Katerina Diamond – The Teacher: A shocking and compelling new crime thriller – NOT for the faint-hearted! (страница 7)

‘Is this seat taken?’

Abbey looked up at the stranger, her mouth full of food, she chewed quickly to reply. The canteen was empty and she couldn’t say it was taken. Did he just want the chair? Was he going to sit with her?

‘No,’ she finally managed.

He put his tray down opposite her and sat down, smiling. He took his coat off and hung it on the back of the chair, making himself comfortable. He was a young, slender man with black floppy hair. Although definitely older than her, she couldn’t quite place his age. He looked eccentric, different. The most remarkable thing about him though were his eyes, they were cold and grey like cut glass, Abbey had to force herself not to stare.

‘I’m Parker, Parker West.’ He held his hand out to her over the table. She rubbed her palm on her skirt to remove any traces of tuna mayonnaise and then shook his hand.

‘Hello.’

‘You’re Abigail Lucas?’ He smiled again, she could not hide her surprise – how did he know her name?

‘Who—’

‘Oh, they didn’t tell you? I’m going to be helping you with the archives. I have a masters in zoological archaeology and I’m working towards my PhD,’ he said, almost embarrassed.

‘Oh, yes, Mr Lowestoft did mention it. I didn’t realise it would be today.’

She had already worked her way through Australasia and Southern America on her own, cataloguing every single animal, noting down its region and its place on the food chain. Up till now she alone had the power to decide the fate of these creatures. She could mark the animal for restoration or for destruction. Where possible she was to save the animals, although it felt so futile – so far she had condemned over two hundred animals to the incinerator, their final resting place. The worst cases were in the northeast corner of the building where there had been a leak in the roof that had gone unnoticed for far too long. She hadn’t been able to save any of those, the mould and rot had set in so much that their deterioration had sealed the deal. She wasn’t sure if she trusted a stranger with this responsibility.

‘He just said you could probably do with a hand. This museum has a particularly quantitative supply of species and sub-species; it’s a lot for one person to get through … in two months, is it?’

‘I can manage it,’ she said apologetically, internally scolding herself for apologising at the same time.

‘Oh, no one said you can’t. To be honest with you, I volunteered, no one is paying me. I’m writing a paper for my PhD, you see, well I won’t bore you with the details of it but you would be doing me a huge favour if you would allow me to tag along, I might even be able to offer you my expertise with the identifications at least; you would obviously have to handle the actual restorations.’

‘If you think …’

‘The final decision is yours, my fate is in your hands.’ He had a soft, pleading but mischievous look in his eyes, she wanted to smile at him, she wouldn’t because that’s not who she was. People, she knew, are rarely who they show themselves to be. There is always a lie, always a mask.

‘Hello, Parker, you can call me Abbey,’ she said after a pause. She would just have to deal with it.

‘Nice to meet you, Abbey.’ He half smiled. His anticipation was evident as he ploughed his way through his lunch, raring to go, eager to meet her dead little friends.

She thought of all the animals she had already worked through alone and decided maybe this wasn’t the end of the world, it didn’t mean that Mr Lowestoft didn’t trust her, it just meant she could take her time and not worry so much about the self-imposed deadlines she had assigned. The hardest decision she had made on her own so far was on a small creature whose identification numbers had been ruined by water and damp, she did not recognise the animal and could not find it in any of the encyclopaedias. Maybe it was stored in the wrong part of the world, but there was no saving her – she knew the creature was a female, her teats were still enlarged from recent motherhood. Abbey wondered what had happened to this little beast. Her cheeks had been ravaged by termites but her black eyes were so calm. As Abbey had fingered the tiny bullet hole in the animal’s chest, a spider had crawled out and she dropped the animal in shock, smashing what was left of her face. Abbey could not stop the tears as she placed the red sticker on the small animal, wondering if her children had befallen the same fate or if they had made it, at least for a little while. She wondered if they had got the chance to have children of their own; she liked to think they had.

When she took Parker through to the floor where all of the Asian cadavers were kept she saw how exhilarated he was, his eyes transfixed and wide, like a child on their first trip to a toy shop, not knowing where to start, unsure what to break first.

‘Follow me.’ She led him to the far end of the room, her voice echoed as did her footsteps when her shoes thumped against the polished wooden floors. The room itself was lit from a double row of green glass bricks slotted in above where the original windows had been, long since boarded up to accommodate the large metal shelving units that had been put in after the fire; metal didn’t burn like wood. Everything in the room had taken on a hint of pale green as though it had been dipped in Chartreuse, a warm honey-green liquor. They could hear the music from the next room seeping in through the metal ventilation grates that sat above the oak skirting. It was the same music that had played every day since she had started. She didn’t know what it was called but it was classical, sometimes the melody would run through her mind as she tried to sleep at night. She looked over at Parker, noticing him trying to take it all in, looking up and down, occasionally uttering an exclamation at something he had seen.

‘So incredible,’ he muttered. She got the impression he didn’t mean to say that out loud. Usually when people learned what Abbey did they pulled a face and said something like ‘Oh, that’s nice’ in the worst impression of a sincere voice they could muster, the idea of stuffing dead animals was completely repulsive to them, although they were entirely missing the point. Parker’s response was a refreshing change, she was proud of her occupation; it was all she had.

‘We basically operate on something similar to the Dewey decimal system, so the first two numbers correspond to a continent, then the next three numbers the species, followed by—’

‘Yes, I know how it works.’

‘OK, sorry.’

‘No, I didn’t mean to be rude, please, just ignore my … personality, sometimes I can be a bit … I’m sorry. Thanks for taking the time to explain it to me. Carry on.’ He fumbled for words, this time she couldn’t help but smile a little.

‘You need to mark the animals down against the numbers on this register and then you need to mark whether they are to be kept or not. Anything that can be restored needs a yellow sticker and put a red one on the ones that are beyond saving.’ She handed him the stickers.

‘Nothing is beyond saving,’ he said thoughtfully as he stared at the coloured sheets in his hand, his eyes looking through the paper and beyond. She studied his face for a moment, unable to look away. His skin was so pale and his hair so black against it. The gentle curls undermining his angular bone structure. He looked up quickly, drawing in his breath, as though for a moment he forgot he was not alone.

Abbey watched Parker working. Once he had begun to work he had not uttered a single word to her. She occasionally heard him mumbling to himself but essentially it was no different than working alone. The silence was not strained or awkward, it was just silence, something they were obviously both comfortable with. From time to time he would pull out a well-worn leather pocket book and scrawl something inside it, then put it back in his inside pocket. She wondered what he was writing, what was his paper about?

The day was drawing to a close, the natural light from the high-set windows changing to an orange glow as the sunset drew closer.

‘Parker!’ Abbey called for the fourth time, trying to snatch his attention as he scribbled furiously in his notepad, engrossed. He looked up, startled, almost scared, then his face softened into a smile as if he’d just awoken from a nightmare and pulled back into reality.

‘What time is it?’ He looked up at the windows, almost surprised at the warm dusk light that had crept up on them.

‘It’s seven p.m. now, I don’t normally work this late but we did make a lot of progress, you have been a great help.’

‘Yikes! Seven! I should get home.’

‘Sorry, I should have thought, your wife must be worried.’

‘Yes, Sally will be worried … and she will probably want feeding and some exercise.’ He smirked at Abbey’s confused and slightly embarrassed face. ‘She’s my dog.’

Abbey blushed, hoping to God he didn’t think she was fishing for information, she wasn’t, she wouldn’t. Somehow she knew the thought never crossed his mind.

After Parker’s departure, the museum was desolate. Abbey was just leaving when she walked past the front desk. The samurai was standing ever poised in his glass case by the entrance. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up on end as she allowed herself to properly look at him in this light. He was still, he couldn’t hurt her or anybody else, but still she felt him staring, his hand on his katana.