Free Hard Going by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

demanding concentration from children amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.
    Classes were in session when Connolly arrived, and the building was quiet. She stepped in gingerly, her nostrils quivering at the hated smell. Why did schools everywhere smell the same, she wondered – kind of rubbery. A youth with his hair a mad, waxed ziggurat, his tie at half mast and his trousers apparently falling down, hove into view, lounging along the corridor. He stopped dead at the sight of Connolly and looked furtive, but she hailed him cheerily before he could leg it, and asked him where she could find Mrs Shepherd.
    ‘Dunno,’ he said, staring at her, eyes blank, mouth ajar, as if he had evolved from a fish. ‘She ain’t my teacher,’ he added after some thought. ‘You a parent?’
    ‘Do I look like a parent?’ Connolly said exasperatedly. He shrugged, as if it were a mystery beyond his grasp. ‘Where’s the head teacher’s office, so?’
    He pointed, and shuffled off, his duty to the world discharged. Connolly watched him go, and her police instinct coupled with her taxpayer’s outrage drove her to call to him. ‘Hey!’
    He looked back apprehensively.
    ‘Why aren’t you in class?’
    ‘Goin’ a’ toylit,’ he mumbled. His hand strayed guiltily of its own accord towards the shirt pocket hidden under his pullover. She remembered the whiff of tobacco she had caught from him and concluded he was sneaking off for a fly fag, the gom.
    ‘Education’s wasted on the likes o’ you,’ she said, turning away. It was a better world when they were allowed to send them down mines and up chimneys.
    Given her aversion to hanging around schools, it was a piece of luck that Mrs Shepherd was not in a class, but on a free period, and even greater luck that she was alone in the staff room, marking work, when Connolly tracked her down. She seemed to be in her fifties, a neat, brisk woman with a well-controlled figure, firm face, and rather nice wavy brown hair that looked as if it belonged on someone else, too soft and loose and inviting for this professional pedagogue.
    ‘I’ve just put some coffee on,’ she said cordially. ‘Won’t be a minute. Sit down. Which one of them is it? My money’s on Kelly Watson. We’ve already got a sweep going on whether she gets pregnant or expelled first.’
    Connolly sat and told her why she was here. Her face changed.
    ‘Oh, God, yes, Lionel,’ she said. ‘Such a terrible thing! It’s hard to believe it. Have you any idea who did it?’
    ‘How well did you know him?’ Connolly countered this unhelpful opening.
    ‘Oh, I’ve known him for years – what is it? – nine or ten, anyway – though I’m not sure one ever really knew Lionel, if you know what I mean. He was a very private person.’
    ‘How did you meet him?’ Connolly asked, settling back into the armchair. The staffroom was catastrophically untidy, with books and stacks of exercise books everywhere; dirty coffee mugs; newspapers; personal belongings stuffed in bags of various types from plastic carrier to canvas sport; bits of clothing; bits of equipment on their way from one class to another; and, messily pinned on peg boards all round the walls, notices and appeals and leaflets and timetables in profusion. It was all horribly reminiscent. Connolly sat, the most miserable of captives, trying not to allow her eyes to wander towards the freedom beyond the big window. Outside there was sunshine and gently waving treetops. Inside, the smell of bodies, and the coffee machine, hawking and spitting like an elderly chain-smoker.
    ‘It was at a planning meeting, actually – I was part of a group protesting about a development in Brook Green, and he’d just joined the local Residents’ Association, which was representing one of the neighbours. We happened to be sitting next to each other, and after the meeting a bunch of us went off for a drink. He and I took to each other and we were friends from then on.’
    ‘What was