Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 134, No. 5. Whole No. 819, November 2009

Homework by Phil Lovesey

The son of award-winning crime writer and EQMM Readers Award winner Peter Lovesey, Phil Lovesey had several stories published in EQMM before turning to novel-length fiction and then taking a hiatus from fiction writing altogether for five years to teach in a large secondary school. He returns to our pages with a story that makes use of his teaching experience in a most creative way. Readers interested in his novels should look for The Screaming Tree, Death Duties, Ploughing Potter’s Field, and When the Ashes Burn.

English homework.

Judy Harris — Year 10.

In your opinion, is Hamlet merely faking his madness, or is he really insane?

This term we have been studying Hamlet, a play written ages ago by William Shakespeare. It’s quite good, though the words are all strange for modern people to really understand. There’s lots of stuff that is really, really old, that Sir needed to try and explain to us before it made any sense, not that most of the class seemed bothered, goofing around as usual.

Most of us thought that the film was better than the book, but that Mel Gibson bloke still used all the old words, so that when there wasn’t much going on except him talking, I noticed quite a few of the class were either mucking about or texting. I even told Sir about this after one lesson, but all he did was sort of smile at me, then tell me that Shakespeare wasn’t for everyone, and maybe it was better for me if the class didn’t think I was telling tales, which seemed quite harsh, as I was only trying to help him.

The story of Hamlet sort of goes like this: There’s this prince (Hamlet) who lives in another country a long time ago. His dad dies, and his mum marries Hamlet’s uncle, so Hamlet doesn’t get to become the king. He gets real mad about this, and reckons his mum’s a bit of a whore for marrying his uncle, especially when the ghost of his dad comes back and tells Hamlet that the pair of them were an item before he died, and that his brother even dripped poison into his ear and murdered him, just so he could get off with Hamlet’s mum and become king.

This was quite a spooky bit in the film, the ghost thing, and most of the class were watching, except Cheryl Bassington, who was still texting her boyfriend under the desk. He’s an apprentice plumber who lives down our road, and I often see him pick her up on his crappy little motorbike thing. She says they’ve done it lots of times, which I think is really lame at her age, as I reckon you should save yourself for someone who really loves you.

Hamlet has a woman who loves him. Her name’s Ophelia, and she sort of hangs around the palace, pining for him. It’s that Helena Bonham Carter in the film, and all the lads in the class were right crude about her in her nightie. Steve Norris made a sort of “joke” about boning-Bonham-Carter which even Sir sniggered at, but I just thought it was sick. I think Ophelia’s really sad, because she really does love Hamlet, and when he starts acting a bit mental, she gets really upset. He even tells her that he never loved her, and that she should go away and become a nun. Even Polonius (her own dad) uses Ophelia to test if Hamlet really is mad, which seems, well, odd — but then Polonius gets stabbed behind a curtain anyway, which serves him right for being such a bad dad in the first place.

My Dad wouldn’t ever do such a thing to me, regardless of what the papers said about him at the time of the robbery.

It seems that in Hamlet, everyone’s only after power, and that they’re prepared to do anything to get it, even if it means killing their family, marrying incestuously, using their kids, or faking madness that really hurts people. I think that’s very bad of all of them. Ophelia is so cut up about Hamlet being horrible to her that she goes and drowns herself, and even Hamlet doesn’t seem that bothered. Neither did the boys in the class, who asked for that bit to be shown again, as they reckoned you could see Helena Bonham Carter’s tits through the wet nightie. Thank goodness that someone tells Ophelia’s brother what a schemer Hamlet is, so that he comes back really angry and tries to kill Hamlet in a duel.

We all thought that the ending was right crap, because nearly everyone dies. Hamlet, his uncle, his mum, Ophelia’s brother; they all end up dead in this big hall, either poisoned or stabbed with poison-tipped swords. Dave Coles reckoned that the Macbeth we did for SATS in Year 9 was better because there were real nude women to perv over, and hangings and beheadings and stuff. When I told him I’d hated that film, loads of people laughed at me, and I felt right stupid, especially as Sir didn’t tell them off for being so cruel.

Maybe that was when I decided to do what I’ve done to you, Sir. Maybe that was the moment that it all made a sort of sense. Like I’ve written, maybe some people simply want power, and don’t care about other people’s feelings. Like you, then. Just two terms in the school, obviously wanting to be the trendy young teacher, joining in with them, laughing at me, not stopping it like other teachers would have done. Perhaps it was just another tiny, all too quickly forgotten moment for you, but believe me, Sir, it went well deep with me. Well deep.

That night, I told my mum about what had happened in your class, how you’d let them laugh at me. She was cooking — well, I say cooking, putting a ready-meal in the microwave for Uncle Tony for his tea, more like. Because she has to have it on the table for him when he gets in, or there’s trouble. He rings on his mobile from The Wellington Arms, tells her to have it ready in five minutes, then suddenly she’s all action, heaves herself up from the sofa and sends me up to my room as she gets it done.

Once, his meal wasn’t ready. I heard the result. Lots of shouting, then a scream. Mum’s scream. Then what sounded like moaning. I didn’t come down until the door slammed half an hour later, and I saw Uncle Tony walking away from the house from my bedroom window. Mum wouldn’t look at me, sort of flinched when I tried to put my arm round her. She was trying to stick a torn-up photograph of her and Dad back together, but her hands were shaking too much, and she was trying not to cry. I asked if I could help. It was a nice photo — her and Dad on honeymoon in Greece, both of them looking right young and happy on a beach in front of all these white hotels. She swore at me and told me to get back upstairs to my room.

Hamlet used to love his dad as well. Then he went away to some college somewhere, and when he came back his dad was dead, and his uncle had married his mum. The problem is that his dad is now a ghost, and tells him that he was murdered, so that makes Hamlet really angry. He also doesn’t know if it’s just his mind being tricky with him, so he decides to set a trap to see if his uncle is really guilty or not. Hamlet gets these actors to do a play which is sort of like his uncle killing his dad, and watches his uncle’s reaction. He wants to “prick his conscience.”

Dave Coles went “wheeey!” when Mel Gibson said the word “prick” — which everyone but me thought was real funny. I thought it was a good plan of Hamlet’s. He wasn’t saying “prick” like a penis; he was saying it like a needle, pricking his uncle’s brain to see if he was guilty. I think I’m cleverer than most of them in the class because I read more and understand these things, know that words can have more than just the obvious meaning. I think it’s because I’m not allowed to use the computer at home (Uncle Tony’s on it most of the time he’s in), so I don’t have any MSN or anything. Or a mobile phone. Just books, really. A bit of telly sometimes, downstairs, when Mum’s finished watching the soaps. But mostly I’m in my room, thinking and reading.

I write to Dad a lot. Tell him about school. Mum says I can’t talk about some of the stuff that goes on in the house, as it would only upset him. She says that even though Uncle Tony isn’t my real uncle, he’s doing us a massive favour by staying with us when Dad’s away. They used to be good mates, Dad and Uncle Tony, working at the warehouse together, going down to the pub, but when it all went wrong, and the police came for Dad, they sort of fell out.

What’s really great is that Dad’s letters are getting longer each time he writes back to me. Just a page in the beginning, now it’s often three or four. His spelling’s really coming on too, because of all the classes he’s been taking. He’s been well behaved, so they’ve allowed him more time to study. He says he’s taking his GCSEs too! Strange, isn’t it, Sir? There I am, in your class, studying Hamlet for my English GCSE Shakespeare coursework, and my dad’s doing exactly the same thing. At thirty-eight, too. He reckons once he’s done his English, Maths, and Science, he’ll do loads more subjects after that. He says one bloke further down the wing he knows has got nineteen GCSEs! See, Sir? They tell you all this stuff about people in prison being right thick and scummy, but there’s some of them really trying to improve themselves. Dad’s got another two years left, so I reckon he’ll have more qualifications than me when he gets out. How weird will that be?

In Dad’s last letter, he talked about Uncle Tony, and said that even though they weren’t best friends anymore, it was good that he had agreed to lodge at our house, and help pay the rent and stuff. He said it was the least Uncle Tony could do, because really, he owed Dad big time. He also said that the years would fly by, and when he finally got released, he’d got a surprise that would keep me, Mum, and him happy for years. When I showed Mum the letter, she screwed it up and chucked it away, said my dad was talking nonsense, told me never to mention it again. I’m not sure, but I think it was to do with the robbery at the warehouse. Thing is, although the police had CCTV film of Dad loading stuff into a van when he shouldn’t have been, the actual stuff was never found. The local newspaper said it was worth over a 100,000 pounds — though you can’t believe everything they say, can you, Sir?

Dad doesn’t like me to visit, see him where he is, so every other Saturday, when Mum and Uncle Tony go to Norwich, I go to the reference library in town. It’s nice there, warm. I don’t use the Internet stuff. I prefer to look through the books and old newspapers they have on this stuff called microfilm. Honestly, Sir, it’s amazing. Thousands and thousands of newspapers from all over the place going back years and years. All catalogued to make searches easier. People think that the Internet is the way to find out stuff, but I reckon searching through old newspapers in the reference library is better. There’s loads of interesting stuff in those papers, articles people can’t be bothered to upload onto the Web, because I guess it would simply take too long. Can be frustrating, though, and you have to have a little bit of luck and patience.

Yeah, luck. I guess that’s how I managed to find you, Sir. Luck and patience. And, of course, a really good reason. And you made sure you gave me plenty of those, didn’t you, Sir? Calling me a sneak, not helping me when the others laughed at me. I began to wonder why you did that. Why you wouldn’t help me. And then I noticed, figured out why. Just one of those chance things that no one else saw, but I did.

It was a Wednesday, the last lesson before lunch, and we were all in your classroom as Mel Gibson was waffling on about whether or not to kill himself (To be, or not to be; remember, Sir, you made us watch the bloody thing ten times that lesson?), and true to form, I could see Cheryl Bassington texting away in the darkness on her mobile under the desk. Except it wasn’t her plumber boyfriend she was texting, was it, Sir? Because when she pressed Send, the next thing that happened was you got your phone out from your jacket and read the screen as discreetly as possible. I saw you, Sir. Watched it happen. You, Sir. Someone who should be trusted to educate us; getting secret texts from a fifteen-year-old girl. Well, naturally, my conscience was “pricked,” as Shakespeare might have said...

I began wondering what Hamlet would do in my situation. You know, needing to find stuff out, but not wanting to be caught doing it. So I did what he did — pretended to be a loony for a bit. That lunchtime, I went and sat right next to Cheryl Bassington and started eating a bit weirdly, mixing my pudding into my pizza and making stupid noises and giggling. Very Hamlet, Sir, you’d have been proud. Anyway, I could see my plan was working, and that Cheryl and her mates couldn’t wait to get up and leave. The next bit was so easy — just as they were going and calling me all sorts of names, I suddenly leant over and clung on to Cheryl, slipping a hand into her coat pocket and grabbing the mobile as she yelped and tried to hit me to get away. Mr. Price came over and began shouting at us to behave, but Cheryl and her mates just swore at him and ran off. He asked me if I was all right, and I said I was fine. Next, I went straight to the toilet block, locked myself in, and went through the phone.

They’re really quite easy to figure out, these mobile things. There’s a kind of main menu with all sorts of helpful symbols to direct you to all the stuff stored on it. I found myself looking at Cheryl’s pictures first, and let me tell you, Sir, there’s some right rude stuff on there. Not just bits of the plumber, either, but stuff of you, as well. And not like shots taken in class when you weren’t watching, but photos of you smiling right at the camera, in bed, with her... Well, you were there, you know the rest...

I couldn’t believe how bloody stupid you’d been, what a crazy risk you were taking. If Cheryl showed any of this stuff to the wrong person — you’d be out of a job, wouldn’t you, Sir? They’d probably stick you in prison, too, wouldn’t they? And my dad tells me what they do to people like you in prison, Sir. Really horrible things that even the wardens (he calls them “screws”) turn a blind eye to. Really, really stupid of you, Sir.

Next, I went into the text menu, and found loads and loads. From you, to her; from her back to you. Some of them went back as far as six weeks, which, considering you’ve only been teaching here for just over two terms, kind of makes you a very fast worker, I guess. They have names for people like you, Sir.

Anyway, the most recent series of texts between the two of you were about meeting up on Saturday night. At the usual place, apparently, wherever that was. You suggested half-eight, and Cheryl had simply replied with one of those really lame smiley-face things. Sad. And sick.

But seeing as no one had complained, no rumours had started, I had to assume that no one else knew about you and her. Except me, of course. Which really made me think about things for a while.

Strange life you’ve led, Sir. Like I say, the reference library comes up with all sorts of stuff. One of the main reasons I went there was to find out more about what had happened to my dad. It even made one or two of the national papers, because I guess it was what those newspaper people refer to as a “slow news week.” Seems one of the main things about it was the fact that the police reckoned Dad had to have had someone helping him that night. There were two CCTV cameras that covered the warehouse, but only one was trained where it was supposed to be, on the loading yard. The other one was pointing across the road at (and here I’m going to use a quotation, just like you told me to) “the entrance to a nearby youth club, where a group of underage girls could be seen to be drinking and cavorting with young lads.”

See what I’m saying, Sir? If someone had been helping Dad (and he’s never admitted as much, even to me) then the camera wasn’t pointing the right way to catch them. It was watching young girls instead. Maybe it was looking for trouble from them, but then again, you know better than that, don’t you, Sir? For guess what I found when I researched our town’s CCTV company a little further? That’s right, a picture of you, stood with the two other operators on the launch of the company five years ago. You — unmistakably. Your name on the caption thing, everything. A big photo of all three of you, smiling in front of loads of little television screens, the article telling people how you could remotely direct and move all these little cameras around the town to catch criminals and keep us safer. Sort of like you playing Big Brother, wasn’t it, Sir? Only, not the crappy programme on the telly — the book by George Orwell. Like I say — I read a lot, I really do.

And once I found out about your “preferences” from Cheryl’s mobile, things started to drop into place. I began piecing it together as I sat in those toilets on that Wednesday lunchtime. Just under a year, you’ve been teaching. Eighteen months my Dad’s been inside. According to the papers, at Dad’s trial, the CCTV company admitted they’d received a resignation from one of their operators for “failing to comply with company policy whilst monitoring the immediate area around the warehouse.” That was you, wasn’t it, Sir?

I reckoned you left the job, took a quick teacher-training course somewhere, then got the job here. But, like I say, it was only a theory. I could have been wildly wrong. So I decided to do what Hamlet does, and devise a test (another conscience-pricker) to see if I was right. Here’s what I did...

First, I texted you back on Cheryl’s phone. You remember that one, Sir? The one where she asked to meet you that very night, at The Wellington Arms? That was me, not her. But less than a minute later, the phone buzzed in my hands with your reply, something about having to be really careful, it was quite a public place.

And I was giggling now, as I replied, insisting we must meet, that I was worried, had something to tell you that I might need to see a doctor about. I remember having to stop myself from laughing when I pressed Send.

Next, I deleted the messages and dropped the phone down the toilet. Now, even if Cheryl and her mates did find it, the thing wouldn’t work. You wouldn’t be able to secretly text her before the meeting in The Wellington. You were most likely going to show up, and she had no idea about it. Quite a scheme, eh? I think even Hamlet would have been proud of me, don’t you, Sir?

It’s a good play, Hamlet, and has often been interpreted in many different ways. It seems to me that the central question — does he fake his madness to get revenge on those who’ve betrayed him? — is almost impossible to answer. Perhaps Shakespeare was trying to say that all revenge is a form of madness, as it can consume our minds if we’re not careful.

I think Dad’s the sanest man I know. Yes, he did a stupid thing and got caught, and now he’s being punished for it. But he’s never talked of revenge — even though I reckon he’d probably want to get that CCTV operator who spent too long looking at young girls getting drunk, rather than catching Dad’s accomplice on the night of the robbery. The police never found any fingerprints or anything, but the fact is that Dad couldn’t have done it on his own. Someone else must have helped him, been inside the warehouse, handing him the boxes of stuff to load into the van, just out of shot of the properly sighted camera. But when the police went through the tapes, Dad was the only person on them. Doesn’t seem very fair, does it, Sir? My Dad in prison, and the other man going free because you didn’t do your job properly?

Chances are, Sir, you never made the connection between me and Dad. Judy Harris, I mean, it’s not as if it’s a very uncommon surname, is it? Sort of invisible to you, aren’t I? The swotty kid who complains about the others, tells tales on them; the easy one to ridicule. The plain one, the one that doesn’t wear makeup, giggle at you as you pass by in the corridor. Just invisible old Judy Harris, gives in her work on time, does all the homework, tries her best. Strange how life can turn out, isn’t it, Sir?

Back to my conscience-pricker. Having arranged for you to be in the Wellington, I decided that Mum and Uncle Tony needed a little more culture in their lives. I went to the shopping precinct on the way home, bought myself a copy of the Hamlet DVD, told them both that after tea, I thought it would be a really nice idea if we all sat down and watched it together. Well, of course, Uncle Tony — already a little drunk at this point — raised a few objections, said he didn’t mind watching Mel Gibson stuff, Mad Max and the like, but he was buggered if he was going to sit down and watch a “load of Shakespeare shit all night.” (See, another quotation, that’s two so far; doing right well, aren’t I, Sir?)

Anyway, I made a bit of a fuss, and eventually Mum decided to smooth things over and asked Uncle Tony really nicely if he’d do this one thing. I said it’d make us all feel more like a proper family, and Uncle Tony sort of made a throaty noise, shrugged, and gave way, saying he’d give it half an hour, and if it was bollocks, then he’d leave it.

So, Sir, just after half-seven that night, I put Hamlet on our DVD player. Imagine that — a bit of real culture in our grotty house. Amazing, eh? And then I did what Hamlet does, watched my mother and my uncle real close as the story unravelled...

It didn’t take long, say twenty minutes at the most, and that’s even with all the old language to cope with. Mum and Uncle Tony soon got the gist of it — the betrayal of Hamlet’s father — and began sort of shifting uncomfortably and giving these sideways looks at each other. Honestly, Sir, it worked a treat.

Uncle Tony started coming out with all this stuff about Mel Gibson going “poofy,” and that he was much better in Braveheart and the Lethal Weapon films. I just knew he was begging for an excuse to leave what was becoming more and more embarrassing for him. So at that point I decided to tell him about you, Sir. Not the Cheryl Bassington stuff, or even the way you were so mean to me; no, instead I told him about the other stuff.

Yeah, I know, I lied. But just a white one, really. And Hamlet himself does that, doesn’t he, when he tells poor Ophelia that he doesn’t really love her anymore? I told Uncle Tony that when I was in town buying the DVD a strange bloke had come up to me asking me my name and where I lived, and when I told him, he asked me if Tony Watts lived with us. When I said he did, the man told me he wanted to speak to him about “the favour” he’d done my Uncle Tony with the security cameras, and that as far as he was concerned he thought that Tony Watts owed him, big-style, and that he’d be waiting in the Wellington at 8:30 to “sort it all out.”

Well, my Uncle Tony being the sort of bloke he is, you don’t have to try too hard to imagine his reaction. He was well angry, and began swearing and cursing, telling me I should have told him much earlier, asking for a description of you, then grabbing his coat and storming off, slamming the front door behind him so loudly that the walls shook. Mum looked right ashen, turned the DVD off, and told me to get straight upstairs to my room, that she thought I’d caused enough upset for one night. Uncle Tony didn’t come home that night.

That was two weeks ago, and you’ve been off school ever since, haven’t you, Sir? At Thursday morning’s full-school assembly, the Head told us that you’d been attacked the previous night, and were staying away to recover. Two broken ribs and a fractured jaw, the local paper said, with a couple of witnesses saying you’d been beaten up by a Tony Watts (unemployed) in the car park of The Wellington Arms. Police, apparently, are still trying to find a motive, but I’m sure with a little “help” they’ll have a clearer picture of why he did that cruel thing to you.

Uncle Tony’s on remand, as we can’t afford the bail, so he’ll be inside till the court case, which should be really interesting. The police have already interviewed my mum about Uncle Tony, but they haven’t got to me yet. I’m not sure whether to tell them what I know, or to keep quiet about it. I’ll write to Dad and ask him what he thinks I should do.

Our substitute teacher isn’t very good, but she’s told us to finish these assignments and the school will send them to you to mark while you recover. I’m sure that when you read this, Sir, you’ll realise why you were attacked that night, together with how much I know about you that you’d rather other people didn’t.

In conclusion, I say that whether Hamlet was faking his madness is irrelevant. How sane are any of us, anyway? And isn’t the very idea of faking madness a bit mad in the first place? Maybe you should know, Sir, the amount of faking you’ve done in the last few years.

I look forward to receiving my A for this essay. After all, I really did my homework on you.

Copyright © 2009 by Phil Lovesey