Ли Чайлд - Belfast Noir

And then the conversation, almost inevitably, turned to Mr. Knox.

We all fancied Mr. Knox. No one even bothered to deny it. The whole school fancied him. He was the French and Spanish teacher, and he was part French himself, or so the rumours went. He was part-something, anyway, he had to be: he was so different from the other teachers. He had dark hair that he wore long and floppy over one eye, and permanent morning-after stubble, and he smoked Camel cigarettes. Teachers couldn’t smoke anywhere in the school grounds, not even in the staffroom, but he smoked anyway, in the staff toilets in the art block or in the caretaker’s shed, girls said, and if you had him immediately after break or lunch you smelled it off him. He drove an Alfa Romeo, bright red, and where the other male teachers were rumpled in browns and greys he wore coloured silk shirts and loafers. On “Own Clothes Day” at the end of term he’d wear tapered jeans and polo necks and Chelsea boots and, even in winter, mirrored aviator sunglasses, like an off-duty film star. He had posters on his classroom walls of Emmanuelle Béart and a young Catherine Deneuve and Soledad Miranda, and he lent his sixth-formers videos of Pedro Almodóvar films.

But that wasn’t all. A large part of his charge came from the fact that he’d had an affair with a former pupil, Davina Calvert. It had been eight years ago, and they were married now: he’d left his wife for her, and it was a real scandal, he’d almost lost his job over it, except in the end they couldn’t dismiss him because he’d done nothing strictly, legally wrong. It had happened long before we joined the school, but we knew all the details. Everyone did. It was almost a rite of passage to cluster as first- or second-years in a corner of the library poring over old school magazines in search of her, hunting down grainy black-and-white photographs of year groups, foreign exchange trips, prize days, tracking her as she grew up to become his lover.

Davina Calvert, Davina Knox. She was as near and as far from our lives as it was possible to get.

Davina, the story went, was her year’s star pupil. She got the top mark in Spanish A-level in the whole of Northern Ireland, and came third in French. Davina Calvert, Davina Knox. Nothing happened between them while she was still at school—or nothing anyone could pin on him, at least—but when she left she went on a gap year, teaching English in Granada, and he went out to visit her. We knew this for sure because Lisa’s older sister had been two years below Davina Calvert, and at the time was in Mr. Knox’s Spanish A-level class. After Halloween half-term he turned up with a load of current Spanish magazines, Hola! and Diez Minutos and Vogue España . They asked him if he’d been away, and where he’d been, and he answered them in a teasing torrent of Spanish that none of them could quite follow. But it went around the school like wildfire that he’d been in Granada, visiting Davina Calvert, and sure enough, when she was back for Christmas at least two people saw them in his Alfa Romeo, parked up a side street, kissing, and by the end of the school year he and his wife were separated, getting divorced. The following year he didn’t even pretend to hide it from his classes: when they talked about what they’d done over the weekend he’d grin and say, in French or Spanish, that he’d been visiting a special friend in Edinburgh. Everyone knew it was Davina.

We used to picture what it must have been like, when he first visited her in Granada. The winding streets and white medieval buildings. The blue and orange and purple sky. They would have walked together to Lorca’s house and the Alhambra and afterward clinked glasses of sherry in some cobbled square with fountains and gypsy musicians. Perhaps he would have reached under the table to stroke her thigh, slipping a hand under her skirt and tracing its curve, and when he withdrew it she would have crossed and uncrossed her legs, squeezing and releasing her thighs, the tingling pressure unbearable.

I imagined it countless times: but I could never quite settle on what would have happened next. What would you do, in Granada with Mr. Knox? Would you lead him back to your little rented room, in the sweltering eaves of a homestay or a shared apartment? No: you’d go with him instead to the hotel that he’d booked, a sumptuous four-poster bed in a grand and faded parador in the Albaicín—or more likely an anonymous room in the new district where the staff wouldn’t ask questions, a room where the bed had white sheets with clinical corners, a room with a bathroom you could hear every noise from. The shame of it—the excitement.

And back in the KFC on the Upper Newtownards Road, on that rainy Monday Baker Day in April, we knew where Mr. Knox and Davina lived. It was out towards the Ice Bowl, near the golf club, in Dundonald. It was a forty-, forty-five minute walk. We had nothing else to do. We linked arms and set off.

It was an anticlimax when we got there. We’d walked down the King’s Road, passing such posh houses on the way; somehow, with the sports car and the sunglasses and the designer suits, we’d expected his house to be special too. But most of the houses on his street were just like ours: bungalows, or small redbrick semis, with hedges and lawns and rhododendron bushes. We walked up one side, and down the other. There was nothing to tell us where he lived: no sign of him. We were starting to bicker by then. The rain was teeming down and Tanya was getting worried that someone might see us, and report us to the school. We slagged her—how would anyone know we were doing anything wrong, and how would they know which school we went to, anyway, we weren’t in uniform—but all of us were slightly on edge. It was only midmorning, but what if he left school for some reason, or came home for an early lunch? All four of us were in his French class, and Lisa and I had him for Spanish too: he’d recognise us. We should go: we knew we should go.

The long walk back in the rain stretched ahead of us. We sat on a low wall to empty our pockets and purses and work out if we had enough to pay for a bus ticket each. When it turned out there was only enough for three, we started squabbling: Tanya had no money left, but she’d paid for the bon-bons, and almost half of the Pepsi, so it wasn’t fair if she had to walk. Well, it wasn’t fair for everyone to have to walk just because of her. Besides, she lived nearest: there was least distance for her to go. But it wasn’t fair! Back and forth it went, and it might have turned nasty—Donna had just threatened to slap Tanya if she didn’t quit whinging.

Then we saw Davina.

It was Lisa who recognised her, at the wheel of a metallic-blue Peugeot. The car swept past us and round the curve of the road, but Lisa swore it had been her at the wheel. We leapt up, galvanised, and looked at each other.

“Well come on,” Donna said.

“Donna!” Tanya said.

“What, are you scared?” Donna said. She had thick glasses that made her eyes look small and mean, and she’d pushed her sister through a patio door in a fight. We were all a little scared of Donna.

“Come on,” Lisa said.

Tanya seemed like she was about to cry.

“We’re just going to look,” I said. “We’re just going to walk past and look at the house. There’s no law against that.” Then I added, “For fuck’s sake, Tanya.” I didn’t mind Tanya, if it was just the two of us, but it didn’t do to be too friendly with her in front of the others.

“Yeah, Tanya, for fuck’s sake,” Lisa said.

Tanya sat back down on the wall. “I’m not going anywhere. We’ll be in such big trouble.”

“Fine,” Donna said. “Fuck off home then, what are you waiting for?” She turned and linked arms with Lisa, and they started walking down the street.