‘So in consultation with the police, bearing in mind the disruption that is likely to affect all of us in the coming days, I have decided to suspend classes for the time being.’
A ripple of disturbance ran through the assembled teachers. Elaine’s neck became mottled with pink patches, the traditional sign that she was about to lose her temper.
Stephen Smith, a sweet-natured man and one of the longest-serving teachers at the school, raised his hand.
‘Elaine, don’t you think the girls might need the routine of classes and work to keep their minds off what has happened?’
‘I did consider that, Stephen, thank you. But I am led to believe that the next couple of days are going to be a write-off from the point of view of concentration. Already it is impossible to work with all the noise and disruption that is going on.’
As one, we turned to look out of the window, to where the news crews were setting up, their vans parked along the school wall. They had started to move on from the woods. The media would need a new backdrop for the lunchtime news and it looked like the school was it.
‘I don’t know if any of you have been in the school office this morning, but it has been chaotic to say the least. Janet has been fielding calls from worried parents since she arrived. They are concerned about their children’s safety, even though no one has suggested that the school is in any way involved in this terrible tragedy.’ Elaine’s voice broke a little over the last few words. I wondered, perhaps unfairly, if her grief was for the school’s reputation rather than Jenny.
‘We have a duty to guarantee the safety of the girls, and I don’t feel comfortable about making that sort of promise to the parents. It’s not that I think they are at
risk
of being attacked. I’m simply aware that the press are going to be very intrusive, and that sort of publicity can attract the wrong sort of attention. I don’t want them to be exposed to that sort of atmosphere.’
Which was fair enough.
Elaine darted a look at Vickers, who looked even more desiccated than he had the night before. His eyes were hooded and I found it hard to guess what he was thinking. ‘Also, Detective Chief Inspector Vickers has asked if he can use some of the school facilities, so I want us to be able to give him free access to the school.’
‘Very kind,’ Vickers said. He straightened a little, straining to pitch his voice so that everyone could hear. ‘Our main incident room is at Elmview Police Station, but we’ll be doing some interviews here. We’re interested in talking to Jennifer’s friends and classmates, and we don’t like to conduct interviews of that sort in a police station. We prefer to keep them in familiar surroundings. We’ll also be using the school hall for a press conference later on today as it’s got all the facilities we’ll need.’
I couldn’t understand what Elaine was thinking. If I had been her, I would have wanted to keep the school as far away from the investigation as possible. From the way she kept looking to DCI Vickers for guidance, he seemed to have conquered her completely. It was all very inconvenient, particularly given the fact that I wanted to stay out of the investigation, off the radar, out of the loop.
‘So can we all go home or what?’ Geoff Turnbull spoke from the back of the room, as unruffled as if this sort of thing was routine, predictably crass. I didn’t bother to
turn
around to look at him, though I could picture him lounging there, all blue eyes and biceps and carefully groomed black hair. He was one of the PE teachers at Edgeworth, and I liked him not at all.
Elaine bristled. ‘No, Geoff. I would like the teachers to make themselves available to the police and the girls, even though no actual teaching will take place. Given that we are going to have a lot of students hanging around, waiting to be picked up by their parents, it’s more important than ever that you should be here. We will divide the girls up into groups and supervise them until their parents or guardians arrive to collect them. I’m afraid I will be asking you to stay on after the end of the school day also. I’m going to need your support today, so I would ask you all to bear with me.’
Jules Martin said, ‘How long is this going to take? When are we going to get back to normal? Some of the girls are preparing for exams at the moment and I don’t want their work to be disrupted.’
I shot a cynical look at her and got a bland smile in response. If I had a friend in the staffroom, it was Jules, and she was about as dedicated as I was. Her concern was laudable, and almost definitely faked.
‘I’m very much aware of the exam students,’ Elaine said. ‘For them, this will be a study week. Janet will help by sending out revision plans for the relevant classes, which I expect all of you to supply to the school office by lunchtime today. As for how long this will take …’ She turned to Vickers.
‘I can’t give you an estimate at the moment. Based on
my
experience of previous investigations, the media interest will die down over the next few days unless there are significant developments. We’ll do our best to minimise the disturbance and hopefully everything will run as normal here next week. We should have finished our interviews by then anyway. I’ve got a big team here, so we should get through everyone quite quickly.’
Elaine checked her watch. ‘OK, everyone. I’d like you all to go to your form rooms and take the register, then send the girls to the school hall. I’ll tell them what’s going on. I think it’s important to involve them in this and keep them informed.’
‘But what will we say if they ask us questions?’ Stephen asked, looking troubled.
‘Think of something,’ Elaine said through gritted teeth, clearly teetering on the edge of her last nerve.
The staffroom emptied in record time. I slid out past DCI Vickers, making eye contact for a split second. He nodded discreetly – almost imperceptibly – in return, to my relief. The last thing I wanted was for everyone else to work out that I’d met DCI Vickers before, and recently. The identity of the person who’d discovered Jenny’s body had been the main topic of conversation when I got to the staffroom. If nothing else, Carol Shapley was thorough – she had interrogated pretty much everyone before they got through the door.
The assembly hall was almost full. I had managed to find a chair near the front, by the wall, facing in so I could scan the entire room. The girls, who had never been
known
to be completely quiet in their lives, were just as silent as the teachers had been earlier. Not a flicker interrupted the rapt attention they were paying to the stage where Elaine was speaking, again flanked by the chief inspector and the press officer. In the intervening hour or so, Elaine had ironed out a few of the kinks in her presentation. She ripped through her speech without a twitch.
The assembly hall was much emptier than it should have been; I guessed, looking along the rows of girls, that around half had been kept home from school or had gone home already. That tallied with what I’d found in my own greatly diminished class on taking the roll. Word had got around already that it was an Edgeworth girl who had died. Now they just wanted to hear the details.
‘This will be a difficult time for all of us,’ Elaine intoned, ‘but I expect you to behave with dignity and decorum. Please respect the Shepherds’ privacy. If you should happen to be approached by the media, don’t comment on Jenny, the school or anything to do with the investigation. I do not want to see an Edgeworth student speaking to any journalists. Anyone who does will be suspended. Or worse.’
Some of the older girls looked more devastated by the media ban than the news about Jenny. Their heartfelt sobbing had not so much as smudged their impeccably applied make-up, I noted.
‘The school secretary is contacting your parents as I speak,’ Elaine continued. ‘We are asking them to collect you or make other arrangements for you to be looked
after
for the next few hours. The school will be closed for the rest of the week.’
DCI Vickers looked a bit shocked at the fizz of excitement that spread through the assembly hall. I wasn’t. The girls, like all teenagers, were self-centred and unthinkingly brutal on occasion. They may have been genuinely upset about Jenny, but they were also working the angles for themselves. An unexpected week off, for whatever reason, was not to be sniffed at.
Elaine held up her hands and silence fell again. ‘This is Detective Chief Inspector Vickers. He is leading the investigation into this very sad death and he has a couple of things he would like to say to you.’ Another ripple ran through the hall. I wondered if Vickers had ever been the focus of so much overexcited female attention before. His ears, I was amused to see, were delicately shading to dark pink before my eyes. He stepped forward and leaned in to the microphone. Looking rumpled, pale, slightly shabby, his edge was well disguised.
‘Thank you, Ms Pennington.’ He had leaned too close to the microphone and the ‘p’ of Pennington popped from the overamplification. ‘I’d like to appeal to any of you who have any information regarding Jenny Shepherd to come forward and speak to me or one of my team.’ He nodded to the back of the hall. Like everyone else, I looked around and I jumped when I noticed Andrew Blake leaning against the door frame, two uniformed police officers beside him. Valerie was presumably tied up with the Shepherds.
‘Alternatively, you can speak to one of your teachers if
you
find that easier,’ Vickers said. Every head in the hall turned back to face him, as synchronised as the crowd at a tennis match. ‘They’ll be able to help. Don’t think that what you know isn’t worth telling us. We’ll decide if it’s useful or not. What we’re looking for is information about Jenny – in particular her friends in and outside school, and anything strange that you might have heard from her or about her, anything out of the ordinary. Was there anything worrying her? Was she in any kind of trouble? Was she involved in any disagreements with other students or anyone else? Was there anything going on that she was keeping a secret from grown-ups? If anything, anything at all occurs to you, please don’t keep it to yourself. But I would say one thing: try not to gossip among yourselves before you talk to us. It’s all too easy to talk something up until you’re not sure you can distinguish between what you know and what you’ve heard.’ He looked around the room again. ‘I know there will be a great temptation to speak to the media about this. They are very good at getting information out of people – better than the police, sometimes. But you can’t trust them, and you really shouldn’t talk to them, as your headmistress says. If you have something to say, talk to us.’
The girls nodded, hypnotised. For a man who was about a thousand points down on the glamour scale from Inspector Morse, Vickers had done pretty well.
What he hadn’t done, of course, was answer the questions they had really wanted to ask. So for the rest of the day, in between supervising study groups and developing emergency revision plans for the exam students, I tried
to
deal with the speculation that was raging through the school.
‘Miss, did she have her head cut off? Someone said her head was, like, gone?’
‘I heard that she was stabbed hundreds and hundreds of times, yeah? And all her guts were hanging out, and you could see her bones and everything.’
‘Miss, was she tortured? I heard she was all burned and cut.’
‘Was she raped, Miss?’
‘How did she die, Miss?’
‘Who killed her, Miss?’
I was as repressive as I knew how to be. ‘Get on with your work, girls. You’ve got plenty to do. The police will find out who did it.’
I actually felt sorry for them. Despite their bravado, the girls were scared. As an introduction to mortality, it was a tough one. What teenager doesn’t think she’ll live for ever? To have one of their own snuffed out so violently was a shock, and they needed to talk about it. I got it. But it made for a tiring sort of day.
I was still at the school at half past five, as Elaine had predicted. The last of the girls in my care had just been collected by her father, a fat-necked man in an expensive suit, driving a Jaguar. He had taken the opportunity to tell me what a waste of his time it had been to make him collect his daughter, and that as usual the school had completely overreacted. I wondered what exactly was usual about the murder of one of his daughter’s contemporaries,
but
I managed not to say anything as the girl climbed into the car, mute and round-eyed with misery. I could practically hear her begging me not to make things worse by arguing with him, so I smiled serenely.
‘We’re just doing our best to make sure the girls are safe. That’s the most important thing, I’m sure you agree.’
‘It’s a bit late now to worry about keeping the girls safe. Horse and stable-door stuff, this. And you get yourselves a nice little holiday into the bargain by closing the school for the rest of the week. No consideration for the parents, who have to sort out childcare for the next four days.’ His face, which was already flushed, went a shade darker. ‘You can tell your headmistress that I am deducting a week from this term’s fees. That should make her reconsider her priorities.’
‘I’ll pass that on,’ I said, then stepped back smartly as he revved the engine and sped away, tyres spitting gravel. It hadn’t been worth pointing out to him that the Shepherds would give everything they had to be in his position, but I had thought it.
As I turned to go back into the school, someone called my name and I looked around.
Oh no
. Geoff Turnbull was jogging across the car park, heading straight for me. Running away would have been undignified. Besides, he was quick on his feet. I’d have to tough it out.
‘I haven’t seen you all day.’ He stopped altogether too close to where I was standing and ran a hand down my arm caringly. ‘This is horrendous, isn’t it? How are you coping?’
To my utter horror, the question made my eyes fill
with
tears. It was totally involuntary, the product of exhaustion and stress. ‘I’m OK.’
‘Hey,’ he said, shaking my arm gently. ‘You don’t have to pretend with me, you know. Let it out.’