There is an ice cream van parked outside the school gates. My father would never have allowed that, but Fallow tolerates it, and there is often a queue of boys there after school or at lunchtime. Some buy ice cream there; others return with bulging pockets and the furtive grin of one who has balked the system. Officially, junior boys are not supposed to leave the school grounds, but the van is only a few yards away, and Pat Bishop accepts it as long as no one crosses the busy road. Besides, he likes ice cream, and I’ve seen him several times, munching on a cone as he supervises the boys in the yard.
Fallow, too, visits the ice cream van. He does it in the morning, when lessons have already begun, making sure to circle the buildings clockwise and thereby avoid passing under the Common Room window. Sometimes he has a plastic bag with him—it is not heavy, but quite bulky—which he leaves under the counter. Sometimes he returns with a cone, sometimes not.
In fifteen years, many of the school’s passkeys have been changed. It was to have been expected—St. Oswald’s has always been a target, and security must be maintained—but the Porter’s Lodge, among others, is one of the exceptions. After all, why would anyone want to break into the Porter’s Lodge? There’s nothing there except an old armchair, a gas heater, a kettle, a phone, and a few girlie magazines hidden under the counter. There’s another hiding place too, a rather more sophisticated one, behind the hollow panel that masks the ventilation system, though this is a secret passed on jealously from one Porter to another. It is not very large but will easily take a couple of six-packs, as my father discovered, and as he told me then, the bosses don’t always have to know everything.
I was feeling good today as I drove home. Summer is almost at an end, and there is a yellowness and a grainy texture to the light that reminds me of the television shows of my adolescence. The nights are getting cold; in my rented flat, six miles from the city center, I will soon have to light the gas fire. The flat is not an especially attractive place—one room, a kitchen annex, and a tiny bathroom—but it’s the cheapest I could find, and, of course, I do not mean to stay for long.
It is virtually unfurnished. I have a sofa bed; a desk; a light; a computer and modem. I shall probably leave them all behind when I go. The computer is clean—or will be, when I have wiped the incriminating stuff from its hard drive. The car is rented and will also have been thoroughly cleaned by the rental firm by the time the police trace it back to me.
My elderly landlady is a gossip. She wonders why a nice, clean, professional person such as myself should choose to stay in a low-rent flatblock filled with druggies and ex-convicts and people on the dole. I’ve told her that I am a sales coordinator for a large international software company; that my firm has agreed to provide me with a house, but that the contractors have let them down. She shakes her head at this, bemoaning the ineptitude of builders everywhere, and hopes I’ll be in my new home by Christmas.
“Because it must be miserable, mustn’t it, love, not having your own place? And especially at Christmas—” Her weak eyes mist over sentimentally. I consider telling her that most deaths among old people occur during the winter months; that three-quarters of would-be suicides will take the plunge during the festive season. But I must maintain the pretense for the moment; so I answer her questions as best I can; I listen to her reminiscences; I am beyond reproach. In gratitude, my landlady has decorated my little room with chintz curtains and a vase of dusty paper flowers. “Think of it as your little home away from home,” she tells me. “And if you need anything, I’m always here.”
7
St. Oswald’s Grammar School for Boys
Thursday, 23rd September
The trouble began on Monday, and I knew something had happened when I saw the cars. Pat Bishop’s Volvo was there, as usual—always first in, he even spends the night in his office at busy times—but it was almost unheard-of to see Bob Strange’s car there before eight o’clock, and there was the Head’s Audi too, and the Chaplain’s Jag, and half a dozen others, including a black-and-white police car, all parked in the staff car park outside the Porter’s Lodge.
For myself, I prefer the bus. In heavy traffic it’s quicker, and in any case, I never need to go more than a few miles to work or to the shops. Besides, I have my bus pass now, and though I can’t help thinking that there must be some mistake (sixty-four—how can I be sixty-four, by all the gods?), it does save money.
I walked up the long drive to St. Oswald’s. The poplars are on the turn, gilded with the approach of autumn, and there were little columns of white vapor rising from the dewy grass. I looked into the Porter’s Lodge as I walked by. Fallow wasn’t there.
No one in the Common Room seemed to know exactly what was going on. Strange and Bishop were in the Head’s office with Dr. Tidy and Sergeant Ellis, the liaison officer. Still Fallow was nowhere to be seen.
I wondered if there had been a break-in. It happens occasionally, though for the most part Fallow does a reasonable job of looking after the place. A bit of a crawler with the management, and of course he’s been on the take for years. Small things—a bag of coal, a packet of biscuits from the kitchens, plus his pound-a-go racket for opening lockers—but he’s loyal enough, and when you consider that he earns about a tenth of even a junior Master’s salary, you learn to turn a blind eye. I hoped there was nothing the matter with Fallow.
As always, the boys knew it first. Rumors had been flying wildly throughout the morning; Fallow had had a heart attack; Fallow had threatened the Head; Fallow had been suspended. But it was Sutcliff, McNair, and Allen-Jones who found me at break time and asked me, with that cheery, disingenuous air they adopt when they know someone else is in trouble, whether it was true that Fallow had been arrested.
“Who told you that?” I said with a smile of deliberate ambiguity.
“Oh, I heard someone say something.” Secrets are currency in any school, and I hadn’t expected McNair to reveal his informant, but obviously, some sources are more reliable than others. From the boy’s expression I gathered that this had come from somewhere near the top.
“They’ve ripped out some panels in the Porter’s Lodge,” said Sutcliff. “They took out a whole bunch of stuff.”
“Such as?”
Allen-Jones shrugged. “Who knows?”
“Cigarettes, maybe?”
The boys looked at one another. Sutcliff flushed slightly. Allen-Jones gave a little smile. “Maybe.”
Later, the story came out; Fallow had been using his cheap day trips to France to bring back illicit, tax-free cigarettes, which he had been selling—via the ice cream man, who was a friend of his—to the boys.
The profits were excellent—a single cigarette costing up to a pound, depending on the age of the boy—but St. Oswald’s boys have plenty of money, and besides, the thrill of breaking the rules right under the nose of the Second Master was almost irresistible. The scheme had been going on for months, possibly years; the police had found about four dozen cartons hidden behind a secret panel in the lodge, and many hundreds more in Fallow’s garage, stacked floor to ceiling behind a set of disused bookcases.
Both Fallow and the ice cream man confirmed the cigarette story. Of the other items found in the lodge, Fallow denied all knowledge, although he was at a loss to explain their presence. Knight identified his bar mitzvah pen; later, and with some reluctance, I claimed my old green Parker. I was relieved in one sense that no boy in my form had taken them; on the other hand I knew that this was yet another small nail in the coffin of John Fallow, who had at one blow lost his home, his job, and quite possibly his freedom.