28

The place couldn’t have looked more different. The first time Beth had seen the building from the outside it had been at night and there had been barely a soul around. Now, on a Monday morning, hundreds of pupils were spilling from coaches parked outside the school or sauntering up the road from Collemby town centre at a snail’s pace, as if trying to delay the inevitably dull day in full-time education for as long as humanly possible. Beth and Black watched them go in from their car. There wasn’t much point fighting their way through the crowds. Beth couldn’t bring herself to speak to Black, but he didn’t seem to notice and was his usual silent self. She knew she would have to switch into professional mode once they entered the school but, right now, she was struggling to file away the thought that she was sitting next to a killer.

It was all over in five minutes. One moment, the last of the kids were pushing each other through the big double doors at the front of the school or filing into its numerous side exits; the next, there was absolute calm, with not a single person left outside the building, bar Beth and Lucas, who took the opportunity to walk unopposed into Collemby Comprehensive and request an audience with the headteacher.

Thanks to DCI Everleigh, Mr Morgan was expecting Beth and Lucas and he permitted them entry to his office, though he did not offer them any refreshment. If Beth had to pick one word to describe the man in front of her, she would have chosen ‘serious’. The head was in his early fifties, wore the dark suit and tie of a middle manager, and his shoes looked as if they had been polished for an hour that morning. He wished them every success in their quest to find Alice but wasn’t sure how he could help them.

‘Were you in the building when Alice Teale disappeared?’ asked Beth.

‘I was, but I’m afraid I didn’t see her leave the school. That was Miss Pearce, our PE teacher, who was in the staff room.’

‘Do you often work that late?’ asked Black.

‘More than I’d like to. Friday is different, though. We encourage the sixth-formers to stay behind for A-level revision sessions, followed by sporting activities to help them unwind. I also have the DTs.’

Black instantly thought of delirium tremens, the symptoms displayed by acute alcoholics, but he didn’t think those were the kind of DTs the head was talking about. ‘The what?’

‘Detention time,’ Morgan explained. ‘We deliberately schedule it on Friday evenings. We found that the kids who routinely misbehave don’t care about normal detentions. If you schedule them for a slot when they would rather be somewhere else, however, such as Friday evenings or even Saturday mornings, it dramatically cuts the rate of offending. It’s just one of my more radical ideas, which has helped to turn this school around.’

‘And you’ve done that,’ said Beth, ‘from what we’ve heard. Truancy down, attendance up, bad behaviour down, exam results up. They’re calling you a super-head. What’s your secret?’

‘Attention to detail in all things,’ he said proudly. ‘And we target the worst offenders remorselessly. I took the old New York City zero-tolerance approach to crime and adapted it to suit the needs of our school.’

‘The Broken Windows model?’ asked Black.

‘That’s the one,’ said the head. ‘It’s been proven that if you stamp down hard on small misdemeanours like vandalism, graffiti or the dropping of litter, then larger crimes are less likely.’

‘Crime rates fell in New York,’ agreed Black, ‘but how does that work in a school?’

‘In exactly the same way. We also have a zero-tolerance approach to antisocial behaviour of any kind. We realized that twenty per cent of the pupils were responsible for eighty per cent of the bad behaviour. We were dealing with the same offenders time and time again, so we come down on them hard. The Friday-evening detentions have been a particularly effective deterrent.’

‘So you were supervising the detentions when Alice left?’ asked Beth.

‘Yes.’

‘That’s pretty late, isn’t it? If school turns out around three o’clock, you don’t keep the kids back for six hours, surely?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘We let them go home then bring them back in for an hour or two at a pre-arranged slot, which is intended to cause maximum irritation to the culprit. These are serial offenders, with a history of dishonesty.’

‘Ever have any reason to give Alice Teale a detention?’ asked Black.

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Is Alice popular?’ asked Beth.

‘With teachers or classmates?’ asked the head.

‘Both.’

‘From a teacher’s perspective, I would say she is a good student who rarely, if ever, gives us any cause for concern, and she is deputy head girl,’ he added approvingly. ‘Among her fellow pupils, it’s always hard to tell when you are the head of a school, but she seems well liked, though we did have an incident months ago.’

At that point there was a knock on the door and the school secretary walked in. ‘Sorry, Mr Morgan, I need to collect the registers.’ He nodded his assent.

‘What kind of incident?’ asked Beth.

‘An act of vandalism.’

‘Alice committed vandalism?’ asked Beth. ‘On school property?’

The headteacher glanced at the secretary, who was opening and closing drawers while looking for the registers. Her presence seemed to faze him. ‘It’s probably easier if I just show you.’ He got out of his chair and gestured for them to follow.

They walked down the corridor and out through the side exit door that led to the spot where the green Jaguar was parked.

‘This yours?’ asked Black.

‘Yes.’

‘Nice.’ He peered inside. ‘And it’s absolutely immaculate.’

‘I have it valeted,’ he said. ‘Regularly.’ Then he pointed. ‘It’s round here.’ He led them around a corner, to a wall on a small outbuilding. ‘It took the caretaker a devil of a time to scrub it off.’

Black and Beth moved closer to the greying red-brick wall and the marks that were still partially visible there. Black squinted at what remained of the lettering. Someone had written something on that wall in white spray paint and, despite the best efforts of the school caretaker, you could still just make out the outline of each of those faded letters and discern their meaning.

ALICE TEALE IS A SLAG