The Head is Dead

  With a sigh of relief, Mum removed the flowers from the old woman’s grasp. “We can deliver them now. We won’t keep you any longer.”

  Pearl hadn’t finished with us, though. She looked at Ricky, sitting in the front seat with the window wound down and his face half out as if he’d been enjoying the breeze, and tutted mournfully. “He’ll be twenty-one next month. I can hardly believe it! He was such a lovely little lad,” she said. “So sweet natured. So quiet.”

  “Really?” said Mum. “Poppy said he was quite upset at the spring fayre.”

  “Yes… Well, he doesn’t like crowds these days. It’s a pity, they never used to bother him. He was an absolute sweetie, you know, when he was younger. One of life’s innocents, if you know what I mean. Never a shred of nastiness or spite. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. He was always locked in his own little world, of course. But he made it look like a nice place to be.” She gave a wistful laugh. “Some days I wished I could join him there.”

  Mrs Plumtree and Ricky got out of the car. She looked pale, but she waved and smiled at us before opening the boot to get the shopping out. As she and Ricky started up the path, we edged back towards the wall. But before we could escape Pearl’s clutches she said to Mum, “He must be missing his brother, I suppose. We hardly see Davy these days. He’s always off somewhere or other. I don’t know how Joyce affords it, really I don’t. And what with her retiring soon. How’s she going to manage, I wonder?” She sighed and then added, “Ricky changed the day Davy went travelling. Poor lad. He never seemed quite the same again.”

  I was looking at Pearl when I felt it. Something weird. Nasty. Like a stab wound: a knife between my ribs. Someone was staring at me. At us. And that person was thinking thoughts that were Pure Evil. For the second time since we’d been in Barnford, I could smell malice in the air.

  I looked wildly around but couldn’t see anyone new in the street. There were Mrs Plumtree and Ricky struggling with the shopping. There was the old lady, still rabbiting on about Nothing in Particular.

  And then I noticed Mr Piper coming up the road pushing a double buggy containing two chocolate-smeared children and my stomach turned right over. He called a cheery “Hello!” and stopped for a chat. He didn’t stay long because the kids started to wail. “Better get going,” he said, smiling at Mrs Plumtree. “These monsters need to be fed.” He rolled his eyes heavenwards and added, “No rest for the wicked!”

  Before he was even out of earshot, Pearl said to Mum, “He’s the acting head now. That must mean more money, mustn’t it? I heard they’ve been struggling lately. His wife’s scared they might even lose the house. Nice for him to have a bit extra, what with the kiddies. They live in the next street, you know. Such a lovely family.”

  He reached the corner – a dad with his two small kids heading home for tea – and it should have been a nice, cosy sight. But just before he disappeared, he looked back over his shoulder and I could see he’d heard every word. The look he darted at Pearl was one of naked fury and I was totally unnerved by it. I could feel something ugly and menacing lurking; it was almost as if evil was shimmering in the street like a heat haze.

  “Come on,” I said to Graham. “Let’s go.”

  I jumped over the wall, closely followed by a mystified Graham. With Mum trailing behind, we hurried back in the direction of the B&B before Mrs Plumtree had even had a chance to thank Mum for the flowers.

  the plot thickens

  I didn’t even try to explain the odd sensation I’d had outside Mrs Plumtree’s, because I knew Graham liked to stick to Scientifically Proven Facts. Instead I said, “Mr Piper gave Pearl a really nasty look back there.”

  “I can’t say I’m entirely surprised,” he replied. “I gather grown-ups don’t take kindly to having their financial affairs gossiped about. He must have been terribly embarrassed.”

  I didn’t push it any further but changed the subject slightly. “Speaking of financial affairs… I don’t get it about Mr Edwards. Surely anyone clever enough to dream up a plot this complicated isn’t going to make a stupid mistake about money? If he did nick it, he wouldn’t have shoved it into his own bank, would he?”

  “I agree,” said Graham. “That would be too obvious. The sensible thing would be to hide it in an offshore account. The whole thing is very puzzling.”

  We walked back to the B&B lost in our own thoughts. When we got there we found DCI Swan waiting for us.

  “You’re quite sure that Mr Edwards started doing the murder trail before you saw Mr Walters answer his phone?” she demanded.

  “Oh, he did answer it, then, did he?” I said, a bit sarcastically. “He wasn’t dialling out?”

  DCI Swan frowned. “No,” she admitted. “You were right about that particular detail. We checked the phone log and it seems that the call to Mr Walters was in fact made from Mr Edwards’ phone.”

  I looked at Graham in a told-you-so sort of way. Mr Edwards had pretended to be Mrs King and lured Mr Walters to the spot to frame him for her murder. I was right!

  Or was I? If I was honest with myself, I had to admit that Mr Edwards didn’t look like he’d be capable of imitating the head’s voice. Not convincingly, anyway. Perhaps the man had hidden talents. Or did he?

  Fortunately I kept my mouth shut. If I’d spoken just then I’d have looked a complete idiot, because what DCI Swan said next blew my theory right out of the water.

  “Mr Edwards’ phone is the same make and model as Mrs King’s. I admit I was a little puzzled by it, but the explanation is quite simple. We believe she picked up the wrong one by accident and called Mr Walters to tell him that his son would be permanently excluded.”

  “So Mr Walters was telling the truth about her ringing him?” I asked.

  “It seems so,” agreed the policewoman. “But then – finding her asleep – the temptation to silence her proved too much for him. He smothered her on impulse. And before you start going on about possible connections between the two incidents, let me state quite categorically that there isn’t one. They are two different cases entirely. Both quite simple. Both clear cut. To the professionals, at any rate.”

  So there we were again with another open-and-shut case, and another suspect folded up nice and neatly inside it.

  But as DCI Swan left the B&B I could see from Graham’s face that he didn’t believe it any more than I did.

  I couldn’t let go of the idea. Neither could Graham. We were both one hundred per cent certain that someone had phoned Mr Walters to lure him to where the body lay, and it wasn’t Mrs King. The more we talked, the more we convinced ourselves that Mr Walters and Mr Edwards had both been framed. By the end of the day we’d have bet our entire savings that:

  a) they were innocent; and

  b) they’d been set up as part of the same grand plan.

  But how on earth were we ever going to work out what that plan was, or who was behind it?

  I found it hard to get to sleep that night. We were supposed to be heading home the following morning, and the thought of leaving before we’d worked out what had really happened to Mrs King made me tense and uncomfortable. I slept badly and woke up early, the sun streaming in through the cheap curtains of my room. I couldn’t stay in bed any longer, so I got up and opened them.

  It was a nice spring morning: the brightness of the sun made all the newly emerging leaves look unnaturally green. I was tetchy and restless. What I needed was a bit of exercise. Pulling on some clothes, I tiptoed out and posted a note for Mum under her door.

  Graham was already up and dressed, and when he heard me on the landing he came out of his room to meet me.

  “Fancy a walk?” I asked. He nodded, and silently we slipped out of the house.

  We headed for the park. If we were going to be stuck in the car for five hours, it made sense to get some fresh air – that’s what I’d written on the note to Mum, anyway. The streets were quiet at that time in the morning and we didn’t want to disturb anyone, so we didn’t talk much. Until we
reached the park gates I think we were both absorbed with our own thoughts. I’d half expected the gates to be shut, but a team of gardeners was already there, digging manure into a border at the entrance.

  It was a big park, with a huge lawn adjoining a football pitch. We meandered around the bandstand and along a shady avenue between two columns of tall trees towards the play area.

  If the sun hadn’t been quite so bright, we might have missed them. As we reached the end of the avenue, a ray of light slanted through the leaves, glinting off the golden frame of a pair of glasses that lay on the earth, their lenses cracked and broken.

  I thought somebody had dropped them: one of the gardeners, maybe, or a visitor. But then I saw a handbag, gaping wide open, its contents scattered among the leaf mould as if it had been rifled through. Someone had been mugged, that much was obvious. I was just opening my mouth to tell Graham, when I saw something far worse.

  A hand – its fingers old and wrinkled – extended towards us from under a bush as if it was begging for help.

  I couldn’t speak. I just pointed. And then I walked towards the body.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Graham warned.

  “I won’t,” I said, and the words came out as dry as dead leaves. “I just want to check whether they’re alive.” I pulled aside a branch and with a jolt of pure horror recognized the person whose dead eyes were staring back at me.

  It was Pearl.

  a murderous job

  It’s difficult to get your legs to work properly when you’re suffering from shock. Graham stayed to guard the body while I tried to sprint over to the team of gardeners at the gate, but with my limbs feeling like lead it ended up as more of a dazed stagger.

  They could see a mile off that something had happened. I was still more than fifty metres away when one of them dropped his shovel and walked quickly towards me, saying, “What’s wrong, love?”

  “An old lady’s been mugged. Killed! Back there.”

  It didn’t take long for the whole emergency-disaster-blue-flashing-light machine to swing into operation. Once the gardener had called the police, the park was closed and they began the investigation into another murder.

  DCI Swan drove me and Graham back to the B&B and took our very brief statements while Mum sat there looking appalled. I didn’t say a thing about that horrible feeling of lurking evil I’d had yesterday when I’d seen Mr Piper, or the funny look that he’d given Pearl. This time I was sticking to the facts, pure and simple – at least as far as the policewoman was concerned.

  But I knew that Pearl’s death was too much of a coincidence. The words she’d spoken as Mr Piper walked away down the road echoed through my brain. “He’s the acting head now. That must mean more money, mustn’t it? I heard they’ve been struggling lately. His wife’s scared they might even lose the house. Nice for him to have a bit extra, what with the kiddies.” And what had Graham said? Financial reasons come fifth on the list of most common motives for murder.

  New possibilities started to bubble away in the back of my mind, but I couldn’t talk to Graham about them. Not yet. Mum was determined to get away as quickly as possible and was bustling around making sure we’d packed everything. “The sooner we leave here, the better,” she said.

  But before we could go, we had to force ourselves to eat the Monster Fry Up that Majorie had prepared as a farewell breakfast.

  Graham and I were pretty quiet while we ate, which was more than could be said for Marjorie, who had heard our news with avid interest. “I don’t know what the town’s coming to,” she tutted. “All this crime! You’ll be glad to go home, won’t you?”

  Mum didn’t answer – her mouth was full of sausage and baked beans – but she nodded fervently and Marjorie carried on chatting.

  Twenty minutes later, when we were stuffed, Mum went off to shower and brush her teeth while Graham and I loaded our bags into the car. It felt strangely unsatisfying to be leaving: like we’d been out-manoeuvred by someone. But who?

  “Mr Piper,” I said as we stood on the pavement next to the car. “I reckon it’s him.”

  Graham looked at me. “It could be, in theory,” he agreed. “Particularly if he was worried about money. But what about the rest of the teaching staff? They’d all have a motive, wouldn’t they? There was that article in the newspaper about Mrs King’s plans to get rid of the inefficient ones. I believe people can be very aggressive when it comes to defending their livelihoods. We should go back to where this began and look thoroughly at each and every one of them.”

  “OK, let’s start with the fayre,” I said, trying to be Cool and Logical like Graham. “Most of the teachers stayed on the field that afternoon, didn’t they? They were stuck on their stalls.”

  “Yes.” Graham nodded.

  I screwed my eyes tight shut, running the fayre behind the lids like a speeded-up film. “As far as I can remember, only three teachers left the field that afternoon. Mr Piper rushed to the supermarket for coconuts. Mr Stuart got changed. And Miss Maris made herself a cup of tea.”

  “Let’s find out more about those three, then,” said Graham. “I expect the school has its own website. Do you think we could have a look on your mother’s laptop?”

  “Yes. But we’d better be quick.”

  We went inside, unpacked the laptop and fired it up while Mum was still in the bathroom. In a couple of minutes, Graham had tracked down the St Andrew’s School site, which included, as he’d suspected, staff profiles.

  It turned out that Mr Piper’s speciality was IT. Graham whistled through his teeth.

  “So he knows about computers,” he said. “That opens up all sorts of options.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He could have hacked into the school fund,” mused Graham. “It would be a relatively easy task for an expert to transfer funds to Mr Edwards’ account without him knowing.”

  “So you’re saying Mr Piper could have framed Mr Edwards?” I asked.

  Graham nodded. “But I don’t know why he’d want to.”

  “Maybe Mr Edwards didn’t like him. He might have wanted to stop Mr Piper from becoming acting head or something. So he had to be got out of the way.” Suddenly I got all excited. “Mr Piper could have swapped Mrs King’s pills, too – he was holding her bag when she did her opening speech. He went to the supermarket just before four o’clock, but he was back on the field a couple of minutes after you’d seen Mrs King yawning. The timing would be really tight, but he could have killed her. And the murder trail was his idea in the first place, wasn’t it?”

  “Was it?” Graham was frowning, putting the brakes on my enthusiasm. “I recall Mrs King telling us it was. But when we started planning it in the library, I seem to remember that Miss Maris told us Mr Stuart had thought it up.”

  My shoulders drooped. “Oh… Yes, I think she did.” I sighed. “It’s like a smokescreen, isn’t it? All those different rumours about who said what to whom? Do you think we’ll ever see through it?”

  “We can but try,” said Graham “Let’s have a look at Mr Stuart.” He clicked on the teacher’s picture, and when a potted profile came up, he whistled through his teeth again. “Mr Stuart runs the after-school chess club. So he’s a good strategist, capable of planning several moves ahead.”

  “You said that whoever was behind this had planned it like a chess game.” I was feeling dead confused. “But does Mr Stuart have the killer instinct?”

  “He seems a pleasant individual,” replied Graham. “He must have a fairly good-natured temperament if he was prepared to have wet sponges thrown at him all afternoon. But maybe if his job was on the line…” He left the sentence unfinished.

  “OK,” I said. “Well, Mr Stuart went off but he was there on his stall again when I rushed to the loo. So he could have killed Mrs King too.”

  “But we mustn’t forget the phone call to Mr Walters,” Graham reminded me. “Someone lured him to where Mrs King’s body lay. Could it have been Mr Stuart?”

/>   I shut my eyes, picturing the scene. “No,” I said at last. “He was there getting soaked when Mr Walters answered his phone. But Mr Piper could have done it. Or – if we’re looking at everyone – Miss Maris went for a cup of tea before Mr Walters took that call. Mr Edwards could easily have left his phone in the staff room. Maybe she did it.”

  “She’d only have had about two minutes.”

  “The same as Mr Piper.”

  “Who was collecting coconuts.”

  “Allegedly.” I sighed, then banged my hand on the table in frustration. “But what about Mr Edwards? What about Pearl? Where do they fit in? This whole thing’s like a maze. Someone’s set up all these openings that lead into dead ends. How are we going to find our way through it?”

  “We have to,” Graham replied solidly. “Mrs King was murdered. So was Pearl. They both died at the hands of a person or persons unknown.”

  “Person or persons,” I repeated. Suddenly a new thought hit me and a cold chill prickled down my spine. “There’s something we haven’t thought of,” I said quietly. “Something far worse.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The teachers could be working together.”

  teamwork

  We were already in the car, heading for the motorway, when Mum’s phone rang. She pulled over to answer it.

  It had honestly never occurred to me that there might be a Mr King. Mrs King had been such a massive personality, that the concept of her sharing a house with another living, breathing human being seemed totally implausible.

  But that very morning Mrs King’s husband had materialized in the St Andrew’s School assembly. He’d insisted on donating enough money for the environmental area to go ahead and had written out a cheque on the spot.