A Lesson in Dying (4 page)

As soon as he opened the door to go into the corridor he could tell that the party was going well. Patty had hired a group of local musicians and he could hear the thumping rhythm of the music and laughter and talking. He was angered by the injustice of Medburn’s absence. If none of the parents had turned up, if Patty had forgotten something important, the headmaster would have been there to gloat. Now he would stay away and pretend that it was beneath his dignity to join in.

In the hall Hannah and Paul Wilcox told each other that it was the best evening they had enjoyed for years. This was one of the reasons why it was so good to live in the north-east, they said self-consciously, drinking Newcastle Brown Ale from plastic mugs. There was a sense of community to be found nowhere else. How they pitied their friends who still lived in the Home Counties! The conversation made Paul uneasy. It was a complacent charade. When they first met they would have been more honest. It would have been easier then to tell Hannah about Angela Brayshaw. Hannah’s fierce directness had once taken his breath away; she had been tactlessly truthful. Now they were like the middle-aged couples they had despised.

‘I need to have you around more,’ he said suddenly, staring into the thick brown beer. ‘ I can’t manage on my own.’

‘Nonsense,’ Hannah said. She sounded amused. She was trying to ignore the desperation in his voice. He wanted to make some grand outrageous gesture to show her how depressed he felt. ‘Nonsense. You’ve managed fine. Lizzie will be at playgroup soon. Then you’ll have more time to yourself.’

‘I don’t want more time to myself,’ he cried. ‘I need company. I need your company.’

‘How sweet you are!’ she said. She bent over the table to kiss his forehead. He could tell that she was still tired and did not have the energy to take him seriously. It was no time for revelation.

‘Come and dance,’ he said. He took her hand and they joined the crowd under the flashing lights at the centre of the hall. The crowd parted to let them through, then gave them room to move because they danced so well. Everything we do is a sort of performance, Paul thought. We pretend to be a perfect couple. Why can’t we be natural with each other any more? Why can’t we say what we think? At one time he had always known what she was thinking. Now, even when they were making love he could tell that her mind was elsewhere, perhaps with her accountant or at the next sales conference or with her smart, grey-suited partner. If only he were brave enough to talk to her, he thought. That might bring them closer together again. But Medburn was right. He was too scared to take the risk.

Jack looked through the glass door into the hall. He was reminded of the old days when Susan and Patty had been allowed to youth club dances and he had been sent by Joan to walk them home safely. There was the same feeling of being excluded from their pleasure. ‘I can’t get no satisfaction,’ the group sang and he supposed that this noise held the same sentimental associations for Patty and her contemporaries as big bands did for him. He saw Angela Brayshaw sitting at a small table by the bar drinking a glass of wine. She was alone and seemed quite detached from the general good humour.

She held the glass daintily to her mouth like some amateur actress portraying a duchess drinking tea. She saw him looking at her and smiled, flattered as she was by any male attention – even that of someone as unlovely as Jack Robson. He turned away, reminded suddenly and unreasonably of Kitty Medburn.

Jack pushed open the heavy arched door into the playground. Outside it was very cold. Through the uncurtained window he could see the shapes of dancing witches and ghosts, their costumes becoming more bedraggled as the evening went on. Suddenly the new, young teacher stumbled out of the door behind him. He stood still, bent double, his hands on his knees as if he might be sick.

‘Are you all right, lad?’ Jack said. Matthew straightened up, pulled himself together.

‘Yes thank you,’ he said, forming the words with unnatural and forced precision. ‘ It was just a bit hot in there.’

And he fled back to the hall and the bar. He’ll have to be careful, Jack thought. Medburn’s only looking for an excuse to sack him. If he shows himself up tonight he’ll be in real trouble. He hesitated, wondering if he should follow Matthew and offer to take him home, but he continued over the playground to the school house where the Medburns lived, his boots ringing on the tarmac in the clear air.

He could still hear the music and it annoyed him to think that Medburn, in his living room, must be able to hear it too. He had never been in the Medburns’ house. He had lived in the same village as Kitty for sixty years, yet since her marriage he had scarcely spoken to her. She had come occasionally to nurse his wife. Even in her anonymous uniform and despite his anxiety and guilt, he had been intensely aware of her, but she had seemed not to recognize him. After her marriage to Medburn they had moved in different circles and he had given all his loyalty and affection to his wife.

He knocked at the door of the school house. There was no light in the living room and the curtains were still undrawn. Standing there, as he had stood many times, waiting for instructions about light bulbs to be replaced or lavatory paper to be ordered, he tried desperately to maintain his anger. He knocked again, more loudly and impatiently, and stamped his boots on the step. A light went on in the passage and a door was opened. Kitty was standing there and he could tell at once that something was wrong. She was still wearing her district nurse’s uniform and she was expecting someone else.

‘Jack?’ she said. ‘Jack Robson. Is it you?’ She peered at him, though she must have been able to see with the light from the corridor thrown out onto the yard.

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to see why you and Harold aren’t at the Parents’ Association Hallowe’en party. I thought something might be wrong.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘The party. I wondered what that music was. I’d forgotten all about it.’

‘Can I come in?’ Jack said. She seemed so vague and so different that he thought she must be ill.

She stood aside and let him walk past. She must have come in from work hours before but the house was cold. He walked into a small back room where a fire was laid in a grey tile grate. It was a shabby, miserable room, he thought. There was a dark wallpaper and heavy furniture.

‘Where’s Harold?’ he asked. She had followed him into the room without a word. Her hair was shorter and curled softly about her face and it still had traces of copper in the grey. Her face was blank, but there were tears on her cheeks. He had never known her cry, even as a girl.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He went out earlier. I don’t know if he’ll be coming back.’

He went up to her and put his arm around her. It was a friendly gesture of comfort but as he touched her he knew he would never be satisfied with friendship.

‘What do you mean,’ he said gently, ‘that Harold won’t be coming back?’

‘We had a row,’ she said. He could imagine her in bitter arguments. She would be a fighter. In the playground she had kicked and punched as hard as the boys. ‘We have a lot of arguments.’

‘He’ll be back,’ Jack said, easy, reassuring. ‘He would never leave you.’

‘He’s got another woman,’ she said. ‘He told me when he was angry. He said he wanted to live with her, not with me. Then he had a phone call and he went away.’

She spoke simply. He could not tell if she were angry or unhappy.

‘But what about the party?’ Jack cried. ‘What about Patty’s Hallowe’en party?’

‘Perhaps he’s forgotten about it too,’ she said.

She released herself from his arm and sat on an overstuffed settee.

‘I was jealous,’ she said. ‘We’ve had our rows, but I didn’t want anyone else to have him. Especially someone younger. I’m used to him. I’m too old for change.’ She hesitated and he thought she was going to say something more.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We’re not too old at all.’

She stood up.

‘You’d better go,’ she said. ‘ You’ll miss your party.’

He had been surprised that she had confided in him. He realized now that she was already regretting it. More than anything he wanted her to trust him.

‘You’ve no idea,’ Jack said, ‘where he is?’

She shook her head. ‘I thought it must be his woman friend on the telephone’, she said quietly. ‘I presume he’s gone to her.’

No, Jack thought, remembering Angela Brayshaw’s smile. That’s impossible. She’s in the school.

Kitty opened the front door to let him out. He could hear the music again and saw dark silhouettes of people swirling against the spotlights inside. He was reminded of the
Titanic
, of the passengers who laughed and danced and drank champagne, unaware of imminent tragedy. He turned to say something else to Kitty, but she was gone and the door was firmly closed. He was disappointed – he’d thought he might take her hand before he went, to remind her of his support – but he could understand that she was too proud to share her unhappiness with him.

On the way back to the school across the short space of the playground he was as confused and excited as a boy. There had been, between him and Kitty, an intimacy which he would never have thought possible. He was thrilled because she had not treated him as a stranger – she had chosen to tell him about Harold Medburn’s affair when there had been no need to. At the same time he felt guilty, as if this excitement were a betrayal of his affection for Joan, his wife, a rejection of the calm support she had given him throughout their marriage.

At the door into the school he paused. He wanted more time to savour the memory of the conversation with Kitty, to assess for himself if the significance he had given to it was real. He needed to be alone, away from the noise of the party. There was a small walled playground at the side of the school, used exclusively by the younger children, so they would not be frightened by the rowdiness of the older boys. It was as bleak and sunless, he always thought, as the exercise yard of a prison, a depressing place for the infants to play, but he knew he would be private there. The wooden door set in the wall opened by a latch. He was surprised by how silently and smoothly it opened, and walked through.

Set in the wall at one end of the yard was a rusting netball hoop. It had been there as long as he could remember, and when the school had taken pupils until the age of fourteen it had been used by the older girls. It was too high for the younger children. As he walked into the yard, trying again to conjure Kitty’s face, her voice, her presence, the moon was directly above him and filled the walls with its white light. It left little shadow. The only shadow was on the concrete under the netball hoop and it moved as the figure above it, which hung from the loop and threw the shadow, swung very gently.

At first Jack thought it was some tattered remnant of the party, a giant bat with folded wings, discarded as being too grotesque even for Hallowe’en. Then, as the figure turned on its axis, he saw it was Harold Medburn, wrapped in his academic gown, hanging from a noose made of white pieces of cloth. The contrast of black and white and the gloss of the moonlight turned the picture into a strip of negative film, just pulled from the photographer’s fluid. He shut the door on it and stood for a moment in the playground.

The party was over. There were loud shouts of farewell and the noise of banging car doors and engines.

At least Medburn didn’t spoil Patty’s evening, he thought, before he even wondered why the headmaster had hanged himself or realized that now Kitty would be free.

It was only much later, when the police came with their questions and cars and spotlights, that he was told that Medburn had been murdered.

Saturday night was a bad time for murder, especially in Northumberland, where serious crime was rare. The divisional commander was at a dinner dance but was so shocked by the news of the murder that he sobered immediately. Ramsay was the only detective inspector the Otterbridge Communications Centre could contact, and he was in bed. No one knew where to find the portable generators to power the spotlights and when they were tracked down it took some time to find the keys to the storeroom. Detective Sergeant Hunter, who was supposed to be on duty, was not answering the radio. As the unfamiliar first steps of a murder inquiry were taken, Medburn’s body swung from the netball hoop, waiting for the photographer, and for the senior policemen to come to a decision about how the investigation should progress.

The commander, the superintendent from Otter-bridge and Ramsay stood in the moonlight on the frosty playground, unwilling participants in the Hallowe’en drama. The commander had been moved from the city centre division to wind down before retirement. He had been a good policeman in his day, everyone admitted, but was more adept at public relations now than catching criminals. The superintendent was a fat and idle man whose limited energies were devoted to his hobby of amateur dramatics. In the end they left it all to Ramsay. He would carry out the investigation after all.

‘Delegation,’ the superintendent muttered to himself as he walked back to his car. ‘That’s the secret of good management.’

More importantly Ramsay was unpopular and if anyone was to make a mistake it would better be him.

The inspector watched them make their excuses and scurry away. He knew better than to expect their support. He had no illusions about his work.

The commander went home to bed, to sleep off the effect of too much food and whisky, and Ramsay was left alone with the uniformed policeman who was guarding the gate to the playground. Ramsay was a tall, angular figure in a long overcoat and he waited without moving.

Later the young constable told his friends that he was more spooked by the motionless, silent figure of the inspector than by the body still wrapped in the bat-like gown. It was dawn before the civilian scene-of-crime officer arrived and Ramsay finally allowed the the body to be removed. It was dawn before Gordon Hunter, cocksure and unrepentant, turned up in a taxi.

If Kitty Medburn had not been given sedation, Ramsay would have spoken to her first and the relationship with Patty Atkins might not have become so central to the case. In the event Patty was first alphabetically on the list of suspects, and Ramsay was aware, almost immediately, that she could be useful to him. She was bright, curious, involved in the community. She spoke without thinking and wanted to please them. At first he set Gordon Hunter to charm her. Hunter was young, attractive in a brash way, appealing, Ramsay thought, to women. But as they sat in her living room, with Hunter asking the questions, Ramsay came to realize that she was performing for
him.
Hunter was asking the questions but when she came to answer she faced the corner where Ramsay was sitting. This came as a shock to the inspector. Since his wife had left him some months before he had avoided the company of women. He had no intention of making a fool of himself again. Yet even on that first meeting there was an understanding between the bored, disorganized housewife and the aloof, rather arrogant policeman, which would dictate the course of the investigation. They liked each other from the beginning.