.’ It was, without a doubt. ‘How’s your marathon training going? Have the blisters healed yet?’
As if fired by Pat’s can-do approach to running, his brand-new hobby, I set out with newly straightened shoulders for the nearest late-opening big DIY store, just off Canterbury’s tortuous ring road: it was better to buy locks now than to sit around belly-aching, to use Pat’s phrase, about the bad ones. Good ones for the stockrooms – check. And very good ones for the house – check. And fish and chips – not very good – from an edge-of-town chippie. As for my boxes, they’d have to wait till another night – there weren’t all that many, of course, because most of my personal stuff, anything to identify me with my past, was safely in store in a city two hundred unlikely miles away.
My carpentry tools, though somewhere in my house, were at the bottom of one of them. So waiting till another night was no longer an option.
CHAPTER TWO
It might have taken me longer than I liked to fit the new stockroom locks, but before Val, the cleaner, arrived I had finished them, and, as if I were somehow guilty, disposed of the evidence. I had also printed off a short note to all the staff asking them to remove anything they valued from the stockrooms, the keys for which were in the office. I left a copy on each teacher’s desk, with a few duplicates pinned on the noticeboard.
Next into the building was not a teacher, but a kind-faced woman in her fifties: Melanie Pugh, the yellowed and peeling label on whose door said she was the school secretary. But with her knowledge of everything from first aid to the politics of the chair of the governors she could have run the school rather better than I could. Her bright blue eyes shone with alertness.
She greeted me with a smile and a glance, which might equally have been admiring or forbearing, at my shoes. All the photos of my predecessor, Mrs Gough, had shown her in footwear so sensible it might have been prescribed for a Saga walking holiday. How this affected Melanie’s appraisal of me I couldn’t yet tell. I suspected, however, that her opinion would count for a good deal.
My handing over the new keys with a request that she keep track of whoever borrowed them and insisted on their return raised an eyebrow.
‘Ofsted. Security,’ I lied. I could see myself making Ofsted the scapegoat for every change I wanted to make, just as people used Health and Safety as an excuse to deny people innocent pleasures.
She took the keys, noticing that I’d labelled them A and B, rather than anything more specific. ‘This is all very cloak-and-dagger,’ she rightly observed.
‘We had an intruder last night.’
‘Here? My God!’
‘I didn’t see him or her properly. Not well enough to identify them. I dare say it was only a youngster seeing if he could nick a football.’
‘Even so! It must have scared you to death!’
‘Nearly. Anyway, I thought we should tighten things up a bit. In my old place we had a lot of trouble with ex-pupils, one of whom attempted arson – we ended up with security lights and CCTV cameras recording everything going on inside and outside. But in a nice little village like this?’
Her face closed. ‘It’s not always perfect.’ She busied herself with a loose-leaf folder. ‘A is which door?’
‘The sports rubbish.’
‘So B is the other rubbish. Fire hazards the pair of them, if you ask me.’ Her look was challenging. ‘Ofsted or no Ofsted.’
‘No Ofsted,’ I admitted.
My reward was a complicitous grin. ‘Mrs Gough used that excuse once when she banned mobile phones. Kids, not staff. She said they were an invention of the devil. She wasn’t the type to be … rigorous … but she was absolutely firm about that one. And she made us promise to continue with the ban when she left.’
‘I’ll make sure I do too. Meanwhile, getting everyone to help tidy them up is towards the top of my To-Do list. Actually, I’ve been trying to work out the best time for a staff meeting,’ I said, registering that her cupboard contained both a kettle and a toaster. Breakfast was a long time ago. ‘But the staff are so busy with after-school activities, not to mention deputising for the lunchtime supervisors, who seem to be perennially sick, I’ve no idea what would be the best time to schedule it.’
‘Early morning’s no good,’ Melanie said, standing and easing her back with an audible crunch. She allowed herself to wince, her almost unlined face suddenly middle-aged. ‘Both Tom and Liz have to do the school run for their own families.’
‘I should imagine they have to collect them too – right? Or can they be popped in their own after-school clubs as a one-off?’
Her silence told me there was a problem. She didn’t need to spell it out, anyway. It was Tom Mason. A tall, broad-shouldered man in his thirties, he’d completely shaved what was obviously a balding head and looked as if he should have a commanding presence in the classroom. He’d wanted my job – and why not? One of his children was in the preschool group, which acted as a feeder to the reception class; two much older ones went to the comp in the nearest town. His wife was a practice nurse in the local surgery. He hadn’t been very gracious in defeat. Yesterday, each time we met in a corridor, he nearly but not quite jostled. He looked as if he might be a fully signed up member of the Awkward Squad.
‘When did Mrs Gough hold her staff meetings?’
‘Fridays, three-thirty till five. So everyone will be bracing themselves for one at the end of the week.’
‘My goodness! Did anyone ever turn up? Quite. Well, let’s try Mondays, three-thirty till four-thirty, with a timed agenda.’
‘Monday is Chess Club.’ She pulled a face.
‘Actually, every day has an after-school club, doesn’t it?’ Unlike in many schools, catering for early-starting and late-working parents, this one could only deal with children till four-thirty. ‘How many children actually attend, as a matter of interest? We need to choose a day that will minimise parent complaints.’
‘Monday, Chess; Tuesday, Ball Skills, very popular, except that Helen’s still on crutches, remember, after her skiing accident; Wednesday, Music and Movement – the girls like that, but there are no boys at all; Thursday, about twenty go to Choir, which segues into Drama when there’s a play in rehearsal.’
‘Like now.’ Someone had already started painting a backdrop for the temporary stage. ‘So Thursday’s sacrosanct. And every child needs more running around and letting off steam than they get in the average school week … Tell you what, I’ll take over ball skills myself until Helen’s recovered.’
‘I’ll let everyone know it’s running again from next week.’ She made a note. Looking up with a sardonic grin, she added, ‘Every pushy parent will be frog-marching their kid into it now.’
‘Did I ever say I objected to frog-marching? That leaves Monday, but chess is so good for the kids’ brains. If they play, that is,’ I added, in the face of Melanie’s pointed silence.
‘You’d have to ask Tom.’
I wouldn’t swear aloud on school premises. But I could expel my breath very expressively. ‘I’d rather ask you.’
Melanie looked around conspiratorially, then formed her hands into a pretty round zero.
‘So he gets the brownie points for being a good little volunteer and does his marking and lesson prep at the same time. Hmmm. OK, we’ll go for a short meeting this coming Friday, and make Monday the official day in future. Do you usually deal with notices of meetings and agendas?’
She looked puzzled. ‘Mrs Gough believed in word of mouth.’
‘Ofsted are sticklers for the written word. Think of their last report.’ Our mutual grin acknowledged my earlier fib. ‘So every last sneeze will have to be minuted. Problem?’
‘Actually, I never had to stay. Not unless anything directly involved me. It was a bit of a perk, you see.’
‘A well-deserved perk. We’ll have to find you another one: in fact coming in at this hour you’ve already earned two at least. Hey, I should have asked if a late finish on Monday is all right for you.’
‘Better than Friday. But I’ll be here this week if you need me.’
‘No way. I’ve been known to take the odd set of minutes myself,’ I said.
But Melanie was looking very embarrassed, trying not to look at her watch. ‘I’m sorry – I know the children haven’t even arrived yet, but today I really need to get away for an hour. I’ve got to take my father to the doctor. It’s urgent or—’
‘Fine. Absolutely no problem.’
‘I’ll be back as soon as I can. And I’ll make up the time.’
The hands of her old-fashioned wall clock told me it was not yet eight. ‘You’ve already made it up. Off you go. Actually, I’ll take your place for a bit – it could be quite an education.’
My own office door had a big brass plate screwed onto it: HEADMISTRESS. Much as I’d like to replace it with one saying HEAD TEACHER, I could imagine the ramifications of getting a different sized plate and rubbing down and repainting the door. No, I’d have to put up with it for a while. I was housed in an imposing, high-ceilinged and very cold room with, if I stood, a superb view of the old, unused bike sheds at the back of the building. Melanie’s, however, was right at the front, a plus in itself, and very much warmer, the radiator twice the size of mine in a room half the size. That was a real bonus. So was the much lower window. If I adjusted the vertical blinds a little, I could see the road outside without moving from Melanie’s desk. So I was treated to an unparalleled parade of expensive cars, mostly 4x4s, all of which decanted children right by the gate. To do so just there, of course, meant the driver stopping on the yellow zigzag lines you see outside every school. They’re there for a reason. Child safety. Here any children arriving on foot had to weave their way between these monsters, some so high off the ground that I doubted if the drivers could even see people less than a metre tall. I’d have liked to go out and smash windscreens and kick in lights. Instead I made plans:
Cones.
The police.
Myself as temporary crossing warden? It might lack dignity but could be very effective.
A walking bus: it would take time to sell the idea but would tick a lot of boxes, including health.
Staring out of the window, I bit the end of my pen: any or all of these would raise my wretched profile.
But that was nothing compared with the children’s safety. Heavens! Wasn’t that a governor, no less, a guy who’d quizzed me on the interview panel, dropping off what must be the granddaughter he’d spoken of with such pride? Tomorrow I’d be unofficial Lollipop Lady come what may. Tomorrow? At the end of school today!
I was still at Melanie’s desk, typing a notice of meeting and asking for agenda items for Friday’s meeting, when a tall woman materialised in front of me. She had a shock of greying red hair, as if that Victorian artist’s model Lizzie Siddall had lived into her late sixties, and looked bemused at my obvious shock.
‘I was completely engrossed,’ I explained. ‘I never noticed you come in.’
She pointed at a side door, which I had last registered as being bolted on this side. ‘Melanie always leaves this open on Tuesdays. So I can sign in our team.’
‘Team?’ I repeated stupidly: I had a weird vision of elderly footballers taking on five-year-olds. Trying to get a firmer grip, I added more coolly, ‘I understood that everyone who wanted to come into school had to be buzzed in through the main door. I’m Jane Cowan, by the way.’ I stood, extending my right hand.
Although she shook it, it was her turn to look puzzled. ‘You’re never Mrs Gough’s replacement? Goodness me! Just sitting here? I thought you must be standing in for poor Melanie.’
‘Maybe I can be both a replacement and a stand-in?’ I found the visitors’ signing-in book and some plastic IDs under the in tray.
‘Oh, we never use those. In any case, you wouldn’t see them under our costumes. I just tell Melanie how many of us there are, sign the book and that’s it.’
And, as I recalled, it was one of the procedures that offended the inspectors. But I wasn’t about to throw my weight around just now; there were some battles I had to win myself, some I’d get Melanie to fight for me – like this one.
I read, upside down, what she had written. Tamsin Powell and the OTB team (11).
‘OTB?’
‘Yes. Open the Book.’
‘Ah. Bible stories.’ Yes, I’d heard of that initiative.
‘That’s right. Old and New Testament. I’ve an idea Mrs Gough only invited us in to fill the odd half-hour a week, but she discovered that the kids enjoy watching us perform almost as much as we enjoy acting. Though acting might be too strong a term.’ She added anxiously, ‘We’re totally non-denominational – not at all preachy.’
‘Don’t worry – I’ve heard very good things from my colleagues of other Open the Book groups. Now, you mentioned costumes?’ I had a nasty feeling about the stockroom’s new locks.
‘We try to look a bit Biblical. But you’ll see in a few minutes, won’t you? When you attend assembly.’
‘Of course I meant to – but Melanie’s been called away urgently, and someone has to hold the fort. I’m trying to find someone else to take over even now.’
‘Good. Because the other thing I came for was to complain that someone’s locked up our things.’
I handed over key B with a request that she make a point of returning it. But she was already halfway through the door and probably didn’t hear me.
Leaving control of the office to a student teacher, a slender girl with bubbly blonde curls called Fearn, broke every rule in my book, let alone Ofsted’s, but that was the only option. Firstly I needed to make my peace with the team, who were decked out in those rags – they turned out to be home-made unisex tunics for disciples and villagers alike; red-and-white-check tea towels round their heads were held in place by what looked like twisted tights. Secondly, of course, I had to be present when guests gave up their time to educate the kids with stories they’d probably never hear otherwise. If I was disconcerted by seeing Tamsin as Jesus, I wouldn’t show it.
One man, small, wiry, and in his late seventies, read the story with a decidedly Yorkshire accent. Similarly aged actors, books in hand, read the dialogue – but that would be to underestimate their fervour and commitment. Some people only had miming roles. But all acted their hearts out. Homespun it undoubtedly was, and probably not to the sophisticated tastes of city-dwelling inspectors, but every pair of eyes was glued to the players. Even the teachers were absorbed. Heavens, I was! The woman of Samaria had only done bad things, the embarrassing words sin and adultery soiling no one’s lips, but she sported lovely scarlet nails and a matching silk head covering as a possible hint. They concluded with a simple moral and an uncontroversial prayer. Everything was fine. Except that when, having sincerely thanked the group, I reminded Tamsin about returning the key when they’d stowed their gear, she looked at me as if I had two heads.
‘But we always have one. How else can we get everything we need?’
‘Melanie will kill me if it’s not back in its place when she gets back,’ I lied cheerfully but apparently convincingly. ‘In fact, there’s a new system I should have explained earlier. We lend you the key every time you sign in – you sign for the key too – and then you return it when you sign out.’ Clearly that concept was alien to her. But I was after a bigger fish: ‘Which reminds me, you never told me how you got into the building this morning.’
‘Through the kitchen, of course. To save using the entryphone and disturbing poor Melanie.’
Elf and Safety! Food hygiene regulations! I had to stop this – but how could I without offending them?
‘In any case, Dougie – he was the narrator today – has a door key. He could let us directly into the hall.’
Or anywhere else.
He was a man who radiated honesty. But I’d have to get that key back. Or find a locksmith – our poor budget! – to change those locks a good deal sooner than later.
‘So Dougie is the team leader? I thought it was you.’
‘We’re all equal. He just gets here earlier than most of us. I suppose Belinda is the leader because she directs all our performances. She used to be on the stage, you know, but is happy to step out of the limelight and let us lesser mortals have a go. She writes plays for village hall fundraising evenings – so talented. Do you act, Jane?’
Only every hour of every day. ‘Not really. Time, of course.’ I spread my hands. ‘It’s been lovely to meet such a generous and talented group, Tamsin, and thank you again. Now, I’ve left a student teacher in charge of the office, and I’d better take over before she panics.’
‘Young Fearn? You’ll be fine with her. She’s got a good head on her shoulders. Elaine’s niece, you see. One of the gossiping women by the well,’ she added by way of explanation.
The moment she’d gone I popped into the kitchen. The cook in charge, a tiny woman called Adele – ‘the kids call me Addle!’ – seemed quite pleased her lovely clean floors were no longer going to be walked over by all and sundry. She was more than happy to keep the outer door locked. So I had one ally.
It was a good job Melanie kept a kettle. I was in need of a very strong coffee.
So was Melanie by the look of it, arriving just as I switched the kettle on. She produced crumpets, kept with individual butter pats, from a tin next to the toaster.
She threw off her coat, dumped her bag and settled at her desk in one not entirely fluid movement. ‘Oh, Jane, you are a star: just what I needed. But you’re the boss: I should have made it for you.’ She eased off her boots, replacing them with neat, wholesome loafers. ‘You have children and look after them and they leave home and you heave a sigh of relief, to be honest. And then you find you’re supposed to do childcare for them, which would be lovely except your parents are turning into children and you have to look after them too!’ The angry buzzing of the entryphone interrupted her. ‘Heavens, don’t be so impatient! OK, OK!’ She pressed a button, without checking who the visitor might be.
‘Fred the Fiddle,’ she explained tersely. Was she psychic? ‘He’ll need a hand.’
I was nearer the door than she. I opened it to receive a violin case and something that might have been a junior cello.
‘Some bloody idiot locked the back door,’ our visitor said. He was in his forties, with a hangdog face and shoulders bent by life. ‘Whoever it was should try carrying this lot from halfway down the street. More outside,’ he said, ducking back to retrieve another couple of instrument cases – flute? Clarinet? Surely the poor man didn’t have to carry all those around with him?
‘The same idiot who locked your music stands in the stockroom, I daresay,’ I said, passing him the coffee I’d made for myself.
‘No. I bring my own. They’re in this bag.’ He dropped it, the contents clattering appropriately.
‘You mean the school doesn’t supply them?’
‘Used to, but they disappeared.’
No comment. ‘Instruments? You bring them in each week? Shouldn’t the children have them full-time so that they can practise at home?’
‘You think they’d bother?’
‘There’s no point in learning if they don’t, surely! Half an hour a week? You don’t get to be Nicola Benedetti like that. Nor even play well enough to get any simple pleasure.’
He put down the mug and pointed. ‘See that – it’s a pig flying across the road. Time you got real, sweetheart.’
My put-down expression had been perfected over many years. It worked now. He gobbled like a turkey.
‘To think I was on your side till ten seconds ago.’ I looked him up and down. ‘But I’d better not hold your petty misogyny against you. If you think the kids need their own instruments, I’ll move heaven and earth to get them. Now, the Ofsted inspectors say anyone entering the building needs to sign in, yes, each and every time. And has to wear ID. So that’s the way it’s going to be. But at least next time you come, you’ll know there’s one thing you don’t have to carry – music stands.’
I didn’t warm to the man. But at least he’d provided me with the excuse I needed to mobilise the staff to sort out those stockrooms.
Or, given that someone wanted something badly enough to flee as soon as I turned up, wouldn’t I prefer to do it myself?
I’d prepared and personally signed notes for every parent and carer reminding them that parking directly outside the school was illegal. However, as thickening sleet slashed across the village, it struck me that handing them out in person was pretty quixotic – particularly as in this weather I might well have done as they did. At least the governor, Richard Morris, parked fifty metres away when he saw what I was up to, and, to do him justice, came and helped me – after all, as he pointed out, he could address people by name. Since he was six foot tall and broad with it, to say nothing of tending the gardens of half the villagers, people neither answered back nor balled the notes into the overflowing gutters. Not that they did with the ones I handed out, after they’d seen me shove the sopping wet paper back though the open car window of the first mother to try it.
‘If only we could create a dropping-off zone,’ I said, as Richard gathered up Rosie, his granddaughter, who’d been playing imaginary hopscotch in the windblown playground. Why no one had painted real hopscotch there permanently I didn’t know. ‘A place where cars could pull off the road … If we could move the staff car park somewhere nearer the school, and—’
He raised a hand. ‘You’re talking folding money there, Jane. Not a chance in the current climate. Look, that’s almost the last car. Rosie’s frozen, aren’t you, sweetheart? Best get you back home for a hot drink.’ He tipped his cap to me, and headed off, another gargantuan vehicle narrowly missing him as it pulled out without so much as a helpful signal.
Having spent so much time doing peripheral things, I knew I’d have to stay late to deal with proper head teacher work too routine to recount – though I did have one minor triumph with a local firm promising to fit security lights within five working days.
That done, it was time for my prowl round to see that all was well. I took a roll of black sacks with me and key A. And my mobile, of course.
At least the vile weather meant that no one had left any windows open, and this time I was fairly certain that I was the only one on the premises. Heartened, I opened the sports stockroom, taking in battered tennis racquets, a cricket bat minus a chunk of its toe, and several random socks and boots. The most obvious detritus was a pile of stinking muddy, mildewed football shirts, in a variety of colours, none of them school regulation; they were mostly Premier League strips at least two seasons old so I felt no compunction in stowing them in one of the black sacks. Outside the village hall was a charity collection point for fabric and rags. This would be my first bulging donation. Should I continue with the clear-out? No, not until someone – me? – had put a new light bulb in the empty socket in the centre of the room. Fishing in the shallows lit by the corridor lights was one thing; plunging into possibly shark-filled waters in semi-darkness was another.
Shouldering the sack, unlocking and relocking doors on my return to my office, this time I kept eyes and ears open. And my nose shut. The bundle stank so much it couldn’t spend the night anywhere near civilisation, or whatever in a school might pass for it. Grabbing my bag and case in my spare hand, I let myself out of the main door and headed out into the night. I hadn’t bargained on its snowing as hard as it had been raining earlier, or I might have abandoned the stuff on my back. But I wasn’t, as Pat had reminded me, one to give up easily, so I trudged precariously on. I felt and possibly looked like a female Santa. It was only about fifty yards to the village hall, wasn’t it?
The distance was just long enough to attract the attention of someone who crept up behind me and snatched not my Radley bag, nor my laptop case but – just as I was popping it into the hopper – the sack of clothes.
CHAPTER THREE
Snow. High heels. Giving chase was impossible. I told myself I was lucky that the thief had only stolen rubbish that wouldn’t fit anyone bigger than a slender ten-year-old. I still had my computer and my bag. But I was angry and uneasy in equal measures. Snow was falling very thickly now, covering his tracks. His. Yes, I was pretty sure that the figure disappearing into the whiteness was male.
As I teetered back to the caretaker’s house – my house! – I was too busy staying upright to think. Once locked inside, however, I reviewed my options. Actually, I didn’t have that many. I hadn’t got round to stocking the fridge or the freezer with provisions for a country winter, and if I wanted to eat breakfast I’d have to save the bacon and heel of bread. I could risk a drive to the nearest supermarket, though I had little faith in the provision of grit and salt for roads out here. Or I could plod out to the pub. Perhaps if I took a book I’d not look as forlorn as solo diners usually do. But if I read, I’d not have my radar alert for Simon’s unpleasant associates. If any, of course.
Furious with myself for even imagining such an unlikely scenario crammed with unbelievable coincidences, I dug out a rucksack, my walking boots, stable but incredibly heavy after the high heels, and my alpine poles. Waterproof trousers to go with the heavyweight cagoule? A head torch? Sure, I’d look ridiculous. But who would care? Who would laugh at me in this white, unlit place?
My yeti outfit hung up on a hook in the porch, I joined the three other occupants of The Jolly Cricketers’ bar. They huddled round the open fire, backs to the room. I preferred the less romantic radiator, which warmed my back fitfully as I took up my usual position facing the room, with a keen eye on the door. My glass of Cabernet Sauvignon was acceptable; I’d had far worse chilli con carne. No one talked very much, either to their colleagues by the fire or to the landlady, a woman in her early sixties with hair cut so well I’d ask for the name of her hairdresser when I got to know her. To be honest, although she seemed pleasant enough, she didn’t go out of her way to encourage conversation. We exchanged a few sentences about the weather, that was all. One of the other customers called her Diane when he demanded another pint.
I waited till I was ready to pay; as evening’s entertainment went, this hadn’t been great, so I might as well get something out of it.
‘A really funny thing happened to me on the way here tonight,’ I said.
‘We’ll have to rename it The Forum, won’t we?’ she responded, straight-faced.
‘We could. But no togas were involved.’ I gave the briefest of explanations.
Result. ‘Someone steals your rubbish before you can bin it? What on earth were you throwing out? Christian Dior? How weird,’ she acknowledged, as I shook my head.
‘Just old stuff,’ I assured her, ‘that didn’t fit me.’
‘That’s all right, then.’ She turned away.
Her lack of curiosity baffled me. Weren’t bar staff supposed to thrive on absorbing and disseminating apparently useless bits of information? She’d made no attempt to find out who I was, or why I’d turned out on a night like this. Perhaps she knew – perhaps she was Tom’s auntie, and already primed to loathe me.
As I withdrew to the porch and my Arctic garb, she adjourned to the window. What she’d no doubt like was the men leaving too, so that she could call time on the whole uninspiring evening.
I set off purposefully, grateful for the poles – by now I couldn’t tell the pavement from the road. Sometimes I was helped by the light from people’s living room windows, their lives framed for an instant as I passed. How strange to let the world into your home, like a mini reality show. Had no one told them that drawing curtains kept the warmth in? But really I envied them. I would never dare leave mine open. Probably never would. Putting my head down, I walked all the faster. I had a job waiting for me: to check the forecast and to decide if I should try to keep the school open.
The best thing about snow is that anyone or anything crossing it leaves tracks. A couple of years back Simon had been either too arrogant or too stupid to realise this, and had succeeded in proving to the satisfaction of the police and then the court that despite all the warnings and banning orders, he had been not only in the neighbourhood of my house but actually peering through the triple-locked windows.
I made myself pull back the curtain a crack to see how much snow had fallen overnight: about a foot. The V of light from my window showed that my overnight visitor had been of the four-legged variety, though in my townie ignorance I couldn’t identify it. A cat? Too sensible, surely, to leave a nice warm hearth. Would a dog be allowed to roam alone? Surely not. A fox, then, even though it wasn’t cunning enough to disguise its prowling. Why had it headed to the school? At least I could safely assume that it didn’t have free access to the place and would want to rummage in the stockrooms. The kitchen bins would be its target.
My own breakfast quickly out of the way, like the fox I trekked across the playground. I didn’t wear quite all last night’s cold-weather gear but I carried the rest with me: if I had enough staff to keep the school open, any child turning up would have the time of its life. We could look at snow crystals, calculate the weight of snowmen, work out why snow slides became slippery and then, with red fingers and noses, adjourn inside and write about it.
As I let myself into the school a giant tractor appeared, snow-ploughing its way through the village. I gave what I hoped was a neighbourly and approving wave, but perhaps the driver was perched too high to respond.
Top of my inbox was an email directive from Brian
