Death of a Teacher (19 page)

So what did they know? The young man had a Canadian coin. He had been interested in Fraktur Art. He had been smartly dressed. If he was the same man who had visited St Mungo’s School, then he had problems with his eyesight.

So start from the other side, Ro thought. Who might want to attack a young man at St Trallen’s and obliterate his eyes? An angry lover or partner? A homophobe, perhaps? Someone who had found him trespassing? Or who had connections with the school? Or both … Could Phil Dixon be
implicated
? It was his land, his granddaughter was at St Mungo’s, and often too many coincidences hinted at an explanation.

Ro felt uncomfortable. Had she stepped in just a little bit too smartly at the barbecue, to try and deflect curiosity from Phil when Nigel raised the question of the chapel? She hoped not. But the question was lurking there in her own peripheral vision – could Phil be implicated? Again, she hoped not.

And what about Jed Jackson? He had been out alone in the squad car and was the first copper at the scene. It was odd that he had been so close by. His 
views on drugs were conservative to the point of intolerance. Had he seen what he thought was a dealer, out there on the headland, and had he lost his rag, like he had done with her on the Sunday night a week later?

There were endless possibilities. But she could do one thing: she could speak to her sergeant and ask if they could find out about black cabs, and who could have driven the young man to Pelliter. She could research it herself without wasting anyone else’s time. Tomorrow, Ro thought, when I’m back at work, I’m going to talk to Sergeant Liddle about this, and I’m going to make sure we make that enquiry.

But what if it meant working with Jed Jackson? Ro grimaced. Not under any circumstances. It would be easier to go it alone.

J
ed had had a bad weekend. His early morning trip to the shore on Sunday had left him feeling spiritually abandoned. Going to church had made it worse. He felt no peace during the prayers, and the visiting speaker had preached in a banal way. Lunch with his parents had been pleasant but dull; he felt tired and unsettled. His brother, home from college for the weekend, was a far more ‘normal’ character, texting his mates and arranging to go drinking.

‘Come with us, Jed. You’re really boring these days.’

But Jed had refused. He trudged round the garden or attempted to read.

On Monday he finally agreed to go into Norbridge with his brother for a drink at lunchtime. But later, the others wanted to go on to the fairground or drive to the shore and Briggs’ ice-cream shop. Jed wasn’t interested.

Instead he found himself wandering around the shopping centre in Norbridge, wondering whether he could justify his aimlessness by buying a birthday present for his mother. But her birthday was weeks away. He walked up to Norbridge Abbey, set just a few yards back from a busy road and flanked by two attractive pubs. It was a place he had known all his life but he had never been to see it as a tourist.

It was half an hour before Evensong and there was time to look around. It wasn’t as impressive as Carlisle Cathedral or Hexham Abbey, but it was dramatic in its own way. There was a rose window to the west and the
fragmented
light, like the shards in a kaleidoscope, speckled the stone floor. By the north door, where he had come in, there was a small shop which had not been there at the time of his schoolboy visit. It sold rather flimsy guides and gave out free diagrams of the building, and there was a poster outlining the points of historical interest – a piece of St Cuthbert’s coffin (oh yeah, Jed thought), the tomb of the one of the earlier members of the local gentry, some silver and gold communion vessels, and the page of the
Book of St Trallen
. 

‘You don’t make much of the
Book
,’ Jed said to the pleasant elderly lady minding the stall.

‘Well, no.’ She leant forward confidentially. ‘It isn’t much to look at. And between you and me, the dean thinks it might not be quite what we think.’

‘You mean a fake?’

‘Good heavens no. Just, well, perhaps a copy. A very early copy, of course. Or a draft of some sort. But do go and have a look for yourself. It’s in the crypt. Next to the monument to the Fellside Pals in World War One.’

‘Thanks.’ Jed knew where the crypt was; he turned away from the little shop and walked to where the door led to some bumpy steps. He was trying not to think about Ro Watson, but Ro had asked him about the
Book
when they had been working together outside St Trallen’s Chapel. He thought about the dead man too, still unidentified in the morgue at Cumbria Coast Hospital.

The page from the
Book
was framed in a large gilt Victorian wooden frame which detracted from what was already a slight piece of work. The frame must have weighed a ton and the paper inside looked very fragile. It was
obviously
paper, not vellum, which he knew meant it could be no earlier than the early sixteenth century. Not really medieval, then. The style was cruder than he remembered from seeing it as a child, but it made a compelling
impression
. It showed a huge illustrated spelling of the word ‘Trallen’. Then, in a pointed Gothic script, there were the Latin words which a helpful, if tired and curly, sticker on the wall underneath identified as from the Lamentations in the Bible.

Underneath the writing was a picture of a beautiful young woman with
something
dripping from her eyes. Jed moved closer and squinted at it. Was it tears or blood? As schoolkids they had debated the point.

But what struck him this time around was the youthfulness of the saint. She had the slightest of female figures and a rather mysterious smile. He decided that when he got home he would Google her and find out more. There had been a much bigger shrine to St Tribuna at Restalrig in Edinburgh, he knew that. But the Cumbrian connection seemed to focus on her as a girl, rather than the esteemed matron she became. It was odd to think of this beautiful creature growing stout and jolly, running an abbey.

Jed didn’t know much about women – as opposed to girls, and he knew as 
much about them as most young men. But Ro Watson was the first older woman he had ever really talked to, besides his mother. He had only one aunt, but they had lost touch after a family row. He had no sisters and he had only had one serious girlfriend, whom he’d met within days of arriving at
university
. Most young people clung to these early pairings with the desperation of survivors in an emotional lifeboat. Jed and his girlfriend only split up when she went to London to take an MA course and met someone else who was ‘more fun’. Since then Jed had been out with one or two people – another friend from college, and a police cadet he had met during his training. But nothing seemed right. Maybe he had been too preoccupied with starting his career to get seriously involved.

And, in a way, he had been too preoccupied with something else. It had been a hidden soundtrack beating through his adult life, causing all sorts of problems. When he was sixteen, his older female cousin, who had been
beautiful
, exciting and the subject of a serious crush on his part, had died. It had looked like a suicide from a drugs overdose and it had affected Jed deeply. While he had been at university it had been parked for a while in his
subconscious
. But later, after he had decided to join the police, her death had come back to haunt him and to appear as a sort of
ex post facto
reason for his unusual decision.

He had been bitterly angry with her for dying – not just because he would miss her, but because she had let the side down in some unexpressed way that he felt tarnished them all. Despite everything, he knew she had been a lovely person. She had lived in Pelliter with his grandparents; that was how he had become so friendly with her. She hadn’t minded an adolescent boy tagging along with her and her glamorous friends from the art college. But she had gone away, about six months before she died so suddenly. The teenage Jed had felt abandoned.

He had pushed it to the back of his mind and settled down to work for his A levels. But that couldn’t isolate him from the family row that erupted after her death.

‘Phil’s in a terrible state,’ Jed’s mum had said. ‘Of course he’s to blame, he let her go wild. He’s been far too soft with Samantha all her life. But I can’t bear to hear Judith berating him like that. I’m afraid I gave her a piece of my mind. We’ve had a serious falling out.’

So the two sides of the family had never met again, even though the Jacksons heard on the grapevine that the Dixons had recently come back to Pelliter to live. And Jed had been left with the residual impression that being soft on people led to tragedy.

Jed looked at St Trallen. There was something about the slight figure and the cryptic smile which reminded him of Sam. She had been no saint, but 
she’d had that air of mystery and ethereal beauty which might have entranced a pagan prince. In fact, she must have entranced someone, because he had heard later that Sam had had a child and his Aunty Judith had adopted her.

‘That will suit Judith down to the ground,’ Jed’s mother had said nastily. ‘A baby to mould to her satisfaction. She’ll get her own back on Samantha now.’

Jed went up into the abbey, where Evensong was beginning, and sat at the back. He prayed for Sam and Sam’s baby whom he had never met. And he prayed for his mother, and for the first time in years he prayed for his Uncle Phil and Aunt Judith.

And now, Jed felt the service call to him in a way none of his other attempts at prayer had done. Every time he had tried to relate to God that weekend it had been all about him, Jed Jackson. But this time, when he was least expecting it, the message sneaked under his radar and left him breathless, because it was about someone else. The clergyman read from St Matthew ‘
Judge not, that ye be not judged
….’

And then he found himself praying for Ro Watson and the brave way she cared for her son. He had been very wrong, he realized, to be so rude to Ro the evening they had been to interview Alison MacDonald. He had found the young teacher almost unbearably attractive, and the slight love bite he had spotted on her pale neck had given him confusing sensations. She had reminded him of Sam. So much about her had been so good – her dedication to her job, her intentness as she tried to answer the questions, the confusion on her face as she decided not to trust him. The idea that she had been
clubbing
in Manchester with some moron, probably taking drugs and ruining herself like Samantha, had given him a sense of panic.

But he had been very wrong to behave as he did. He flicked back in the Prayer Book and read the Magnificat.

He thought, I’ve been such an arrogant idiot. I’m proud, and my
unhappiness
this weekend has been because I behaved really badly. The verses at the beginning of Evening Prayer said:

I have been so wrong, he thought.

But that meant it was time to apologize. And Jed Jackson would find that very hard. That would be his punishment. 

Sheila Findley lay in bed on the evening of Bank Holiday Monday. She thought about the day with some sort of satisfaction. Beside her, her husband was sleeping silently and peacefully. It occurred to her that for months she hadn’t been aware of him doing anything independently of her. That was the trouble with depression – it really was very selfish. Or self-centred anyway. She could understand how it infuriated others, but at the time she couldn’t have cared less about how others felt. Even Ray.

But it was different now. She’d actually become fed up with her own misery.

She’d known it was tough on him, too. But then, he wasn’t the one who was depressed. She also knew, all the time, that a massive misunderstanding was at the root of their problems. He wasn’t to blame for her crisis, but she hadn’t the energy to explain. Circumstances had come together in a way which had left him thinking it was his entire fault. But it wasn’t. What he had done wasn’t so very terrible, and if she hadn’t started her miscarriage when she did, she would have had the strength to help him. But after losing the baby she had been too fed up, exhausted and miserable to bother.

Things had been a bit better lately. Life had been improving, thanks to her medication, but without anything really being said. They had been tiptoeing around the issue still, but smiling as they did so. But it couldn’t go on. It needed dealing with.

Bank Holiday Sunday had been great. She had planted about three-dozen bedding plants and the garden had looked abundant in a sort of super-bright, suburban way. In the evening, though, Ray had been white and terribly quiet. With her renewed perception she had noticed his over-attentiveness, a sure sign he was worried.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ she had said, eating a supper which he had cooked with silent concentration.

He had looked at her. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ he’d said.

‘Yes. I know I’ve spent the last six months completely insensitive to your feelings, but my empathy is coming back. A bit like getting the sensation back in numb feet.’

He had played with the broccoli on his plate.

‘Oh come on, Ray. I’m not going to stab myself with the bread knife, or put my head in the dishwasher. What’s the problem? Have you remortgaged the house or pranged the car?’

Her husband had said with forced brightness: ‘Really, Sheila, there’s nothing wrong.’

Sheila looked back at him intently. ‘It’s that wretched woman, isn’t it? You’d tell me about anything else. What’s been going on with her?’

‘Nothing’s going on with her. Nothing ever did go on with her. I made one 
mistake after a party and she’s made me pay ever since. You know that. Why are you bringing it up now?’

‘Because I know you, Ray. There’s something new.’

He’d pushed his plate away. Every so often, since her breakdown, Ray had watched Sheila revisit the shock of her discovery. It was one of the few facts that penetrated her depression and made her react, but each time it had been horrible because of the erupting row which flared and died, seeming to push her further into her lonely hell. He waited for the routine storm of contempt and disgust to break over him and wash away, leaving her marooned on an island he couldn’t reach.

But this time was different. Sheila had got up and came round to his side of the table.

‘Ray, I’m sorry.’

‘What?’

‘I’m really sorry.’ She’d paused. ‘I let you think that your misguided moment with Callie, years before we got together, really mattered to me. But it didn’t. It was just a symptom, an excuse for me to rage on at you.’

‘But the day you found out, you lost our baby …’

‘Yes, but why should finding out about something so petty cause me to miscarry? It was bad – but not that bad. To be honest, I hadn’t felt well all day; that’s why I was stupid enough to lose my rag with Jonty McFadden and after that the pains started. It was all a hideous coincidence, and what happened to me was so wretched we both got cause and effect muddled up. And afterwards I was so mad at the world, I let you think it was all your fault.’

I did believe it was all my fault, Ray had thought. He’d known what had happened because Sheila had told him, sobbing in the front of the car, clutching her stomach as he drove through the evening traffic to Cumbria Coast Hospital. Until that afternoon, Sheila had been four months pregnant and life had been rosy. But then she had come across Liz Rudder and Callie McFadden in the staff-room when everyone else had gone home.