Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (72 page)

A bell shrilled through the building, setting Green’s hair on end and nearly derailing him from the significance of Long’s comment. He waited for the sound to stop.

“What kids? There’s no mention of that.”

Long paled, and his moustache twitched. His gaze flicked between the window and the door. “There wasn’t. I mean, I didn’t. Ah, it—it slipped my mind initially, I guess, and the policewoman who was investigating was so pushy, she threw us all on the defensive. She seemed hellbent on railroading Matt, and I wasn’t about to give her any ammunition.”

“So you withheld information from the police?”

Long thrust back his shoulders and sucked in his paunch. “She withheld stuff from us! Wouldn’t even tell us what the accusations were, or who the kid was! How were we supposed to know what to think? We ended up looking at every kid with suspicion, wondering is that the one? Am I going to be next? So I figured, if she was going to play it like a star chamber witch hunt, I wasn’t going to make her case for her. Not against a fellow teacher whom the parents were ready to hang by the balls anyway. You have no idea the hysteria that took over this place back then, detective. Parents scrutinized our every move—every teacher who ever had a kid on a behaviour mod program to reward good behaviour, every teacher who took a kid aside for a private discussion, our every motive was challenged. Plus our loyalty was questioned. Parents accused us of covering up and of putting their little kids at risk to protect one of our own. Teachers who’d known families for years and done their best to help their children over the years felt betrayed. So yeah, I saw the look in your eye when you said I withheld information. I didn’t know a damn thing for sure, except that every little fact I raised would be inflated with hysteria, so I figured let the cops build their own damn case.”

Outside, a hush had fallen as the yard emptied of children. Inwardly Green cursed and hoped Long could continue his tirade long enough to come to the meat of the matter. The man was growing red from indignation and lack of breath, and Green suspected he’d been saving up this tirade for ten years.

“Matt drove a few kids home sometimes after rehearsals or games,” Long continued, “when it was dark and their parents were too damn busy to pick them up. If he was guilty of anything, it was naïveté for thinking that trying to help children was the right thing to do and that the parents wouldn’t sue the ass off him if anything went wrong. Nowadays we don’t hug kids, detective. We don’t meet them alone to give them private advice or encouragement, and we sure as hell don’t put them in our own car without a million waivers protecting us from here to China.”

The hall below filled with the thunder of a hundred feet, and children’s chatter reverberated off the walls. Long broke off his diatribe and moved toward his door. “I’ve got to get to my class now, detective. So if you’ve got more questions, they’ll have to wait.”

“That’ll do for now.” Green flipped his notebook shut. “I appreciate your honesty.”

“Yeah, well, you know—” Long paused in the doorway and watched as the upstairs hallway filled with students. Sweaty, redfaced, and irritable from the heat, they jostled one another noisily. “It was a difficult time for everybody, and we just wanted to be fair. Frankly, we didn’t think that was true of everyone.”

Those words stayed with Green as he plowed his way through the crowds back down the stairs. Crime always aroused strong feelings in those it touched, and as a police officer he’d often borne the brunt of the public hysteria and finger pointing that followed. And nowhere were the feelings more intense and personal than when the victim was a child. Teachers, like police officers, could change from protector to traitor in the public eye on the strength of one word.

Once downstairs, Green headed back toward the principal’s office to inform her he was done and found his way blocked by a massive woman in a purple and yellow floral tent dress and a straw hat. She overflowed the secretary’s chair and took up all the remaining space in the little outer office. She eyed Green with a chilly stare no doubt designed to make the most rebellious student rethink his approach. When Green introduced himself, the stare grew shrewd.

“Oh, it’s you. Mrs. Allen said to keep an eye on you. She’s gone to a meeting, and she said if you had more questions, you should give her a call.” The woman reached a pudgy arm across her desk to pick up a dish of mints. She offered one to Green, which he declined, before popping one into her mouth. “Waste of time talking to her, anyway,” she continued, sucking noisily. “She’s only been here three years.”

Changing his mind, Green reached over, selected a mint, and regretted it the instant it hit his taste buds in full force. He propped himself as casually as he could against the edge of her desk. “How long have you been here?”

“Twenty-three years. And you’re right, I remember it all.”

“Remember what?” Green asked in surprise. Ross Long hadn’t had time to tip off the office, even if he’d wanted to.

“The Fraser case. That’s what this is about, right? Those teachers you wanted, they all testified at the trial.”

Shrewd doesn’t do the woman justice, Green thought, and gave her an appreciative smile. “Did you testify?”

The woman looked askance, her jowls shaking with the vigour of her denial. “Hell, no. I had to work with these people. Back then, I was on my own with three kids to support, no car, no child care, and this job was around the corner from my house.”

“So you thought you’d better not take sides?”

“Listen, this community’s got some powerful people in it. There are parents who are crown attorneys themselves, or justice lawyers, or work for big firms with lawyers up the yingyang. Consider this school’s been slated to close three times—look at it, it’s a dump!—but if the school board closed it, the kids would have to be bussed out of their community, maybe even meet the big bad world in the Glebe. So each time, the parents had enough clout to make the board, the trustees, the director and his backroom boys all back down.”

The mint was slowly burning a hole in Green’s tongue, and he eased it carefully into the corner of his mouth, trying to look attentive. “And were they out for blood on this case?”

“Blood? No, the kid’s balls. And the balls of the principal, who didn’t act fast enough on the first complaint, and the balls of the board, who didn’t fire the kid on the spot.”

“By kid you mean—?”

“Matt,” she exclaimed, crunching her mint and sending spittle flying. “He was a kid from where I sat. One of those nice, soft-spoken guys who loved teaching and who had a special touch with the timid ones. He started off in Grade Six, but the big kids walked all over him, so the principal moved him down to Grade One. He loved the little ones, and they loved him.”

“No hanky-panky?”

She hesitated and eyed him dubiously from under folds of flesh. Then, with excessive care, she leaned forward and took another mint from the bowl. “Who’s going to know all this?”

Green, who hadn’t even extracted his notebook, gave an exaggerated shrug. “Maybe nobody. We’re not reopening the case, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m just trying to fill in some holes. Are you suggesting there may have been some hanky-panky?”

“Not that I ever saw, mind you. I wouldn’t have kept quiet if I really knew something. I mean, I have kids myself, and the parents would have had to get in line behind me to get a piece of his balls. But—” She paused to tug on her dress and to redirect the overflow of her breasts. In the heat, she sweated freely. “There was something weird about Matt. You know those soft, gentle kinds of men? They seem to feel safer with kids, maybe even sexually, you know? This is just my feeling. I mean, the sex drive is there, right, and the guy’s got to make it with somebody, and if he’s too damn shy to try a woman and he gets tired of going solo—well, it makes sense, eh? And that’s what creeped me out. I didn’t have a thing to go on, I never saw him look at a kid funny or sneak one off to a back room somewhere, but he hung around with the little kids, and he didn’t show much interest in the pretty young thing we had here at the time who was trying to catch his attention.”

Just as well you kept these thoughts to yourself, Green thought. Without substantiation, your speculation about Fraser’s sexual inclinations probably wouldn’t have done much to enhance Barbara Devine’s case, but it would have been chewed to bits by defence council.

“Is that what most of the teachers thought? That he was a bit strange and just might be guilty?”

“The teachers?” She snorted. “They weren’t allowed to have an opinion. Or if they did, they didn’t dare voice it. The teacher’s union swooped in here almost as soon as the shit hit the fan and told everybody that their duty was to stand behind a fellow teacher and show him a united front against these false accusations. They weren’t supposed to talk to anyone about it, not the parents, not the press, and they were supposed to answer police questions only about things they personally knew.”

“Wise under the circumstances.”

“Sure. And what did that tell the parents? You have no idea how many upset parents came through that door to complain to me the teachers were implying the kids were lying—”

“Kids? What kids?”

“Well—the ones who said Matt molested them.”

“I thought there was only one.”

“Only one that went to trial—and what a little piece of work she turned out to be—but there were a few who started reporting things in the months after her. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The point is the union told the teachers to support Matt, which meant saying the charges were false, which meant saying the kids were lying. Or at least imagining things.”

“Where did the school board stand on this?”

“Where it usually does, as far from the stink as possible. Don’t want to interfere with the case, that was their line. Offer counselling to the families, keep Fraser away from kids, and let the courts do their thing.”

“Also probably wise under the circumstances.”

Her baleful look returned. “Easy for you to say, you see this kind of thing every day. But schools are supposed to be like families, and here we had the parents suspecting the teachers, and the teachers accusing the parents of lynching, and the board not supporting either the parents or the teachers.”

“In other words, a mess.”

“You got that right. After Matt was acquitted, the guys in power—I mean the parents, the board and the union—had two choices for the mess. Blame the six-year-old girl who started it all, or blame Matt Fraser. Some choice, eh? Especially when the lawyer who was heading up the parent group happened to be the little girl’s stepfather.”

“So Matt Fraser was history.”

She nodded and went for her third mint. “Best all around, don’t you think?”

Eight

Best all around,
except for Matt Fraser, Green thought, as he switched the car’s air conditioning on full and sat for a moment studying the school. The inscription “Duke of York Elementary School, 1924” was set in stone over the transom of the front door, and the overall effect was one of dignified decline. There was no hint of the pain and vitriol which had fomented inside.

Schools were supposed to be like families, the secretary had said. Green tried to envision Tony arriving home one day with a dark, bewildered tale about his favourite teacher. Or even his daughter Hannah, who emerged from his ex-wife’s infrequent letters as little more than a disembodied scrap of rebellion. The mere thought of either of them in the clutches of a predator knotted his gut. Faced with the most primal and abhorrent violation of their child, what parent could be blamed for losing their head? And what teacher would fail to sympathize, no matter where their professional allegiance lay?

“Mike, what are you doing?” Barbara Devine demanded when he posed her those very questions back at the police station half an hour later. He had found her in her office eating a soggy hotdog with her stocking feet propped on the window ledge and an open policy binder balanced on her lap. She swung around to her desk and shoved her feet back into her high heels.

“The Fraser disappearance may become a homicide investigation,” he replied blandly. “I’m gathering background.”

“Oh, damn,” she muttered, then dropped the half-eaten hot dog in the garbage and scrubbed the mustard from her hands with a napkin. “Why do you assume it goes back to this abuse case, rather than some new trouble he’s got himself into?”

Green debated whether to tell her about Fraser’s visit to Bleustein or the CAS , but decided against it. He didn’t entirely trust her not to meddle. “Instinct,” he said instead.

She eyed him for a long moment. A smudge of mustard on her upper lip detracted from the look of professional disinterest she affected. “Mike, you don’t know sex crimes. Trust me, these guys don’t change. Fraser has probably made a hundred new enemies by now, while you’re busy barking up the wrong tree.”

“Then enlighten me. I want to know why the investigation took so long and why things got so out-of-hand.”

She sighed. “There was no way to handle that case without it getting messy, because everything had to be kept secret. You know the laws on sex crimes and offences against minors, Mike. We couldn’t reveal who the victims were or what Fraser was alleged to have done to them. In fact, before we laid the charges, we couldn’t even confirm that Fraser was under investigation, and we certainly couldn’t solicit information or question classmates about other incidents.”

“Even subtly?”

She folded her arms across her chest brusquely, a sure sign he was getting to her. “Investigating child abuse is not like any other criminal case, Green. You can’t inquire subtly about it. I’d investigated dozens of allegations against teachers and other professionals, many of which had no substance whatsoever. Building a credible case is like dodging landmines in the dark. You have to protect the rights of the accused and the privacy of the children, but still uncover the facts in the case, all the while watching your back so the accused doesn’t sue the pants off you if he gets off. You don’t want a witch hunt; you don’t want the man’s reputation slandered or his name smeared, nor do you want the defence to be able to argue undue influence. So you keep as tight a lid on the information as you can.”