“I had heard you were popular with the pupils,” May admitted.
“There’s no real trick to loyalty, John – may I call you John? You barter with them, that’s all. Teenagers are materialistic little buggers. The ownership of many shiny little items seems to reduce their sense of living under threat. I give them stuff. Of course, the trouble is that this school has a remit to preach traditional Christian values, empirically accepted history, and the English literary canon as if deconstruction and postmodern historical relativism didn’t exist. I expect intelligent children to question the received wisdom of their elders, and make no bones about treating them differently. The kids in my extracurrics have trouble conforming, because they make connections other kids don’t make. They’re quick to see through the illusions of the external world, but it encourages them to acknowledge the legitimacy of value judgements. A good thing in my book; most pupils don’t go deeper than what we term seals and Nazis.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, you know.” Kingsmere flagged his hand at the posters lining the walls. “Received ideas and lazy opinions. Seals are nice; Nazis are evil; everything else falls into one camp or the other.”
“Surely some truths are constant and universal,” said May. “The earth is round not because we currently think that to be the case, but because scientific absolutes have proven it not to be flat.”
Kingsmere gave a knowing smile. “The objectivity of science is easily exploded, Mr May. We live in a reflective age which recognises that most personalities, institutions, and beliefs no longer fit into neat logical categories.”
“But without a certain degree of generalisation and simplification there can be no understanding,” May argued.
“An understandable attitude from a policeman, but a rather naïve stance, I fear. We need to step beyond the tyrannical pedantry of facts to arrive at a more sophisticated level of theoretical interpretation,” Kingsmere explained, not expecting his guest to understand.
“I can assure you that if we ran the police force on Derridean deconstructivist ideologies, we’d never arrest anyone, because the degree of guilt would depend on the fluctuation of individual opinion.”
If Kingsmere was surprised by May’s conclusion, he was careful not to show it. “A good argument for replacing constables with academics,” he said instead. “The school’s top two percent should be allowed to free itself from the straitjacket of a dogmatic education and explore modern liberal relativism. Most private pupils aren’t brighter because their parents had to pay for their education. Actually, they downplay their intelligence because they have a choice of being smart or popular. My job is to single out the smart ones and keep them here long enough to find practical applications. The pressures on them are enormous. Since the dot-com gold rush, private schools have been treated like banks – parents put their kids in when they’re flush, draw them out again when they’re broke. If you think divorcing parents are bad for a child, try removing his peers and dumping him in some budget-strapped state school. Here we are.”
They were now deep within the venerable building. Kingsmere swiped a card on his study door, which surprised May. The reason quickly became apparent, for the room was a technological revelation: flat-screen computers, underlit glass tables, transparent circuitry and touch panels, the graceful white plastic of Apple Macintosh, the pristine organisation of an operating theatre. “This is where I take my extracurricular classes. The best way to encourage learning is to trick them into doing it for themselves. After twenty minutes surrounded by this equipment, they have to be torn away from it.”
“A far cry from the book-lined studies of earlier times,” said May, looking around with approval.
“It’s a modern version, that’s all. The school was left an endowment for technology. Thank God for rich St Crispin’s old boys. Look, I’m sorry if my lads embarrassed your partner. I’ve taught them to question authority, but they can sometimes take things too literally. It wouldn’t have happened if I had been here, I can assure you.”
“Don’t worry. Mr Bryant prefers a spirited exchange of views. It happens a lot.”
“Perhaps I should allow you to explain the purpose of your visit now.”
May felt he was being led through the conversation like a pupil but put it down to the teacher’s habitual manner of dealing with his young charges. “I understand you were off sick this week, so I don’t know whether you’ve heard much about our investigation.”
“I read about it in the newspapers, of course. The police seem to be going out of their way to avoid the suggestion that London might have a serial killer on the loose.”
“The term usually denotes someone driven to commit murder by aberrant, uncontrollable passions. That hardly seems appropriate in this case. The victims fall into the common geographic profile – both murders were committed in the same area – but they were not the focus of violent desires. I’ve heard that some of the pupils here have been getting into fights with a gang on the nearby estate.”
Kingsmere appeared disappointed by the mundanity of the enquiry. “So I understand,” he said. “The seniors, mostly. It’s a territorial matter of little interest. The sixth form use the rear grounds of the estate to reach the rugby pitch and the athletic ground. It’s a very old dispute.”
“I thought the Saladins were new. We have around thirty-seven registered – that is, official – gangs currently operating in central London, so it can be hard keeping track of them.”
The teacher cocked his head, intrigued. “How does a gang become official?”
“It gets registered if one of its members tries to shoot you, Mr Kingsmere.”
“What I meant was that the territorial dispute goes back a long way before gangs. Our school has been on the same site for centuries, and the estate was built during the postwar slum clearance. Our boys argue, with some justification, that we were here first. Tensions have existed here for many generations. I set a local area research project last year, and we found that as early as the eighteenth century, the poorer residents of the neighbourhood had appointed someone to champion their rights. Hang on, let me see if I can find the document.”
A new light of enthusiasm fired him as he powered up his laptop and began searching through project files. The white square board above his chair filled with data.
“This one, in particular, may strike a chord.” He briskly tapped the screen as if drawing the attention of an unruly class. “In 1929, a guy called Albert Whitney led a revolt by the tenants of Three Bells Street against exorbitant rents charged by their landlords, to wit, the owners of this school. Three Bells Street was destroyed during the war, and now lies beneath the rear grounds of the Roland Plumbe Community Estate.” Kingsmere flicked off the light, as if keen to keep any further information to himself. “If ever there was a case to believe in psychogeography, this is it.”
“Psychogeography is a process based on empirical data,” said May with a certain amount of malicious relish. He had used this argument before with his partner.
“Data that comprises the temporal value judgements of the superstitious, uneducated masses,” snapped Kingsmere.
“Either way, it’s the kind of hostile territory that attracts the attention of vigilantes,” May told him. “It will warrant further investigation.”
As he left the school, a nagging doubt about Kingsmere wedged itself in May’s mind. Connections were slow to form, synapses failing. He felt sure there was something he had forgotten, as though a harmful half-remembered dream was even now fading from his memory.