The Baby-Snatcher

Chapter Thirteen

Mark Taverner waited in the staffroom for Brian’s call. Usually he preferred to go out at lunchtime. When Sheena was alive he’d gone home. Even before she became ill he’d liked to check that she was happy. The colleagues in the staffroom had commented snidely on these absences. Once Mark had heard an ageing maths teacher say to another with the weary envy of a tabloid hack, ‘There goes Taverner. Off for his midday bonk.’

In fact sex was never considered at these lunchtime meetings. Sex played little part in the relationship at all despite Sheena’s obsession with it in her books. Or perhaps because of it. She wrote about sex as a symbol of violence or betrayal. Mark had read her stories before they married and made an effort in the beginning to be sensitive. He thought there must have been a previous relationship in which she had been abused or humiliated and he wanted to prove to her that he was different from the other men she had known.

It seemed that he had failed. Perhaps he was too careful. She had allowed the advances in a disinterested way but had taken little pleasure from the contact. Inexperienced as he was he had realized that. Only once, when he became angry, had she responded at all. They had both been shocked by the encounter and he had taken care not to repeat his outburst. Her illness had provided an excellent excuse for abstinence. He could understand that she was always very tired.

He had gone home at lunchtime to see her. He would let himself in at the front door and before even taking off his coat he would climb the narrow stairs and there she would be, in the little room she had turned into an office. The little room, where in the other houses in the street a baby slept. She would be leaning over the A4 sheets of plain paper on which she wrote, a fountain pen in her hand. She had refused to learn about computers.

She must have heard him come through the door but she pretended not to. It was an affectation. She liked him to think she was concentrating so deeply on her work that she had not noticed. Then she would turn and exclaim. ‘Mark! Is it that time already?’

He would kiss her cheek and go down to the kitchen to make tea and a sandwich while she finished her sentence and collected her thoughts.

They would sit together at the kitchen table and she would talk about her work. She never asked how his day had been. Often she would need reassurance. Not about the quality of her writing – she believed implicitly in that – but because of some setback. Her agent had not been sufficiently enthusiastic about her latest novel. Attempts to break into the American market had come to nothing. He would tell her that of course it was a struggle but that recognition would come one day. Then he would wash the dishes and hurry back to school.

Sometimes he could not make it home at lunchtime. Perhaps there was a meeting or a parent demanding to see him. Then he would arrive, late in the afternoon, to find her looking out for him, distraught. He hated to see her unhappy, but those moments, when she clung to him as soon as he came through the door, made everything worthwhile. It showed how much she needed him.

After her death he never went to the house in the middle of the day. He preferred to walk into the centre of the town and sit in one of the cafés, watching the shop assistants in short skirts and clacking high heels, who hurried in to buy sticky buns to take away. And the harassed young mums with their babies.

Today he bought his sandwiches at the school canteen and took them back to the staffroom to wait for Brian’s call, ignoring the conversation around him.

‘Have you heard the latest? The head wants a policy document on pastoral care. Pastoral care! Who has time for that any more?’

‘If the bloody Ofsted inspector can do any better with my Year Nine group he’s welcome to try.’

Mark hated the staffroom. Too many people smoked. When the bell rang he collected his piles of exercise books with relief. He was disappointed that Brian had not phoned but thought they could probably meet up later. Brian would make the effort. He was a friend.

Otterbridge High was a comprehensive school but had once been the grammar and still made much of its academic reputation. It offered Latin, for example, and insisted on blazers. There were glass and concrete blocks – a Sports Hall, a Science Lab, which had been built in the early seventies when there was still money for that sort of thing – but the heart of the school was an impressive nineteenth-century building. Mark was pleased that he usually taught from a classroom in the old school. The ceiling was high and the acoustics were good, and there was less chance that the roof would leak. Teaching came hard to him. He would never have survived a soulless inner-city institution.

Only as he walked down the corridor past the jostling children did he realize that his next lesson was Year Eleven music, and that Marilyn Howe would be in the class. He knew she was back in school because he had seen her distinctive white hair from the stage where he sat during assembly. He was not sure how he would feel about meeting her. He was not quite sure what he would say.

In fact it was Marilyn who spoke to him first. They met at the classroom door. No other pupils had yet turned up.

‘Hello, sir,’ she said, and gave him that smile, flattering and insinuating. Then a group of children turned up. He could not mention her mother’s death in front of them so he only nodded and held open the door for her to go in ahead of him. Even if they had been alone he would have found it hard to speak to her. He had found the smile profoundly shocking. Of course he had understood that the girl was infatuated. The devoted gazes, the questions once the lesson was over, all these had been a nuisance, but he had supposed that the death of her mother would put an end to them. Now, it seemed, the irritation would continue.

At four o’clock he phoned Brian’s office again. Noel put him through immediately.

‘Sorry about lunchtime,’ Brian said. ‘I had a visit from the cops. One particular cop. Inspector Ramsay. Has he had a go at you?’

‘No. I gave a statement to a constable. A woman.’

There was a silence which was starting to become awkward when Mark said, ‘ I wondered if we might meet. There’s something I need your advice about.’

‘Great. Why don’t you come to supper? Em could do with the company and we’ll get a takeaway if she doesn’t fancy cooking.’

‘No. Just the two of us if you don’t mind.’

There was a pause. ‘Sure. Where should we meet?’

‘I don’t know. I hadn’t thought…’ Mark realized suddenly that this was probably a mistake. It wasn’t the right time. ‘Look, it doesn’t matter. Em will be expecting you. You’ll miss the children’s bedtime.’

‘Sod the children’s bedtime. But not the club, then. She might see the car from the house and I’ll have to tell her I’m working late or there’ll be a row.’

‘You shouldn’t lie to her, you know.’

‘None of us could live, could we, without lies?’ Even then that seemed a peculiar thing for Brian to say. ‘Look, I’ll come over to Otterbridge. To the Tap and Spile in the market square. Early. Six thirtyish. Then I can earn a few brownie points by being home for supper.’

‘All right.’ Mark was still hesitant. He was trying to put together an excuse.

Brian said cheerily, ‘Look, I’ve got to go. There’s a call on the other line. I’ll see you tonight.’

Mark sat in his classroom marking books until five, then he was driven away by the distant thud of pop music from the sixth-formers’ aerobics class. It started as a mild irritation but after twenty minutes he was completely distracted, so he packed up and left. The corridors were empty. Outside it was nearly dark.

The front entrance of the school opened directly on to a suburban street. It was all steps and pillars like a municipal town hall, and would have been more in keeping facing a busy road in a town centre. Mark stood on the pavement wondering what to do next. There was hardly time to go home and still be in the pub for Brian. He felt ridiculously conspicuous and undecided. He looked at his watch to suggest that he had an appointment, a real purpose in lurking on this street corner, then he set off.

Almost immediately he thought he was being followed. There were footsteps which he was certain were not an echo of his own. When he turned round no one was there, but he imagined the pursuer flattened into the shadow of the high wall which marked the boundary of the school grounds. He felt his hands sweat and his heart pound. Occasionally Sheena had been the victim of panic attacks. Objectively, he recognized the symptoms, but still he was convinced that he was on the verge of a heart attack, that he was about to die. He stood still and forced himself to breathe deeply. There were no scuttling footsteps. When he turned round again the street, better lit now, was empty.

He told himself he had been imagining things. It was his guilty conscience. He deserved, after all, to have nightmares.

Brian Coulthard arrived at the Tap and Spile five minutes late, expecting to find Mark already there. Mark’s punctuality was legend. He checked both bars then settled down with a pint at a table by the fire. He had a view from there of the door. At seven, another pint later, he was beginning to become concerned. He was debating whether he should drive to the Taverner house in case there had been some sort of accident when Mark came in. He stood inside the door, dazed and blinking, like someone just woken from sleep and did not see Brian until he called out, ‘ Hey. Over here.’ Then he stumbled to the table, his hands stretched ahead of him in apology.

‘I’m really sorry. I left school early so I called into St Mary’s Church for a few minutes. Just to sit, you know, and think. I lost track of the time.’

‘No sweat,’ Brian said. He did not ask what Mark had to think about. ‘You’ve waited for me often enough. Drink? I’ve only got half an hour left, though. I promised Em I’d be in at eight.’

‘It won’t take long.’ But now he was here it seemed even more difficult than he’d feared, his dreadful betrayal was impossible to put into words. And Brian didn’t make it any easier with his bustling approach to the bar, his demand to be served. It was as if he were trying to avoid any serious discussion. By now the pub was filling up with men in suits needing a quick drink before facing their families, and there was a queue.

‘I’m sure that cop will get in touch with you,’ Brian said, as soon as he sat down with Mark’s orange juice and his half-pint. ‘Ramsay. He was asking all about you.’

‘I hope he doesn’t come to the school.’ Mark had a picture of flashing lights, a uniformed policeman standing at the classroom door, children sniggering.

‘He’s not daft,’ Brain said. ‘He’ll be discreet.’

‘Look,’ Mark leant forward across the table, felt spilled beer seep into his jersey at the elbows. ‘There’s something I have to tell you.’

But the noise of voices around them was now so loud that Brian had not heard. Or so it seemed because he jumped up suddenly and pushed his way through the crowd to the gents. When he returned he did not sit down.

‘I’d better go.’ He was holding his Burberry mac by the hook over his shoulder and his car keys were already in his hand. ‘Em’ll have my supper in the cut if I’m late again.’

‘Yes,’ Mark said. ‘Of course.’

‘Can I give you a lift?’

‘No. I’d rather walk.’

They left the pub together, and standing briefly on the pavement Mark made one more attempt to say his piece. Brian cut him off with an excuse that he was already late, but Mark was certain now that he did not want to hear.

‘Give Em my love, then,’ he said.

‘Sure,’ Brian answered. ‘Sure.’

When Mark walked home he stopped several times to listen, but there were no following footsteps.