All the Daughters

Penny Freedman

Description

In this explosive follow-up to This is a Dreadful Sentence, featuring Gina Gray and DCI Scott, a twelve-year-old girl is killed, pushed down the stairs at her home and beaten over the head with a golf club. Scott leads the investigation and finds himself crossing paths again with Gina, a university lecturer, linguistics expert, harassed daughter, mother and grandmother, and all-round know-all and busybody. Gina's daughter, Ellie, was the dead girl's teacher and when the police suspect her of involvement in the murder, Gina steps into the fray and launches her own parallel investigation. What she lacks in forensic evidence and IT wizardry she makes up for in linguistic acuteness, an extensive network of informants and sheer chutzpah. Scott is determined that she will be kept well away from the inquiry but a serious attempt on her life persuades him to work with her again and together they bring the case to a startling conclusion. Gina's view of the world is often comic but the crime she unravels is as wicked as it is possible to be. Penny cites Susan Hill and Kate Atkinson among her inspirations. 'I love murder mysteries,' she says, 'but there aren't enough good female detectives, and those there are fail to convince as having the kinds of lives most women lead. There's not enough multi-tasking!'

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781780886572
• Langue: English

Extrait

ALL THE DAUGHTERS
ALL THE DAUGHTERS
PENNY FREEDMAN
Copyright 2012 Penny Freedman
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
Matador 9 Priory Business Park Kibworth Beauchamp Leicestershire LE8 0RX, UK Tel: ( 44) 116 279 2299 Fax: ( 44) 116 279 2277 Email: [e-mail] Web: www.troubador.co.uk /matador
ISBN 978 1780886 572
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset in Aldine by Troubador Publishing Ltd Printed and bound in the UK by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
For Zo Emmeline and Genevieve Joy, who are and are not the daughters of this book, and for Robert with all my love
Contents
Foreword
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
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25
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27
28
29
A Note
FOREWORD
I lived very happily for thirty years in the city which was the inspiration for Marlbury and I have many good friends there. I would not want anyone to think that Gina s jaundiced view of the city is mine. The characters who appear in these pages bear no relation to any of that city s inhabitants, and the places of learning and entertainment have only the most superficial resemblance to prototypes there.
I am all the daughters of my father s house And all the brothers too, and yet I know not.
Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 4
1
TUESDAY 21 st SEPTEMBER
And what s her history?
So what s your policy on farting in class, Eve? Ellie asks.
Eve gives a hoot of laughter. Well, I try not to do it as far as possible, she says. It helps if you don t eat gipsy tart for lunch.
You know what I mean, Ellie protests, waving her wine glass with dangerous vigour. They drove me mad this afternoon. You just get them settled and working on something and then one of the boys farts - or the others say he has - and they all start flapping their arms and holding their noses and making a big production. Next thing, they want to open the windows to clear the air and then they start dropping things out - not their own things, other people s - all sorts - pencil cases, books - there was even a shoe this afternoon - and then the owners want to go down and collect them, and the whole lesson collapses. And all the teachers in the rooms below know you ve lost control when all these things start hurtling past their windows.
She ends with a comic wail, but I can see she s perilously close to tears. Poor Ellie: my twenty-two-year-old daughter, fresh out of university and in her first term of teaching at The William Roper Academy, Marlbury. Now Marlbury isn t your crumbling post-industrial city. On the surface, it s a prosperous and charming town - quite a tourist attraction, in fact, with its fine abbey and gardens and little half-timbered houses - but it has its areas of social deprivation and William Roper is creamed several times over by three grammar schools and a bunch of private schools. Middle class parents have numerous ways of avoiding William Roper and avoid it they do. I taught there myself for fifteen years, give or take a few terms of maternity leave. It wasn t an academy then but I doubt the change has been anything more than cosmetic: a lick of paint, a smart uniform and a shiny logo. That unpleasant American expression comes to mind; Ellie is discovering that, even with lipstick on, The William Roper School is a pig.
There are extra problems to teaching drama, I say to Ellie. It s a bit easier if you ve got them pinned down in desks.
That s why I asked Eve. They all mill about in the art room, don t they? How do you keep them focussed?
Well, I don t have the farting problem, for a start, Eve says. My room stinks so much of paint and turps nothing else gets a look-in. But the real secret is being relaxed. If they know you re rattled, then they know they ve got you. You start by pretending - you should be good at that, you being an actress and all - and then you find you re doing it for real. Of course, it s hard jumping in the deep end like you re doing
Eve s voice, with its soft Irish consonants, is like warm honey and her sitting room is an improbable feast of colours and textures. There are rugs, covers, cushions, curtains, all made by her over the years, in a palette of blues, greens and yellows; there are ebullient arrangements of dried flowers and grasses; there are vigorous sketches of her four gorgeous daughters and her growing brood of grandchildren. As she talks on, though, soothing Ellie, and I sit back on my sofa and sip my wine, I find I can superimpose on all this the sights, sounds and smells of William Roper as I met it when I was only a year older than Ellie is now. Sights and sounds are easy: gum-smeared windows, graffiti-gouged desks, leprous paint and the clattering, shattering soundtrack of a thousand teenage voices ricocheting between hard surfaces. What surprises me is the way the smell comes up to meet me, compounded of many simples, that unmistakeable blend of spearmint gum, cheese and onion crisps, cheap floor cleaner and teenage sweat.
I did my time there at the coal face and then, as I was coming up to forty, I got out. Eve stayed, but then Eve is a better woman than I am. Eve is the woman I would like to be if I could somehow be wiser, calmer, sweeter and kinder. If I were quite unlike myself, in fact. But still I aspire. Misguided, neurotic, sour and judgemental as I am, I still believe that I could be that warm, consoling earth-mother if only - if only what? If only the world were a different place, I suppose. Anyway, I didn t stick it out at William Roper; I escaped to teach English for academic purposes to foreign students at Marlbury University College, where the ambience is superior, the students are, for the most part, well-motivated and the classroom smell is different: garlic mainly, with sheepy overtones of damp wool between October and March, when students from warmer climes - Greeks in particular - don t like to take their coats off.
Enough of this. I snap back into the conversation. I ve remembered, I say, what I used to do about the farting issue.
Ellie and Eve turn to look at me. I sense that their conversation has moved on in my absence.
I told them that in polite society it wasn t done to comment on other people s bodily functions and I made anyone who mentioned farting come in at lunch time and write rhyming couplets on the subject of polite behaviour.
Ellie objects, But we re not supposed to punish kids by giving them extra work to do. We re supposed to engage them in the work, not make it a chore.
Well, I never made them write rhyming couplets at any other time. I hate rhyming couplets - they make everything sound trite and trivial, like Pope.
The Pope? Ellie asks, startled. He doesn t speak in rhyming couplets, does he?
Eve shouts with laughter and I splutter on my wine as I say, Not the Pope, Pope - Alexander - 18 th century poet, so-called. What an ignoramus you are, Ellie. I told your father he was wasting his money on your expensive education.
Ah yes, says Eve. That will be a bit of a handicap in coping with the William Roper kids - you having been to Lady Margaret College for Girls, all posh and civilised and well-behaved.
Not as well-behaved as all that.
We turn to look at Colin Fletcher. I d almost forgotten he was here. He s withdrawn himself a bit from our female circle and is mulling over a crossword, I think.
Lady M has a bit of a drugs problem at the moment, I hear.
There always were drugs around, says Ellie. We got them from the boys at The Abbey.
This isn t just the odd bit of cannabis or ecstasy, Colin says. It s serious stuff.
Wow, says Ellie. That ll be getting Mrs Mayfield in a flap. I wonder if they re coming from The Abbey too.
Colin smiles. As we re the school doctors for Marlbury Abbey, I couldn t possibly comment. Professional confidentiality.
Colin is a GP - our GP, in fact - and if he were an actor you d be bound to cast him as the old-fashioned family doctor. He s tall and broad-shouldered, with a lot of springy grey hair and a rather military moustache. Like my ex-husband, Andrew, he is an alumnus of The Abbey School, Marlbury s finest and most ancient public school, but he has surprisingly left-wing views and I bumped into him on several demos during the Thatcher years. I saw him on the march against the Iraq war in 2003 too - though you didn t have to be left-wing to join that - just in possession of a couple of brain cells. He is gentle, humorous and charming, and if I m never quite comfortable with him, it s simply because he s been familiar with the most intimate bits of me and that feels rather odd.
Talking of drugs, I say, did you know I d given up smoking?
How long since your last cigarette? Colin demands with professional scepticism.
Six weeks.
Eve gives me a round of applause and I bow graciously.
I d like to say it was your influence, Colin, I tell him, but actually it was because of Freda.
Freda is the fifth member of our party this evening. She hasn t joined in the conversation yet, although Ellie and I are proud of her extensive vocabulary. She is Ellie s three-year-old daughter, born at the end of her first year at university and the reason, I m afraid, that Ellie is facing the rigours of William Roper at the moment. It s a sensible career decision for a single mother