III

Eastvale Comprehensive used to be called Eastvale Grammar School. In the old days it was a respectable institution attended by promising children from miles around, many of whom gained scholarships to Oxford or Cambridge, or went on to the northern red-brick universities closer to home.

The building itself was Victorian, attractive in a Gothic way from the outside, with turrets, a clock and a bell tower, and full of high gloomy corridors within. A number of "temporary" classrooms, trailers propped up on bricks, for the most part, had been added to the original building in the early seventies, and they looked as if they were definitely there to stay.

Things changed for the school when the comprehensive system was turned loose on the country. Now teachers struggled with overcrowded classes of such mixed abilities that it was impossible to nurture the bright and do justice to the slow. Often the children had to suffer inept teaching by fools who knew more about athletics and rugby than Caesar's conquest, Shakespeare, or the square roots of negative numbers.

Banks knew the place, though he had never set foot inside the main building before. Both Brian and Tracy went there, and the tales they told did a lot to undermine Banks's faith in the comprehensive system.

As a working-class boy in Peterborough, he had always felt a strong aversion to any kind of elitism, yet as a moderately well-educated man with a taste for knowledge, he had to admit that no amount of special treatment and mollycoddling could turn a lazy, hostile slob into a star pupil; far from it, too many mediocre minds could do nothing but discourage exceptional students from doing their best. At school, he remembered, kids want to belong; they do not want to be ostracized by their peers, which happens if they excel at anything other than sports.

As far as natural abilities went, he had no real opinion. Perhaps some were born with better brains than others. But that wasn't, to him, the issue-the point was that everybody should be given the chance to find out, and the idealistic basis of the comprehensive system seemed to grant just that possibility. In practice, it didn't seem to be turning out that way.

In his own education, he had been very lucky indeed. After failing his "eleven-plus" exam, he had been condemned to the local secondary modern school, there to be molded into an ideal electrician, bricklayer or road sweeper. He had nothing against manual occupations- his own father had been a sheet-metal worker until angina forced an early retirement-except that he wasn't interested in any of them.

Fortunately, because he did well at his studies, he got a shot at the "fourteen-plus." He worked long and hard, passed, and found himself a new boy, an outsider at the grammar school. It seemed that all the relationships had been formed already during the three years he had spent in exile, and for the first two terms he despaired of making any friends. It was only typical schoolboy stand-offishness, though. As soon as the others found out that he was a terror in a scrap, owned the toughest conker in the school, and made perhaps the finest rugger scrum-half the team had ever seen, he had no problem gaining acceptance.

It had been a cruel process, though, he reflected. The first exam split his groups of friends in the most divisive way: grammar school kids rarely talked to secondary modern boys, no matter how many games of commandos or cricket they had played together in their childhood; and his next exam accomplished much the same thing in reverse. This time, however, the friends that Banks had made at the secondary modern school never spoke to him again because they thought he had betrayed them. Entering the gates of Eastvale Comprehensive somehow brought back the good and the bad of his own schooldays.

When Banks walked through the yard it was lunchtime; the children played hand-tennis or cricket against stumps chalked on the wall in the yard, or smoked behind the cycle sheds, and the teachers lounged in the smoky staff room reading the Guardian or grappling with the Sun crossword. The head, however, was in his sanctuary, and it was into this haven that Banks was ushered by a slim, pretty secretary, who looked hardly older than school-leaving age herself.

The institutional-green corridors were half glass, so that anyone passing by could look into the classrooms. Now, the desks stood empty, and the blackboards were still partly covered in indecipherable scrawl. Many of the desks, Banks noticed, were just as desecrated with the carved initials of girlfriends and the names of famous cricketers, footballers and rock-and-roll bands as they had been in his own schooldays. Only the names had changed. And the place smelled pleasantly of bubble gum, chalk dust and satchel leather.

The head was sipping tea in his paneled office, a well-thumbed copy of Cicero on the desk in front of him. He greeted Banks and turned sadly to the book. "Latin, Inspector. Such an elegant, noble language, quite easily capable of sustaining lengthy flights of poetry. Nobody, it seems, has any use for it these days. Anyway," he sighed, standing up, "you've not come to hear about my problems, have you?"

The head, like his book, looked as though he had seen better days. His face was haggard, his hair gray, and he had a pronounced stoop. His most noticeable feature, however, was a big red nose, and it didn't take much imagination to guess what nicknames the kids had for him. Though he wore a bat-like cape, there was no mortar-board in sight. The study looked so much like Banks's old headmaster's lair that he felt the same quiver of adrenaline as he had all those years ago while waiting for the cane.

"No, sir," Banks smiled, slipping easily into the language of respect. "I came to ask a few questions about one of your boys."

"Oh, dear. Not been getting himself into trouble, has he? I'm afraid, these days, it's very difficult to keep track of them, and there are several bad elements in the school. Do sit down."

"Thank you, sir. It's nothing definite," Banks went on. "We're just faced with one or two discrepancies in a statement and we'd like to know if you can tell us anything about Trevor Sharp."

There was no flash of recognition in Buxton's expression. Obviously he had long since given up trying to keep track of all his pupils. He got up and walked toward his filing cabinet, from which, after much muttering and tut-tutting, he pulled out a sheaf of papers.

"Reports," he said, tapping the papers with a bony finger. "These should tell us what you want to know. I'd appreciate it, though, Inspector, if this got no further than you and me. These are supposed to be confidential…"

"Of course. In return, I'd be pleased if you didn't mention my visit, especially to the boy himself or to anyone who might tell him."

The head nodded and started turning the pages. "Let me see… 1983… no… winter… summer… 1984… excellent… ninety percent… very good…" and he went on in this fashion for some time before returning to Banks. "A bright boy, young Master Sharp. The name suits him. Look at this." And he passed Banks the reports for the previous year. They were full of "excellents" and high marks in all subjects except Geography. About that, his teacher had said: "Does not seem interested. Obviously capable, but unwilling to work hard enough."

As it turned out, that lone failure foreshadowed the more recent reports, which were scattered with remarks such as "Could do better," "Does not try hard enough" and "Takes negative attitude toward subject." There were also several complaints from the teachers about his absences: "If Trevor were in class more often he would attain a better grasp of the subject," wrote Mr. Fox, his English teacher, and "Failure to hand in homework and to appear in class have contributed greatly toward Trevor's disappointing performance in History this term," commented Mr. Rhodes.