Teacher's Dead (9 page)

I left home nice and early and took a slow walk to Fentham Road. I arrived at the road at exactly nine o’clock, and Miss Ferrier was right, the road was quiet. No music playing, no dogs barking. I rang the bell at number thirty-five and stood well back, looking up, hoping for no change in the weather. Miss Ferrier opened the door and she was as nice as my mother.

‘Hello. Good to see a young man who’s on time. Come on in.’

From what I could see the house looked pretty normal, but she led me straight upstairs and into the front bedroom. It turned out that although the front bedroom had a bed in it, it also had a television, and a three-piece suite, and all the things you’d expect to
find in a living room. She pointed to one of the chairs.

‘Park yourself down there.’

I did as I was told.

‘What’s your name again?’ she asked.

‘Jackson. Jackson Jones.’

‘That’s right, Jackson Jones. So, what is it that you want to talk to me so much about, young Mr Jones?’

It was difficult to know where to start.

‘First I’d just like to say I’m sorry about what happened to Lionel.’

She was quick to respond. ‘What do you mean, sorry? He did the crime, so now he’ll do the time.’

‘But it’s still sad, and it must be hard for you.’

‘Who cares about me? I’ve had people telling me that I’m a bad mother, I’ve been investigated by welfare people, I’ve had people throw things at me in the streets, even my own son’s told me that I’m born evil, so who really cares if it’s hard for me?’

‘I do.’

She paused to laugh. ‘Rubbish. What do you know about me? You’re just a boy. I have a pain in my foot that’s older than you.’

‘I can’t feel your pain but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t got any feelings.’

She began to stare at me and I thought she was going to tell me to get out. She clapped her hands and rubbed them together.

‘Do you want a cup of tea, then?’

Relieved I replied, ‘No thanks, I had a big breakfast. Miss Ferrier, can you tell me, was Lionel always as quiet as he was in school?’

‘Do you mean was he always strange? Let me tell you, Lionel was the best baby a mother could have. I mean that. I won’t go into details, that’s woman’s talk, but even his birth was a pleasure. Whatever people call normal, that’s what he was. When he was small he used to be way ahead of the rest of his class, and you couldn’t stop him talking.’ She paused for a moment. ‘His dad should have been given the sentence he got.’

‘It sounds like he was a great kid, you really loved him.’

‘I was a proud mother,’ she said, ‘proud of my son.’

‘I hope you don’t mind me asking,’ I continued, ‘I mean, you can tell me to shut up, but where is his dad?’

‘I don’t know. One day he left. No, that’s not right. One day I kicked him out. I had to. He started collecting guns and knives and playing with them as if they were toys. One day I’m sitting in here and he comes in carrying a dead cat, can you believe that, the man had found a cat that had been run over. He takes it round the back garden and begins to take the thing apart. Not only that, he gets Lionel and makes him watch it all. Can you imagine being nine years old and watching your father tearing a cat apart? And he did it
more than once. He had all kinds of animals in here, and most of them he killed himself.’

I began to see a link between Lionel’s behaviour and his dad’s but I couldn’t understand why his dad started acting like that. When I asked Miss Ferrier she didn’t know either. But then she told me that one day it just stopped.

‘Just like that?’ I asked.

‘Yes, just like that. He stopped killing animals but he started beating me. Just like that. Now you must understand, this man took no drugs, he didn’t drink, well, a social drink every now and then, you know, but he was never drunk, and his parents loved him.’

‘So why did he start doing all this crazy stuff?’

She headed for the door. ‘I have no idea. Are you sure you don’t want a cup of tea?

‘No, I’m fine, thanks.’

She went to make herself some tea and I did some more thinking. By the time she came back I had many more questions to ask but I suspected that her goodwill wasn’t going to last much longer. She came back with a photo album that she handed to me.

‘Look at those,’ she said.

She began to sip her tea; I began to look through the album. Every photo was a photo of Lionel. Lionel just after birth, Lionel in the hospital cot, Lionel on his potty, Lionel taking his first steps, Lionel on his first bike, Lionel at a theme park, Lionel with the girl
next door. It was the Lionel Ferrier picture show. Some of the photos featured his parents, but most were of him alone.

After I had a good look I handed back the album and said, ‘That wasn’t so long ago, really, was it?’

‘No, that’s right, it seems like yesterday, but then he lost the plot, just like his father. They both just lost the plot. Let me show you something else.’

She held the waist of her skirt down and carefully lifted her blouse up a couple of centimetres, just enough for me to see three lines of stitched wounds.

‘That’s what his father did to me, and there’s more on my back and arms. I’m telling you I was so close to death that I could see my ancestors. He came in one day and told me that I was getting in the way of his spirit and messing up his vibes so I had to go, and then he started stabbing me. Lionel just sat there as if he was watching a cat being cut up.’

I was truly shocked. ‘Gosh. I’m so sorry, Miss Ferrier.’

‘I don’t want to scare you but this is reality, this is what happened, and you’re only getting a bit of it. All those people out there who make judgements don’t know a thing, they just read stuff in the papers or hear rumours and they believe anything.’ As she continued she began to cry. ‘If anyone knew the pain that I’ve been through they wouldn’t be so quick to judge. I almost died in this house, I almost bled to death and
all my so-called partner and son could do was stand over me and watch. If it weren’t for a neighbour who heard us struggling I wouldn’t be here now. So I kicked him out. Then Lionel took over. He didn’t stab me but he thinks that it’s his duty to run the house, so what does he do, he runs the house just like his dad did. Look at me. I live in this room, I live in a bedsit in my own house, because Lionel wants the house to himself and he doesn’t want to see me unless he wants something from me. What kind of life is this for a grown woman? What did I ever do to anyone to deserve this? I’m sorry. I’ve said too much.’

Still clutching the photo album she went over to a bedside table and took some tissues out of a box.

‘I’m really sorry. I bet you weren’t expecting this. You’ll be having nightmares. And I’m sorry about drenching you the other day. You want to see the grief I get from the kids around here, it’s the only way to keep them away. They think I’m mad, but it’s my way of staying sane. I’m not an evil woman.’

‘I know, Miss Ferrier. I don’t believe everything I hear, and that’s why I’m here. I want to get to the bottom of this.’

‘But I just don’t understand why it’s so important to you. What are you after?’ she asked.

‘I was in the playground when Lionel stabbed the teacher. What I saw that day was horrible, and I just can’t stop thinking about it. I’m not sure if I’m really
over it yet, but I just know there’s more to it than what I saw. Why would Lionel or Ramzi take a knife to school?’

‘I don’t know. Lionel did strange things with knives but I’ve never known him to take one to school, and if he did it wasn’t one from this house.’

I felt it was time for me to leave but I had one more question.

‘How well do you know Ramzi, Lionel’s friend?’

‘I didn’t know him at all,’ she replied to my surprise. ‘One day Lionel came home and said he had another servant. When I asked him what he meant he just said, you’re my servant, and now he has another one. One at home, one at school. And that’s all he said. The first time I ever saw that Ramzi boy was in court.’

‘You mean he’d never come here?’

‘Oh yes, he’d come here, but any time he came Lionel made me stay in my room. He said he was ashamed of me.’

I was shocked, but I didn’t want her to see that. I thought I should show her kindness. I stood up. ‘Miss Ferrier, thanks for talking to me, I really mean that. I have never thought you were mad or wicked or anything like that. Even when you wet me up.’

‘I’m sorry, but I thought you were like all the others.’

‘I understand, Miss Ferrier. Are you going to tell
Lionel that I visited you?’

She threw the photo album down on to the chair I had been sitting on.

‘No. He’s told me never to write to him, never to visit him. He even told me never to speak about him. You see what my life is like. It doesn’t get any worse.’

I said goodbye, left the house, turned right and ran for my life. The gang were much slower than before, but now I knew that they took to the street about ten-thirty on Sundays. This kind of knowledge could save my teeth.

When I arrived home that morning after visiting Miss Ferrier I knew that I could have stopped my investigations on that day. I had proved myself right to myself, and I had nothing to prove to anyone else. There were reasons for Lionel and Ramzi’s madness. Lionel was bad all right, but I had found out why he was bad. I knew that it wouldn’t be right to blame everything on his father but his father did have a lot to do with the way that Lionel viewed the world, and the way he saw life, and death. Just like Miss Ferrier said, I tried to imagine what I would have been like if I had known my dad and he had dismembered animals in front of me, and did all the other things that he had in front of Lionel, but it was impossible to imagine. You’d never know how these kinds of things would affect you until they actually happened to you, and these are things that you would never want to happen to you. Although I only had my mother to raise me I did have a stable home, so trying to think what life was like for Ramzi was also
impossible. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to not only move home, but to change parents once a year. How do you collect things, how do you keep up with hobbies and things like that? I was of the belief that Ramzi had so little control over his life that he was easy to control. Anyone could have led him, and they could have led him anywhere.

So Lionel and Ramzi were corrupted kids, they had raw deals in life, they were loners, they were weirdoes. That pretty much explained their actions. They lived in a crazy world and so they did some crazy things. Things were falling into place and I was feeling a little better knowing that I was right; it wasn’t as simple as it seemed. My therapy was working, but the questions kept coming. Why did they bring a knife to school? As bad as they were I wouldn’t have thought they wanted to start cutting up animals in the playground. What made them turn on Mr Joseph? As bad as they were they had never launched unprovoked attacks on people before. Why Mr Joseph, what had he done? I still had more work to do.

I told my mum what I had found out and how I was feeling about it all, and believing that it was all over she congratulated me on what she called my ‘first case’. She didn’t say much else. I had been hoping that it may get her to speak about my dad for a bit. She never really talked about him, and over the years
I had gathered only random facts about him. She said he was just passing through; she didn’t hate him; she never told me what he looked like; she said she had three names for him and she really didn’t know which one was his real name. I used to think he was a gangster, or a secret agent who was only known by a code name. When I asked my mum after telling her about ‘my case’ if he would have done anything like what Lionel’s dad did, she said, ‘No, that was part of the problem, he did nothing, absolutely nothing.’

I felt frustrated not knowing who my father was, but the truth was that my mother didn’t really know who my father was either. But I had the feeling that one of my future cases was going to be about me. Maybe one day I could use my investigative skills to track down my father. Maybe.

I did nothing but enjoy the rest of the summer holiday for a couple of weeks. I read a couple of books, listened to some music, saw a couple of films, I even went skiing on an artificial ski slope a few times, but it was as if I was trying to hide from reality. I had a greater calling. I had to get back on the case. So my next step was to take up my mother’s suggestion. Sometimes my mother could be very sarcastic, she would say things that she didn’t really mean, so one evening I asked her how serious she was about me inviting Mrs Joseph round for dinner.

‘Deadly serious,’ she replied. ‘I’ve never been more serious in my life.’

‘Why are you so keen on meeting her?’ I asked.

‘I’m just a responsible mother, and it’s good to know the company your son is keeping. I’ve spoken to her on the phone but I think it’s my duty to see her in the flesh. If my son is spending so much time with a woman I think it’s only right that I should meet her,’ she said with a smile.

I had not seen Mrs Joseph for some time and I wanted to tell her about my meeting with Miss Ferrier, but when I called her she didn’t answer her phones. I was getting concerned, in a way she was the best friend I had and I wanted to keep her informed. When I finally got her on the phone she told me she had gone to the countryside to take a break. She stayed in a little family-run hotel by a stream and she said it did her a world of good. I thought it would be good if we could meet up. As always she was happy to meet me.

‘I want to take you to a big match,’ she said. ‘Meet me on Saturday afternoon, at four, outside the town hall.’

I was intrigued. ‘So what’s this big match, then? You don’t have swimming matches, so is it netball, basketball, boxing? Hey, you not taking me to a boxing match, are you?’

She laughed down the phone.

‘You’ll see. All I’ll say now is that you’ll be thrilled.’

Saturday was only two days away and I thought the right thing to do was to wait and see what she had in store, but I couldn’t do the right thing. I watched the local TV sports news to see what was happening in the area that week but found nothing. I searched the newspapers trying to find news of any games but found nothing. All my detective skills got me nowhere. So when I met her on Saturday afternoon I felt at a slight disadvantage not knowing our final destination. I looked down the road, looking for clues, and asked, ‘So where’re we going, then?’