Night Windows

by Jonathan Smith

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Someone has stolen Patrick Balfour''s identity. A successful headmaster of a London school, a regular broadcaster and a writer of historical novels, as well as having a fairly spicy private life, Balfour is the object of some unsurprising envy. Yet who would be so malicious as to commit identity fraud and frame Patrick as a thief and a paedophile, using his national insurance number and impersonating his handwriting? As Patrick is teased by a series of letters, it becomes apparent that his adversary is certainly better-read than him and he is sent off on a tense literary chase, picking up clues from Kafka''s The Trial to R L Stevenson and to Joseph Clark, a 17th Century contortionist. Patrick''s morale begins to collapse - the police don''t believe him and his daughter rejects him. Desperate, he decides he must pursue his pursuer.

Release date: July 26, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 384

Sample

It all began just after lunch on 5 November – Guy Fawkes Day, in fact – and Patrick Balfour was sitting at his desk, pencil in hand, drafting a letter. He always drafted in pencil, using a soft 3B, before transferring the words to the screen. It was a difficult letter, this one, to difficult parents about a difficult pupil.

Patrick liked to think he wrote a good letter, a natural letter, a friendly letter, but this sort could take him ages. There were easier things in the world than telling parents that their child had behaved very badly, that the apple of their eye could not only be naughty sometimes but was also capable of being a nasty little sod. But, by inserting a few phrases and by moving around a word or two, he was trying to catch his more conciliatory tone: to suggest that this was the kind of boy who deserved a last chance, and that he was the kind of man, the kind of head, who always liked to leave the disciplinary door open.

Well, he was trying too hard. Because when he read through the new version he found that, far from improving it, he had succeeded only in making himself sound pompous, and pomposity was one of a headmaster’s occupational hazards that Patrick was most keen to avoid.

So he stood up, as he often did when he was irritated with the world or (as here) with himself, and walked round his study, up and down, round and round. It was on the first floor, his study, a spacious book-lined room with a high ceiling, and a room with some of the best views in London.

To the south the Thames flowed by not fifty feet away, with the Globe Theatre and Tate Modern on the far bank. The Thames, full of tugs and city cruisers, lapped the bank with its grey water, the surface bobbling with polystyrene cups and empty plastic bottles. The embankment ran both ways, full of joggers and pigeons.

From his west window he had a snapshot of his school – a timed snapshot, too, because the clock tower was directly opposite him – and these snapshots gave him a feel of the place. Indeed, by looking down on the comings and goings in the quad below he could pick up more than anyone realised; almost at a glance he could see from the body language in the quad whether the school was purposeful and bustling or looking a bit ragged at the edges.

Some days Patrick felt he could be even more specific: in a split second he could spot that a new power group was forming down there, or, on a more individual level, he could sense from her shoulders and walk that the underachieving girl who had just crossed the quad – the one they had been talking about in last Tuesday’s staff meeting – was not so much moodily adolescent as downright depressed.

Patrick liked to think he knew every one of them by name – he prided himself on it – and sometimes as he stood at the window he would test himself. And as he looked down on the quad below, in amongst the moving mass would be the hard core, the lads, the boys with their shirts out, the ones with their top buttons undone, with their shoe laces missing, with their ties half down, with their different colour socks and their non-school shoes (and, in one case, with a letter soon on its way to his parents).

Milling around with the lads, of course, would be the in-girls, the outnumbered girls (the school was not yet fully co-ed), and in amongst the outnumbered girls in all probability would be Alice, his daughter Alice. He always noticed her. She was now one of the gang, one of the sixth-form girls with their low-cut strappy tops and half-hidden tattoes and partly exposed midriffs. She was now one of the in-group, one of those boys and girls who eagerly grasped every available opportunity to get up the school’s nose, or rather the management’s nose, or in Alice Balfour’s case her father’s nose, by exploiting the dress code, by being late for lessons and by letting the place down as badly as possible in public.

And Patrick was glad they did that. Well, not let the place down too badly but took them on. Even when they were a bit of a pain and pushed you to the limit, he thanked God for the unmalleable young. The difficult ones were usually the ones who did something with their adult lives, did something extraordinary, and as an extraordinary man himself Patrick liked to see extraordinariness reflected in his school.

As for the grumbling teachers, the long-term malcontents, the ones who were always threatening to leave but never quite got round to handing in their resignation, he could tell them a mile off. It was the way they met in the middle of the quad for a five-minute moan, then glanced up and tossed their heads in the direction of his study, the place where they felt the real problem could be located, little knowing that the real problem was up there looking down on them. As Patrick often said to other heads, ‘Difficult pupils come and difficult pupils go, but difficult teachers go on for ever.’

But on this occasion, on Day One, on that drab, dreary afternoon of 5 November, none of that was catching Patrick’s eye. For a start everyone was in lessons. No, on this occasion he could see a blue Volvo circling the quad, looking for a parking space, and it was the slow, unhurried way it was proceeding, its rather dawdling feel, which struck him as unusual. There wasn’t a parking place – on their cramped central London campus there rarely was – and the car paused with its engine running while a man in a grey suit got out from the driver’s seat and walked over the cobbles to the porter’s lodge. There was something about the man, the suit, the way he took his time, the way he carried himself, which suggested that he was not a parent. He did not quite seem to fit.

Come on, Patrick said to himself, you can’t stand here like this all day: get back to your desk, you’ve got a pile of work. Back to that letter you’re supposed to be writing.

In an altogether brisker mood, he had just finished the letter and signed it when the internal phone rang. It was his secretary. Patrick had no doubts at all that he had the best secretary in the world.

‘Yes, Daphne.’

‘Two things, Patrick.’

‘Yes.’

‘The BBC have just rung again.’

‘Yes.’

‘Amanda Martin from Newsnight. About next Thursday. She really wants you to go on.’

‘Will it be Paxman?’

‘I didn’t ask.’

‘Anyway, I can’t, we’ve already told her I can’t.’

‘Yes, we have told her that but she –’

‘And it’s the Lower Sixth Parents’ Evening.’

‘I know that, Patrick.’

‘And there’s no way I can get out of that. Michael would go mental.’

‘Well, you know what Amanda Martin’s like, Patrick, she never gives up.’

‘Look, I can’t do any more this week, Daphne, I really can’t.’

‘I’m just telling you she rang, Patrick. I really do not need to be told the state of your diary.’

Daphne’s voice was, unusually for her, just short of sharp, betraying a tone of controlled annoyance. This usually meant that Michael Falconer, Patrick’s deputy, was having one of his days. If Daphne was tetchy it probably stemmed from Michael coming in and out of her office every quarter of an hour, pressing her for an immediate meeting with the headmaster ‘if by any lucky chance he is in’.

‘And,’ Daphne added, ‘there’s an officer from the CID here.’

‘We weren’t expecting anyone, were we?’

‘No, but he’d like to see you, Patrick.’

‘About?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’

‘It’s not that business on the Waterloo platform? The mobile phone thing.’

‘No, as far as I know Michael has sorted that one out.’

‘Fine, send him straight over, would you?’

‘And you’ve got Mrs Colley at three-fifteen. The yellow file’s on your desk.’

‘Yes. Got it, thanks.’

The police.

Within seconds of putting down the phone he heard the footsteps coming across the wooden, echoey upper hall.

The police.

What was it this time?

What was Patrick Balfour thinking on that grey afternoon of 5 November, if what was happening in his head at that moment could even be called ‘thinking’? In the ten seconds or so that it took before the knock on his study door Patrick was caught on his whistle-stop tour of horrors:

a fatal accident on a school trip, with one of his staff held responsible

someone with a gun on the premises

anything to do with sex

a suicide in the Thames, the note blaming persistent bullying

a senior member of his staff arrested for shoplifting

his bursar embezzling

more or less anything to do with the chaplain.

And would whatever it was get into the press? His school might not have been the most prestigious in the country, it wasn’t Eton or Westminster, and it wasn’t right at the top of the league tables, but it was now the school in England most featured by the media and the one most talked about on the circuit. Because Patrick Balfour, by hook or by crook, had made it so. It was now a school to emulate. Even his rival heads, seething with envy at his high profile and over what he had achieved, would concede that much. Which meant that it was also a school to throw mud at. Which meant that any misdemeanours got the school, or rather Patrick Balfour’s face, on to page three. Or, in the worst of all cases, on to page one. If you live by the sword, Patrick’s enemies said, you die by the sword.

The ten seconds were up. There was a knock on the study door.

‘Come in.’

Patrick walked round his wide desk to greet the man in the grey suit he had seen getting out of the blue Volvo.

‘Mr Balfour? Mr Patrick Balfour?’

‘Yes, what can I do for you?’

The detective took out his badge, a small black leather flap-over wallet with the Metropolitan Police crest. Patrick nodded at the identification and almost smiled at the routine. Alone, with only a bottle by way of company, he tended to watch too many cop shows on late-night television.

‘I’m John Bevan, Detective Chief Inspector Bevan.’

They shook hands. Bevan sounded as if he might be Welsh.

‘Do sit down.’

‘Thank you. Before I do so could I just confirm, Mr Balfour, that you have two addresses in London?’

Bevan was Welsh all right.

‘We do. We have a flat here, on the next floor up, over the shop you might say. It belongs to the school, of course. Our own house is just off the Gloucester Road.’

‘And your address there is …?’

‘64 Finley Place.’

In fact, Bevan was as Welsh as they came, from South Wales, with that singsong valleys accent Patrick had never much liked, though it was unusual to hear one quite as strong as his in London. Bevan went on in a relaxed, almost friendly way,

‘And you use both your homes, Mr Balfour, do you?’

‘Yes. I’m there some weekends and sometimes in the week. If I can get away.’

‘I see.’

‘Not always easy, of course, in a school like this.’

‘No, I can imagine. You’re a busy man.’

‘My wife and daughter are at Finley Place much more than I am, more or less permanently.’

‘So you are quite often here, in the flat, at the weekends?’

‘Yes.’

‘Alone?’

‘Quite often, yes. Not always.’

‘Thank you.’

The detective chief inspector turned and settled on Patrick’s wide leather sofa, the one on which parents always sat for their first interview with the headmaster. Bevan was in his late forties, pale-faced and plump, greying at the temples, with the look of a sportsman who had gone to seed. He pulled up his socks (they were black and red) and nodded Patrick towards his own upright leather chair.

‘May I suggest you also sit down yourself, Mr Balfour?’

Though irritated by the way the chief inspector so readily assumed higher status, Patrick did as he was asked. The detective then took a moment – for Patrick’s taste a moment too long – to look at the dark oak bookcases which reached high and wide to the ceiling, to nod appreciatively at the thousands of leather-bound books, and to glance up at the evenly spaced portraits of three nineteenth-century headmasters, all solemn clerics – two wearing beards, one a moustache – which hung on the wall behind the headmaster’s desk.

The detective also took in, nodding again to himself as he did so, the cluster of family photographs, the silver-framed ones of Patrick, Caroline, Jamie and Alice. These were on the mantelpiece, in amongst the fixture cards and the formal invitations. If he were being honest, Patrick had always felt uneasy about the way he had this group of photographs placed just so, photographs too at ease with themselves and their beholder. It was all too calculated. It was all part of the kit that he liked to think he despised, the kind of aren’t-we-a-happy-family cluster that second-rate headmasters tended to have on their mantelpieces because it was the sort of photographs they believed that their prospective parents liked to see.

There was one of Caroline looking young and glamorous. As she once had been. And there was the obligatory wedding-day pose. Then there was one of Alice before the teens kicked in, about twelve-ish, a bit toothy and gauche but sun-tanned and healthy on her horse. Next along there was Jamie, uncomfortable in his suit but impressive in gown and mortarboard on his graduation day. Then one of Caroline and Patrick with the children in Norfolk, a photograph Patrick had asked a passing Japanese holidaymaker to take.

Of all the photographs the one that meant the most to Patrick was not, however, in this silver-framed cluster or visible to Detective Chief Inspector Bevan. It stayed, a touchstone, in his desk; and every morning Patrick Balfour opened the top right-hand drawer just a little to look at it. It was a black and white one of his father, a headmaster himself, surrounded by his staff in the playground of his primary school. His father’s unwavering eyes were on Patrick, saying, Do what you can to help, Patrick.

The detective chief inspector was now nearly ready. After briefly studying the ends of his fingers, he sat up a little on the sofa, his stomach bulging hard against his belt as he leant forward.

‘Mr Balfour, I have to tell you there has been an allegation made against you.’

‘An allegation?’

‘And that allegation, together with some other information and material which has come into our possession, has given me cause for concern.’

Part of Patrick wanted to laugh. Perhaps it was the way the chief inspector delivered the phrases come into our possession and cause for concern, like a policeman in a rather pedestrian school play, or perhaps it was the ludicrous nature of the moment, but he managed to keep his face straight and his voice steady as he said, ‘What material? What are you talking about? What information?’

‘I don’t think this is the time or the place to go into that in detail.’

When Patrick told Daphne to cancel all his appointments for the rest of the afternoon she looked him full in the eye before picking up her shorthand pad. He told her that he was going off with Detective Chief Inspector Bevan to the police station to clear up some misunderstandings. He insisted that no one, but no one, be told anything. One word in a school community, as they both knew only too well, and it was all over the place. If pressed about where the headmaster was, by Michael Falconer or indeed by anyone at all, she was to play the straightest of bats and say it was an urgent family matter.

Daphne knew all about straight bats. She did not blink. Indeed, there was only the slightest of wobbles in her voice when she asked, ‘Do you want me to ring Caroline?’

‘No, thank you. I will later.’

‘Or the Chairman?’

‘No, I’ll do that.’

‘If you’re not back by four-thirty, what about the Heads of Department Committee?’

‘Michael will have to take it.’

‘I’ll tell him.’

‘Too bad if they don’t like it.’

As Patrick recrossed the wide wooden hall to his study, Detective Chief Inspector Bevan was waiting for him just inside the door. Patrick tapped his pockets to check he had his wallet and his mobile phone with him, and on his way out he remembered to pick up his reading glasses from where he had left them, face down on that disciplinary letter.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’

But the detective chief inspector did not want to go just yet. He wanted, if the headmaster wouldn’t mind, to see the headmaster’s private flat, and he went ahead of Patrick up the curving staircase with that nimbleness peculiar to slightly overweight men. On their way up, passing the early Munnings watercolours and the prints of Patrick and Caroline’s Cambridge colleges, he questioned Patrick on the issue of keys to the flat.

‘Does anyone else have one?’

‘My wife, of course.’

‘And your daughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘But they’re not here now?’

‘No, my daughter is in class. Or at least I hope she is.’

‘So she’s at school here then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does that cause you any problems?’

‘Not that I am aware of.’

‘Can’t be easy, though.’

‘We get on very well.’

‘And how old is she?’

‘Seventeen.’

‘Very nice. Same as mine. But she … lives with her mother?’

‘Mostly, yes, as I’ve told you. She sleeps over there most nights.’

Patrick opened the door to the flat, but Bevan paused on the threshold, looking at the lock.

‘Anyone else have a key to this flat? Outside the family?’

‘Joan. She pops in to clean each morning. She’s been with us for years.’

‘Reliable, is she, this Joan?’

‘Totally.’

‘And that’s all? All who have a key?’

‘The Clerk of Works will have a set. He has a key to every property in the school.’

‘Why?’

‘He has to get in if there’s a burst pipe or whatever.’

‘And what about all those who work for the Clerk of Works?’

‘They’d be under the Clerk of Works’ control, the keys.’

‘And you don’t mind all these people having access to them?’

‘Why should I? What is all this?’

‘Just that a lot of people in your position, Mr Balfour, have to guard their privacy.’

‘Schools like this don’t work like that.’

‘Is that so?’

‘It’s more like a goldfish bowl.’

Patrick stood aside to let Detective Chief Inspector Bevan go in first, and followed him from room to room. He felt like a confused vendor unexpectedly dealing with a prospective buyer. This is the kitchen, and that’s the bathroom; you can just see the dome of St Paul’s, and then we have the three bedrooms, my daughter’s, it’s a bit tidier than usual, but then she’s rarely here, as I just said, and this is my son’s, but he’s in America just starting his Ph.D, and this is where my wife and I sleep, well no, it’s where I sleep, and here’s the sitting room, which has most of my paperbacks and a small study area over there in the corner. Nice view of the Thames, isn’t it?

But Patrick said none of this.

Instead, as he watched the detective move around, all he could hear replaying was Bevan’s singsong voice in his study downstairs, and the words We won’t go into the detail of it now, Mr Balfour, but they are serious matters and the words There are things I need to discuss with you and the words I wouldn’t be here otherwise, would I? and the words No, it’s not ‘an arrest’ as such. To be technical, you’ll be our guest.

Patrick was also thinking about Caroline, and about his children, and about what he might have to tell them. In his mind he was phoning them all or, which was worse, speaking to them face to face. He was thinking about Newsnight, and he was hearing the question in the television studio, So tell me, Mr Balfour, why were you arrested? and he was thinking what the hell is going on here, and he was thinking what on earth do you mean by We’ve got something to show you. Bevan interrupted these thoughts.

‘And you work up here sometimes, Mr Balfour, do you? You’re comfortable up here.’

‘What do you mean by “comfortable”?’

‘You can relax up here on your own?’

‘Yes, I sometimes bring school stuff up here, but I might come up to have a quiet read, or do some writing. I write as well.’

‘But more often you’re downstairs?’

‘Well, that’s where all the files are and where my secretary is. That’s my public study.’

‘And if you see any of your students you see them in your downstairs study? For disciplinary matters?’

‘Well, I see my pupils on many matters.’

‘But always downstairs?’

‘Of course.’

‘Never up here? You never see a pupil up here?’

‘Good God no, this is strictly private.’

‘I see.’

‘I have to be myself somewhere.’

Bevan smiled.

‘Of course, yes. So at weekends, when your wife and daughter are in Finley Place, and your secretary’s not in, you might well be up here?’

‘I might be, yes. I might be doing any number of things.’

The detective opened no drawers or cupboards. Nor did he seem interested in the family snaps or what was on the bookshelves, beyond taking Patrick’s novels out and looking at the author’s photograph and at the biographical details inside the back flap. Patrick knew only too well the narrow panel of words Bevan was now reading. After all, he had to agree the details each time with his publisher.

Patrick Balfour read History at Cambridge where he was awarded a double first. As well as being a headmaster he has written historical novels about Robert Louis Stevenson and Auguste Rodin.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is married with two children and lives in London.

Bevan put the books back on the shelves and peered out of all the windows, one by one, and, turning around each time, made rather a point of looking back at the room from every angle. Intensely irritating though Patrick found the whole thing, especially the ponderous pace at which it was conducted, he was damned if he was going to demean himself by asking, ‘So what exactly are you looking for?’ He stood in the middle of the room as impassively as he could be until the detective chief inspector spoke again.

‘That’s fine. Thank you, Mr Balfour.’

By now Patrick was less concerned about this visit to his flat than about whether, on his way across the quad to the thankfully unmarked police car, he would have to walk side by side with the policeman, even though detectives did not wear uniform. He had only five minutes until the bell to end lesson six and he did not want to walk through the quad when it became a millrace of pupils.

In a school, in the goldfish bowl, headmaster-watching went with the territory. There were thousands of windows, scores of buildings, and Patrick knew there were eyes, curious eyes, hostile eyes, eyes focused on him every hour of the day. The last thing he wanted (short of bumping into Michael Falconer and having to say ‘Oh hello, Michael, this is Detective Chief Inspector Bevan’) was to run the gauntlet of hundreds of pupils and a handful of staff, a point he made to Bevan while closing the front door of the flat behind him. The detective chief inspector was instantly accommodating.

‘By all means, let’s meet by the porter’s lodge in a couple of minutes, shall we? My car’s a blue Volvo.’

‘I know, same model as mine. I saw you arrive.’

Bevan’s eyebrows picked that up and he half-smiled the acknowledgement. However, as they turned the corner at the bottom of the staircase, there, dammit, was Michael Falconer hurrying up the opposite staircase to his office, to the deputy head’s office, where most of the day-to-day school discipline was administered.

Michael Falconer saw them both, and Patrick could see that Michael saw enough to register ‘Who on earth is that with Balfour?’ but neither made a move towards the other, and Michael hurried on. Patrick had little doubt that his deputy would hurry on. It was part of Michael’s management style to hurry on, to run from room to room, from meeting to meeting, and to suggest that by dashing in this way from place to place he was saving the school from falling apart. It was also outside Michael’s door that those boys and girls sent to him for bad behaviour had to stand and stew. Indeed, there was a guilty looking bunch standing there at this very moment.

Well, Patrick reflected, it was at his own door that some big stuff had now arrived, some very big stuff indeed, but as he stepped out into the quad he was more determined than ever to appear effortlessly in control. Part of being a good head, as Patrick knew better than most, was in looking the part. He made sure that he was always well dressed, and he took particular care each day with his shirt and tie.

The quad was more or less empty of pupils, just a few piles of books left lying where they shouldn’t be, and the usual sprinkling of sixth-formers lounging against the wall, with their shirts right out. As Patrick walked towards the unmarked blue Volvo he realised that one of them, the boy they were all huddled around and listening to, was Hugo Solomon.

In catching Hugo’s eye, Patrick caught a look he knew only too well from many previous encounters, a look more subtle and soiled than a simple schoolboy sneer. It was the look of someone who was never surprised by any development, the look of a mind with a low view of humanity, the look of a contrarian who enjoyed conflict for its own sake.

Suddenly, when Patrick was about ten yards from the group, they all glanced his way, burst out laughing, and then turned quickly back towards each other. Sometimes Patrick heard that sound, at exactly that artificially increased volume, as he left a classroom or turned the corner of a corridor. He could usually tell if it was personal, if it was verbal ink thrown at the back of his jacket. This laugh sounded like one of those.

Primary schools. Patrick could never forget them, because his father had been the head of one, and because all primary schools had their own distinctive smell. As did police stations. This he found out during the long afternoon of 5 November. With police stations, he noticed, it was an altogether different smell. It was a mixture of beer and sweat, of unwashed clothes, of skin deeply ingrained with nicotine, and, above all, the smell of an indefinable fear.

Detective Chief Inspector Bevan, light on his feet, walked ahead of him along the narrow, brightly lit corridor. As Patrick followed he could hear, through a wall or two, a distant drunk banging on a cell door, banging and shouting.

‘Give me my fuckin’ trainers back, they’ll be nicked.’

‘Shut it!’

‘While you got me in ’ere some fuckin’ thief’ll nick my trainers.’

After a pause a voice, the voice of a policeman bored with the man in the cell and all those lowlifes like him, called back, ‘Shut it, scumbag.’

They passed some uniformed officers. As so often when Patrick Balfour walked in a London street or along a railway station platform, a few eyes flicked his way, half-recognising him. It was a glance Patrick knew only too well. They had seen that face before, they knew who he was, who was it, come on, on telly, who was he on with the other night?

Then Bevan turned left and ushered Patrick into a small interview room.

It was a plain room with a table, two chairs and no . . .