A (Very) Public School Murder Read online

  Simon Parke has been a script writer for Spitting Image, a Sony award-winning radio writer and a weekly columnist for the Daily Mail. An Oxford graduate in history and a former priest in the Church of England, he is now CEO of the Mind Clinic and author of many books including the Abbot Peter murder mysteries, set in Seaford on the Sussex coast, where Simon now lives with the seagulls and his running shoes.

  First published in Great Britain in 2016

  Marylebone House

  36 Causton Street

  London SW1P 4ST

  www.marylebonehousebooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Simon Parke 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Marylebone House does not necessarily endorse the individual views contained in its publications.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978–1–910674–34–5

  eBook ISBN 978–1–910674–35–2

  Typeset and eBook by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to Shellie Wright, Rebecca Parke and Elizabeth Spradbery for bringing their keen eyes to the fourth draft of the manuscript; they made it better. I am also indebted to Karl French, for his encouragement and insightful edit of the sixth draft. And finally, to Alison Barr who was there at the beginning of the Abbot Peter story; and who thought it would be a good idea if he was let loose for another adventure now. Here’s to many more.

  Author’s note

  Stormhaven Towers is a creation of fiction, as are the characters who people the place. But Stormhaven is less fictional – a thinly disguised version of Seaford, set between Newhaven and Eastbourne on the Sussex coast. Any geography or history on display in this story is probably true.

  It was their last exchange,

  after fourteen years of relatively happy marriage, her words; and she’s awkward when remembering that unhappy conversation . . .

  ‘An issue has arisen, a serious one,’ says Jamie, head of Stormhaven Towers public school.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘A serious issue.’

  Jamie’s been here for just eighteen months and is still making his mark. It takes time. You can’t get rid of the staff you don’t want, not immediately at any rate. It takes time to winkle them out from their crevices. And then sometimes events loom up from nowhere, dangerous events that can scupper everything . . . like this one.

  ‘What issue?’ says Cressida, in her direct doctorly manner, as if it was probably unimportant, a crying over spilt milk. She has short boyish hair, brown with a fleck of grey, aluminium-framed glasses for reading and is working at home today, sitting on the sofa with a computer on her lap.

  ‘At the review weekend,’ he says, not answering her question. The issue is too raw, he doesn’t really want to speak about it – or not with Cressida at least. It’s every head’s nightmare, frankly, and has gatecrashed end-of-term proceedings with brutal force.

  The review weekend, at the end of the academic year, is Jamie’s idea – a get-together with selected members of staff. What he gains from them, Cressida isn’t sure . . . she isn’t one for navel-gazing.

  ‘But isn’t that what these weekends are for?’ she asks, attempting some perspective. ‘For issues to arise?’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ he replies impatiently. He knows very well that this is precisely what these weekends are for – but surely she could be a bit more sympathetic? No wonder he doesn’t tell her anything! ‘But this one is serious – really very serious. I don’t see a solution.’

  And each time he thinks of it, the scene darkens still further. If the news gets out, there’ll be dire implications for the school finances, no question. The Japanese will pull out of the summer school project, for a start – and that’ll be ‘goodbye’ to a gold mine the school can ill afford to lose. The Japanese takeover of the school the following summer holidays is funding the new dance and drama wing as well as the new science labs.

  But how can the news not get out? There’s no way Jamie can keep a lid on it. Secrets have a habit of reaching the light eventually; and if cries of ‘cover-up!’ follow – well, that’s the end for the leadership . . . certainly the head. No, he’d have to go public on this one, take the hit – but stay afloat, stay honest and build slowly . . . literally.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe what Ferdinand has been up to,’ he says.

  Though he won’t tell her.

  ‘Apart from being clinically dull?’ comes the reply. Ferdinand is the school chaplain and Cressida is not interested. She doesn’t look up as she speaks, continuing with her work.

  Jamie paces around their large drawing room in the headmaster’s house, a short walk away from the main school buildings . . . with a walled garden for privacy. He wants her attention; he wants her to ask again what the issue is, so he can say, ‘I’m afraid I can’t say.’ Cressida says he’s like a little boy sometimes – well, which man isn’t? – and she’s been down this path before. His life is spent trying to keep some sort of balance, at least avoiding unmanageable imbalance and some terrible outbreak of excess.

  ‘Why don’t you just explode, Jamie, scream what you feel?’ she’d occasionally say to him.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think me losing my temper is going to help anyone, Cressida. What’s the point in losing my temper?’

  ‘It might help you – and postpone your heart attack by a few years.’

  ‘And anyway, there’s nothing I can’t handle here.’ That would just have to be true. ‘Balance is always the better path. No screaming necessary.’

  ‘The better path to where?’

  And it’s harder and harder each year; harder for Jamie to achieve this balance, this is what he finds; and his body – and blood pressure – suffer in the struggle.

  ‘Does it need a solution?’ she says, with further disinterest as Jamie continues to prowl. His restless pacing, not uncommon, irritates her; patients at least sit still, she makes sure of that. But Jamie holds so much in, he always has; and he currently resembles a bomb in the room, detonation imminent. They used to laugh about it, make a joke of it, or she did at least . . . but not now, not these days, for the laughter between them has stopped; and Cressida can’t stand much more of this.

  ‘Might this mystery issue not just go away during the long summer holiday, Jamie?’ The school has just broken up for eight weeks, which leaves her a little envious . . . though Jamie claims there’s no break for him, that there’s always work to do. ‘Eight weeks and a bit of sun can change things. Nothing really matters that much in my experience.’

  ‘This does, dear. This matters – oh, yes!’ It was an angry ‘dear’. ‘And it’s not going away – it’s hardly got started . . . and the Japanese don’t like this sort of thing.’

  ‘The Japanese? I thought they must be involved in some manner.’ Cressida is well aware that the Japanese are the new moral yardstick at Stormhaven Towers . . . they’ve replaced God. If the Japanese like it, then it’s good. And if the Japanese don’t like it, it’s bad. Morality is quite simple now.

  Jamie goes to his study; Cressida is proving no help at all. He needs time to think, though his thoughts don’t help. His thoughts are a loop of panic about how this will all be perceived, old fears dressed in new clothes – and no fresh thought arriving to brea
k the loop. And yes, Cressida is busy – he knows that, as he gazes out of the window at the manicured lawns and newly planted saplings by the school gates. He shouldn’t judge her, she has her own concerns, running a successful medical practice in Church Street . . . He just wishes – he really just wishes . . .

  Almost immediately, his mobile strikes up a tune, a short excerpt of Bach. Jamie brings the text onto the small screen . . . and goes pale as he reads. Where had this come from? She’d seemed fine when he last saw her! And what exactly is he to do? Well, he’ll have to go – he’ll have to go and meet with her. It may be nothing, one can’t tell – but at least it’s a different worry . . . and one requiring action, which is a relief in itself. He needs to do something.

  With the decision made, he returns to the front room where Cressida is still on her laptop – healing hands punching figures onto the screen. Whatever your diagnostic skills as a GP, you have to be good with IT.

  ‘I need to go out,’ he says firmly.

  ‘OK. Urgent?’

  ‘Very urgent.’ Words spoken with self-importance, as if this is not a matter he can discuss with the likes of her. ‘I’ll be back soon.’

  She doesn’t reply, but continues with her statistical analysis of patient footfall in the surgery. It isn’t just schools who review their practice; Cressida just prefers to do it alone – and via statistics, a truer sound than any human voice. Jamie gathers his things and wonders about a kiss before he leaves – perhaps on the top of her head, affection without intimacy. But he decides against it, she might think it odd . . . or just not notice. It is as if she doesn’t notice him sometimes.

  ‘A dead relationship but a functioning marriage,’ was how he’d described it to a friend, after one bottle of wine too many. But maybe this is normal for a marriage – stability of life trumping alienation of the soul; and really, he’d dug this hole for himself by choosing to marry her, so who else was there to blame? It had seemed the easiest thing to do at the time. ‘No one else to blame, Jamie!’ he’d say to himself in further self-punishment.

  He pauses for a moment at the door and looks back into the room, so desirably furnished; and such warmth in the sun through the large patio window. He feels almost unbearably sad, a moment of excess which he must flee.

  ‘Remember when we talked, Cressida?’ he says, eyes watering. He holds his pose for a moment, before turning to leave. She doesn’t look up and he shuts the door quietly behind him. And pausing for a moment as she sits there – sunlight streaming across the cream and rose carpet, across the expensive parquet flooring – she could. Cressida could remember those days, the days when they’d talked, happier days, talking days . . . though it was a long time ago now. Their conversation had withered as their bank balance had grown.

  And a little over three hours later, the body of Jamie King, headmaster of Stormhaven Towers, was found splayed on the rocks, at the foot of Stormhaven Head – at skewered rest by the white cliffs he loved to walk with rucksack and stout shoes in the holidays.

  He was hardly the first unhappy soul to end it all here. But suicide – it was a shock for those left behind, the cold ripples were endless.

  ‘Remember when we talked, Cressida?’

  ACT ONE

  The annual school review

  was a new tradition – if such a thing can be – introduced by the new headmaster, Jamie King.

  Opinions were mixed about the new man as the honeymoon afforded to all leaders drew to a close and his style became apparent. Some enthused about this straight-talking dynamo, seeing him as a new broom – someone with drive, just what the school needed in these competitive times, when private schools were like rats in a bag. Others were less keen on this insensitive hustler. They found him rather pushy, rather negative compared with his genteel predecessor, Maurice Stone, whom everyone liked – even if the school was flatlining under his rather vague leadership. He would walk some way around a nettle rather than grasp it.

  Maurice had been a teacher at heart, and had smelled of blackboards and chalk; whereas the new breed of school heads – and this included Jamie – were primarily businessmen. Oh, they kept a few academic tomes on their office shelves . . . but these were for show, for parents mainly. The Financial Times was more useful reading.

  ‘I wish you the best of luck,’ said Maurice kindly over a slightly awkward tea and biscuits, an unofficial handover from the old head to the new.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Jamie.

  ‘There was strong competition for the post,’ said Maurice, with a sad smile. Jamie nodded humbly. ‘Just never forget . . . well, just never forget that Stormhaven Towers is a school, old boy.’

  Jamie smiled at this well-meaning but deluded educational dinosaur.

  ‘If we’re to survive, Maurice, I must never forget it’s a business – old boy!’

  Maurice may have winced, but things had changed from the old days. Could he not see that? This was now a very competitive marketplace, full of high rollers like Eton, Harrow, Winchester – these schools were the envy of the world. The Russians and Chinese begged for places. Well, Jamie intended to cut a dash, make the big boys take notice, stir the water here on the Sussex Downs . . . ruffle some feathers if necessary. And the School Review Team was just the start.

  Their ‘Grand Review of the Year’ was undertaken at the end of the summer term. The students had gone home – and teachers across the land breathed a huge sigh of relief, contemplating long weeks of summer freedom, with no marking, no assemblies . . . and no performance reviews. Jamie was very hot on performance review – the main purpose of which was to make staff feel inadequate, make them try harder in the coming year . . . to push themselves and to push the students on whom their jobs depended.

  ‘Where are we now? Where have we come from? Where are we going?’ Jamie would say, as the School Review Weekend approached. Maurice Stone had never asked questions like that; they seemed almost impolite. But Jamie was high energy, and sometimes looked fit to burst, with his slightly pickled red skin. Did he drink too much?

  ‘The End of Year Review is a way of looking after the business,’ he’d say. ‘And every business needs looking after.’

  ‘Don’t you mean “school”, Headmaster,’ said one of the old guard.

  ‘If I’d meant “school”, I’d have said “school”, Christopher. Welcome to the twenty-first century!’

  The shape of things to come had become clear on a Staff Development Day in January. Jamie had felt it was time to lay his cards on the table.

  ‘Things are changing, my friends,’ he said to the teachers, gardeners, administrators and cleaners of Stormhaven Towers, gathered in the rather run-down school theatre. He wanted everyone to hear this and he took centre stage, quite literally, to tell them. ‘The globalized educational marketplace is a different world from the one in which Stormhaven Towers was founded – and we need to join it . . . or die!’ There was some awkward shifting in the ranks, but Jamie had carried on. These people needed to get real. ‘The arrival of wealthy and demanding foreign parents – along with the wealthy and demanding English ones! – means that many schools out there are now equipped beyond our wildest dreams. Take Westminster school—’

  ‘But we’re not Westminster, Headmaster,’ said Gerald, who’d had enough and would soon be leaving.

  ‘No – but we could be, Gerald – that’s just the point. We could be!’

  ‘We’ll never be Westminster school,’ said Geoff Ogilvie, Director of Boys. ‘For a start, we’re not in Westminster – we’re in Stormhaven! There’s a difference.’

  There was some laughter which disappointed Jamie . . . he’d be patient.

  ‘But have you seen their science labs, Geoff?’ he asked, with almost messianic vigour. Geoff taught science, this would engage him. ‘It’s like NASA in there, and their theatre, well – it beats the West End.’

  ‘We’ve done some good shows in this theatre,’ came another voice.

&
nbsp; ‘But we could do better ones! And their music centre – their music centre has a recital hall, a recording studio and practice and rehearsal rooms! And what have we got?’

  ‘A happy school?’ Some of the staff were beginning to feel a bit battered.

  ‘A school that’s going nowhere! Westminster’s art block is like a Saatchi gallery.’

  ‘What’s a Saatchi gallery like?’

  Well, if he was honest, Jamie didn’t know. It was just something another head had said to him: ‘Westminster’s art block is like a Saatchi gallery, Jamie. The rest of us are still in the Dark Ages!’

  Jamie wasn’t an art man himself. He’d read business studies at university. But that question this morning said it all: ‘What’s a Saatchi gallery like?’ Here at Stormhaven, the staff were out of touch, they didn’t know about a Saatchi gallery or sense the brave new world of education out there. Educationally, they were like the Flat Earth Society, out of sync with the new ways, clueless about recent developments – and in particular, the possible money from abroad. They still dreamed of the old tumbledown institutions where they themselves were educated – parochial little boarding school worlds with eccentric but largely unemployable schoolmasters covered in chalk dust imparting their random and limited genius to the thick and brilliant alike.

  No, things were going to change at Stormhaven Towers, Jamie would make sure of that. It was his way – or the highway.

  And so they gathered,

  the chosen ones, for a residential weekend at the end of the summer term. Everyone was tired . . . of course they were tired. Shattered. The final week of the school year was an exhausting – and somewhat hysterical – succession of sports days, leaving services and prize-givings. But the headmaster had not allowed anyone to be tired until now. One week before the end of term, he’d gathered them all in the common room and explained the situation: ‘You’re not tired!’ he’d said to the weary faces before him. ‘There’s nothing more tedious than tired staff! The children are tired, hollow-eyed with exhaustion – but you’re not tired! Why would you be tired? This is your job! So no tired talk in the common room, please!’