Death of a Teacher (27 page)

At St Trallen’s farm at the same time, Phil Dixon was in the kitchen with a crime squad officer and Sergeant Liddle. Becky had woken with a headache and very confused memories of the night before. She was in her bedroom with her grandma anxiously in attendance. A police doctor and their own GP had been and gone.

‘I think it might have been Rohypnol, the date rape drug, on the scarf he used to gag her,’ the doctor had said. ‘Everything that happened will be either forgotten or seem unreal. In the circumstances that’s a good thing.’ Apart from the effect of the drug, she was fine.

‘You’re lucky,’ the police doctor had added. ‘She didn’t feel the real effects of the experience, though being bundled into the car was bad enough. Why on earth did she get in?’

‘I don’t know,’ Judith had said testily. ‘She says she’s forgotten why. She’d never met this awful man before. I’ve been on the phone half the night to 
people who wanted to know what was going on and I know they say he looked like his sister, Mrs Rudder. Big bodies, small hands and feet. But why Becky would get in a car with either of them beats me.’

In the kitchen, Phil Dixon slowly tried to come to terms with what he was being told. John Rudder had died the afternoon before, after another massive stroke. Liz Rudder was under sedation, having been told that her brother had died too. A husband and brother in one day, Phil thought. However awful Kevin had been, it was a dreadful situation for Liz Rudder to be in.

‘We’ll be able to piece it together eventually,’ the police officer said. ‘But we think Kevin killed John Rudder’s younger stepbrother, Richard, and also Brenda Hodgson. Someone will be flying in from Canada to identify him.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t really understand.’

‘Well, it will take time for us to work it out, but these family things usually boil down to money. Kevin’s business seems to have been struggling. He needed John Rudder’s money.’

‘But then why did he try so hard to keep John Rudder alive?’

‘I think we’ll find that John Rudder had some sort of pension or health insurance which kept on paying out while he was alive. When he died things would be bad enough for Kevin, but we suspect that Brenda Hodgson hinted to Kevin that John Rudder had made a will leaving the money outside the family. That would have been terrifying for Kevin, so Brenda had to go. And maybe Richard Rudder too.’

‘But how did Kevin know that my granddaughter was one of John’s
children
?’

‘It’s interesting. We’ve had someone go through all his computer accounts overnight. John Rudder started with email many years ago. An early adopter. Like a lot of people then, he wasn’t very adept at setting up accounts. This one was through the business. It probably never occurred to him that Kevin could access it. Maybe Kevin didn’t do so, originally. But perhaps when emails started coming in again from Richard, and John couldn’t open them because of his stroke, Kevin opened them for him. And then started answering them.’

‘So he knew Richard Rudder was coming to Pelliter to see his brother?’

‘Exactly. Richard Rudder was the only one who knew that your daughter Samantha had a child by John Rudder. But John couldn’t talk, so the only way the story would get out was if Richard came to Pelliter and managed to communicate with John. Samantha was dead, and you clearly had no idea who Becky’s father was. So Kevin set Richard Rudder up, once Richard was
determined
to come to Pelliter. Richard came by taxi, from Manchester Airport. We think Kevin brought him up to the chapel and killed him. Then Brenda dropped her little bombshell about having hidden the will, and she had to go too.’ 

Phil put his head in his hands. ‘So where does this leave my
granddaughter
?’

‘Well she’s potentially quite a wealthy young woman. She may well have inherited half a house in High Pelliter. If we can ever find this will….’

‘I don’t care about that,’ Phil said sharply. ‘I just feel angry, because John Rudder and his brother might have been my last chance of finding out what happened to Samantha, my daughter, Becky’s mother.’

‘Well, there are mounds more emails to go through, Mr Dixon. Maybe there will be something in there that will help us all understand.’

‘Yes.’ Phil put his head in his hands to hide his tears. Oh Sam, he thought, will we ever know what really happened?

T
hat evening, Jed sat in Ro’s kitchen with Ben. After fifteen minutes or so, Ben’s phone pinged with a text message.

‘That’s Becky,’ he said, looking a little bit pink. ‘She’s fine now.’ He had heard the story from Jed and his mother, and they had told him everything, including Kevin’s suicide. ‘Can we go and see her?’

‘Maybe next weekend. She isn’t really fine, Ben. She’s had an awful experience.’

‘But Mum, Becky’s special. She’ll be all right. Really.’

Ro looked at her son’s intent face. He was right. There
was
something special about Becky. She took two glasses out of the cupboard.

‘Come on, Jed, relax. A couple of glasses of vino plonko aren’t going to turn you into a sociopath. And what’s this about you and Alison MacDonald anyway?’

Jed looked uncomfortable. ‘I was sick of traipsing around Pelliter again yesterday. When it got to five o’clock I thought I’d go to Ali’s house on the way to Norbridge. She’d just got in from school. Her parents were still at work and her sister was out so we sat and talked….’

‘And so is Alison going to rehabilitate you to the realms of ordinary fallible mortals?’

‘Don’t be mean, Ro, even if I deserve it.’

‘But I wasn’t being mean; I was being fair. But let’s stick with the case. John Rudder and your cousin Sam were definitely an item? Seems a bit unlikely.’

‘Not necessarily. Sam was looking for a father figure and John Rudder was looking for a bit on the side, but Sam really got to him. Then years later, finding out about Becky precipitated his stroke in some way, before he’d had a chance to sort things out. He must have really struggled to be able to write a will leaving his property to her. At least that’s what Peter Hodgson says his sister told him. And did you know about the other children?’ 

‘What other children?’

‘Oh, the gossip is already going round the station. Apparently this Callie McFadden woman who works at St Mungo’s is already claiming that her son is John Rudder’s child and entitled to some of his money. And rumour has it that the Armisteads have got their snouts in the trough as well, although that must be one in the eye for Roger.’

‘What a mess!’

‘Apparently Peter Hodgson remembered his sister telling him all about it. He’d dismissed it as local tittle-tattle, but now he’s telling everyone. It was only when he heard John Rudder was at death’s door that he remembered. All the excitement makes him the centre of attention and that’s jogged his memory too. And I think there’s little love lost between him and Liz Rudder. I had to go and see him this morning.’ Jed shuddered. ‘He’s not a nice man, Ro. He’s amazingly blinkered and self-righteous.’

‘Although he’s a priest?’ she said mischievously.

‘They’re not all good guys. Though Neil Clifford is OK.’

‘Yes,’ Ro said. It was because Neil called her that she had started to put two and two together. And Neil was Phil’s friend. And Ro trusted Phil’s
judgement
.

‘So let’s go over it all,’ she suggested. ‘Richard Rudder realized his eyesight was threatened, and decided to come to Britain, to be reunited with his brother and check up on some artwork for his research. He knew about Becky of course, because Samantha had been his friend. He emailed his brother but eventually Kevin intercepted the emails in the office, and pretended to be John. When Richard turned up, Kevin lured him to the chapel and killed him, maybe even by accident.’

‘And then mutilated his eyes with a knife so that Richard was unidentified as having retinitis pigmentosa.’

‘That’s the weird thing,’ Ro said. ‘I can see the logic in everything else, but the mutilation with a knife seems so gratuitous, as if it was done for thrills. Who would ever have looked at the dead man’s eyes? It wasn’t really necessary to mutilate him. Kevin seems to me like a one-dimensional person and I think his sister was the same. Deeply selfish but not necessarily evil, until he needed to defend his interests. He took what he thought were practical steps and when the game was up he topped himself. But the knifing doesn’t square up. It’s a different sort of behaviour. That sort of psychopath wouldn’t commit suicide.’

‘Are you saying there were two of them? Do you think Liz did the knifing? She’s completely in the clear at the moment.’

‘She’s certainly nasty enough as far as I can see. But how could she get away with it without being seen? She’s a local fixture. Someone would have noticed her prowling around the headland.’ 

‘So if it wasn’t Liz – who was it?’

‘I don’t know. But my antennae are twitching. Knife crime for kicks wasn’t Kevin. But if it wasn’t him, who the hell was it?’

A few evenings later, Jed turned up again at Ro’s cottage.

‘Can I talk to you about something that’s bothering me?’ he said.

‘Why don’t you talk to Alison?’

‘She’s up to her neck in these assessment tests for Year Six. It’s a tense time for her. Anyway …’

‘Anyway what?’

‘I value your judgement.’

You wouldn’t, if you knew what a mess I’d made of my life in the past, Ro thought. But then again, it
was
the past. ‘Let’s sit on the patio now the weather has turned again. It’s lovely and warm out there.’

They took a pot of tea on to the table by the burn, which was more
sluggish
now as summer drew nearer. Ro had made some home-made biscuits, the first for weeks. Jed sat opposite her, staring westwards into the setting sun.

‘Something else interesting has cropped up in all the emails between Richard Rudder and John. The crime people asked me to look at them. From their point of view it’s cut and dried and they don’t really care about the details.’

‘So you’re raking over the correspondence between your niece’s father and his brother? Crikey, it could only happen in Cumbria where everyone’s related to everyone else.’

‘Yes, well, they don’t know about my connection.’ Jed shifted
uncomfortably
.

‘But you want to know the whole story about your beautiful trendy cousin who went off the rails? The one who turned you into a pillar of moral
rectititude
?’

‘Ro … All right, I suppose I deserve all this. But, yes, I wanted to know.’

‘OK so try it on me.’

‘Well, I’ve gone back over a year in the correspondence, to try and work out when it stopped being John who was replying and started to be Kevin. The date of John’s stroke helps, but the emails could have been intercepted earlier.’

Jed narrowed his eyes and, for a minute, the other, puritanical Jed Jackson looked out. ‘Sam’s death was discussed in some detail between the Rudder brothers on email. Richard didn’t make contact with his brother for several years after he went to Toronto. He must have been angry with him. But when he got in touch again, just before John’s stroke, he emailed John about Becky’s birth.’

‘So John didn’t know about that till then?’ 

‘No. It was a huge shock to John Rudder, I expect. It must have made him want to change his life, find his daughter maybe. And then he had that stroke. Total stress, I suppose. But what is odd, is that Richard Rudder says in his email to John that an older woman went to see Sam after her child was born and they had a huge argument.’

‘Crikey. Do you think it was Liz Rudder? Had she found out?’

‘No, I don’t think so. Liz knew nothing about Becky’s birth. Neither did John, remember?’

He took a remarkably big gulp of hot tea. ‘There’s nothing I can do about it, nor should I … I can’t tell Uncle Phil.’

‘Can’t tell him what? Jed, tell me instead. You’ve got a hunch, haven’t you? Who was it who had the row with Sam?’

‘The row that made her do something stupid, like overdose? I can guess. Can’t you?’

‘No.’

‘I think it was her mother. My Aunty Judith.’

Two weeks later, Judith Dixon welcomed Ben warmly, and Ro perhaps a little less warmly, to St Trallen’s Place.

‘Becky’s in the garden,’ she said. ‘Let’s go out there.’ She led the way to where Becky was sitting on a swing seat. Ben immediately plonked himself down next to her.

‘I’ll go and make some tea,’ Judith said, turning back to the house. Phil smiled. ‘Thank you, love. That would be great. We’ll stay with the kids.’ He and Ro watched Judith walk briskly up across the immaculate lawn, a compact woman with greying fair hair that shone in a neat bob, weaving between the burgeoning flower beds.

‘Judith loves it here,’ Phil said. ‘She’s a great homemaker and we’d never have been able to afford anywhere else like this. Pelliter was an odd choice for us after what happened to Sam, but it worked out for Judith and Becky. And me too.’

Ro nodded. The May sunshine was warmer now, and stronger. It was another beautiful Bank Holiday weekend. But she could tell Phil was
unsettled
. He looked at her.

‘Jed gave me all the copies of the correspondence between Richard and John Rudder. There seems no doubt John Rudder was Becky’s father. You heard about what happened, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘All of it? Including the woman who rowed with Sam and tipped her over the edge? I’m beginning to think Judith knew more than she ever told me. But I can’t face her with it.’ 

Ro looked up at the house where grandmother and granddaughter were deep in conversation.

‘I couldn’t disturb that, could I?’ Phil said, nodding in the direction of his wife and Becky.

‘No,’ Ro answered.

There was silence between them for a minute. Then Ro said, ‘Callie McFadden – the TA from the school – and Faye Armistead have both been talking to anyone who’ll listen. I think John Rudder fathered both their
children
. Three eleven-year-olds. I wonder what made him do that, a sort of sex spree in a short time. But with your daughter it was love, wasn’t it? What do you think Sam and John Rudder had in common? The squatter and the
financial
adviser? It seems odd.’

‘I should think they both liked art, and history. Richard Rudder certainly did, and he and his brother were very alike to look at, and in character too. The draft of Richard’s PhD thesis is apparently very knowledgeable.’

‘About Fraktur Art?’

‘It has some real significance for the
Book of St Trallen
, too. He thinks it may be one of the first pieces of Fraktur Art. Or one of the last medieval
illuminated
manuscripts. The family that lived here had Canadian connections like so many people in the North-West of England. They could even have commissioned it.’

‘In which case it’s a fake,’ Ro said.

‘Well, not a deliberate one. But certainly something quite different from what we thought. Hardly West Cumbria’s
Book of Hours
. And what a lot of trouble it’s caused,’ Phil said. ‘St Trallen has a lot to answer for.’

But maybe she helped too, Ro thought. And she remembered the bell ringing crazily, that bitterly cold spring evening at the chapel. Divine
intervention
? But surely not. This Cumbrian sea air was giving her fantasies, and Ro had always been a realist.

This was why she still thought that someone else had been involved in these crimes. Someone who persuaded Becky to get into the car with Kevin. Someone who had absolutely no scruples about knifing people. Someone evil and totally unsuspected. For a second Ro thought of the horrible boy taunting Ben outside Briggs’ ice-cream shop. Jonty McFadden. Allegedly Becky’s half-brother.

Don’t go there, Ro thought. It does your head in. Think of something else.

Phil was looking at her. ‘I’ve got to keep the family together after all this.’

‘Of course,’ Ro said.

‘But Ro …’

‘Don’t say anything, Phil.’

Judith’s voice reached them across the lawn. ‘Tea coming up. With
home-baked
scones and home-made jam.’ 

‘Fantastic, Grandma!’ Becky shouted back.

Phil put his hand over Ro’s. ‘I wish things were different,’ he said.

‘But they’re not,’ Ro whispered.

The summer suddenly blossomed in Cumbria. The events of April and May seemed years ago. The Dodsworth exams had come and gone; Ray Findley was back at the helm; St Mungo’s was back on track. Liz Rudder had been replaced by Sheila Findley who had rallied brilliantly. Liz was recuperating somewhere, but no one seemed to mind where as long as it wasn’t Pelliter.

In early July, Ro and Suzy were having coffee in Norbridge. ‘Molly’s looking really well. We seem to see her most weekends, one way and another. She’s lost some weight, hasn’t she?’ Ro said.

‘Yes, thank goodness. And she’s getting a proper shape now instead of that awful tubular look, hugely exaggerated by shorts and stripy leggings. Her crazy clothes are now in the bin, you’ll be glad to hear.’

‘And how’s the artwork?’ Ro asked.

‘Great. The mural looks fantastic. The concert is planned for next Thursday, last day of term. The date should have been in your diary for weeks. I hear that Lily Smith and the Mungo Minxes are unmissable. You and Ben are coming, aren’t you?’

‘Alison would never forgive me if I didn’t,’ Ro said. ‘She’s worked like a Trojan at it. The school has been so busy. She seems to be finding time for Jed, though.’

‘Yes.’ Suzy started laughing. ‘And the rumour is, Sheila Findley might not be back for long, Someone saw her in the clinic at the Cumbria Coast Hospital. Where they do IVF!’

‘Well good luck to her.’ Ro laughed.

‘Anyway, talking of unlikely things, here’s another. First Saturday in October. Robert and I are getting married. We’re having a big party. We’re inviting everyone.’

‘Oh, Suzy, I’m so glad for you.’

‘It’ll be at Harvest Festival, one of my favourites. I usually get roped into doing the flowers for it, so I’m going to do two things at once. It will be about a month after Molly has settled into Norbridge High so I think we’ll have got our breath back. Becky’s going to be a bridesmaid too. No doubt Judith will hand stitch her dress for her from top to toe, and it will be impeccably embroidered.’