Miss Girling led Liz back into the main house and into a small anteroom. As they came in a young man stood up from behind a half-sized partner’s desk. He was short, slim and athletic-looking, with close cropped black hair. He wore a black jacket, black jeans and a collarless black T-shirt. The outfit seemed more suitable for a trendy part of London than deepest Suffolk. His face was saturnine and expressionless.
‘Cicero,’ said Miss Girling, ‘this is Mrs Forester. She has an appointment with Mr Sarnat about her son, George.’ She turned to Liz. ‘Very nice to meet you,’ she said stiffly, and was gone before Liz could thank her for the tour.
Cicero gestured towards a large oak door opposite his desk and said, ‘Mr Sarnat is ready for you now. Please go through.’ He spoke in an English so flat and accentless that Liz concluded he must be foreign. She smiled at him but he didn’t smile back, and as she went to open the door, he sat down again, eyes intent on his monitor.
Mr Sarnat had chosen the room that had probably been the dining room of the manor house a century before. It was long and comparatively narrow with tall sash windows looking out towards the courtyard at the back of the house. In the centre of the ceiling was a beautiful plaster rose from which hung a dusty crystal chandelier. Wide polished oak floorboards were scattered with Persian rugs, and two antique side tables held a pair of Chinese lamps. The Head’s desk was centred against the far end of the room, its back to a wall-wide spread of white cornice-topped bookshelves. Unlike his assistant, Mr Sarnat came out quickly from behind his desk, smiling to greet her and shake hands. ‘Mrs Forester, how good to meet you. Please do take a seat.’
Liz sat down in front of the desk while Mr Sarnat resumed his seat. ‘I hope you have enjoyed your tour of our premises,’ he said. ‘Miss Girling has been here for many years, longer than any of us, and she knows the place inside out.’ His lips hinted at the faintest of smiles. ‘As you may have noticed, she is also rather old school.’
‘Yes, but she seemed very proud of your new IT block.’
‘Did she now? I am glad to hear it.’ His English was perfectly inflected but again Liz suspected he was not a native speaker; she wondered if he and Cicero were products of the same language school – though he could not have looked more different from his assistant. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with blond hair combed to one side. He had regular features, with a straight long nose and dull blue eyes capped by the palest set of eyelashes Liz had ever seen on a man his age – she estimated he was in his early forties. He wore an expensive well-cut suit, and a yellow silk tie with a cream-coloured shirt. He could have passed for an international businessman, prosperous and perhaps a little complacent. There was none of the slightly harried look one usually found in a schoolmaster.
‘I’d like to hear a little about your boy. George, isn’t it?’ he said, looking down at some papers on the desk in front of him. Slowly interlocking his hands, he sat back in his leather chair.
Liz gave him the account of her non-existent stepson George that she and Peggy had devised. She explained that they lived in Geneva where her husband worked, but that both she and her husband were English and intending to return in the next year or so. They wanted George, who was just sixteen, to finish his schooling back at home and go to a British university. George was being taught well at the school he attended in Geneva (Liz could have supplied its name if pressed) but he was a highly intelligent child whose interests weren’t altogether catered for by the rather old-fashioned curriculum obligatory in that country’s cantons.
‘What interests are those?’ Sarnat asked with mild interest. Liz still could not place his accent; he might have been Dutch or German or even Scandinavian with his blond Aryan looks.
‘George is very keen on computers,’ Liz said, and for the first time there was real interest in Sarnat’s eyes. ‘He learned programming at a very early age – “coding”, I think it’s called. Other boys seem to like football, but George has never enjoyed sport – he’s always much preferred sitting in front of a screen.’
‘How interesting,’ said Sarnat, and he sounded as if he meant it. He leaned forward in his chair. ‘Do you know what languages he likes to code in?’
Liz opened her hands, palms out, Italian-style. ‘I haven’t a clue about these things, I’m afraid. George likes to say I don’t know Coffee from JAVA, if that means anything to you.’
‘It does, actually,’ said Sarnat with a brief smile. ‘You’ve seen our new IT centre. I think your son might use it very profitably. We do have an exam for the students we take from abroad, but from the sound of it young George would pass with flying colours. Most of it is computer-related.’
‘Really? I’d have thought you’d be mainly concerned that their English was up to scratch.’
‘Not necessarily. You see,’ he said airily, ‘the world these days is more and more interconnected through technology rather than spoken or written language. People like to say the international lingua franca is English, but I’d say it’s digital.’
‘So some of your students don’t know English at all?’ Liz did her best to sound surprised rather than inquisitive.
‘I wouldn’t go that far, and since we want them to feel at home here, we do offer remedial classes for those who don’t have much English when they arrive.’
‘Where do most of them come from?’
‘All over the world,’ Sarnat said, then perhaps sensing Liz would not be satisfied with such a vague reply he added, ‘We try our best not to classify our students in any way. That’s why we are most reluctant even to describe their nationalities. The world here at Bartholomew is seen as one nation, one people, linked by one sense of self.’
‘Goodness, you make it sound almost like a religion. I didn’t see a chapel on my tour,’ she added with a little laugh.
‘There is no chapel, nor any religion; we discourage our students from attending any kind of organised services. The faith we want them to have instead is in themselves, and in the common purpose we as their teachers try to inculcate.’
‘I see,’ said Liz, but she didn’t really. It sounded remarkably airy-fairy for a school Head hoping to impress a prospective parent. But maybe he didn’t want to impress her.
There was a knock. Turning, Liz saw Cicero in the doorway. Sarnat stood up, ‘If you’ll excuse me for a moment.’
He left the room and Liz sat still for a minute or so until, hearing two sets of footsteps leaving the anteroom, she stood up. Taking a step closer to the desk, she studied the titles of the books that sat on the shelves. There was some history, some biography, a complete set of Shakespeare and, at the end of one shelf at Liz’s eye level, several books on, of all things, Confucianism. Curious, she stepped around the side of the desk, reading their titles with an ear cocked for Sarnat’s return. Confucius: A Personal History, Confucianism in Taiwan, Taiwan and the Confucius Synthesis.
What was the fascination with Confucius? she wondered. And with Taiwan? Taiwan had a superb technical education system, she knew – she’d remembered that at one point in the not so distant past Silicon Valley had been full of Taiwanese hardware and software engineers.
As she scanned the books, she noticed a gap in the tightly packed shelves, presumably where a book had been taken out and not returned. Something glinted in the opening. Moving a neighbouring book, Liz took a closer look. She saw a metal protuberance, shaped like a tennis ball, attached to the back of the bookshelf. At the front of the ‘tennis ball’ there was a little glass eye, and when Liz looked more closely the eye opened and shut, then opened again. She could detect a very faint whirring sound.
Hearing footsteps in the corridor, she quickly put the book back and returned to her chair. Moments later, Sarnat came back in. Their exchanges now became entirely conventional and focused on the usual topics discussed by parents and a prospective school – term dates, tuition fees, and the application form Sarnat took from his desk drawer.
But when they had finished their business and said their goodbyes and Liz got into her car again, she was cursing herself. She had fallen for the oldest trick in the book – leave someone alone in a room and watch what they do. There was something very strange about this place. To find CCTV or its equivalent in a school wasn’t odd in itself but to put a hidden camera in the headmaster’s room, focused on the visitors’ chair, and then to leave them alone so you could watch what they did was not only unusual, it spoke of a suspicion and distrust that were positively sinister. What was the school trying to hide?