Simon Lelic Read online

  There was blood on the floor. She had known it was there and she had meant to ignore it because the blood had come after, during, not before. She looked at it anyway. The girl whose blood it was had still been alive when she had shed it. It had run down her arm and to her hand and from her fingers as the teacher had carried her out. It lay in drops and in several places it was smeared, as if by a toe or a heel or a knee where someone had stumbled.

  He would not have stopped, Lucia was sure, and so she carried on, not walking on the blood but not not walking on the blood.

  The assembly hall was some distance from the staffroom. The walk would have allowed him plenty of time to think, to reconsider, to change his mind and then back again. Somehow she knew that he had not thought. He had focused on not thinking.

  As she paced the length of the corridor she passed classrooms with their doors open and a series of recessed stairwells. She glanced through each doorway and up each flight of stairs, sure that he would have done the same. In her school, she recalled, there had been pupils’ work displayed along the corridors: geography projects or charity work or photos from the year-end musical. The walls she passed were bare, breeze-block grey. The only markings were from the paint, a darker grey, that the caretaker had used to conceal graffiti. After every other door there was an alarm switch and at the far end of the hall the alarm itself, higher up and encased in wire.

  There was tape across the doors that led into the assembly hall. The doors themselves were locked. Lucia took a key from her pocket, turned it in the padlock and opened one of the doors. She ducked under the tape and stepped inside.

  It smelt of plimsolls. Rubbery, sweaty, the yield of scores of scrabbling feet. The assembly hall, she knew, doubled as the gym. There were climbing frames, folded to the walls and locked in place.

  She shut the door behind her, just as he had done. He would have looked to the front, she assumed, at the stage and whomever had been speaking. The headmaster. Travis. Lucia’s eyes, though, caught on the climbing frame opposite her, on the ropes that bisected the rows of bars. One of the victims had hauled themselves upright, had used a rope to try and help them escape the onrush of bodies. There was blood on the knot at the bottom and at intervals for several feet up. At head height the blood marks stopped.

  The hall was as it had been all week. Nothing had been moved, other perhaps than by the faltering feet of a photographer. It would have been hard not to bump into something. There was no clear pathway to the stage, nor to the side of the hall across from her. From the rear wall to the podium, chairs lay on their backs, on their sides, any way but the right way up. Many were still laced together so that where one chair had fallen the rest had fallen too, transforming the row into a barrier, the legs of the chairs into barbs. Lucia was reminded of an image of Verdun, of the land and the barricades between the trenches. She imagined children, their eyes bleeding fear, tripping and becoming entangled and then trampled by those behind. She imagined the impact of one of the upended chair legs against a stomach, a cheek, a temple.

  On the chairs and under them were jumpers, some books, the contents of children’s pockets. A set of keys here, attached to a chain attached to a belt loop torn from someone’s trousers. An iPod, black, with its headphones still plugged in and its screen cracked. Mobile phones. And shoes. There was a surprising number of shoes. Girls’ shoes mainly but also trainers and boots. To one side a single brogue, size ten or eleven. A pair of glasses, the lenses intact but one arm snapped off. A handkerchief, white.

  She tried to ignore the state of the hall and to picture it as he would have seen it: every seat full, the children silent for once given the circumstances of the assembly, some of them crying and trying not to. The teachers seated in rows flanking the headmaster, jaws tense, eyes downcast or fixed on the headmaster himself. Travis at the lectern, his hands on the corners furthest away from him and his elbows locked, his eyes commanding the attention of his audience, his speechifying relentless despite the late arrival to the hall. Travis would have seen him walk through the doors of course. Some of the teachers would have too, though they could not have made out what he was carrying. Children in the back row may have turned, may even have noticed the gun, but they would have assumed, surely, that it was a prop, that his late entrance was staged to coincide with some aspect of Travis’s address. The gun was in keeping with the theme of the headmaster’s sermon after all. Violence was the theme of the day.

  She traced his steps as best she could, moving across the rear of the hall and then turning at the corner towards the stage. Halfway along the side wall Lucia stopped and faced inwards, in the direction of where the pupils would have been sitting.

  He would have had no skill with a gun. His aim was poor and his prey would have started moving and the gun itself did not fire straight. So Sarah Kingsley, aged eleven, was the first to be shot. As it turned out, she was also the last to die. Lucia wondered if it had registered, his mistake, after he had squeezed the trigger. Whether he had even noticed. Sarah’s blood was at her feet. It was Sarah’s blood, mainly, that she had followed along the corridor. It was Sarah’s blood on the rope.

  The first report would have impacted like a brick through glass. The stillness in the hall would have shattered and been displaced by a jagged, piercing panic. The children would have scattered, they would have screamed. He would have tried to remain still, to stand unyielding against the thrashing bodies, to find his aim again. Once more he had fired and once more he had missed his target. Felix Abe, aged twelve, had died instead.

  Two from two. The weapon was a museum piece, not a semiautomatic. It was in poor condition. That he killed five, five with six bullets, was in a way a minor miracle. It was the worst kind of luck.

  The teachers would have been standing by now, fixated and immobile, like theatre-goers trapped in the circle as chaos consumes the stalls. They would have seen him fire for a third time and they would have seen the third child fall. When he fired again - his fourth bullet, the second one to hit Donovan Stanley, aged fifteen - they might have understood. When he had then looked to them and taken his first step towards the stage, they might finally have run themselves.

  Lucia moved to where the final victim - Veronica Staples, the teacher - had fallen, at the base of the steps leading away from the stage. There were more shoes gathered here, piled almost neatly at the bottom step. There was a handbag too, its contents spilled and scattered: a lipgloss with its case cracked; receipts and scraps of paper, marked and muddied by frantic feet; a pen; a whistle threaded with pink ribbon; half a packet of Polo mints.

  She turned, checking the ground around her as she did so, and saw where he had fired the sixth round, the last bullet in the barrel, and where his blood had splattered the wall. The plaster, once yellow, was pitted by bullet and bone. There were strands of hair too, clumps of it, where his head had impacted against the wall and slid towards the skirting. She crouched and imagined herself level with him, looking at him, watching the carnage he had created reflected back at her by his unseeing eyes.

  Finally she reversed the order, moving to the point where Sarah, the first victim, had been shot. In her mind, the scene unfolded like a DVD playing in reverse. The bullets retreated, the chairs toppled upright, the blood flowed to the place it belonged. Children found their seats, teachers lowered their gaze and Samuel Szajkowski walked backwards and out of the room.

  It was warmer outside than in. Stepping out into the playground was like stepping on to a runway in the tropics. The policemen, tall and overweight both, were red cheeked and sweating. They had been chatting, making jokes, and they were grinning as she came through the doors.

  ‘Find what you were looking for, Inspector?’

  Every day the same question. A different uniform but the same question. They thought Lucia enjoyed being here. They thought that was why she kept coming back. But they were asking the wrong thing. She had found what she was looking for - she had found what she had been sent to discover -
but she had found out more besides. The question was what to do about it. The question was whether to do anything at all.

  Do you have any idea, Detective Inspector May, of the crisis the teaching of mathematics is facing in this country?

  Of course not. Why would you?

  Do you have a pension, Inspector? Do you have a mortgage? You pay rent, though. Money comes in and money goes out. More out than in, I’d warrant. I do not mean to pass judgement, Inspector, but that tends to be the way. And do you know why? I’ll tell you why. Because most of the adult population in this country can barely count their own toes, assuming for a moment that they can see beyond their bellies to locate them. It has been true since the 1960s and it will remain true for as long as you care to consider.

  Calculators, mobile telephones, personal computers, electronic chips in the brain or whatever technological so-called advancement is foisted upon us next: they are eroding the human being’s capacity to think. And mathematics - addition, subtraction, multiplication, long division - has been the first to suffer. Children don’t want to study it. The government doesn’t want to fund it. Teachers don’t want to teach it. What is the point? they say. There is no glamour in mathematics, Inspector. There is no sex. Children don’t care about pensions. They will be young forever, didn’t you know? Ministers don’t care about numeracy. They care about trees and recycling and structural employment for the poor. And teachers. Well. Teachers, I am afraid, care about nothing beyond themselves.

  The young, the graduates, they have a chance to make a difference. They have the opportunity to teach a subject from which the children will actually learn. But if they don’t understand it, how can they teach it? And if no one else can be bothered to do it, why should they? It is too hard. It is too challenging. The mathematics teacher, as a consequence, is a dying breed, an endangered species that no one cares enough about to try and save. Mr Boardman has been teaching mathematics at this school for twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven years, Inspector. Can you imagine anyone under forty contemplating pursuing anything for more than twenty-seven minutes? Present company excluded, I hope. And when Mr Boardman retires, as one day he surely shall, who will I find to replace him? A Chinaman perhaps. A Ukrainian, if I’m lucky.

  Instead, I get history teachers. History. The study of swords and stupidity and scandal. Just what a teenager needs to prepare himself for a life of fiscal and behavioural responsibility. If it were up to me we would not offer it. We would teach mathematics and grammar and physics and chemistry and economics. But the parents want it. The government demands it. They impose on us their curriculum and they instruct us to teach history and geography and biology and sociology. They instruct us to teach humanities.

  I ask you.

  You would not have attended university, I assume?

  Well. I stand corrected. And what, pray tell, did you read? No, don’t tell me. It is clear from your expression. And in a way, my dear, you are a case in point. Where has your history degree got you if not further back than where you began? You are, how old? Thirty.

  Thirty-two then. If you had joined the police force when you were sixteen you might be a chief inspector by now. Superintendent.

  But I digress. My point is that when Amelia Evans left us - and not before time, let me tell you - we had no choice. We needed a teacher who could recount in order the wives of Henry VIII, who could point on a map to the fields of Bosworth and who could recall the date of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. The first Queen Elizabeth, that is. Heaven forbid we teach them anything of relevance to the age in which they actually live.

  It was the name that drew me to him. Russian, I assumed. Eastern European. Of a country that still recognises the educational import of the third of the three Rs. That’s what I have resorted to, Inspector. Scouring the international backwaters for someone to help me safeguard the future of this nation.

  It was a mistake. Naturally it was a mistake given what has happened but it was a mistake a priori. I am a man who owns up to his mistakes, Inspector, and I can but admit to one here. I misjudged the man. I prejudged him. I willed him to correspond with a template I had envisioned and when he did not I adjusted the template to fit.

  Although, having said that, I knew from the start that there was something about him amiss. One just knows, don’t you find? He seemed the decent type, isn’t that what they always say? Quiet, kept himself to himself. ‘Never harmed nobody.’ Well, he was quiet certainly. An introvert and I do not trust introverts. I do not trust extroverts either. One needs balance, Inspector, I am sure you agree. In your profession as much as anyone’s, words must be followed by action, compassion reinforced with resolve. Good cop, bad cop, am I right?

  He had a beard, wispy and ill-considered. He was average in height, average in build, averagely turned out in every aspect of his dress. Distinctly unimpressive in other words but not offensively lacklustre either. He looked, Inspector, like a teacher of history.

  He sat where you are sitting. He waited to be asked. He did not smile as he took my hand and he gripped only the tips of my fingers. It was a woman’s handshake, Inspector, and that I would say is when I knew.

  Yes, I know. I hired him. You may voice what you are thinking. Yes, I hired him and as I have said it was a mistake. Believe me, it has shaken my self-belief. My ability to judge a character is something in which I take pride. Well, you know what they say about pride. Next time I will trust my instincts. I questioned myself, that was the problem. We needed a teacher and Samuel Szajkowski was the least underqualified of a less than inspiring lot.

  What else? Lots of little things. His attempts at humour for instance.

  How do you pronounce this? I asked him, gesturing at the name on his CV.

  It’s shy-kov-skee, he says and I ask him where it is from.

  It’s Polish. My grandfather was Polish.

  I see. And do you speak it?

  No, not really.

  Not really.

  I know words. Some useful, most less so. I can’t spell any of them.

  You see what I mean? He was making a joke of his inadequacy. At an interview, for pity’s sake. I did not laugh and we carried on.

  Why teaching, Mr Szajkowski? What has motivated you to become a teacher?

  Szajkowski nods and for a moment appears to contemplate. I can think of nothing more worthwhile, Mr Travis. My father practised medicine and my mother worked in a bank. Neither profession made them happy.

  They are noble professions, young man. They are significant professions.

  Oh I quite agree. But so is teaching. It doesn’t pay particularly well but can you think of anything more rewarding? Again he ponders. I think the word I’m looking for is meaning, he says. Teaching to my mind has meaning. Genuine meaning.

  I did not appreciate that answer either. It seemed pompous and it seemed calculated. He might have read that answer in a book.

  He asks for a glass of water. I have not offered but he asks for one anyway. I have Janet bring one in and he thanks her, rather obsequiously. He takes a swig and then seems unsure what to do with the glass. He makes a motion towards my desk but then changes his mind. In the end he just clutches it in his lap. I can tell he regrets having asked for it but I do not offer to take it from him. I do not see why I should have to.

  In an ideal world, I tell him, we would have you teaching just the younger pupils. Years seven, eight, nine, ten. But this is not an ideal world, Mr Szajkowski, and we are short-staffed.

  Szajkowski nods, gives the impression that he understands. I am not at all sure that he does.

  You would be teaching students in their exam years, I say. GCSE, even A-level. And not just history, Mr Szajkowski. Teachers get ill. I do not encourage illness but it happens. It is a fact of life. And when teachers get ill, other teachers need to cover their classes.

  I would be happy to, Mr Travis. I’m more than willing to do my bit.

  It is a permanent state of affairs, Mr Szajkowski. There will be no respite w
hile you are employed here, I can assure you of that. Assuming of course that we decide to employ you in the first place.

  Of course, he says and again he nods gravely. I appreciate the warning, just as I would appreciate the opportunity. I am sure the situation here is not unusual. I would imagine the demands would be similar in just about any state-run school.

  Again a hint of arrogance, like he is in a position to lecture me about the condition of education in this country. But I let the matter drop. He will, I tell myself, come to terms with his inexperience soon enough.

  Before he leaves - just before he walks out of my office still clutching that infernal glass - I ask him one more thing. I ask him what he thinks of history. I ask him what he thinks history is.

  He says, have I read Carr, is that what you’re asking me?

  I admit I am taken aback. E. H. Carr, Inspector. There is a copy on the shelf beside you. A moronic work. Lucid enough but entirely misguided. A history teacher who has not read it, however, may as well be replaced by a book.

  And what did you make of Mr Carr’s hypothesis?

  I agreed with parts, he says. But in general I found his arguments overblown. A bit too self-important. History is what it is. It can’t predict the future but it can help us understand who we are, where we’re from. History is all about context, he says, and without context all meaning is lost.

  That impressed me, I will admit. He had some intellectual backbone even if he lacked any in his demeanour. His qualifi - cations, indeed, were never in doubt. Good school, venerable university - not one of these self-aggrandising polytechnics - and solid grades. An A-level in mathematics, if you please. He was bright. Green but bright, and because he was green he was cheap.

  We have targets now, Inspector. Targets to meet and books to balance. You raise an eyebrow at me but I cannot ignore the cost of the capital in which we invest, human or otherwise. Believe me, I would like to. The handling of currency sullies one’s soul as much as one’s fingertips. Book-keeping can be a sordid business. But it is a necessary one, and one I would rather deal with myself than leave to bureaucrats who have no facility with the workings of a school.