know, shouldn’t think so for a minute.’ He began to look at her more closely. ‘Why? Come on, tell me.’
Debbie found herself telling him about her encounter at the station last night, and the way the strange figure had made her feel. ‘He looked sort of, well, dangerous,’ she finished, lamely. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘No, go on, it’s interesting.’ She had his attention now, and he plied her with questions she couldn’t answer. Had she really heard the sound of breaking glass coming from the station? Not from anywhere else? What did he look like? Was she sure he didn’t catch the train?
‘Perhaps you saw him – the strangler,’ he said, half seriously.
‘Rubbish! If it was over at Mexborough it can’t have been anything to do with what I saw.’ Debbie was annoyed because she felt uneasy.
‘It’s the next stop up the line.’
She thought about it, and then saw what time it was. ‘Oh, God, I’ve got to go. I’m teaching in five minutes.’
Tim smiled at her encouragingly, and as she left was getting out a notebook and pen. ‘I’ll just stay here and get some work done. It’s quieter than in our staff room. See you later.’
As she left the canteen, she saw Rob Neave leaning against the wall watching the students with a conspicuously bleak expression. He caught Debbie’s eye and winked. As she went past him, he said, ‘It’ll be nearer five than four-thirty. Is that OK?’
‘Yes, it won’t take long. It’s nothing much.’
He looked sceptical. ‘Your last nothing much took half my budget,’ he said, referring to the time when Louise and Debbie had decided to take advantage of the fact that the college had actually appointed someone with responsibility for security. They’d campaigned for better lighting in some of the isolated parts of the campus, assuming that the boyish face and easy charm of the new appointee meant he would be a pushover. He’d proved to be a tough negotiator, who was, fortunately, on their side. They’d got their lighting.
Debbie noticed as she looked more closely at him that he was tired and drawn. She wondered if he was another person who’d had a sleepless night. She almost told him about her experience at the station. She felt in need of expert advice.
Debbie’s Friday afternoon A-level class distracted her and she forgot, for the moment, about the incident at the station. The students were studying ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, and making heavy weather of it. Debbie had asked them to think about the lines: God save thee, ancient Mariner!/From fiends that plague thee thus!/Why look’st thou so?’ With my crossbow/ I shot the Albatross. Why, she had asked them, did the mariner shoot the albatross that had brought good luck to the ship? Somehow, the discussion had got hijacked into an animal rights argument that was interesting, but not what Debbie wanted them to do.
‘Anyway, it’s cruel,’ said Sarah Peterson, who had been following the discussion closely. Debbie sighed. Sarah rarely contributed, but it was typical that when she did it was with the wrong end of the stick securely in her hands. She could see Leanne Ferris, one of the brighter members of the group, about to deliver a sharp rebuttal, and she pulled them back to the poem, and began to work them around to thinking about a less literal interpretation. She saw Sarah diligently writing down the points she was making.
Sarah was Debbie’s particular concern that year, a different kind of student from Leanne. Leanne, quick-minded and confident about her own ideas, would sail through anything the exam system threw at her, as long as Debbie could persuade her to do a bit of work. Sarah worked very hard, but didn’t understand. She had no confidence in her own ideas and opinions, so she wanted someone – Debbie in this case – to tell her what she should think. She didn’t want to know why the answers were correct, what they meant or what the implications were. She just wanted the answers, as her palpable puzzlement when answers weren’t offered made clear.
After the class, Sarah waited until the others had gone, and then asked rather diffidently if there was time to discuss her last essay. ‘The one I did on Othello. I didn’t get a very good mark.’ She rummaged in her bag and produced the essay which looked rather crumpled, and a can of Coke. ‘I’ve got to go straight to work,’ she said apologetically, gesturing at the can. Sarah, like a lot of students at City, could only afford to stay at college by working. She had a job at a pub on the outskirts of Moreham.
They discussed the essay, or at least, Debbie did, while Sarah wrote things down. ‘Have another go at it,’ Debbie suggested. ‘Once you’ve got one good essay, it gives you a model for others. Let me have it on Monday, OK?’
‘Thanks, Debbie.’ Sarah smiled and briefly met Debbie’s eyes before hurrying out. Debbie collected her things and headed back to her room.
When she got there, Rob Neave was leaning on the windowsill beside her desk, flicking through the pages of one of her books – a collection of Auden’s poems. He usually showed some interest in her books, though she sometimes found it hard to tell if he really meant it. His face could be difficult to read. He looked up as she came in. ‘Deborah.’ He was one of the few people who used her full name. ‘So what’s this nothing much problem?’
‘Do you want a coffee? There was something else as well, actually.’ He declined the coffee, as she knew he would. He’d made some pointed comments in the past about the standard of the coffee that she and Louise drank. He waited as Debbie got herself a drink, idly turning the pages of the Auden.
She remembered the last time she’d talked to him about poetry. He’d picked up a copy of The Waste Land from where it was lying on Debbie’s desk. What had this got to do, he’d wanted to know, with the lives most of the students led? ‘A lot,’ Debbie had retorted. And was it going to help them with what they really needed in their lives – a way to make a decent living? ‘It teaches them how to think.’ Debbie wasn’t giving anything away to anyone about the value of studying literature. He’d argued the point good-naturedly for a bit longer and she’d wondered at the end of it if he’d been winding her up.
‘You can borrow that, if you want.’ She was surprised when he said he would. ‘I thought you didn’t see any point in poetry,’ she said.
‘I didn’t say that.’ He was still turning the pages, but not really reading.
Aware that it sounded a bit blunt, Debbie asked, ‘Is it right that you used to be in the police?’
He looked at her. ‘Who’s been talking to you? Yes, for ten years.’ He didn’t seem to mind her question, but something told her not to ask any more.
‘Let me show you this.’ She took the book out of his hands, and started leafing through it. ‘This one. That end bit there.’ She was looking at the lines towards the end of ‘The Shield of Achilles’, the bit about the ragged urchin in the weed-choked field. That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third/ were axioms to him, who’d never heard/ Of any world where promises were kept/ Or one could weep because another wept. He read it through and looked at her, waiting. ‘Didn’t you meet that boy a hundred times when you were in the police force?’
He was still reading the lines. ‘Yes, you see them all the time.’
‘That’s what I meant. Poetry has a lot to do with their lives.’
He grinned, acknowledging both the point, and the fact that she wasn’t prepared to let the argument go. ‘OK, but you can romanticize as well.’
‘I don’t think that romanticizes. It calls raping and killing axioms.’ She was standing close to him as they read the lines, and she was aware of the warmth coming from him, the smell of a laundered shirt, the faint smell of sweat.
He nodded, but cut the topic off. ‘Right. What’s the problem.’ He listened while Debbie outlined the concerns that she had working in Room B110 at night, where the curtainless windows, brightly lit, looked out on to the street and gave any passer-by a clear view of who