The School of English Murder (9 page)

‘Rich has never given me a satisfactory reason as to why we all have to shorten our names: even the dimmest of the punters is quite capable of managing two syllables. Now, business I’m afraid. Jenn’s told you about Ned?’

Amiss froze. ‘No. What?’

‘What a heartless little bitch that girl is. Nothing exists outside her own nasty empty head. Ned was killed in a cycling accident last night.’

‘On his way home?’

‘So Rich said. Hyde Park Corner.’

‘I’m very sorry.’

‘Me too. He was a sweet if silly man. But of course the chief casualty is Rich. He rang me this morning and sounded very upset. Hopes to be in after lunch, but we’re not to count on it. He’s told me which of the punters you’re being given. Cath and I will look after the rest. It’s a relief to have you here, I may say; our groups have been much too large recently.’

‘I don’t know what to do with them. Rich promised to brief me this morning. All I’ve been told is to take them to lunch at the Tate Gallery.’

‘Oh, Lord.’ Gavs thought for a moment. ‘Tell you what. I videoed a programme last night that you can play them. You’ll find it gives plenty of opportunity for discussion. It’s about money and the fashion industry.’ He smiled faintly.

‘Thanks a million.’

‘Now, come and have a cup of coffee.’

‘Love to, but is there time? I thought we started at nine.’

‘We do, but they don’t. It takes them a good half hour to trickle in and settle down. Come on in. Have you met Cath?’

‘Yes. Last night, at the cocktail party.’

‘Ah, you’ve been blooded. Oh, no, of course, I forgot. You were blooded the night before, weren’t you? So you’ve passed the really important tests. Don’t worry about the teaching. They don’t. Just keep them diverted. And when all else fails, you can take them shopping. Black or white?’

‘Black, please. Ah, there’s Cath.’

Cath had impressed Amiss at their brief meeting. A pale-skinned blonde, she had the coolness and standoffishness associated with Alfred Hitchcock heroines. Yet although she held out no promise of warmth, she had class and intelligence and would be a partner to make most men strut with pride. It had struck Amiss that she and Jenn complemented each other perfectly.

‘Too bad about poor old Ned,’ she remarked. ‘We didn’t see him much but he was a nice old thing.’

‘He was an odd old thing at the party,’ said Jenn as she came in with more water for the machine.

‘He always seemed odd at parties, Jenn. They weren’t his scene. He only ever came to see Rich.’

‘I dunno. I just thought he seemed sort of high, like as if he was a bit pissed.’

‘I don’t think he drank,’ said Gavs.

‘No, he didn’t,’ said Cath, ‘and he definitely wasn’t drinking alcohol last night. Never came near the bar.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ said Jenn. ‘He went on about the fruit juice I’d bought. That mango and kiwi one, you know. Said he’d never had anything like it. But I thought maybe he’d had a couple before he came in.’

‘Anything’s possible, I suppose.’ Cath shrugged and walked away. She picked up a magazine and became lost in it.

‘Come on, Bob.’ Gavs grimaced sympathetically. ‘I’ll show you your quarters and set up your video machine. Do you know how to use a language lab, by the way? No? Well, I’ll show you another time.’

‘I heard it was a bit dangerous,’ said Amiss, as he followed upstairs.

‘Oh, only if you play with what you don’t understand. Poor Wally. Goodness.’ He turned round on the landing to face Amiss. ‘I’ve only just realised. That’s two of us dead within a couple of months. I hope this isn’t one of those things that goes in threes.’

‘Me too,’ said Amiss fervently.

12

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Suppressing his distress about Ned as best he could, Amiss got through the morning with less difficulty than he had feared. Much as in principle he disliked his group of spoiled BPs, he was grateful to them for being so undemanding and easy to handle. The television programme lasted until coffee time and — being about people with more money than sense — absorbed them. In the hour and a half of discussion afterwards, he found that as long as he buttered them up and gave them ample opportunity to boast about their wealth, they seemed perfectly happy.

The group Rich had allocated him were to be with him until the end of the following week. They had been chosen for Amiss as the punters least interested in learning English and most interested in having a good time. Rich had explained tactfully that those who had some ambitions to learn were assigned to Gavs and Cath, who could actually teach. Galina, the Italian, and Fabrice, the Frenchman, he knew best: they liked money, nightclubs, dancing, sex and each other. They also had separate interests: Galina liked men; Fabrice liked women. He had met the other three briefly at the cocktail party. Gunther was a fat German playboy whose interests were money, gambling and racing; Simone, the Swiss, was interested in money, keeping germs at bay and finding another husband; and Ahmed, the Saudi Arabian, seemed interested in money, shopping and anything that smacked of depravity.

Lunch had its compensations. As he admitted later to Pooley, he would have been lying if he denied getting any enjoyment out of eating excellent food and drinking superb wines. The deal was that the students picked up the tab for the teacher and split the bill between them. Therefore, as Rich explained to Amiss, the smart teacher handed the wine list to the BP most likely to have a distinguished palate. Amiss had opted for Fabrice on the simple grounds that he was French and therefore had no excuse not to understand wine. It was a wise decision. Fabrice got so excited about the wine list that he persuaded his colleagues to consider this meal a special occasion. The resulting bill made Amiss feel quite faint.

Lunch lasted until half past three, when the conversations about horoscopes began to falter. Amiss’s suggestion that rather than go back to the school they would take a look at the gallery went down very well. Ahmed dissented, explaining that representational art was contrary to Islam, and that while they were in the gallery he would go back to his flat and read the Koran. Amiss almost enquired how he had squared with his conscience the alcohol he had just drunk and the pork he had just eaten, but he remembered Rich’s advice of the night before. ‘You’ll pretend to be friends with them, old man: they’ll pretend to be friends with you. But they know, and you must always remember, that you’re their servant. Play the game the right way and they’ll throw you titbits like this.’ He showed Amiss his watch. ‘Patek Philippe, old man. About three thousand quid’s worth. Grateful punter a couple of months ago. Play it the wrong way, and they’ll have you fired.’ He looked sadly at Amiss. ‘Oh, yes, dear boy. If punters complain, out you go, I’m afraid. Their word’s law and all that.’

Rich had also been eloquent on the subject of etiquette. ‘Now, dear boy. You might think that since they’re only here for the beer we should drop the façade of their being students and keep our responsibilities social.’

‘It had occurred to me.’

‘Two main reasons why not, Bob. First, there’s the little matter of visas. Now there’s no problem with your EEC BPs. They can come and go to London as they please. And most of the others have no problem in getting visitor’s visas, but some of them have — particularly Arabs — and that’s where we come in. They book a course; we send them a certificate of registration; they send it to the Home Office; and Bob’s your uncle. And while we can be a little… flexible, I’m very careful to run a place that could stand inspection from immigration at any time.

‘Then — and this is important for all of them — there’s the matter of self-respect. We know they’re here to party, gamble, screw and generally have a rave-up away from their nearest and dearest. They need to believe they’re here to learn English. It also makes their lies much easier to tell. So we all keep up the fiction that they’re with us from nine to five working hard. The only difference between us is that they believe it.’

Amiss and his charges wandered about the gallery for an hour. He showed them a lot of Turner and Stubbs, gave them a few simple facts about each of them, and sent them back to their bases to lie down before the challenges of the evening. He wondered how many of them would shortly be phoning home to lie about having spent a busy day studying English art.

He debated going home for a rest himself, but decided instead to drop in at the school to commiserate with Rich. By the time he arrived, all the students had gone. He found Rich in the study, crying at Ned’s desk.

As Amiss retreated in embarrassment, Rich looked up and collected himself. ‘Come back, Bob, please. I was hoping you’d come. I have a favour to ask.’

‘Of course, Rich. Anything.’

‘Shouldn’t make offers like that,’ said Rich, making a pathetic stab at a laugh. He put his head in his hands for a moment. ‘Fact is, old man, I’ve got to go to Ned’s house to collect his cat and I can’t face it alone. You wouldn’t come with me, would you? I’d be eternally grateful.’

‘Well, if it’s me you want, Rich. But I’d have thought—’

‘Gavs can’t. I wouldn’t have Jenn. Cath doesn’t want to, but she offered to take your group out so you could do it.’ Rich got up and grabbed Amiss’s sleeve. ‘You will, Bob, won’t you? Please. I’ve no one else. There was only Ned. I just lived for the business, you see. Never had time to make friends. Or the inclination, if I was honest.’

‘I’ll certainly come with you, Rich. When do you want to go?’

‘Half an hour OK? And will you sort things out with Cath? She’s upstairs.’

‘Sure. See you then.’

Amiss went into the lounge and threw himself in the nearest armchair. He told himself firmly that this was a stroke of luck.

Yet he could not shake off a certain reluctance to go with Rich to Ned’s house. It was distressing enough to witness grief at the best of times. To do so in one’s role as spy made it much worse.

For a few moments he toyed with just walking away forever from the school. Then common sense triumphed and he set off in search of Cath.

Amiss had low standards when it came to housekeeping, but even he was appalled by the condition of Ned’s north London house. It was the kind of artisan’s cottage that in the right hands would be a little gem. Indeed, it was clear from the appearance of the street that gentrification was rampant. Ned’s house, however, was untouched to the point of looking as if no one had painted or even cleaned it in twenty years. There were damp patches on the walls, and torn lino on the floors. The tiny living-room sported a one-bar electric fire, two badly scratched greenish-brown leather armchairs — one leaking horsehair — and an enormous oak sideboard of great ugliness. Around the walls stood bookshelves of various sizes, all full, and piles of books had spread all over the floor and on to the top of the sideboard, where they threatened to engulf the large photograph of Rich that dominated the room.

He followed Rich into the kitchen, which boasted several hundred more books, along with a two-ring electric cooker, the kind of fridge commonly found in caravans, a dustbin, several tins of catfood and not much else. The nearest thing to a modern convenience was the catflap in the back door.

‘Do you want to look upstairs?’ asked Rich grimly.

‘More of the same?’

‘Worse, if anything. The roof leaks in several places.’

Rich wrenched open the door and called, ‘Plutarch, Plutarch. Damn stupid name for a cat, if you ask me. But then it’s a damn stupid cat, and vicious as well.’

‘Does it know you?’

‘Not really, but she’ll come when she wants grub and if you don’t mind, we’ll wait until then. Sit down inside and switch on the fire if you’re cold. I’ll find some glasses and bring us some brandy.’

‘Brandy?’

‘Hip-flask. Ned wouldn’t have had any.’

As far as Amiss could see, the books were all related to Greece. Clearly Ned had been fluent in both ancient and modern Greek and his interests stretched from philosophy to modern travel. ‘Explain,’ he said to Rich as he brought in the drinks. ‘What’s the background? And why did he live like this?’

‘He was a messer — one of life’s failures. That’s the background. Loved Greek and went to Oxford, but then got a pass degree. According to him it was because he couldn’t be bothered working on Latin. Don’t ask me, I’m not educated.’

‘And then?’

‘Nothing really. About twenty-five years ago his aunt gave him enough money to buy this and he never did anything to it. He just didn’t notice. Teaching made him enough to buy books and go to Greece sometimes.’

There was a rattling noise in the kitchen. ‘Here we are,’ said Rich. ‘Now hold on here until I call you. Plutarch, Plutarch,’ he crooned as he went gently into the kitchen. ‘Yummyyummy-yummy. Look what Uncle Rich has got for you. What a lucky Plutarch.’

Amiss, who was well-disposed towards animals, wondered not for the first time why they were so often addressed as mental defectives. Then he speculated about how one should address a mental defective. Finally he remembered how he had occasionally addressed someone with whom he was in love. He tried to think about something else.

‘Bob, now please.’

Rich had placed a pile of books against the catflap and was standing in front of a resplendent cat-carrying basket. ‘That’s very smart,’ observed Amiss in surprise.

‘Typical. He’d have spent more on the cat than on himself if he’d been able to think of enough things to buy for her. He was the same with me. You should see some of the things he got me — Spode, Meissen. And him dressed nearly in rags. Made me want to weep.’

Plutarch was gross, longhaired and ginger and scoffed her food as if there were no tomorrow. Rich and Amiss stood watching in silence. Finally the beast cleared her plate, stretched and looked round enquiringly.

‘Shut the door, Bob. Whatever you do, don’t let her out.’

Rich advanced on Plutarch, muttering endearments. These cut no ice with the cat, who launched herself in the general direction of the catflap. The books fell over, leaving the flap accessible and with great presence of mind Rich threw himself to the floor against the cat’s only exit. ‘Sorry, Bob,’ he gasped. ‘Can you try to get her in the basket? And watch out. She’s a terror.’