Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain

In earlier years, Kevin’s end-of-term reports had semi-optimistically suggested a possible capacity for improvement, should he ever begin to activate his dormant brain. But any realistic hopes of academic achievement had been abandoned many terms ago.

In spite of — or was it because of? — such intellectual shortcomings, Kevin was an individual of considerable menace and power; and if any pupil was likely to drive his teacher to retirement, to resignation, even to suicide, that pupil was Kevin Costyn. Both inside and outside school, this young man could be described only as crude and vicious; and during the current summer term his sole interest in class activities had focused upon his candidature for the British National Party in the school’s annual mock-elections.

Teachers were fearful of his presence in the classroom, and blessed their good fortune whenever he was (allegedly) ill or playing hookey or appearing before the courts or cautioned (again!) by the police or being interviewed by probation officers, social workers, or psychiatrists. Only rarely was his conduct less than positively disruptive; and that when some overnight dissipation had sapped his wonted enthusiasm for selective subversion.

Always he sat in the front row, immediately to the right of the central gangway. This for three reasons. First, because he was thus enabled to turn round and thereby the more easily to orchestrate whatever disruption he had in mind. Second, because (without ever admitting it) he was slightly deaf; and although he had little wish to listen to his teachers’ lessons, his talent for verbal repartee was always going to be diminished by any slight mis-hearing. Third, because Eloise Dring, the sexiest girl in the Fifth Year, was so very short-sighted that she was compelled (refusing spectacles) to take a ring-side view of each day’s proceedings. And Kevin wanted to sit next to Eloise Dring.

So there he sat, his long legs sticking way out beneath his undersized desk; his feet shod in a scuffed, cracked, decrepit pair of winkle-pickers, two pairs of which had been bequeathed by some erstwhile lover to his mother — the latter a blowsy, frowsy single parent who had casually conceived her only son (as far as she could recall the occasion) in a lay-by just off the Cowley Ring Road, and who now lived in one of a string of council properties known to the largely unsympathetic locals as Prostitutes Row.

Kevin was a lankily built, gangly-boned youth, with long, dark, unwashed hair, and a less than virile sprouting on upper lip and chin, dressed that day in a gaudily floral T-shirt and tattered jeans. His sullen, dolichocephalic face could have been designed by some dyspeptic El Greco, and on his left forearm — covered this slightly chilly day by the sleeve of an off-white sweatshirt — was a tattoo. This tattoo was known to everyone of any status in the school, including the Head; and indeed the latter, in a rare moment of comparative courage, had called Costyn into his study the previous term and demanded to know exactly what the epidermal epigram might signify. And Kevin had been happy to tell him: to tell him how the fairly unequivocal slogan (‘Fuck ’em All’) would normally be interpreted by anyone; even by someone with the benefit of a university education.

Anyway, that was how Kevin reported the interview.

Whatever the truth of the matter though, his reputation was now approaching its apogee. And with two sentences in a young offenders’ unit behind him, how could it have been otherwise? At the same time, his influence, both within the circle of his immediate contemporaries and within the wider confines of the whole school, was significantly increased by two further factors. First, he even managed in some curious manner to exude a crude yet apparently irresistible sexuality, which drew many a girl into his magnetic field. Second, he was — had been since the age of twelve — a devotee of the Martial Arts; and under the tutelage of a diminutive Chinaman who (rumour had it) had once single-handedly left a gang of street-muggers lying pleading for mercy on the pavement, Kevin could appear, often did appear, an intimidating figure.

‘KC.’ That was what was written in red capital letters in the girls’ loo: Kevin Costyn; Karate Champion; King of the Condoms; or whatever.

Tradition at the Proctor Memorial School was for pupils to rise to their feet whenever any teacher entered the classroom. And this tradition perpetuated itself still, albeit in a dishonoured, desultory sort of way. Yet when Mrs Stevens walked into 5C, for the first period on the afternoon of her birthday, the whole class, following a cue from Kevin Costyn, rose to its feet in synchronized smartness, the hum of conversation cut immediately… as if some maestro had tapped his baton on the podium.

And there was a great calm.

‘It’s only me,’ he’d spoken into the rusted, serrated Entryphone beside the front door.

He’d heard a brief, distant whirring; then a click; then her voice: ‘It’s open.’

He walked up the three flights of shabbily carpeted stairs, his mind wholly on the young woman who lived on the top floor. The bone structure of her face looked gaunt below the pallid cheeks; her eyes (for all McClure knew) might once have sparkled like those of glaucopis Athene, but now were dull — a sludgy shade of green, like the waters of the Oxford canal; her nose — tip-tilted in slightly concave fashion, like the contour of a nursery ski-slope — was disfigured (as he saw things) by two cheap-looking silver rings, one drilled through either nostril; her lips, marginally on the thin side of the Aristotelian mean, were ever thickly daubed with a shade of bright orange — a shade that would have been permanently banned from her mouth by any mildly competent beautician, a shade which clashed horribly with the amateurishly applied deep-scarlet dye that streaked her longish, dark-brown hair.

But why such details of her face? Her hair? The mind of this young woman’s second client that day, Wednesday, May 25, was firmly fixed on other things as a little breathlessly he ascended the last few narrow, squeaking stairs that led to the top of the Victorian property.

The young woman turned back the grubby top-sheet on the narrow bed, kicked a pair of knickers out of sight behind the shabby settee, poured out two glasses of red wine (£2.99 from Oddbins), and was sitting on the bed, swallowing the last mouthful of a Mars bar, when the first knock sounded softly on the door.

She was wearing a creased lime-green blouse, buttoned up completely down the front, black nylon stockings — whose tops came only to mid-thigh, held by a white suspender-belt — and red high-heeled shoes. Nothing more. That’s how he wanted her; that’s how she was. Beggars were proverbially precluded from overmuch choice and (perforce) ‘beggar’ she had become, with a triple burden of liabilities: negative equity on her ‘studio flat’, bought five years earlier at the height of the property boom; redundancy ( in voluntary) from the sales office of a local engineering firm; and a steadily increasing consumption of alcohol. So she had soon taken on a… well, a new ‘job’ really.

To say that in the course of her new employment she was experiencing any degree of what her previous employer called ‘job satisfaction’ would be an exaggeration. On the other hand, it was certainly the easiest work she’d ever undertaken, as well as being by far the best paid — and (as she knew) she was quite good at it. As soon as she’d settled her bigger debts, though, she’d pack it all in. She was quite definite about that. The sooner the quicker.