Murder In School (17 page)

Skelgill takes DS Leyton’s notebook and
looks hard at the open page, as if to check whether his Sergeant has actually
got this written down.  ‘So Mary Queen of Scots drove an atheist and an
alcoholic to suicide?’

‘I think they’d happily believe it, Guv.’

‘I must put this in my email to the Chief
this afternoon.’  He hands back the notebook.

DS Leyton chuckles.  ‘Thing is, Guv
– I don’t reckon at this age they grasp the finality of death.  And it
doesn’t sound like either Hodgson or Querrell will be missed.’

Skelgill purses his lips.  ‘Hodgson
I can understand – probably all they got from him was
“Get off the
effing square”,
but I thought Querrell was supposed to be
Akela?’

DS Leyton shrugs.  ‘Not so sure about
that, Guv.  According to Cholmondeley he was a bit of a slave driver. 
Like when he refereed the rugby – if a kid got injured he’d just leave
him lying there and play on.’

Skelgill lifts his head in
acknowledgement.  ‘What about the official line?’

‘They’ve been told they both had personal
problems unconnected to the school.’

Skelgill puffs out his cheeks. 
‘That’s stretching it a bit as far as Querrell was concerned.’

DS Leyton shrugs.  ‘Like I say, Guv
– I think they’re just taking it in their stride.  BAU.’

‘What?’

‘Business as usual, Guv.’

‘Did the kid say that?’

‘Er... yeah, I reckon he did.  Why,
Guv?’

Skelgill shakes his head slowly. 
‘You keep giving me a
déjà vu
, Leyton.’

DS Leyton beams.  ‘I get that myself
all the time with the missus, Guv.’

Skelgill reciprocates with a forced grin. 
‘So no indication that anything was amiss with Querrell?’

DS Leyton looks hopefully at his
notebook, as if willing something hitherto unwritten to materialise.  Then
he jolts and says, ‘Oh, Guv – Cholmondeley did say he’d heard raised
voices while he was waiting to see Jacobson, and Querrell had come out with a
face like thunder.’

‘When was this?’

‘He couldn’t remember exactly – last
week.  Seems he has to go to Jacobson every day to collect a diary sheet
for the first-form noticeboard.  He’s the house rep.’

‘I take it he doesn’t know what they were
arguing about?’

DS Leyton shakes his head.  ‘He just
said it wasn’t unusual for Querrell to be bad tempered.’

Skelgill purses his lips.  ‘Did he
mention this hill-race they’ve got tomorrow?’

‘No, Guv – what’s that about?’

‘Something Querrell normally organised
– Jacobson told me about it.  That could be what the fuss was
over.  The first years have to run to the top of Skiddaw and back.’

DS Leyton shifts uncomfortably in his
seat.  ‘Blimey, Guv – the more I hear about this place the more I
reckon I got off lightly in my day.  No wonder he was unpopular if that
was the sort of stunt he put them up to.’

Skelgill nods.  ‘What did the boy
say about Jacobson?’

DS Leyton shrugs.  ‘Nothing we don’t
know, Guv.  Said he’s a queer old bird – but that he’s a soft touch
for tuck and forgetful when it comes to punishment exercises.’

‘Think he was holding anything back?’

‘Nah, Guv – I don’t.  He’s
very open and quick to answer.  A bit too talkative for his teachers’
liking, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Well he was right about the
scones.  Jacobson eats more than me.  You’d think he’d carry a bit
more padding.’

DS Leyton leans back and proudly pats his
ample stomach.  ‘We’re not all designed to survive a shipwreck, Guv.’

Skelgill glares disapprovingly at his Sergeant. 
‘Except you’d still be stuck on the desert island long after I’d built a raft
and sailed to safety.’

‘Then you’d come to rescue me, Guv
– just as the coconuts run out!’

Skelgill chuckles and gets to his
feet.  ‘Come on – thank god it’s Friday.’

He strolls across to the doorway; while
DS Leyton, following, pats his pockets for the key that Skelgill had given him
earlier.

‘Here we are, Guv – I thought I may
as well wait for you before going in.’

But Skelgill’s attention is fixed upon
the stone lintel above the entrance.  He reaches up and brushes his
fingertips across the uneven surface.

‘What is it, Guv?’

Skelgill steps back and points with an
index finger.  ‘What do you reckon that is?’

DS Leyton squints hopefully at the
chiselled marking that Skelgill indicates.

‘Dunno, Guv.  A backwards number
six?’

‘Wouldn’t make sense, though, would it
– number six on a gatehouse in the middle of nowhere?’

‘Could just be a design, Guv –
looks a bit like those prehistoric markings on the rocks at Copt Howe.’

Skelgill shoots a surprised glance at DS
Leyton.  ‘How do you know about them?’

‘Ah, you see, Guv – one of our kids
is doing the Stone Age as a project at school.  We drove down and had a
look last weekend.  They made axe heads there, too – traded them all
over Europe.’

‘Well, you’re certainly turning into a
fount of information, Leyton.  You’ll be teaching me about fishing next.’

‘No fear, Guv – you know me and
hydrophobia.’

‘You should give it a try sometime. 
I shall be on Bass Lake on Monday morning bright and early if you want to come.’

‘I’m all out of leave, Guv – ‘till
my next holiday year starts.’

‘Pity we can’t trade – I’m going to
forfeit two weeks at my present rate.’

‘You just off Monday, Guv?’

Skelgill nods.  ‘I was going to
cancel it, but we seem to be grinding to a halt on this case.  Maybe I’ll
have some inspiration while I’m fishing.’

‘Guv, I reckon I ought to follow up those
livestock thefts over at Appleby – the file’s been burning a hole in my
in-tray.  Unless you want me to come and talk to someone else here?’

Skelgill’s shoulders have slumped and he has
a defeated look about him.  He shakes his head.  ‘Nah – you’d
better keep the landowners happy.  I’ll try to do the same with her
majesty.’

DS Leyton pulls in his head in tortoise
fashion.  ‘Rather you than me, Guv.’

Skelgill sighs.  ‘Hopefully she’ll
be in her Friday heads-of-departments meeting for the rest of the day. 
I’ll leave it as late as I can to send her a report.’

DS Leyton nods, and reaches with some
difficulty over his shoulder to pull his shirt away from his skin.  ‘I’m
sweating like a pig, Guv.  Think the heatwave’s coming back?’

Skelgill gazes up to the skies and
watches the movement of the clouds.  ‘Doubt it – not with these
westerlies.  The outlook for the weekend’s not too clever.  I’ve got
a run on Saturday and a mountain rescue exercise on Sunday.’

‘Maybe they’ll get it wrong, Guv. 
I’m supposed to be cutting our grass before the pigmies move in.  Reckon I
might already be too late.’

Skelgill forces a smile.  ‘Come on,
Leyton – let’s get this door open.  I can’t see us finding anything
here, but I’d better return this
Wainwright
.’

Rather in the way of Manchester, whose
reputation is such that the climate is sometimes styled as
‘raining, or
about to rain’
, the Lake District experiences precipitation approximately every
other day, with little respite in summer.  This phenomenon provides the forecaster
with a fifty per cent chance of being correct, before any meteorological skill
or local knowledge is applied.  Not surprisingly, therefore, the forecast to
which Skelgill had referred has been borne out as accurate.  Friday’s
mid-afternoon sunshine proved to be a false dawn, so to speak, and the weekend
something of a washout for those who had outdoor activities in mind: a state of
affairs that probably suited DS Leyton.  Though the worst of the downpour
restricted itself to Saturday and Sunday, a slow-moving occlusion has
bequeathed a stubborn blanket of cloud and low-hanging mist that drapes the
fells; complemented by a light but persistent drizzle, the conditions are such
to merit the colloquial epithet
mizzlin
.

On the damp bankside shingle Skelgill, something
of a doppelganger for Tove Jansson’s
Snufkin
, crouches beneath a
makeshift shelter fashioned from a length of painter and a rather maggoty tarpaulin. 
The rope is strung between two springy alder saplings, and the gabled canopy
held fast at its four corners by a quartet of heavy mudstone boulders –
it is a far cry from the luxury bivouacs enjoyed by today’s cosseted carp
anglers, but it does the job as far as Skelgill is concerned.  Like a
Neolithic hunter at the mouth of his cave, he sits contentedly amidst the grey
smoke that billows from his soot-blackened
Kelly Kettle
, poking with a
twig a pan of fresh brown trout fillets that spit and pop and threaten to leap
from his battered
Trangia
stove.  The still air is thick with the
aroma of their burnt skins, mingled with wood smoke and methylated
spirits.  As the tall aluminium storm-kettle reaches its boil he expertly sweeps
it off its flaming base and decants a stream of steaming lake-water into a tin
mug charged with the requisite two tea bags and powdered milk.  Then he
takes up a chipped enamel plate and, using his fingers as tongs, seemingly
unaffected by the heat, lifts the fillets into a pair of hand-torn white buttered
rolls.  The finishing touch is a squirt of
HP
sauce from a plastic
bottle that he fishes from the forces surplus knapsack at his side. 
Preparations complete, he stretches out his legs, his boot-heels gouging
furrows into the shingle, and readies himself for his fisherman’s breakfast.

It’s ten a.m. as, nursing the surely
scalding mug, he contemplates the scene before him.  A gentle ripple laps
lightly against the hull of his boat, grounded in the shallows.  From its
stern a single coarse rod with a
DayGlo
reed-tipped waggler float
bobbing gently offshore pays lip service to his continued angling.  But it
has been a successful morning.  Out on the lake since five-thirty,
Skelgill has landed four pike for almost a hundred pounds, including one venerable
specimen that eventually came aboard with two silver treble-hooks and a multi-coloured
plug (not one of his) and their corresponding wire traces hanging like gipsy
jewellery from its jaws.  He cleaned it up and proprietorially set it back
in the water, to fight another day bigger.  The brace of brown trout he
caught out of necessity when he realised he had left his much-loved Cumberland
sausages in the fridge.

Chewing, he stares thoughtfully at the tiny
orange blur of the float, although whether he sees it or looks right through it
is hard to discern.  Perhaps a bite will tell.  There’s a distant swishing
rumble of wet tyres as the Monday morning delivery traffic gets going on the
A66 beyond the tree-lined far bank.  The small songbirds that might ordinarily
be expected to bear territorial ambitions seem subdued by the dank conditions. 
Such avian silence is punctuated only by the occasional
plunk
of a trout
sinking an ovipositioning daddy longlegs, and the hysterical cackle of a
Mallard that finally gets last night’s joke.

Also unclear is whether Skelgill’s angling
success has been matched by the inspiration he desired would come to him, as outlined
to DS Leyton on Friday.  Certainly his taciturn features provide little indication
of such.  Yet his thoughts must be drifting to the intractable Oakthwaite
case.  As Dr Jacobson rather cruelly remarked by allusion to London
transport, for suicides to be coming along in plural, and for the Chief to have
some unspoken reason for him to investigate... there is surely something afoot? 
What would be her motivation, however, is difficult to divine – other
than logic suggests the link is either through her son, a pupil, or Mr Goodman,
with whom she is evidently acquainted at the level of local dignitary.  Each
of these connections could explain her reluctance to state some overt rationale.

Skelgill, with his superior’s patronage,
has determined that the Head may be lining his own pockets, and that Dr Snyder
is not all that he seems.  Other masters have their idiosyncrasies –
the effusive Dr Jacobson, and the tough little South African Mike Greig –
although such singularity seems to be par for the course for Oakthwaite. 
Edmund Querrell’s suicide lacks an explanation and circumstantially is suspicious,
while Royston Hodgson’s death is curious for its locus and Skelgill’s illicitly
acquired inside knowledge.  Information may have been deleted from
Querrell’s computer (yet it is perhaps as likely that this was Querrell’s own
habit).  And at various twists and turns Skelgill’s antennae have been set
twitching by subtle clues and red herrings – with seemingly no way of
knowing one from the other.

Rather as in the travel of the waggler
float out in the surface film, perhaps a hidden hand is at play.  Wherever
Skelgill might carefully cast, believing there to be a sunken shelf or submerged
patch of weed that might harbour his prey, factors unseen determine that it
shall drift and bobble its way back always to the same undesired point. 
Whether driven by some undertow or unfelt breeze, some tension in the line or vibration
conducted through the rod, the pattern defies perception.  And what seem
to be tentative bites – even to his highly trained eye – may only
be the bump of the slowly shifting bait against innocuous subaquatic
obstructions, or invisible zephyrs that tease at the surface tension.

If indeed his ruminations mirror the same
inexorable yet unfathomable path, then his dissatisfaction can be no surprise: nothing
tangible is forthcoming, and he must leave his colleagues disappointed and
himself frustrated.  It is one thing to sail to a tempting conclusion, but
without a clearly charted course it is a port with no name.

And now Skelgill is shaken from his
reverie by the shrill ringtone of his mobile.

The phone is inside a polythene bag in a
buckled side-pocket of his rucksack, and he knows he can’t get to it before the
call diverts.  Unhurriedly he places his plate on top of the
Trangia
,
and drills the half-full enamel mug of tea down into the shingle at his
feet.  Then he extracts the now-silent handset and sets it upon a stone,
as if to wait for the voicemail notification – but when the screen springs
once more into life it’s the same caller trying again: DS Leyton.

‘Yep.’  Skelgill does not sound best
pleased.

‘Guv, Guv...’ His Sergeant’s voice has a breathless
wheeze.  ‘You’re needed.’

‘What?’

‘Bit of an emergency, Guv – it’s
the Chief’s boy – the one at Oakthwaite.’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s gone missing, Guv.’

Skelgill rises abruptly, catching his
head on the apex of the bivvy and almost toppling onto his cooking paraphernalia. 
He manages to leap over the still-hot items and regain his balance with a controlled
stumble and little trot into the water’s edge, accompanied by a selection of expletives
mainly of the A to C variety.

‘Guv?  You okay, Guv?’

‘Leyton, I’m fine – just a bit
pissed off, as you can imagine – what do you mean he’s gone missing?’

‘Sorry, Guv.  What it is, in a
nutshell – the school thought he’d gone home for the weekend –
after that fell-running jaunt – and at home they thought he’d stayed at
school.’

Skelgill stamps about in the shallows.

‘Has he got a mobile?’

‘They’re not allowed ‘em, Guv.’

‘When was he last seen, then?’

‘I don’t know, Guv – I’m on my way
now.  The Chief’s going apoplectic.  We’re just to get there and find
him fast.  Sounds like she’s ready to call in the army.’

‘When did they notice he’d gone AWOL?’

‘In the past half-hour, Guv.  He
didn’t turn up for registration, so they phoned home to see if he was sick or
whatever.  The housekeeper said he’d never been back.’

‘He’s probably skiving off around the
school somewhere.’

Skelgill’s tone is a blend of the sceptical
and the unsympathetic.  DS Leyton, conversely, can’t conceal a growing
note of desperation in his voice.

‘Guv – I know – I’m sure it’s
a false alarm.  But what with these suicides... it’s a three-line
whip.  I’m to phone her back to confirm you’re on your way.’

Skelgill takes a kick at a rock, but his
contact is rather better than he perhaps intends and it flies across and knocks
over his
Kelly Kettle
, spilling some of its contents hissing into the
embers in its fire base.  He surveys his equipment and shelter and the
boat.  It will take him a good hour to decamp, row back to Peel Wyke,
chain up the boat, drive home, shower and change and make it over to the school. 
But his temporary camp is pitched on an isolated and overgrown promontory of
the lake’s largely untrodden east bank: inaccessible from all directions but
the water, inconspicuous and probably safe from looters.  There’s little
to prevent him from heading directly to the landing stage at Oakthwaite.  He
holds out his arms and inspects his attire.

‘Leyton – tell her I’ll be there in
fifteen minutes – but I shan’t be looking like I’ve arrived via Savile
Row.’

DS Leyton lets out an audible sigh of
relief.  ‘Thanks, Guv – I don’t think she’ll be too bothered if you
turn up in your boxers.’

‘Leyton – it might come to that.’

‘Actually, Guv – now you mention
it, I’ve got me other whistle hanging in the back – the missus’s been nagging
me to put it into the cleaners in Penrith.’

There’s a pause while Skelgill
contemplates this offer.

‘Wait for me in the school car park.’