Wisdom of Solomon Chapter 1

1
October 1995

The Head was tense. You could see it in the way the skin puckered about his eyes. Every now and then he worked his lips back and forth over his teeth.

‘Today we are going to be visited by the police. Yes. I have been informed that someone will be coming over at ten o’clock. They will spend the day talking to members of staff and pupils. I’m not happy about it but what can I do? As of yet I’m not sure exactly what they will be asking of us. Therefore, try and carry on as normally as possible, if and when anybody is required I’ll send word. Let’s try to get through as smoothly as we can without too many interruptions. The presence of a detective is bound to cause some disturbance and gossip but I would like everyone to try and minimize the impact this might have. Thank you.’

This news gave Helen and Daphne another chance to sympathise at length about everything tragic and wrong with the world. Alun and Keith cycled through pretending they were in the police, describing the charms of the perfect female detective and then speculating how they would plan, execute and get away with the perfect murder.

'Acid,' insisted Alun, 'that's the only way to be sure.'

Adrenaline swam nauseatingly in my stomach. In class, the kids had to say things two, three times to me before I took it in. Their words came to me muffled as if I was listening to life through a glass on the wall. I constantly looked over to the door. Waiting. At ten thirty a runner came, an excitable first year, fresh into the school. He had been entrusted with a list of classrooms and a message. At such an early stage of his comprehensive school career this amount of responsibility clearly dazzled him. All fifth and sixth form classes were to gather in the hall, he said, with a delivery at once automaton and breathless.

In the hall my fifth formers took their seats, finding friends to sit beside and murmur away with in excitement. Helen waved at me as I entered. Neither Keith nor Alun could be seen, which meant they had to be busy as they would never have missed such an opportunity if at all possible. A touch on my side made me jump but it was only Helen. Everyone in the school knew we were living together but she kept her affections discrete. She laughed at my reaction, and asked, ‘Guilty conscience?’

I knew she was joking. Of course she was joking, but I had to make a special effort to flatten out my words so that I could move carefully over hers. Thankfully, before I had to think of something to say the door at the back of the hall opened and in walked The Head closely followed by a man of hunched shoulder and rounded girth. He too had a moustache, although it was trimmed narrower than The Head's - not quite a Hitler, but not far off. A pair of thick eyebrows rose above equally thick spectacles. Thin hair covered his large head. A worn, tweed jacket covered his belly laden body. He looked more like a put-upon librarian than any kind of detective.

The hubbub quieted as The Head took to the stage. He solemnly reminded everyone of why we were gathered there. It sounded like the opening words of a funeral. He had assured the relevant authorities of the schools complete cooperation. Now it was up to us to live up to that promise, he said, with a look of retribution in his eye if his words were not heeded. The balding man, who had been attempting inconspicuousness off to one side, now came forward in response to The Head’s solemn nod.

‘Thank you,’ he began, his quiet and unobtrusive voice only just carrying, ‘thank you headmaster. If you'll allow me to introduce myself, my name is Herbert Parsley. I’m a civilian investigator working for Gwent Police. I’m sure you all know why I’m here today. Unfortunately it is often a feature of my work that I only show up after something terrible has occurred. And the death of a young man is a terrible thing. It is my job to try and establish more about Mark as a person and about his life. Throughout the rest of the day I’ll be talking to some of you and I’d also like to say that if anybody feels there is something they want to tell me, or something they should tell me, then feel free to come and see me. Nobody I talk to is in any kind of trouble. My role is just to provide a...context for what happened.’

‘So he’s not actually a policeman then?’ I said to Helen.

‘Ummm...no, appears not. Maybe he’s like a Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade. A tough gumshoe who lives by his wits out on the dark, dark streets of Newport.’ She made a decent stab at a film noir accent. Was it significant that the police didn’t seem bothered enough to come to the school themselves? Maybe it was just as he said, he was here for background, for context, nothing more.

The Head dismissed us back to our regular routines. No one from my class was called. Not while I taught them in any case. They were from the year below Mark's so the chances of them having known him were limited. I suppose Parsley was just casting his net wide.

At dinner time I enquired anxiously after the others. Helen had been called in almost immediately. Alun raised a suspicious eyebrow.

‘I don’t think that’s significant,’ she said.

I wanted to cut through any idle chatter before Keith and Alun could get going. I said, ‘What did he ask you? Anything specific? What about his manner?’

‘Well, not as many questions as you for starters.’ I tried to laugh this off and drew back. Helen sat and began to methodically unpack and set out her lunch. Once she had it to her liking, she took one Greek salad roll in hand and began to talk again.

‘He’s rather sweet actually. Didn’t feel like I was being interrogated at all.’

‘Oh aye,’ said Alun, ‘good looking bastard, is he? Careful Sol, my old son.'

‘You obviously haven’t seen him then,’ I said, then, more casually than before, repeated, ‘what did he ask?’

‘Nothing really. He just wanted to hear what I thought of Mark. My impressions of him and so on. He mainly just sat, listened and made the occasional note while I rambled on. He already knew that Mark had been in the play and that I was the director. I talked about that for a while and how well Mark had done. Then he asked me a bit about Mark’s character. I said that he seemed nice enough, took himself a little too seriously at times but all in all a decent kid.’ She shrugged and crunched into her lunch. Half a slice of cucumber slipped out and landed on the small table.

‘Was that it?’

Keith said: ‘Not exactly Columbo is he, this...what’s his name?’

‘Parsley, Herbert Parsley,’ answered Helen. Alun cracked up. We all looked to him for an explanation.

‘Oh come on,’ he said, ‘it’s a joke name. Herbert Parsley. Herb Parsley. A joke name – Bigus Dickus and all that.’

‘Oh yeah, ha!’ Keith enjoyed it.

At just after three a secretary came to inform me it was my turn and offered to supervise the class as long as they had work. At first I dawdled, feeling this was it, this was the end. I was no criminal mastermind. I wasn’t a mastermind of any sort. I’d crack open like an egg.

Herbert Parsley had set up office in the lower sixth common room. He sat, bent over, writing. You could see his red scalp through the hair on top of his head. The door stood open but I still knocked softly to attract his attention. He rose and politely came to meet me half way. His ID card hung on a red lace about his neck. The picture on it represented him exactly. It could have been taken that morning.

‘Mr. English?’ He shook my hand.

‘That’s me,’ I said. Altogether too chirpy. I had to rein myself in. He pointed me toward his workplace. He had moved one of the broad tables, that normally lined the wall, into the middle of the room, placing a chair on either side. The comfy chairs he had eschewed and pushed out of the way so that they formed a forlorn herd in the corner.

‘Where are you from Mr. English?’

‘Oh, I’m a local boy. Why do you ask?’ Was this it? Had he begun?

‘Just wondering, nothing to worry about. Take a seat, please.’

We both sat. He picked up his notebook. It was one of those moleskin types, very nice, I had one myself. Not likely to be standard issue for the force. Scribbles marked the pages but I could not make them out. They may as well have been hieroglyphs. He turned to a fresh page, smoothed down the margin and, with a battered old ink pen wrote something at the top of the page and underlined it twice. I had no problem reading that; it was my name.

‘So, Mr. English, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d just like to start off with you giving me your general impressions about Mark Matthews.’ He sat back, crossed his legs and waited for me to begin. He was at repose, he should have been listening to opera. He left the notebook on the table.

‘Mark Matthews. Mark Matthews. Ummm...well he came with a bit of reputation but I have to say that there was no sign of that here, at least not as far as I’m aware. I don’t know what I can say really. He wasn’t in any of my classes.’

‘But you did know him as part of the play you help to put on with Miss Masterson?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said quickly, ‘sure, there was that. He was very good actually. Surprising. Maybe that’s something he could have done.’ And then, for the first time, it actually struck me that he was dead. All the time since he fell I had been occupied with what would happen to me. What had happened to Mark had not truly entered into my head. Yes, he was dead. Dead, dead, dead, dead. Repeat a word enough and it becomes meaningless. Look at a word long enough and it loses its impact. You start to see the form rather than the meaning. Dead. Ded. Daed. Dad. Deed. But now, mentioning in passing a future that Mark would never have crystallized that abstract thought in my stomach so that it became hard and spiky and uncomfortable. ‘A clever boy too, I thought. Not at all like the picture painted of him by some. Not at all. No.’

‘Were there any particular friends that he had? A girlfriend maybe? Or boyfriend?’

Boyfriend? What did he mean by that? I hated his prying. What to tell and what not to? How could you know the right thing to say? What harm could it do to tell him about Ros? Mark had assured me she was not in on his plans. Besides, if I professed ignorance and it did come out then that would be worse. ‘I think he was seeing one of the girls in the play. They seemed pretty close anyway. Whether it was serious or not I couldn’t tell you.’

He leaned forward, scooped up his book and wrote in it. He seemed very out of place amongst the dartboard, microwave, dirty cups and random chairs of the lower sixth common room. He was an anachronism. A teacher from fifty years before who through some warp, some rent in the time continuum, had stepped straight into the future. He didn’t belong with manmade fabrics.

Herbert Parsley wrote patiently, with an unhurried hand, then looked up and said, ‘Anything else?’

I thought about it, then said, ‘No. No, nothing. Like I said I didn’t teach him. Just the play.’

Parsley tugged something unseen from his terrible moustache before saying, ‘You did visit his mother though, didn’t you?’ I noticed for the first time a very Welsh lilt in his accent and wondered how it had eluded me before.

‘Visit his mother? Yes I did. Yes, I’d quite forgotten.’ He must have thought he’d caught me out but I had genuinely not thought about it. I didn’t know whether that was good or bad. Something prodded me in the back telling me it was the latter. Parsley sat and waited, obviously waiting for me to elaborate. ‘It was after the episode with the exam paper. The drawing and so on,’ Parsley showed no sign as to whether he knew about that or not. I assumed he did so didn’t explain. ‘I went to see him, actually, as well as his mother.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Because I thought that the school had treated him harshly. I wanted to offer some kind of support, any kind of support, and I felt someone from the school ought to apologise for that shabby treatment.’ He nodded and made a note in his book leaving an awkward silence while he wrote.

‘That’s very good of you, to go and do that for someone who you said yourself you didn’t know all that well.’

I refused to take the bait.

‘Not really. I didn’t know him well, that’s true, but we talked a few times during the play. And, like I said, I didn’t agree at all with the headmaster’s action. No need to mention that to him though. Also, it’s not the first time I’ve done that – visited a pupil I mean. I went to see a former pupil of mine who became pregnant and was excluded.’

Parsley said, ‘What did you talk about with him? During the play I mean.’

‘I really can’t remember. Nothing of consequence.’

‘Anything at all might be helpful.'

‘Future plans...subjects...university, he wanted to go, to study film, he said. Just chit-chat, you know.’

Parsley went to write something but changed his mind and carefully put his pen down on the table. ‘Thank you Mr. English, I think we’re done.’ He stood and offered his hand once more. His fingers, like the rest of him, were short and thick.

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it,’ he said, ‘if I do have any more questions is it okay to contact you through the school?’

‘Of course, of course. Good luck,’ I said and turned to leave.

‘Good luck?’

I looked back from the doorway, ‘Yes, with catching whoever did this.’

‘You think we should be looking for someone?’ Something in Parsley’s voice made the sweat start to drip from my armpits. I could feel drops sliding down my ribs.

‘It isn’t a murder?’ I asked.

‘Not unless someone tells me it is,’ said Parsley. Whether he was joking or not was impossible to tell. I suddenly felt that I had to tread very carefully as if I were on a frozen lake and the first gunshots of cracking ice had reached my ears. There was something crafty about Parsley, his near buffoonish appearance merely a smokescreen.

‘My mistake,’ I said, ‘I just assumed.’

He watched me for a second or two, then nodded and went back to his seat. I walked away down the corridor feeling sure that every eye in every classroom I passed was upon me. I looked only straight ahead. My heart crashed about in my chest sending bursts of heat out to every part of my body.

In the toilet I turned on the cold and scooped handfuls of water into my face. Even so, when I looked into the mirror I saw the face of a killer staring back at me. Herbert Parsley must have seen it too.