The School of English Murder (4 page)

Reluctantly Amiss recognised the truth in Pooley’s remarks. He sighed gustily. ‘That was another thing in the Whitehall book.’

‘What?’

‘That the sort of people who join and flourish in the Civil Service like private power. Otherwise they’d be politicians. They get their kicks out of knowing that the public don’t realise they’re actually running things. Makes us sound like a bunch of cradle-rockers. Or come to think of it, maybe we’re talking about the prerogative of the harlot.’

‘Which is why you were quite happy for the Super to take the credit?’

‘That’s the theory.’

‘I see. And to think I thought it was altruism. Well, that’s a weight off my conscience. I needn’t worry about anything happening to you, since your motives are purely selfish.’

‘If I am stupid enough to go after this job and if they are stupid enough to take me and if anything happens to me, my bank manager — or rather Rachel, since I am temporarily without a bank manager — will have instructions to pin up in every CID canteen in the Met the information that Ellis Pooley is a loaded, pinko aristocrat.’

5

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Amiss spent his Sunday morning dithering. He had no one to talk to about his dilemma. Rachel was accompanying the Ambassador on a visit to Lille, Milton was off on his course and Ann Milton was spending a term at an American university on a business fellowship.

He speculated about talking it over with someone else. His parents? His father would tell him not to be daft and his mother would have hysterics. Come to think of it, he hadn’t even summoned up the nerve yet to tell them he had left the Civil Service. Poor devils, he thought, they set such store by common sense. How did they ever produce me?

Mentally he ran down the list of his friends and failed to come up with anyone with sufficient discretion and good judgement. He decided to do something useful. Motivated by the memory of Pooley’s orderly flat, he spent a quarter of an hour cleaning up the worst of the mess before taking off to the Fox and Goose to resume his duties.

It was a predominantly Irish pub, which meant that fast service was required even though the majority of the clientele were in no great rush to head off for their Sunday lunch. Only the prevalent good humour compensated for the sheer physical demands of the job. So far Amiss had had no dispute with customers except over his refusal to allow them all to buy drinks for him and by now he had perfected a line of banter that disarmed all but the most truculent troublemaker. His evident enjoyment of superficially anti-English leg-pulling had won him great support among the regulars, so he could always count on one of them stepping in to tell off a compatriot who was making a nuisance of himself.

When the last customer had left mournfully for home, Amiss helped to clean up, was fed a hearty plate of beef, cabbage and potatoes by Mrs O’Hara, and had cash pressed into his hand by her husband with a request to help out the same evening. Only the previous night he had been moaning to Pooley about the impossibility of avoiding entanglement in the black economy: all casual bar work he knew of was cash in hand. His choice was simple: refuse the job or take the cash. The alternative course — to shop the O’Haras to Inland Revenue — failed to appeal.

When he left the premises at four, he decided on a walk. He felt resigned rather than surprised when he realised he was heading towards Knightsbridge.

It didn’t take him long to find the address Pooley had given him. The Knightsbridge School of English was in a quiet side street about five minutes from Hyde Park. Amiss was surprised at the pleasantness of the location and the excellent state of repair of the beautifully-proportioned Georgian building: it seemed seriously out of keeping with the image he had formed of an ageing leftie, bike-riding principal.

He stood reading the two notices on the neat, glass-covered board outside. One invited students to take English courses on a shift-system: 9.00-12.00, 2.00-5.00 or 7.00-10.00. Each course ran for ten weeks and to his surprise seemed to work out at only about two pounds an hour. The second notice stated simply that there was a vacancy for a teacher of English as a Foreign Language.

As he was about to turn away, the front door of the building opened. A balding man with a wispy beard emerged, struggling to manoeuvre his bicycle through the door without injuring the paintwork, the machine or himself. Shit, thought Amiss, if he sees me now he might recognise me if I turn up tomorrow and it’ll seem odd. Without any further pause and stifling the temptation to say ‘Ned Nurse I presume?’, he stepped forward and called ‘Excuse me.’

The man jumped and barked his shins on the front mudguard with such force that Amiss winced sympathetically. He waited until the agony seemed to have abated slightly and said, ‘I’m awfully sorry to have startled you. Are you all right?’

His victim summoned up as friendly an expression as pain would allow and said, ‘Oh, I’m fine, fine. Not your fault at all. On the contrary, dear boy, all mine. Completely mine. Can I help you?’

‘I was just wondering if the English teacher’s job was still vacant.’

‘Well, my dear boy, unless my partner has filled it without telling me — and I’m sure he wouldn’t do that — I believe it is. In any case, now that you’re here, would you like to come in and talk it over? It might save you a wasted journey if you find you don’t like us.’ And taking Amiss’s ‘Oh please, I don’t want to put you out’ for consent, he began to pull the bicycle backwards through the front door. Amiss followed apprehensively.

‘Come in, come in, dear boy,’ he bleated. ‘Come into the lounge and let’s have a chat. Now… mmm?’ and his brow furrowed. ‘Oh, dear. What can I find to offer you?’ He looked distractedly at Amiss, who kept up a steady mutter of I’m fine, honestly, thank yous which failed to alleviate his host’s distress. ‘Here, here. Do sit down here. I think you’ll find it the most comfortable of the chairs. Or maybe this is.’

Amiss sat down firmly on the nearest and introduced himself.

‘Oh, Robert Amiss, very good, very good. I always find it helpful to repeat my students’ names when I meet them first. You can remember them better then. Now what can I find to offer you?’ And he cast his gaze round helplessly.

‘And you are…?’

‘Oh my dear fellow, my abject apologies. I am Ned Nurse. I’m the principal here.’ He rushed towards Amiss, who leaped to his feet. They shook hands with great ceremony and Nurse headed off towards a corner of the room. ‘Would you like some coffee? Oh, dear no. I remember now, the machine has broken down.’

‘Honestly, I’m fine.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you could do with something.’

Amiss tried to remember if Pooley had said anything about Nurse having suffered concussion. Surely to God he couldn’t be like this normally? It was like trying to have a job interview with a cross between Lord Emsworth and the White Rabbit. Nurse was now wrenching helplessly at a cupboard door that refused to open.

‘I think it’s locked, Mr Nurse.’

‘Oh, not “Mr Nurse”, please. Call me Ned and I’ll call you Roger. You’ll find us very informal here, that is to say if you join us. What did you say? Oh yes, the cupboard. Oh you’re so right. It is locked. And I have the key.’ He pulled out a heavily laden key-ring, and to Amiss’s bewilderment instantly found the right key and opened the cupboard with a flourish. ‘There’s only whisky here, I’m afraid. Now wait a minute. I’m sure there’s more somewhere else. Now where would that be, I wonder? Where would that be?’

‘Whisky’ll be fine,’ said Amiss, who by this stage would have accepted hemlock if it would have speeded things up.

Nurse poured an enormous measure into a tumbler and handed it over. ‘You must forgive me if I don’t join you. Poison to me. Poison.’

‘Whisky or alcohol in general?’

‘Alcohol, dear boy. I can’t handle it at all. Behave most peculiarly. But we don’t want to talk about me. Let’s talk about you. Let’s talk about you.’

An hour later Amiss felt quite wrung out. He had been through what felt like his entire life history with Nurse very much in the style in which he imagined he must conduct his classes. He seemed to want information almost in essay form. ‘Tell me, my dear boy. What used you to do on your vacations?’ or ‘Does an Oxbridge education make one a better man, eh? Tell me what you think. Tell me what you think.’ If the object of the exercise was to establish if he could speak English fluently, then it was well conducted. Amiss’s gratuitous thrusts at the expense of the Prime Minister had elicited squeaks of approval, but he was at a loss to see what it had to do with testing his ability to teach.

He was emboldened to ask a question about the job, thus sending Nurse into a state of agitated guilt. ‘Oh, my dear boy, my dear boy, I’ve been most remiss. Of course that was what we were really here to talk about in the first place. Come with me and I’ll show you round.’

He rushed out of the room, throwing a cascade of only intermittently audible information over his shoulder as he went. He was obviously uninterested in architecture or decoration and hence the tour was undertaken at whirlwind speed. Amiss’s initial reaction to the interior of the house was bafflement. It consisted of six rooms, four of which were furnished as classrooms. Only what Nurse had called the lounge could comfortably accommodate more than eight. The décor throughout was luxurious if slightly flash, conjoining oddly with the low student fees. ‘Do you teach most of your students in the lounge, then?’ he asked Nurse hesitantly as they said goodbye in the hallway.

‘Oh, my goodness no, dear boy. This is only for what dear Rich calls the beautiful people. The others are taught in the prefabs in the garden.’

‘The beautiful people?’

‘Rich’ll explain all that to you in the morning. You will come and see us both then, won’t you? Come at eleven, at coffee break.’

By the time they parted, it was almost seven and it was only by spending an hour’s wages on a taxi that Amiss was able to get to work at opening time.

‘Oh, I’ll go, I’ll go,’ he said wearily over the phone to Pooley at midnight. ‘Christ, I’m beginning to talk like him.’

‘He sounds as if he’s almost under with Alzheimer’s.’

‘Possible. Or maybe he’s just vague. I must admit I took to the old boy, wearing though he is. He’s intelligent, well-read and seems terribly sweet-natured.’

‘Yes, so did my friend. Said he looked very odd though.’

‘Well, it’s his clothes rather than him really. He’s clean enough, but his clothes have washed-in stains and look as if they’re hand-me-downs. And the odd socks and open-toed sandals don’t help.’

‘I wonder what Rich is like. From what you’ve said it sounds as if poor old Nurse is in love with him.’

‘Well, he does sound a bit of a glamour-boy. Ex-ski instructor and all that. I’ll have to put on my best frock tomorrow.’

‘Good luck. I’m almost sure I hope you’re offered the job.’

‘I feel the same. I’m getting curious now, though I know it’s against my better judgement. God rot you anyway, Ellis. Sleep well.’

6

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‘These two jobs definitely don’t go together,’ said Amiss to himself as he responded to the alarm at six the next morning. Carrying out his postal round in a heavy drizzle confirmed in him a growing sense of hope that Rich might offer him the job. He was beyond caring about the danger of working with hypothetically murderous colleagues. More than anything else he wanted to be able to stay in bed until a reasonable time and work protected from the elements. He might even make enough money to be able to leave Seamus O’Hara as well. He was great company, a delightful man and a generous employer, but his habit of hosting spontaneous parties at closing time was wrecking Amiss’s health. He felt his youth was going in the service of what O’Hara, despite recent innovations in the drug world, persisted in calling ‘the crack’.

Back home by nine, he had some coffee and toast and soothed his nerves with the magisterial sweep of the
Independent
. Then he set about choosing a suitable wardrobe for a putative language teacher. He decided to dress up to the décor of the school rather than dress down to the level of its principal.

Amiss had never been a natty dresser. Although as a civil servant he had been required to look respectable, there had been absolutely no pressure to look smart. Indeed, there was an unspoken assumption among senior officials that gentlemen were uninterested in clothes. Yet although his preferred garb was that of jeans and sweater, somewhere buried deep within him was a dandy waiting to get out. Amiss possessed a few pieces of rarely-worn finery that bore testimony to these occasional outbursts of foppishness. One was the silk shirt that took half an hour to iron; the other was the blazer.

It had been running into his old Oxford friend Jeremy Buckland that sent Amiss in pursuit of such an unlikely garment.

Buckland had always been a sartorial byword for understated yet exquisite style. Rather as Audrey Hepburn had once made the justification for couture, Buckland made his most uncouth contemporaries long to head for Savile Row. In the five minutes that was all the time they had had together, Amiss had found that his life-long prejudice against blazers had evaporated. Worse. He had to have one. It had taken him a whole Saturday to run the perfect specimen to earth in Jermyn Street, where it cost him half a week’s salary. Buying a shirt, tie, trousers and shoes that lived up to its perfection took care of the other half. The accessories had been worn often, the blazer never. On looking at himself in his own home Amiss had been unable to think of any occasion when he could wear it without embarrassment. On Buckland a blazer had looked casually smart: on Amiss it looked self-conscious.

‘Just the job for Rich,’ he said to himself, unhooking it from the rail and checking its buttons for signs of corrosion. ‘Anyway, it’s the nearest I can get to looking like a beautiful person.’