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Wednesday – Maya

After the staff briefing, Dan brought Neil Sanderson to the ground-floor room they were using for interviews. Off the stairs and with no natural light or ventilation, the room was cold and dingy. All it contained was an old wooden table, which looked like it had been rejected from all other locations, and four plastic chairs. On the table was an empty tissue box with a lidless biro popping over the edge.

Neil shuffled into the room with his hands in his pockets. His lowered gaze betrayed not hostility so much as frustration and impatience, eyes glancing sideways.

‘Have a seat.’ I pointed at the chair opposite Dan and watched the man get settled. I introduced myself. ‘You’re the school bursar. Is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was Rich Griffiths at the staff briefing you’ve just had?’

Neil hesitated. ‘I’m not sure. I was concentrating on what we needed to tell the staff. Why?’ I felt him searching my face for clues.

‘Why wasn’t he with the rest of the staff at lunchtime?’

‘I didn’t know he wasn’t. 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?’