The Remorseful Day

Chapter forty-eight

Roy Holmes, aged fifteen, was a crudely disruptive pupil at school, a truculently uncooperative son in the Witney Street house he shared with his invalid mother, and a menace wherever he walked in the wider community. He took drugs; he was an inveterate and skillful shoplifter; he regularly snapped the stems of newly planted trees striving to establish themselves; he spat disgusting gobbets of phlegm on most of the pavements in Burford. In short, Roy Holmes was an appalling specimen of humankind. He deserved to have no real friends at all in life; and he had none.

Except one.

Ms. Christine Coverley, aged twenty-seven, in her second year at Burford Secondary School, was not an impressive personage. A small, skinny, flat-chested, spotty-chinned, mousy-haired woman, she could scarcely have expected admirers anywhere — either among her fellow male members of staff, or among the motley collection of pupils, especially the boys, she was timetabled to teach. And, indeed, she had no such admirers.

Except one.

To complicate her incompetence as a teacher, she had been appointed faute de mieux to teach Religious Knowledge, a task wholly beyond her ability. Her classes taunted her mercilessly; and on more than one occasion such was the uproar in her classroom that teachers in adjacent rooms had barged in — only to find, with deep embarrassment, that a nominal teacher was already present there; and with even deeper embarrassment for Ms. Coverley herself, resulting in fevered nightmares and anguish of soul that was often unbearable. One class, 4 Remove (Holmes’s class), was even worse than the others — a group of pagan half-wits, of both sexes, whose interest in the pronouncements of major and minor prophets alike was nil. Over the year her hebdomadal clash with these monsters had been a terrifying ordeal; and the situation was quite hopeless. But no — not quite hopeless. Each night of term she would kneel in her bedsit and beseech the Almighty to grant her some deliverance from such despair. And one day her prayer had been answered.

In the middle of the summer term, at the end of one of her spectacularly disastrous lessons with 4 Remove, her eyes smarting with tears of humiliation, she had stopped the cocky, surly Holmes as he was about to leave the room:

“Roy! I know I’m useless. I wouldn’t be though — if I got a bit of help, but I don’t get any help from anyone. I just want some help. And there’s someone who could help me so easily if he wanted to. You, Roy!”

She turned away, wiped her moist cheeks, picked up her books, and left the empty classroom.

But Roy Holmes stood where he was, immobile. For the first time in his life someone had asked him for help — him — the despair of mother, vicar, social workers, headmaster, police; and suddenly he’d felt oddly, unprecedentedly moved, conscious somewhere deep inside himself of a compassion he’d never known and could scarcely recognize.

If, as Ms. Coverley believed, her God sometimes moved in a mysterious way, it was not quite so dramatic as the way in which Roy Holmes was soon to move. In the next RK lesson one of the boys in the back row had been particularly foul-mouthed and disruptive, whilst Holmes had remained completely silent. After school that day, the youth in question returned home with a bleeding mouth, two broken teeth, and one bruised and hugely swollen eye. No one knew who was responsible. But then no one needed to know, since everyone knew who was responsible.

The nightmares were over, and Ms. Coverley’s last few weeks of the summer term were almost happy ones. Yet she knew that she was not the stuff that teachers are made of, and her resignation was received with relief by the headmaster. For the time being she decided to stay on in Burford, renewing the let on her ground-floor bedsit for a further two months.

The bell rang at 11:15 P.M. and Roy Holmes, somewhat the worse for drink or drugs or both, stood at the door when she opened it. His words were the words she had used to him, almost exactly so:

“I just want some help. And there’s someone who can help me, if she wants to. You!”

It wasn’t a lot he had to say; not a lot she had to say to the duty sergeant, half an hour later, when she rang Burford Police Station; and not a lot when he, in turn, rang Thames Valley HQ, almost immediately put through to the home number of the man in charge of the inquiry into the death of J. Barron, Builder.

Roy Holmes, a pupil of Burford Secondary School, aged fifteen, living at 29A Witney Street, had been riding his mountain bike along the footway on the southern side of Sheep Street at approximately 10 A.M. that Monday, August 3. By the youth’s own admission he was showing off, expectorating regularly, terrorizing any pedestrians, riding no-handed — when he’d decided to defy all superstition and ride beneath the ladder he saw in front of him — when he’d badly misjudged whatever he’d misjudged — when he’d collided sharply with the bottom of the ladder — when the whole thing had jerked sideways — and when a man had toppled from the top of the ladder and landed on the compacted pathway outside “Collingwood”...