Chris was already at the Barber Institute when I arrived, a circumstance to which he drew my attention by an ostentatious flick of his wristwatch.
‘I thought you might have been upstairs in the galleries looking at the pictures,’ he said, ‘but clearly …’ He looked me up and down.
‘I meant to. But I got held up at UWM and you know how rain nourishes rush-hour traffic—’
‘Not that it’s rush-hour now.’ He looked at his watch again. So the first glance was to establish that I was late, the second actually to see the time.
‘—and I had to drive way over to the car park by the Muirhead Tower,’ I concluded.
‘I left my coat on a couple of seats,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’d better hang that one up. You’re very wet.’
‘Didn’t you notice the rain?’
We were in the foyer of an art gallery attached to the University of Birmingham, endowed so generously by one Lady Barber that it houses a small but wide-ranging collection of world-class paintings and sculptures. We were heading for the integral concert hall, the ideal size for a chamber concert such as tonight’s.
When I got back from the loo, he was buying programmes from a young oriental woman, just the sort of student whose death his colleagues were even now investigating. She was fluttering otherwise demure eyelids at him, and he was beaming down at her. Yes, age was suiting him. The baldness that had struck him prematurely sat well with the authority now written strongly on his forty-year-old face. He was responding to her delicate flirtation with a boyish, even impish smile, his eyes twinkling amid his crow’s-feet. Soon it would be time to bring him down to earth with a face the mirror had confirmed as very gloomy indeed.
I managed a smile as he turned to me, but it was perfunctory, as he was quick to spot.
‘I thought you’d left all your problems behind at William Murdock,’ he said, ushering me into the auditorium. ‘Not that it hasn’t enough problems of its own, according to Fraud. You’re sure you want to go back there?’
‘Always assuming it’s there for me to go back to,’ I said, echoing Kathryn. Whom I would have to see first thing the following morning. About the print-out she’d left me.
‘I suppose you could always move in with Mike and start a family.’ He started to sidle along a row towards his coat, right in the middle. Trust Chris to pick the best two places in the house.
‘You been talking to Shahida?’ I asked dourly, inching in his wake. Other than that I would not bite. I wouldn’t point out that the vast majority of women worked, partners, children or not, and that I would be one of them. Wouldn’t I?
We settled down. He handed me a programme, fishing out his reading glasses and flicking open the second. Just as I thought he was absorbed in its contents, he turned: ‘So what’s the problem? You look as if you’ve lost a bob and found a rusty button.’
I hid a grin: whether he liked it or not, Smethwick was educating him.
‘I’ve found—’
But my neighbour shushed me. The musicians were coming on to the stage.
However much anyone else might have been diverted by free wine and loud, middleclass discussion of the first part of the programme – Schubert’s Quintet, the one including two cellos, which was one of my favourites – I knew Chris would return sooner or later to whatever might be worrying me.
‘It’s the register of my English language class at UWM,’ I said, with no more preamble than a gesture with my glass of orange juice.
‘You usually allow yourself one glass of wine,’ he said, staring first at the juice then at me. ‘Sophie, you skipped an evening meal, didn’t you? Don’t you realise how foolish that is, with your stomach? You’ll be getting your gastritis back before you know it. And you know it’s easier to get it than to get rid of it.’
‘I was tied up. With this register.’
He steered us to the edge of the crowd. ‘Well?’
I took a deep breath. ‘There are several students who don’t appear to have been registered at UWM. At least, they haven’t according to one print-out, supplied to me by Kathryn, our new administrator, which records the results of their initial language tests, but have on another apparently identical print-out supplied by—’
He held up a hand. ‘Slow down. How can the two forms be identical?’
‘They both purport to be form IS9909. But they don’t have quite the same names on them.’
‘Computer hitch? No: you think it’s more serious than that, don’t you?’
‘They come from different sources. The one without the names in my group, from Kathryn—’
‘Kathryn – don’t I know …?’
He probably did. She’d been in post when he was working on a case there. ‘Ex-William Murdock.’
‘Ah! Very bright, very efficient. Nice-looking, too. And she’s abandoned ship, has she?’ He shook his head, but not in doubt. ‘Well, it’ll be easy enough to check with her, won’t it, that you’ve got the latest edition? Come on, you’re always moaning about students who don’t get it together sufficiently to start a course on time: perhaps no one’s got round to inputting these latecomers on the computer.’
The Barber doesn’t have anything as vulgar as a bell. Some sort of osmosis takes place between the concert organisers and the audience, who herd themselves back in as neatly as if propelled by a sheepdog or two. We were self-herding now.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I can tell there’s something else on your mind. But just try and forget it during the Brahms. I don’t think you heard a note of the Schubert.’
The second of the Brahms Sextets is the music I would choose to die to – if one has a choice in these matters. And it received a good performance. So I battened down my anxiety, telling it not to think about starting up again till after the music. Maybe I could talk it through with Chris over a light meal. Mistake! At the thought of food my stomach embarked on a symphonic rumbling.
Any hopes I might have had about its inaudibility to all but me were promptly dashed.
‘Where shall we eat?’ Chris demanded, still clapping enthusiastically. ‘And why doesn’t someone do something about that crazy door?’
The musicians, none less than five foot ten, and two of them sporting cellos, of course, all had to duck through a door in the wings that would have even me stooping, each time they came on to the stage and off it again.
‘Don’t know. It’s always been like that, hasn’t it?’
‘All the more time, then, for someone to take a saw to it. How about a takeaway from that excellent place on the High Street? Tell me what you want and I’ll meet you at your place.’
Gentleman Chris indubitably was, but he wasn’t going to volunteer to escort me through the still torrential rain when my car was four hundred yards away. Not when his was only thirty from the Institute.
I shoved the central heating on high for a while, hung my coat and brolly to dry, and opened a bottle of wine I happened to have in the fridge. Not, to be honest, that I ever didn’t have one in the fridge. No, I didn’t think I was going down Carla’s road; I often went several days without even noticing I hadn’t had a drink. It was just that when I did want a drink I wanted it to be at the right temperature.
‘Long queue,’ he said briefly, dispensing foil boxes from a carrier. We’d eat at the kitchen table.
As usual, we kept the talk to gossip while we ate. He’d seen me when my turn had been at its worst – and, of course, I’d been me when my turn was at its worst. So between us we tried not to irritate it. We’d helped ourselves to fruit from the glass bowl between us before either of us mentioned work. No, there was no news of the sex attacker: no more incidents, in fact. Then he broached the topic of UWM.
Full of food and wine, I was able to shrug. ‘Probably you were right earlier – that Kathryn has supplied me with an old print-out whereas the one Tom Bowen’s given me – he’s my tutor—’
‘Since that woman went on maternity leave, right?’
‘Right. And Tom asked me to do some teaching: English for overseas students who are on my course and on the PGCE.’
‘Unusual? And it must put you in an awkward situation.’
‘Sometimes it does,’ I said, thinking of conversations about shoplifting I would have to have tomorrow. ‘But it’s not all that rare, especially as the work I did when I was on secondment to William Muntz College is relevant.’
‘Anyway, this tutor fixed up for you to teach a group and gave you a list of names?’
‘The register, yes.’
‘And another list of names with all overseas students’ results on them? Which doesn’t tally with the one that Kathryn gave you.’
‘The results do. But there are some students on Bowen’s list that don’t appear on Kathryn’s.’ No, I wasn’t getting less anxious at hearing Chris spell it out. I was getting more anxious.
He narrowed his eyes. ‘And you’re sure this teaching is kosher?’
‘Why shouldn’t it be? Anyway, I had an official contract, duly signed by the powers that be. It’s upstairs in my office,’ I added, not quite irrelevantly.
He nodded. ‘Go on.’
When Chris used that tone, when his face shifted into those planes, it was hard to resist his compelling mix of kindness and authority.
I drained my coffee and put down the empty cup. ‘For a couple of weeks now I’ve had the strangest suspicion that some of the students in the group aren’t the ones I started out with. But they still answer to the same names. Eventually.’
‘It takes time to sink in that they’re supposed to be using that name?’
‘Put like that it sounds pretty damning, doesn’t it?’ My smile was apologetic. ‘I hope I’m not about to open another can of worms, Chris.’
‘Let’s just look at that contract of yours,’ he said.
It didn’t take me long to lay my hands on what the office always referred to as self-carbonated sheets. My little acquaintance with carbonated things makes me expect them to fizz – but then, my experience is very limited.
‘Well, your filing must have improved,’ Chris said, setting down the glass of whisky he’d poured himself. ‘I expected it to take you at least ten minutes to find it.’
Whisky! On top of all that wine? That meant Aggie would be finding his car outside again tomorrow!
‘Where money’s concerned my filing’s spot on,’ I said. ‘Look, this is my part of the contract. I handed the other one back, signed. And this is what I have to give in when I’ve finished the term’s classes.’
‘Hmm. Both standard printed forms. Both with the classes you’re teaching filled in by hand. Not computer-printed?’
‘I presume that’s standard practice.’
‘I presume you’ll be asking the fair Kathryn tomorrow.’
‘You presume right. And you can also presume that I shall be asking her for the latest print-out.’
‘What’s the betting all three are different? And what about getting an ID on all your students.’
‘I’ve already photocopied the register so I can ask them to sign beside their name. That way I can compare the signatures with those on their application forms.’
‘Assuming you can find the application forms. I take it Kathryn is a new addition to the staff?’
I nodded.
‘So it won’t be a matter of great surprise if you find in the UWM office the sort of chaos that reigned until Kathryn’s arrival at William Murdock?’ He groaned, presumably at the memory of trying some years ago to verify student details.
I shook my head.
‘Oh, Sophie,’ he said, shaking his head sadly, ‘I suspect you’re going to start shoving your nose into things again, aren’t you?’
I nodded.
‘But you will be careful, won’t you?’
This time I broke the pattern by nodding again.