“I’m afraid there’s hardly anybody here to talk to, Mr . . . er . . . ?”
“Banks. Alan Banks. I was a friend of Bernard Allen’s.”
“Yes, well the only person I can think of who might be able to help you is Marilyn Rosenberg.” Tom Jordan, head of the Communications Department at Toronto Community College, looked at his watch. “She’s got a class right now, but she should be free in about twenty minutes, if you’d like to wait?”
“Certainly.”
Jordan led him out of the office into a staff lounge just big enough to hold a few chairs and a low coffee-table littered with papers and teaching journals. At one end stood a fridge and, on a desk beside it, a microwave oven. The coffee-machine stood on a table below a connecting window to the secretary’s office, beside a rack of pigeon-holes for staff messages. Banks poured himself a coffee and Jordan edged away slowly, mumbling about work to do.
The coffee was strong and bitter, hardly the thing to drink in the thirty-three-degree heat. What he really needed was a cold beer or a gin and tonic. And he’d gone and bought Scotch at the duty-free shop. Still, he could leave it as a gift for Gerry Webb. It would surely come in handy in winter.
It was Monday morning. On Sunday, Banks had slept in and then gone for a walk along the Danforth. He had noticed the signs of yuppification that Gerry had mentioned, but he had found a pleasant little Greek restaurant, which had served him a hearty moussaka for lunch. Unlike Gerry, Banks enjoyed Greek food.
After that, he had wandered as far as Quinn’s. Over a pint, he had asked around about Bernie Allen and shown Anne Ralston’s photograph to the bar staff and waitresses. No luck. One down, two dozen to go. He had wandered back along the residential streets south of Danforth Avenue and noticed that the small brick house with the green-and-white porch fence and columns was a sort of Toronto trademark.
Too tired to go out again, he had stayed in and watched television that evening. Oddly enough, the non-commercial channel was showing an old BBC historical serial he’d found boring enough the first time around, and—much better—one of the Jeremy Brett “Sherlock Holmes” episodes. The only alternatives were the same American cop shows that plagued British TV.
He had woken at about nine o’clock that Monday morning. Still groggy from travel and culture-shock, he had taken a shower and had had orange juice and toast for breakfast. Then it was time to set off. He slipped a sixties anthology tape of Cream, Traffic and Rolling Stones hits in the Walkman and put it in the right-hand pocket of his light cotton jacket. In the left, he placed cigarettes and Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the only book he’d brought with him.
Jacket slung over shoulder, he set off, following Gerry’s directions. A rolling, rattling streetcar ride took him by the valley-side, rife with joggers. The downtown towers were hazy in the morning heat. Finding the westbound platform at Broadview subway station was every bit as straightforward as Gerry had said, but changing trains at Yonge and getting out to the street at St Clair proved confusing. All exits seemed to lead to a warren of underground shopping malls—air-conditioned, of course—and finding the right way out wasn’t always easy.
Still, he’d found St Clair Avenue after only a momentary diversion into a supermarket called Ziggy’s, and the college was only a short walk from the station.
Now, from the sixth floor, he looked out for a while on the office buildings opposite and the cream tops of the streetcars passing to and fro below him, then turned to the pile of journals on the table.
Half-way through an article on the teaching of “critical thinking,” he heard muffled voices in the corridor, and a young woman with a puzzled expression on her face popped around the door. Masses of curly brown hair framed her round head. She had a small mouth and her teeth, when she smiled, were tiny, straight and pearly white. The greyish gum she was chewing oozed between them like a new gum disease. She carried a worn, overstuffed leather briefcase under her arm, and wore grey cords and a checked shirt.
She stretched out her hand. “Marilyn Rosenberg. Tom tells me you wanted to talk to me.”
Banks introduced himself and offered to pour her a cup of coffee.
“No thanks,” she said, grabbing a Diet Coke from the fridge. “Far too hot for that stuff. You’d think they’d do something about the air-conditioning in this place, wouldn’t you?” She pulled the tab and the Diet Coke fizzed. “What do you want with me?”
“I want to talk about Bernard Allen.”
“I’ve been through all that with the police. There wasn’t really much to say.”
“What did they ask you?”
“Just if I thought anyone had a reason to kill him, where my colleagues were over the last few weeks, that kind of thing.”
“Did they ask you anything about his life here?”
“Only what kind of person he was.”
“And?”
“And I told them he was a bit of a loner, that’s all. I wasn’t the only one they talked to.”
“You’re the only one here now.”
“Yeah, I guess.” She grinned again, flashing her beautiful teeth.
“If Bernard didn’t have much to do with his colleagues here, did he have a group of friends somewhere else, away from college?”
“I wouldn’t really know. Look, I didn’t know Bernie that well. . . .” She hesitated. “Maybe it’s none of your business, but I wanted to. We were getting closer. Slowly. He was a hard person to get to know. All that stiff-upper-lip Brit stuff. Me, I’m a simple Irish-Jewish girl from Montreal.” She shrugged. “I liked him. We did lunch up here a couple of times. I was hoping maybe he’d ask me out sometime but . . .”
“It never happened?”
“No. He was too damn slow. I didn’t know how much clearer I could make it without ripping off my clothes and jumping on him. But now it’s too late, even for that.”
“How did he seem emotionally before he went to England?”
Marilyn frowned and bit her bottom lip as she thought. “He hadn’t quite got over his divorce,” she said finally. “So I guess he might have been off women for a while.”
“Did you know his ex-wife?”
“No, not really.”
“What about her lover?”
“Yeah, I knew him. He used to work here. He’s a louse.”
“In what way?”
“Every way. Strutting macho peacock. And she fell for it. I don’t blame Bernie for feeling bad, but he’d have been well rid of her anyway. He’d have got over it.”
“Yeah. Withdrawn, sort of.”
“How did he get on with his students?”
“Well enough, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“He cared about literature, but most of the students don’t give a damn about James Joyce or George Orwell. They’re here to learn about business or computers or electrical engineering—you know, useful stuff—and then they think they’ll walk into top, high-paying jobs. They don’t like it when they find they all have to do English, so it makes our job a bit tough. Some teachers find it harder than others to adjust and lower their expectations.”
“And Bernie was one?”
“Yeah. He complained a lot about how ignorant they were, how half of them didn’t even know when the Second World War was fought or who Hitler was. And, even worse, they didn’t care anyway. Bernie couldn’t understand that. He had one guy who thought Shakespeare was a small town in Saskatchewan. That really got to him.”
“I don’t understand,” Banks said. “How could someone like that get accepted into a college?”
“We have an open-door policy,” Marilyn said. “It’s a democratic education. None of that elitist bullshit you get in England. We don’t send our kids away to boarding schools to learn Latin and take a lot of cold showers. All that Jane Eyre stuff.”
Banks, who had not attended a public school himself, along with, he suspected, the majority of English children, was confused. “But don’t a lot of them fail?” he asked. “Doesn’t it waste time and money?”
“We don’t like to fail people,” Marilyn said. “It gives them a poor self-image.”
“So they don’t need to know much to get in, and they aren’t expected to know much more when they leave, is that it?”
Marilyn smiled like a nurse with a particularly difficult patient.
“What did Bernie think about that?” Banks hurried on.
She laughed. “Bernie loved youth, young people, but he didn’t have much respect for their intelligence.”
“It doesn’t sound like they had much.”
“There, you see. That’s exactly the kind of thing he’d say. You’re so sarcastic, you Brits.”
“But you liked him?”
“Yeah, I liked him. We might have disagreed on a few things, but he was cute. And I’m a sucker for an English accent. What can I say? He was a nice guy, at least as far as I could tell. I mean, he might not have thought much of his students, but he treated them well and did his damnedest to arouse some curiosity in them. He was a good teacher. What are you getting at, anyway? Do you think one of his students might have killed him over a poor grade?”
“It sounds unlikely, doesn’t it?”
“Not as much as you think,” Marilyn said. “We once had a guy come after his English teacher here with a shotgun. Luckily, security stopped him before he got very far. Still,” she went on, “I shouldn’t think an irate student would go to all the trouble of following him over to England and killing him there.”
“What did Bernie do when he went home after work? Did he ever mention any particular place he went to?”
Marilyn shook her head and the curls danced. “No. He did once say he’d had a few pints too many in the pub the night before.”
“The pub?”
“Yeah.”
“He didn’t say which pub?”
“No. He just said he’d had six pints when five was his limit these days. Look, what is all this? What are you after? You’re not one of those private eyes, are you?”
Banks laughed. “No. I told you, I’m a friend of Bernie’s from England. Swainsdale, where he grew up. I want to piece together as much of his life here as I can. A lot of people over there are hurt and puzzled by what happened.”
“Yeah, well . . . me too. He wasn’t the kind of guy who gets himself killed. Know what I mean?”
“Swainsdale, you said?” she went on. “Bernie was always going on about that place. At least the couple of times we talked he was. Like it was some paradise on earth or something. Especially since the divorce, he started to get homesick. He was beginning to feel a bit lost and out of place here. It can happen, you know. So he took the thousand-dollar cure.”
“The what?”
“The thousand-dollar cure. I guess it’s gone up now with inflation, but it’s when Brits take a trip back home to renew their roots. Used to call it the thousand-dollar cure. For homesickness.”
“Did he ever talk of going back to Swainsdale to stay?”
“Yeah. He said he’d be off like a shot if he had a job, or a private income. He said there was nothing for him here after he split up with Barbara. Poor guy. Like I said, he got withdrawn, dwelled on things too much.”
Banks nodded. “There’s nothing else you can tell me? You’re sure he didn’t name any specific pub or place he used to hang out?”
“Sorry.” Marilyn grinned. “I’d remember if he had because I’d have probably dropped in there one evening. Just by chance, you know.”
Banks smiled. “Yes. I know. Thanks anyway. I won’t waste any more of your time.”
“No problem.” Marilyn tossed her empty can into the waste-paper basket. “Hey!” she called, as Banks left the staff lounge. “I think your accent’s cute, too.”
But Banks didn’t have time to appreciate the compliment. Coming along the corridor towards him were two very large police officers.
“Mr Banks?” the taller one asked.
“Yes.”
“We’d like you to come with us, if you don’t mind.”
“What for?”
“Just a few questions. This way, please.”
There was hardly room for them to walk three abreast down the hallway, but they managed it somehow. Banks felt a bit like a sardine in a tin. As they turned the corner, he noticed from the corner of his eye Tom Jordan wringing his hands outside his office.
Banks tried to get more out of the officers in the lift, but they clammed up on him. He felt a wave of irrational fear at the situation. Here he was, in a foreign country, being taken into custody by two enormous uniformed policemen who refused to answer his questions. And the feeling of fear intensified as he was bundled into the back of the yellow car. The air smelled of hot vinyl upholstery; a strong wire mesh separated him from the men in the front; and the back doors had no inside handles.