Kind of Cruel (44 page)

I don’t want to do this, but I have to. Even knowing it’s going to sound like a threat. ‘I need an undertaking from you that you won’t tell the police. No matter what.’

‘The
police
?’

The panic in his voice irritates me. It shouldn’t come as a shock to him when the word crops up in conversation. Someone tried to burn down our house; I was questioned in connection with a murder on Tuesday. Luke knows that our life at the moment involves regular contact with detectives.

‘I don’t want to hear that you’ve asked Dinah and Nonie to keep a secret from the police,’ he says.

‘Other way round,’ I tell him. He looks as worried as I want him to look. He needs to know this is serious. ‘I’m not saying any more until I have your unconditional promise: you don’t say anything to anyone. It’s not for my sake I’m asking you to keep quiet.’ Dinah’s harmed no one. If Simon Waterhouse finds out that his mystery words originated with her, he’ll want to interview her. The idea makes me feel sick. It would make Dinah and Nonie feel even worse, which is why it can’t be allowed to happen, not under any circumstances.

I must be a bad person, as both Jo and I have always suspected: I would let Katharine Allen’s murderer go unblamed and unpunished to protect my girls from pain. Except that it’s not as simple as that, not if whoever killed Katharine Allen also killed Sharon, and set fire to my house knowing that Dinah and Nonie were inside, asleep. What pain am I prepared to suffer – what pain will I inflict – for the sake of punishing that person?

This is such a strange feeling: I have a new, fast mind that can think quickly and strategically without hurting.

‘Tell me,’ says Luke. ‘If it’s in the girls’ best interests for me to keep it to myself, I will. I don’t care about anything else.’

‘Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel,’ I say. A refrain line I’ve been reciting for days, the chorus of my frightening, disrupted life. Will its echo in my mind ever stop, I wonder, and those words become ordinary words again? ‘I know what it is and what it means. Dinah told me.’

‘
Dinah
told you? But . . .’

‘She invented it.’

Luke opens his mouth. No sound comes out.

‘It doesn’t mean she knows anything about Katharine Allen’s death. She knows as little as I do.’

Not quite true. If you know who killed Kat Allen, then Dinah knows less than you do
. My throat closes. I don’t know anything. I can’t know something that can’t be true. It’s impossible.

‘I still have no idea where I saw the words written on lined A4 paper,’ I tell Luke, hoping he can’t hear the tremor in my voice. ‘Dinah swears she and Nonie have never written them down, and I believe her. It was top secret, so they didn’t risk committing anything to paper. They kept the lists in their heads.’

‘Lists?’

‘I was right, they were three headings. Kind . . .’

‘Amber, slow down. I’m not following.’

‘Dinah invented a caste system,’ I tell him. ‘Don’t look at me like that. Do you want to know or not?’ I shouldn’t take it out on Luke; it’s not his fault. ‘Last year at school they had a special assembly about all the different religions. They learned about the Hindu caste system: the important people on the top rung of the ladder – Brahmins, is it? – and the Untouchables at the bottom, no mixing allowed. Do you remember Dinah coming home all steamed up about how wrong it was?’

Luke nods. ‘Even more so than Nonie.’

‘Dinah doesn’t mind injustice as long as she’s on the privileged end of it,’ I say. ‘Turns out what she thought was so unfair wasn’t the idea of a caste system that values some people more highly than others, but its randomness: you’re born high or low, and there’s nothing you can do to change your ranking. She decided a caste system would be an excellent idea if it was based on how good people were, how kind. Or how cruel. So . . . she decided to invent one.’ I sigh. In other circumstances, I might find it funny. ‘A useful way of categorising her classmates.’

‘I don’t believe this,’ Luke mutters.

‘And the teachers. No one at school is exempt. Even the dinner ladies and the guy who drives the school bus. Even the head. Caste trumps position-in-school-hierarchy. Since Dinah and Nonie are both Kinds and Mrs Truscott’s only a Kind of Cruel, they’re superior to her. Kind of Cruel’s the most interesting caste. It’s a bit more complicated than Kind and Cruel, which are self-explanatory. It covers many diverse . . . personality types. Kirsty, for example. Thinking about Kirsty made Dinah realise she was going to need an in-between caste.’

‘Kirsty? Jo’s sister Kirsty? But she’s—’ Luke breaks off. Looks guilty.

‘Too disabled to be kind or cruel or anywhere in the middle? Dinah and Nonie disagree. I’ve tried and failed to explain it to them. I think they’ve sort of . . . mythologised her. They think that because she’s brain damaged, no one can tell if she’s a good person or not, that her inability to speak allows her to hide her personality in a way that most of us can’t.’

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Luke says, staring at his hands.

‘Mrs Truscott’s in the Kind of Cruel bracket for a different reason. To quote Dinah, “She tries to be so nicey-nice to everyone, but she’s not really being nice because then she’ll say the complete opposite to the next person she wants to be nice to.” Truscott can’t be a Cruel, though, Dinah says. Only overtly horrible people are Cruels.’

‘Don’t talk about it as if it makes sense, Amber. It’s sick.’

‘Is it? I’m not so sure.’ I’m only sure that I would want to defend Dinah and Nonie whatever they had done. ‘If it was nothing to do with an unsolved brutal murder, I’d probably think it was a great idea. I’d want to put all our family members, friends and acquaintances in one of the three categories. I’d hound you until you joined in.’

‘Stop,’ Luke says.

I never stop when I ought to. He should know that by now. ‘I’ve played worse games, especially at Christmas,’ I say. ‘It’d be more fun than one of your pedants’ paradise general knowledge quizzes. How many pairs of socks did Clement Attlee have in his sock drawer in his house in . . . blah blah blah.’

‘Nonie knew about this caste system too?’ Luke asks, ignoring my meanness.

‘Course she did. She’s a big fan. Because it’s fair: good people at the top, bad people at the bottom. Dinah made it their joint project from the start, knowing it would appeal to Nonie’s sense of justice. I’m sure it’s given them hours of pleasure, discussing particular teachers and children, debating which caste they ought to be assigned to. Oh, this’ll make you laugh – Nonie insisted on one change to Dinah’s system as originally conceived: people had to be able to move up or down a caste if their behaviour improved or took a dive.’

Luke isn’t laughing. Neither am I.

‘Dinah wasn’t convinced at first. She preferred the idea of people being awarded safe-seat pedestals, or, at the other end of the spectrum, being condemned forever for something they did wrong years ago. But Nonie insisted. Quoting again, “Any good person can become bad suddenly, and any bad person can turn good if they try.”’

‘Did they . . .’ Luke clears his throat. ‘When they were telling you about it, did either of them mention Sharon’s . . . you know, or Marianne, in the context of this caste thing?’

Sharon’s killer, I want to say. Not Sharon’s ‘you know’. We need to start calling things what they are.

You first, then. Hypocrite.

I nod. ‘Both. And the person who set fire to our house, assuming that’s somebody different.’ Which is the opposite of what I’m assuming, so why say it? ‘The two fire-starters are both Cruels.’
Except that there aren’t two of them. There’s only one
.

I try to silence the voice in my head, tell myself I won’t know anything for sure unless and until I can work out where I saw that sheet of lined A4 paper.

‘Marianne
was
a Kind of Cruel,’ I tell Luke. ‘For pretending to care about Dinah and Nonie when it’s obvious she doesn’t give a toss. Hypocrisy and a lack of integrity are recurring themes for Kind of Cruels – Kirsty excepted, obviously. Two-faced people, anyone who lies to themselves about their own goodness.’

Jo. Jo is a Kind of Cruel.

‘Marianne’s a Cruel now, you’ll be glad to hear. The girls downgraded her last time they spoke to her on the phone and she said something mean. They wouldn’t tell me what it was, so I assume it was about me, or us.’ I tried to convince them that they didn’t have to protect me from anything. I think Dinah could have been persuaded, but Nonie wouldn’t budge. ‘I can’t tell you a horrid thing someone else said without saying it myself, and I don’t want to,’ she said.

Sensing that Luke is waiting for something, I look at him – something I’ve avoided so far. Eye contact makes it harder. ‘I think the school angle’s an excuse. The caste system wasn’t invented for school.’ I can’t help smiling. ‘Though it comes in handy there. Dinah sacked some people from her Hector play yesterday, giving them no reason why. She could hardly tell them they’d been recategorised as Cruels, no longer worthy of the spotlight, however good their acting skills. Cruels are the lowest of the low. You don’t play with them, help them with their homework, cast them in your dramatic productions. Kind of Cruels can associate with Cruels – and Kinds, obviously – but Kinds can’t have anything to do with Cruels, in case it contaminates their kindness.’

‘How many people know about this?’ Luke asks. ‘I’ve always dreaded parents’ evening, but this is . . .’

‘Oh, no one at school knows. It’s embargoed information. Only Dinah and Nonie know about it. Which means they can’t put most of their rules into practice, or they only can when they can disguise what they’re doing as something else – bit of a drawback, but Dinah’s not willing to risk anyone finding out and criticising her invention. She’s smart enough to understand that once any system becomes common knowledge, it attracts opposition. That can’t be allowed, not for something that’s so precious to her. And equally precious to Nonie.’

I blink away tears. ‘When they told me about it, they were so terrified I’d be angry – ask them to give it up, or try to tell them why it was wrong. They could have kept quiet, but . . . they knew it was important to me to understand what those words meant. I’d written them down on a newspaper. Dinah saw them, asked me about it. I tried to avoid answering, made a mess of it. She’s clever. She knew I’d found out somehow and that something about those words was bothering me. She and Nonie couldn’t understand it: if I knew about their apartheid system, why wasn’t I bollocking them for it? Why hadn’t I brought it up? They discussed it and decided to be brave and ask me, confess all, even if that meant me having a go at them. Which I didn’t,’ I add defiantly. ‘And I’m not going to. I’d prefer it if you didn’t either. Later, when things have calmed down, maybe I’ll talk to them.’ Or maybe not. Will fighting for the rights of Cruels ever make it to the top of my to-do list?

Luke hauls himself up off the bed and walks over to the window. ‘You’re right,’ he says. ‘It’s nothing to do with school. It’s about reordering the world, after Sharon’s death. The girls need to know they can put evil in its place. Amber, it’s heartbreaking. They need to talk to someone. A professional.’

‘You say it as if we’ve never thought of it before.’ Dinah has promised that if we make her talk to someone she doesn’t know, she’ll pretend her mouth’s zipped shut and say nothing. Nonie bursts into tears and starts shaking at the mention of any kind of therapy or counselling, however Luke and I phrase it. ‘At the moment, I’m less interested in who they might talk to in the future and more in who they’ve
been
talking to.’

‘What do you mean?’ asks Luke.

He’s too focused on the girls; he isn’t thinking about the police, about Kat Allen’s murder. ‘If Dinah invented Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel, and if she and Nonie – and now us – are the only people who know about it, and they’ve never written it down on paper . . .’

‘They must have done,’ Luke says.

‘Except they didn’t. They swore to me, and I believe them. They’ve never written down those words, as headings or any other way. Luke, they were at school on the day Katharine Allen was murdered. It was half term. They went to the Holiday Fun Club, the Holiday Your-Parents-Still-Don’t-Want-to-Spend-Any-Time-With-You-Assuming-They-Haven’t-Been-Murdered Club. You were at work, I was at Terry Bond’s restaurant launch party in Truro . . . Dinah and Nonie were at school between eight thirty and four thirty. They weren’t in the centre of Spilling, writing, “Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel” on a sheet of lined A4, while someone beat Katharine Allen to death in the next room!’

‘Then . . . if they didn’t write it . . .’

‘They also swore, at first, that they hadn’t told anyone their secret, but with slightly less conviction. It wasn’t long before Nonie was asking for a guarantee that whoever else knew, whoever might have committed the words to paper, hadn’t done anything wrong by writing them down and wouldn’t get into any trouble.’ I smile sadly. ‘I think the trouble she had in mind was a strongly worded ticking off for joining in a game that involves defining people as morally untouchable rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt.’

‘Who did they tell, for fuck’s sake?’ I can hear from Luke’s voice that he’s crying. ‘Who do they know who’d kill someone? No one! This makes no sense, it’s . . . fucked up.’

‘The person they told didn’t kill Katharine Allen,’ I say. ‘People, rather. Two of them, also children. They’re as innocent as Dinah and Nonie.’