LITMIR.BIZ

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He may have helped Linda with the power cut. She said she was going to find the caretakers.’

      ‘Could you tell me where Roger Allen is today?’

      ‘He’s not well.’ Neil’s hairline and forehead were damp, and the sweat under his arms hadn’t dried out. ‘He rang me this morning.’

      ‘What’s the matter with him?’

      ‘Stomach upset.’

      ‘Where was he ringing from?’

      ‘Home, I imagine.’

      ‘A police officer has been round to Roger’s house and his wife said she hasn’t seen him since yesterday.’

      Neil rubbed his chin and was silent for a few moments. ‘I don’t know anything about that. He just said he wasn’t well and wouldn’t be in. It was a one-minute conversation.’

      ‘Why did he call you?’

      ‘I’m the person staff report absences to. I do the personnel register each day, and the staff cover. Plus, Roger and I are mates.’ He glanced down at his hands and examined his palms.

      ‘Was his absence mentioned this morning when you met with Mrs Gibson for your first meeting of the new term?’

      ‘I told her he wasn’t well and wouldn’t be in today. That was it. We had a lot to get through.’

      ‘I wonder why his wife doesn’t know where he is. They’ve got two children.’

      He shrugged. ‘No idea.’

      ‘In that meeting this morning, how did Linda seem?’

      ‘Fine. It was the first day of the new term. She was busy, and keen for things to go well. We all were.’

      ‘She didn’t seem preoccupied, anxious?’

      ‘Not at all.’ Neil leaned forwards in his chair and sighed loudly. ‘She was her normal self.’

      His sigh made me curious. ‘Did Mrs Gibson have any enemies? Any fallouts?’ My phone vibrated in my pocket.

      ‘I’ve worked here for Linda’s entire headship. She was a popular and inspiring leader. She regularly had to deal with staff, students and parents who were unhappy, often angry. But she had good people skills. I don’t recall any of those occasions getting nasty or being left unresolved.’

      I got up and walked across the room. ‘Can you run through what you think the school’s challenges are? Issues? Anything that might give us an idea why someone might want to harm Mrs Gibson?’

      ‘Well . . . the language and literacy levels of a lot of our students are lower than we’d like. We have many students with English as their second language.’

      ‘But aren’t a lot of the kids who come here born here?’ I had a feeling I knew what Neil was going to say.

      ‘Yes. But a problem for many of them is their parents don’t speak English fluently, and some not at all. At home they speak their mother tongue and they tend to mix with others of their own culture. Understandable, but it can cause difficulties.’

      It pained me to hear this. Had things not moved on at all since we arrived in the 1980s? Mum popped into my mind, how she would insist on talking to the three of us in Sylheti when Dad wasn’t around. Jasmina and I had quickly become fluent in English but Sabbir hadn’t. By the time Jaz and I left home, Mum still couldn’t speak English and barely could to this day.

      ‘What prevents parents from learning English, do you think?’

      ‘Lack of government funding for language classes for older family members. And parents and grandparents have learned they can get by without having to learn English. When they need a translator, they take one of their children along. We often see it at parents’ evenings. We talk to the students, and they relay what we’ve said to their uncle, dad, grandparents, whoever has come along with them. They do the same for medical appointments and ones with social services.’

      ‘But doesn’t the problem stop when the current generation are proficient?’

      ‘It should. But often the kids only develop their English to a certain point.’ He looked genuinely upset about this.

      Despondent as this information made me, it rang true. Dad had been insistent that we spoke good English. He knew Mum spoke to us in Sylheti. It was something they’d quarrelled about regularly. ‘What implications does that have for their education and for the school?’

      ‘The weaker their English, the more difficult the children find learning. You can then see behavioural problems and absenteeism.’

      ‘Any of the students have a grudge towards Mrs Gibson?’ With her being strangled, it seemed unlikely but we needed to rule it out.

      ‘A few. It’s inevitable. I’ll get you a list.’

      ‘Thank you. As soon as you can, please.’ My brain was assimilating Neil’s information. Was his testimony reliable? I was keen to hear whether Shari would tell us anything different. ‘Two last questions for now. I want to make shure we know about everyone with a link to the school. Take me through them all, can you?’ He scoffed. ‘In a close-knit community such as this, pretty much everyone has been connected with the place at some point. Teachers, kids and parents, obviously. Past and present. Governors. Support staff. You name it!’

      ‘And does the school or LEA have any policies around file storage and deletion?’

      He frowned. ‘Other than the legal requirements of the Data Protection Act, no. Why?’

Wednesday – Steve

      Steve had never been good at being told what to do. The paramedic who’d checked him over had suggested an early night, but Steve couldn’t resist accompanying Andrea and their colleagues to the Morgan Arms. He was aware this was more to delay his sister’s inevitable lecture than it was to extend the time spent with his new work mates, dissecting what might have happened to Linda Gibson.

      ‘What d’you want to drink?’ Andrea asked as they entered the busy backstreet gastro-pub. ‘I’m having a pint of this.’ She pointed at the Bow Bells hand pump.

      Steve swallowed down a surge of nausea. The place reeked of warm goat’s cheese and garlic. He’d resolved to have a soft drink but his colleagues were all ordering bottles of wine and double vodkas, so he felt a bit of a wimp asking for a Coke. Besides, after the events of the day, and with his hangover lingering, a livener seemed appealing.

      ‘I’ll have the same.’ He knew how good the local ale was, having sampled it after his interview a few months ago. In the pit of his stomach, dread was bubbling up in anticipation of the grilling his sister was going to give him when she got home. Even if she had already heard what had gone on with Lucy, and how the Christmas holidays had ended, she would insist on knowing every detail. And he wasn’t looking forward to having to explain quite how spectacularly he’d cocked everything up. He adored Jane but at times she took her big sister role too seriously, and delighted in giving him a hard time when she thought he’d behaved badly.

      Steve glanced round the vast, open-plan bar, taking in its trendy décor. After the cultural homogeneity of Midhurst, and his last school, he was still acclimatising to how much East London had changed since his school days here. The contrasts seemed so much more obvious now. They’d just walked past a boarded-up social housing block with a demolition order, and now they were in a gastro-pub that sold packets of cracked pepper flavoured crisps for two quid, and which had a dedicated wine menu with separate pages for white, red, rosé and sparkling wines. In reality, though, with the high bar, made of what was supposed to look like old ship beams bolted together, the trendy music and shabby chic décor, they could be in New York, Hamburg or Liverpool.

      Andrea was waiting to order.

      ‘Nice

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