Death of a Teacher (15 page)

Then he said goodbye and hurried to find Suzy in the bakery aisle.

Father Peter Hodgson had rarely been out of the house since Brenda’s death. It was eight days after his sister’s murder, and the police had finally let him alone. He had been disgusted by some of their questions and grateful when they had gone away. He had avoided other people. At some point there would be a funeral for his sister. It would be an ordeal, mobbed by sensation seekers and those who gained attention from claiming friendship with her.

But he knew that Brenda had had few real friends. Only Liz Rudder. She was an unusually sensuous-looking woman whose egg-timer body still held the shape which he had watch develop with strange fascination in his teens. Yet there had been a neatness about Liz Rudder too. She had beautiful tiny white hands, he remembered, like an innocent child, and tiny feet. All totally out of proportion to her bulging body.

His sister Brenda on the other hand had been rather shapeless, with small breasts as if two cakes had been flattened on to her chest and strong hips which had become tubular in middle age. He had watched her change over 
the years, flattering himself that, although he was plump, his face was unlined as she became faded and aged. Throughout their adulthood, until moving back, he had dutifully telephoned Brenda once a fortnight and had visited her and his parents three times a year. The routine had started shortly after Brenda had come home from university.

What a disaster that had been! Brenda had passed her A levels with flying colours and had announced that she was taking up a place at university. It had almost cost their mother her health and been so selfish of Brenda when their parents had already scrimped and saved to get Peter to Oxford! That was different, of course – he was a boy, and everyone had said that Peter was
brilliant
, not just ‘above average’ like Brenda. Peter remembered the huge effort his state grammar school had made to get one or two really bright pupils to Oxbridge. It might have been at the expense of the others, but it was a sensible use of resources in his view. In some ways, that had been the happiest time of his life, when he had been the undisputed star in a small solar system, all lesser stars reflecting his glory.

The year Brenda went to university, Peter had been at home until October. He had told her that at Oxbridge that they didn’t need the same longer term times as other places. He had visited his sister on her first weekend away, and expressed his disgust at the redbrick facilities, so different from his own college. He had certainly opened her eyes to how sordid her shared flat in Ardwick was! A week later, he had still been in Pelliter when she had made her hysterical phone call, demanding to be brought home. She had lasted a fortnight.

Thankfully Liz Rudder had come to visit, and sung the praises of a local teacher training college. Slowly Brenda had come to terms with her failure and had applied there. She had rarely gone out of the county since, except on coach holidays to Bournemouth and Torquay with their parents.

Brenda gave him all the local gossip when he called each fortnight, including news of John Rudder’s stroke, but he hadn’t really had time to think about it. At much the same time, his own local difficulties had developed. He had had to face the bishop over tedious complaints from his parishioners. He had scolded a silly woman parishioner for leaving disgusting rubbish in the waste bin in the church kitchen, and this had escalated into a full-blown feud. Apparently his flock found him obsessive, unsympathetic and lazy! Peter would never forgive the bishop for siding with his congregation. He
shuddered
. Dealing with bourgeois values was really not his forte.

He looked at the peeling wallpaper in the dark corner of his parents’ master bedroom and the growing tea-coloured damp stain on the cracked beige ceiling. He heard the ancient pipes groan and creak with the pressure of hot water for his bath. The faint smell of drains lurked on the landing 
where the shabby carpet was starting to lift. He had discovered that
maintaining
a big old house, which had been neglected for years, cost far more than he wished to spend.

But in the meantime, Brenda’s death would help. Although her house was worth very little in the current climate, selling it would bring him in enough to tide him over. Poor Brenda, he thought. In some ways she had been rather a liability. That outrageous suggestion that the chapel be closed for good! What a crazy idea! The product of a mind with too little to do. Peter Hodgson thought that most intelligent people would agree with him that poor Brenda had got the chapel issue wrong. Very wrong indeed. Rather than being closed, the place should be opened up. With a proper priest in charge. Someone like himself.

B
ecky Dixon was missing Molly Spencer this weekend. Molly was staying at her dad’s, but she was coming back for the barbecue at The Briars on Monday. That would be great.

Becky did some work on the mural with Miss MacDonald on Saturday morning, but it wasn’t the same. They chatted, and Becky explained to Miss MacDonald that the building Molly featured in the mural was St Trallen’s Chapel.

‘How interesting,’ Alison said. ‘I come from Norbridge but I’ve never seen it.’

‘It’s a very, very special place,’ Becky said. ‘It always makes you feel calm and peaceful. I think it’s my favourite place on earth.’

Miss MacDonald laughed when Becky added, ‘Second favourite is Burger King.’

Becky spent the rest of Saturday hanging round at home, going on the computer and getting under her grandma’s feet. Sunday was even worse. By the afternoon she was fretful with boredom and frustration.

‘You should be revising for the Dodsworth exam,’ Judith said. ‘Phil, can you find her some more online programmes?’

‘I’ve done them all!’ Becky wailed. ‘I want to play Intergalactic Warriors.’ But the game wasn’t that much fun either. Becky itched to get her hands on the mural again, but it was no good without Molly.

It was looking fantastic now, she thought. She was still amazed at Molly’s basic idea. Miss MacDonald had talked to them one day about the Renaissance, and they had Googled ‘Renaissance Art’ that evening when Molly had come for tea. They’d been most impressed by what Molly called the ‘travel paintings’: journeys of the magi, and soldiers coming home from battle, or the huge procession pictures by Bellini with hundreds of finely drawn characters. 

‘Better than computer games,’ Molly had said, and Becky was inclined to agree with her.

She found it fascinating that it was history, too – not cartoon characters or graphics but real people who had actually worn those costumes and done those things. It gave her a funny feeling to think that something similar might have happened here, on Grandad’s land. If the Chapel of St Trallen had really been a medieval church, had it been host to processions like that? Not as grand as the people in Sassetta’s or Gozzoli’s pictures, but scenes of devotion nevertheless. That was the sort of thing Molly was trying to paint, a bit like the Duc de Berry’s fantastic
Book of Hours
. They had spent ages poring over that. Molly was leaving painting St Trallen’s to the very end. At the moment it was just a picture of a block on the top of a low hill, but when it was finished it would have the solid oblong shape of the chapel with the stained-glass window at one end and the bell tower on top, with yellow and bottle-green gorse bushes and a pale-blue sea shimmering in the far background. It would be unmistakable, Becky thought excitedly.

‘Where’s the vegetable knife?’ Grandma was saying in a loud exasperated voice. ‘Things keeping going missing round here. The grater has gone, and the kitchen scissors.’ Oh, not again, Becky thought, and crept down from the big chair in the living-room where the computer was kept. Judith didn’t see her as she sneaked away to the front room, yards from the kitchen, and sat curled up on the sofa under the window.

Becky’s phone bleeped in her jeans pocket. She had been hoping to hear from Molly, but the number that came up wasn’t hers.

‘Hey, Becks, let’s meet,’ the text message said.

‘Who u?’ Becky messaged back.

‘Lily. Got new fone. Want to tlk about M.’

This was interesting, Becky thought. She had never been texted by Lily Smith, the most mature girl in the class, and gang leader, before. Even the text about Miss Hodgson’s murder had gone to Molly, not Becky. Becky felt
flattered
but annoyed with herself. The flattery won out.

‘OK,’ she texted back.

‘C u at Briggs.’

Briggs’ shop was down the road from St Trallen’s Hill on the shore. It was a favourite place in the summer for kids on bikes, horse riders, and trippers going to the beach. In winter it did a meagre trade in cigarettes, newspapers, and the odd packet of frozen food, but now it was a cornucopia of fabulous wares ranging from fluorescent green fishing nets to rude postcards. Becky had been allowed to walk there alone in the summer for the last two or three years. She had forgotten that Briggs would be opening their famous
ice-cream
stall for the May Bank Holiday. Suddenly the idea of bright plastic 
buckets and spades seemed compelling. These days her grandma wouldn’t let her go anywhere, because there was supposed to be a murderer on the loose, but that had been a week ago now and no one else had been attacked. Grandma was busy chopping mint for her delicious mint sauce, with the radio on. She wouldn’t hear if Becky slipped out, just for a walk.

Becky grabbed her jacket and set off in the warm soft spring sunshine towards Briggs. As the path dropped from the house towards the main road, hardly a major thoroughfare even on the hottest day, she thought: why did Lily Smith tell me in that text that she had a new phone?

It’s not as if I knew the number for her old one.

In the Rudders’ house, Kevin had been dozing for most of Sunday afternoon after that heavy lunch. John had been tucked up in his wheelchair by the window for his afternoon nap. Liz had been away a long time, he thought. Still, a meeting about the Dodsworth exams was bound to be a fraught affair.

John started grunting.

‘What is it, old son?’ Kevin said in a kindly voice.

John heaved himself in his wheelchair; then he shut his eyes and slumped backwards.

‘Ah,’ Kevin said. ‘Time for your painkillers. Sorry, old mate, should’ve remembered. Now, no acrobatics. Don’t want to panic the horses, do we? We’ll save that for Wednesday night, even if it’s just the two of us now.’

Kevin heaved John upright in his wheelchair, pulled up the footrests and started to wheel it towards John’s bedroom. The wheelchair was a sticky mess, he thought, with food caught in the creases of the seat and the armrests. He wondered whose responsibility it was, because Liz was usually so particular. In the bedroom, Kevin lifted John up, and into a tall-backed armchair.

‘There we are. Here are your pills. Can you reach the glass of water? Jolly good. Shall I pull the curtains shut?’

John grunted again; then he lay back and shut his eyes.

‘Poor old boy,’ Kevin murmured sympathetically. ‘Have a good nap. I bet Liz will be back soon.’ He walked backwards out of the room, waving at John in a rather silly way.

John Rudder watched him go. He had really tried to speak, but it was too much for him. His brain distilled the words perfectly but his mouth wouldn’t work. Why do people treat me as if I’m a helpless child amused by silly antics? he thought. Is it because I fall in and out of sleep with vivid dreams which I think are real? Or because I can’t do more than grunt? Not that he blamed Kevin. At least in his cheery way, Kevin was trying. And he had given him his painkillers, which was more than Liz would have done.

I am helpless, John thought bitterly. Some days he hardly surfaced to 
reality. Other days, arbitrarily, like today, he knew exactly what was going on. The stroke had been serious and had deprived him of his speech and the movement down his left side. He suspected his body was getting weaker. But on a good day, his brain still worked.

He had often wondered what had been the reason for his stroke. He knew all about the physical causes. In his case, there had been a blockage caused by a loose bit of fat – cholesterol perhaps – or other detritus in the veins. But why had it happened to him? Yet if what they said was true and stress was really anything to do with it, then he had the answer himself.

A few weeks before his stroke, he had told Liz that their marriage was over.

John Rudder thought, as he always did nowadays, about the past. His marriage to Liz had been over for a long time. He’d been trapped into marrying her in the first place, but that had never really worried him.

He’d actually been pleased when she had said she might be pregnant. He was getting ready to settle down and have kids – he was five years older than Liz, after all. He’d been a magnet for the Norbridge totty since being
transferred
there from the building society in Newcastle, but womanizing got tiring after a while. By the age of thirty he had given up on the idea of romantic love and Liz was as nice as any of the others. Her parents were working class like him, although Liz was clever and educated. Her father was keen, and her affectionate younger brother, Kevin, was a bit of a divvy, but he hero-worshipped John. Marrying Liz wouldn’t be too bad.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Liz had said after they had been together a few months. ‘I’m late. It’s never happened before. I don’t know what to do.’

I do, John thought. I’ll do the right thing. John had never been in this
situation
before, but it didn’t feel as catastrophic as he’d expected. In fact he was rather proud of himself. He could imagine himself as a family man and he thought he loved Liz in his own way. And the time had also come for him to think about being self-employed. Liz’s father had agreed to advance him a very small loan and in return he’d offered to take on young Kevin, who wasn’t doing very well in the office at Pelliter Mill.

When Liz’s pregnancy hadn’t materialized, he’d thought, well, there’s next time. But there hadn’t been a next time. At first they’d used precautions anyway, but after two years he’d suggested they tried for a baby. Nothing happened. Liz had been working at St Mungo’s and had seemed happy to stay there.

The next ten years had been taken up with buying their first house in Pelliter village, and then with the big move to High Pelliter. He’d been sad but fatalistic about not having children, and he had agreed with Liz that the last thing they wanted was any sort of treatment. Who needed doctors messing around with them finding out who was ‘to blame’? Without anything 
being said, he had assumed the sterility was his. Perhaps, he had thought guiltily, the fact that he had no illegitimate children despite his misspent youth was not the luck he had thought it was.

Then over a decade ago, things had changed. It had been so simple that, looking back, John wondered if perhaps all along he had suspected, and chosen not to see the truth.

He had come home early on a hot summer’s afternoon. He’d had a good lunch and a bottle of wine with a client at the Crossed Foxes. He was over the limit for driving and so he had walked down the empty High Street and up the hill to High Pelliter. The heat was so intense that everything seemed muted, and the back door of his house had been open into the garage. He had taken off his shoes, as Liz always insisted, and crept, just as she had done yesterday, through the hot silent house.

‘I think I’m starting with it early,’ he had heard Brenda say. ‘I’ve been flushing and feeling really panicky. It’s awful really. But of course that won’t happen to you, will it? I suppose you’ll just go on taking the mini-pill until the doctor puts you on HRT.’

Liz had laughed. Neither woman had a clue he was there. John had slipped back into the shadows. Then he turned and walked back to the garage. He sat on the step for a minute and thought about what he had heard.

Had Liz been on the mini-pill for years? He knew at once that he couldn’t ask her. If her answer was an outraged negative, she would be appalled that he had even asked the question. His life would be made a misery. If her answer was yes, what could he do? But, if he had heard correctly, it meant that for twenty years she had deceived him. She had deliberately denied him the chance to father children. He found that unbelievable. It was a fundamental refusal of his human rights.

For the next few days he had gone on behaving towards Liz in exactly the same way. He was tortured by indecision. While Liz slept, he tossed and turned, telling himself he was wrong, that she could never do such a terrible thing.

He should have had it out with her and found out the truth. But instead he left his marriage in limbo, and set about seducing female clients with a sort of calm fury. He took no precautions if they didn’t insist. If they got pregnant, so be it. They would at least have the chance to have the children. Unlike him. And at the end of this crazed spree he had fallen in love. It had been a disaster, of course. He hadn’t had the bottle to leave Liz at the time. But at least he had known what real love was like. And years later when he’d finally had the incentive to go, the stress had led to the stroke.

What an irony. You had to laugh, really, and John did, in a dry, cracked sort of gurgle. The effort exhausted him, or maybe it was all the memories. Anger 
played hell with his blood pressure. Even on a good day, whole tranches of time slipped out of his mind, or elided blurrily with other mental slide-shows of the past. He worried that he would not live too much longer, although Kevin and Brenda’s cack-handed attempts to keep him alive had actually done some real good. After all, with some help, John had managed to get up and even to use his old PC, still sitting in the corner of what had once been his office. He had to make sure Liz still thought he was a vegetable. But that wasn’t hard. It was so much what she wanted to hear that convincing her wasn’t difficult. And she hardly ever came close enough to him to look at him and see the new light in his eye.

In the distance he heard Liz’s car pull up, and then Kevin’s slightly pissed voice welcoming her home. So John wouldn’t be able to use the computer today.

But there was always tomorrow, if he survived that long.

Ro had taken Ben out for a Sunday afternoon drive. The sunshine was fierce. But there was the sense of possible treachery lurking behind it. Spring was always volatile, and grey clouds and rain could come in from the west at any time. Still, the weather had attracted them out. Ben had been fractious stuck at home. He had gone on and on about going to Suzy’s barbecue the next day.