'What about a cup of coffee?' suggested Baines.
'What about your roster?'
'OK. I'll make the coffee.'
'No you won't.' She got up from her seat, picked up the kettle, and walked out to the adjacent cloakroom. Baines looked ruefully at the pile of letters. The usual sort of thing, no doubt. Parents, builders, meetings, insurance, examinations. He would have been dealing with all that if. . He poked haphazardly among the remaining letters, and suddenly a flicker of interest showed in his shrewd eyes. The letter was lying face down and on the sealed flap he read the legend Thames Valley Police'. He picked it up and turned it over. It was addressed to the headmaster with the words PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL typed across the top in bold red capitals.
'What are you doing going through my mail?' Mrs. Webb plugged in the kettle and with mock annoyance snatched the letter from him.
'See that?' asked Baines.
Mrs. Webb looked down at the letter. 'None of our business, is it?'
'Do you think he's been fiddling his tax returns?' Baines chuckled deeply.
'Don't be silly.'
'Shall we open it?'
'We shall not,' said Mrs. Webb.
Baines returned to his cramped desk and started on the prefects' roster. Phillipson would have to appoint half a dozen new prefects this term. Or, to be more precise, he would ask Baines to give him a list of possible names. In some ways the head wasn't such a bad chap.
Phillipson himself came in just after eleven. 'Morning, Baines. Morning, Mrs. Webb.' He sounded far too cheerful. Had he forgotten that school was starting tomorrow?
'Morning, headmaster.' Baines always called him 'headmaster'; the rest of the staff called him 'sir'. It was only a little thing, but it was something.
Phillipson walked across to his study door and paused by his secretary's desk. 'Anything important, Mrs. Webb?'
'I don't think so, sir. There's this, though.' She handed him the letter marked 'Private and Confidential', and Phillipson, with a slightly puzzled frown upon his face, entered his study and closed the door behind him.
In the newly-appointed county of Gwynedd, in a small semi-detached house on the outskirts of Caernarfon, another schoolmaster was acutely conscious that school restarted on the morrow. They had returned home only the previous day from a travesty of a holiday in Scotland — rain, two punctures, a lost Barclaycard and more rain — and there was a host of things to be done.
The lawn, for a start. Benefiting (where he had suffered) from a series of torrential downpours, it had sprouted to alarming proportions during their absence, and was in urgent need of an instant crop. At 9.30 a.m. he discovered that the extension for the electric mower was not functioning, and he sat himself down on the back doorstep with a heavy heart and a small screwdriver.
Life seldom seemed to run particularly smoothly for David Acum, until two years ago assistant French master at the Roger Bacon Comprehensive School in Kidlington, and now, still an assistant French master, at the City of Caernarfon School.
He could find no fault with the fittings at either end of the extension wire, and finally went inside again. No sign of life. He walked to the bottom of the stairs and yelled, his voice betraying ill-temper and exasperation, 'Hey! Don't you think it's about time you got out of that bloody bed?'
He left it at that and, back in the kitchen, sat down cheerlessly at the table where half an hour earlier he had made his own breakfast, and dutifully taken a tray of tea and toast upstairs. Ineffectually he tinkered once more with one of the wretched plugs. She joined him ten minutes later, dressing-gowned and beslippered.
'What's eating you?'
'Christ! Can't you see? I suppose you buggered this up the last time you hoovered — not that I can remember when that was!'
She ignored the insult and took the extension from him. He watched her as she tossed her long blonde hair from her face and deftly unscrewed and examined the troublous plugs. Younger than he was — a good deal younger, it seemed — he found her enormously attractive still. He wondered, as he often wondered, whether he had made the right decision, and once more he told himself he had.
The fault was discovered and corrected, and David felt better.
'Cup of coffee, darling?' All sweetness and light
'Not just yet. I've got to get cracking.' He looked out at the overgrown lawn and swore softly as faintly dotted lines of slanting drizzle formed upon the window pane.
A middle-aged woman, blowzy, unkempt, her hair in cylindrical curlers, materialized from a side door on the ground floor; her quarry was bounding clumsily down the stairs.
'I want to speak to yer.'
'Not now, sweetheart. Not now. I'm late.'
'If yer can't wait now yer needn't come back. Yer things'll be in the street.'
'Now just a minute, sweetheart.' He came close to her, leaned his head to one side and laid a hand on each of her shoulders. 'What's the trouble? You know I wouldn't do anything to upset you.' He smiled pleasantly enough and there was something approaching an engaging frankness in his dark eyes. But she knew him better.
'Yer've got a woman in yer room, 'aven't yer?'
'Now there's no need for you to get jealous, you know that.'
She found him repulsive now, and regretted those early days. 'Get 'er out and keep 'er out — there's to be no more women 'ere.' She slapped his hands from her shoulders.
'She'll be going, she'll be going — don't worry. She's only a young chick. Nowhere to kip down — you know how it is.'
'Now!'
'Don't be daft. I'm late already, and I'll lose the job if I ain't careful. Be reasonable.'
'Yer'll lose yer bed an' all if yer don't do as I tell yer.'
The youth took a dirty five-pound note from his hip pocket. 'I suppose that'll satisfy you for a day or two, you old bitch.'
The woman took the money, but continued to watch him. 'It's got to stop.'
'Yeah. Yeah.'
'How long's she been 'ere?'
'A day or two.'
'Fortnight, nearer, yer bleedin' liar.'
The youth slammed the door after him, ran down to the bottom of the road, and turned right into the Upper Richmond Road.
Even by his own modest standards, Mr. George Taylor had not made much of a success of his life. Five years previously, an unskilled manual worker, he had accepted 'voluntary redundancy' money after the shake-up that followed the reorganization of the Cowley Steel plant, had then worked for almost a year driving a bulldozer on the M40 construction programme and spent the next year doing little but casual jobs, and drinking rather too much and gambling rather too much. And then that terrible row and, as a result of it, his present employment. Each morning at 7.15 he drove his rusting, green Morris Oxford from his Kidlington council house into the city of Oxford, down past Aristotle Lane into Walton Street, and over the concreted track that led through the open fields, between the canal and the railway line, where lay the main city rubbish dump. Each morning of the working week for the past three years — including the day when Valerie had disappeared — he had made the same journey, with his lunchtime sandwiches and his working overalls beside him on the passenger seat.
Mr. Taylor was an inarticulate man, utterly unable to rationalize into words his favourable attitude towards his present job. It would have been difficult for anyone. The foul detritus of the city was all around him, rotten food and potato peelings, old mattresses, piles of sheer filth, rats and always (from somewhere) the scavenger gulls. And yet he liked it.
At lunchtime on Monday the fifteenth, he was sitting with his permanent colleague on the site, a man with a miry face ingrained with dirt, in the wooden hut which formed the only semi-hygienic haven in this wilderness of waste. They were eating their sandwiches and swilling down the thick bread with a dirty brown brew of ugly-looking tea. Whilst his companion mused over the racing columns of the Sun, George Taylor sat silent, a weary expression on his stolid face. The letter had brought the whole thing back to the forefront of his mind and he was thinking again of Valerie. Had he been right to persuade the wife to take it to the police? He didn't know. They would soon be round again; in fact he was surprised they hadn't been round already. It would upset the wife again — and she'd been nothing but a bag of nerves from the beginning. Funny that the letter had come just after Inspector Ainley was killed. Clever man, Ainley. He'd been round to see them only three weeks ago. Not official, like, but he was the sort of bloke who never let anything go. Like a dog with a bone.