18

In the short time they had been in the town hall, the sky had clouded over and it was now threatening to rain. The streets were narrow here and many of the buildings tall, which reduced the amount of light that shone down on to the grubby brickwork, when it shone at all. It left the whole town looking like it needed a thorough clean and gave Collemby a dark and foreboding look.

‘There’s something about the atmosphere here,’ said Beth as they got into the car. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘Not really.’

‘You don’t find it gloomy?’

‘Well, yes, it is gloomy, but that’s down to the Victorian architecture and the weather, not the town’s atmosphere.’

‘I don’t think it’s just that,’ she muttered as he drove them out of the square. ‘It feels …’

‘What?’

‘Different. I don’t know. I realize it sounds stupid, but it’s like there’s a tension in the air.’

‘You’re right,’ he said with conviction.

‘Do you really think so?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It does sound stupid.’

There didn’t seem any point in arguing with him further. ‘Where are we going now?’

‘I want to talk to this barman, Ricky,’ he said, ‘but he won’t be at the club yet, so there’s time to follow up another lead. We got a call about a sighting of Alice Teale.’

‘A recent one?’ Could Alice still be alive? And why hadn’t he mentioned this before?

‘The call was recent but the sighting was a couple of weeks back,’ he said. A young girl thought she saw Alice in a car down by the derelict railway station.’

‘How old was the girl, and was she sure it was Alice?’

‘Thirteen, and no. She wasn’t a hundred per cent certain, but her older sister is in Alice’s year so she does know her, at least by sight. She described the car as a big black one.’

‘No make or model?’

‘The kid doesn’t know anything about cars, didn’t even notice the badge as it went by. She said it was going too fast and almost knocked her and her dog over. Probably a young lad who doesn’t know how to drive properly. It swerved out of their way and that was when she saw Alice, she thinks, in the front passenger seat, and she reckons she heard a bang.’

‘Why would Alice be down at the derelict railway … Oh!’ exclaimed Beth. ‘It’s a lovers’ lane, isn’t it?’

‘A popular spot for courting couples,’ said Black diplomatically.

‘Does Alice’s boyfriend drive a big black car?’

‘Chris doesn’t own a car. He does have a driving licence and his father lets him drive the family car, but it’s dark grey.’

‘It could look black in the dark,’ said Beth. ‘But Chris said his mum was cool about them getting together in his bedroom. Why would they need to go down to the railway station, when it’s not private?’

‘So, it wasn’t Chris, then,’ he speculated. ‘It was your mystery man, the one in her bedroom.’

‘I’d say that’s more likely – and what if Chris found out? Sexual jealousy is one of the more common motives for murder, isn’t it?’

‘It is,’ agreed Black. Then he recalled her words in the town hall before they had been distracted by the envelope. ‘You said you’d heard things about the school. What kind of things?’

Beth was tempted to use Kirstie’s phrase – ‘Have you got all day?’ – but knew Black would be unimpressed if she failed to stick to the facts. At least he was more interested in the rumours he’d been so dismissive of earlier. ‘According to Kirstie, Collemby Comprehensive has a long and well-known history of inappropriate teacher behaviour and the head has struggled to clamp down on it.’

‘What kind of behaviour?’

‘At the lower end, affairs between married teachers, which complicates matters in the staff room –’

‘And at the not so lower end?’

‘I was coming to that.’ She had barely drawn a breath before he interrupted. ‘Relationships between male teachers and female pupils.’

‘More than one?’

‘Numerous, apparently, over the years.’

‘Even though it’s illegal and has been for years?’

‘According to Kirstie, the teachers there used to consider it a perk of the job. Now that they can be sacked or even jailed for it, it’s far less commonplace, but she claims it still goes on. It’s just hidden.’

‘And what about her mate? Was Alice involved with a teacher?’

‘I asked,’ said Beth, ‘but she said, “No way.” She was adamant Alice wasn’t seeing anyone except Chris.’

‘Then we’re no further forward,’ he said. ‘All she gave us is gossip.’

‘That’s what I asked for,’ protested Beth. ‘And she did give us a couple of names. Alice’s drama teacher is Simon Nash. He’s young, supportive and good-looking. Kirstie reckons Alice really liked him, but not in that way. She did say he sometimes gave her lifts home after rehearsals. Then there is their English teacher, Mr Keech,’ said Beth, ‘who is openly living with a former Collemby pupil.’

‘How does he get away with that?’

‘He reckons their relationship started long after she left the school, and that’s a grey area. She’s nineteen.’

‘And did it?’

‘Kirstie says not and, apparently, it isn’t his first offence. He’s the bad boy of Collemby and the girls line up for him, so Kirstie says, but she claims that she and her friends can see right through him.’

‘Then Alice is unlikely to have fallen for him,’ said Black. ‘Unless, of course, Kirstie is lying.’

‘One girl made a complaint against him,’ said Beth.

‘What kind of complaint?’

‘Indecent assault. He was accused of grabbing her breasts and the whole school heard about it.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing. The girl withdrew the complaint; it wasn’t considered credible.’

‘Interesting.’

When Beth had finished relating the ‘goss’ Chloe had provided, Black said, ‘I see what she means when she says Collemby is not a normal school. And neither is the town from what I’m hearing.’

‘Alice called it a town full of secrets.’

‘It’s also a town full of gossip, some of which might just be worth checking out.’

Black checked his watch then said, ‘And I know the perfect place to start.’

The trail down to the abandoned railway station was little more than a rough track. It was wide enough for cars, but full of holes where the weather had worn the surface away, and Black’s car bumped along.

‘You would definitely need a reason to come down here,’ said Beth, as she was bounced in her seat yet again.

‘There used to be a standing joke in Collemby,’ said Black, as he pulled the car over on to rough ground near the old railway line. ‘If someone was having a fling with a girl, their mates would say, “He’s just putting her on the train.”’

‘How romantic.’ Again, Beth wondered how he had all this local knowledge and whether he had any past association with the town. It was obvious why couples would have chosen this location, though. It was set back from the town, it covered a large area, if you included its numerous outbuildings and sheds, it was bordered by woodland that had slowly encroached on the site over the years, and there were several places to discreetly park a car away from prying eyes.

They got out of the car and walked towards the station platforms. Beth surveyed the abandoned buildings. There was no evidence of structural damage, but they had evidently not been used in a long time. It crossed her mind that if you were looking for somewhere to hide a body one of these outbuildings might serve the purpose.

‘Has anyone searched here?’ she asked him.

‘For signs of Alice? Fraser got the uniforms to take a look down here, but they’re all boarded up and there were no signs of a break-in. You won’t find Alice Teale down here.’

The place had the feel of a ghost town, and Beth asked, ‘Why has it been left like this?’

‘It’s a strange tale,’ he said. ‘It started with a wealthy local man, Charles Denham, a descendant of the old mining family that invested in the colliery back in the 1800s. They made money hand over fist for nigh on a century, until the mines were nationalized by the government, not long after the Second World War. Denham sat on his fortune and didn’t do much with it. He was the local eccentric. A wealthy old man with too much time and money, and he was looking for a project. When the mine closed he was outraged and when the branch line followed it he was incensed, so he arranged to buy the disused railway station, complete with the platforms and buildings.’

‘What was he going to do with a station that had no railway?’

‘Restore it to its former glory then run steam trains from one end of the county to the other.’

‘An ambitious plan.’

‘It never got off the ground, and he died a few years later, without an heir. The place has been in limbo ever since.’

‘Why doesn’t the council just knock it all down?’

‘Because they don’t own it. No one does, really. It’s part of the unresolved estate of the man. Several relatives laid claim to his money, but it took a decade just to sort that out and nobody wanted this white elephant, so here it stands. Bizarre, isn’t it?’

The sky was still overcast and the subdued light gave the station buildings and its platforms an eerie, almost silvery glow.

‘You can walk the old line for miles,’ Black told Beth as she followed him out of a central section where the tracks had once been, now flat land overgrown with grass and weeds, then they went up the ramp on to one of the platforms. It felt like they were stepping back in time. There was some graffiti, but if you closed your eyes you could almost imagine a train pulling in here.

They passed the window for the ticket office then went down the ramp on the other side, under a metal foot bridge which hung over what would have been the track to link the two platforms.

‘What are you looking for?’

‘The cause of the bang,’ said Black.

The opposite platform had a section of ramp missing at its far end. It ended in an abrupt rectangular shape which jutted out then dropped a few feet, leaving it short of the ground. ‘The edge of the platform must have crumbled away,’ Black said, crossing the old line to take a closer look. When Beth joined him there he was on his haunches looking at the ragged edge of the broken platform, then the long grass which grew next to it. ‘The girl walking her dog said the car swerved to avoid her and she heard a bang. There are no scrape marks from a car’s bodywork, but’ – he parted some of the long grass – ‘take a look.’

Beth bent to examine the ground below and she could see fragments of plastic on the ground. ‘That could be pieces from a headlamp,’ she said.

‘If the car braked then swerved to avoid the girl’ – he made that movement with his hand – ‘its headlights would be roughly this height when it went across.’ He brought his hand round till it hit the lowest point of the broken platform. ‘If he stopped in time, he might smash a light but still be able to drive off.’

‘You think it was someone in a hurry to get away from here because he didn’t want to be seen with Alice?’

‘If it was Alice,’ he cautioned, ‘and we don’t know for sure that it was. At this stage, it’s only a possible sighting, no more.’

‘Might be worth checking the body shops, though there must be a hell of a lot of them around here.’

‘I’ll get someone down here,’ he said, ‘to bag up these bits.’