Ramsay 06 - The Baby-Snatcher by Ann Cleeves Page B

session. Brian left a message saying he’d be in the office until six and spent the afternoon distracted by work.

Chapter Thirteen
    Mark Taverner waited in the staffroom for Brian’s call. Usually he preferred to go out at lunchtime. When Sheena was alive he’d gone home. Even before she became ill he’d liked to check that she was happy. The colleagues in the staffroom had commented snidely on these absences. Once Mark had heard an ageing maths teacher say to another with the weary envy of a tabloid hack, ‘There goes Taverner. Off for his midday bonk.’
    In fact sex was never considered at these lunchtime meetings. Sex played little part in the relationship at all despite Sheena’s obsession with it in her books. Or perhaps because of it. She wrote about sex as a symbol of violence or betrayal. Mark had read her stories before they married and made an effort in the beginning to be sensitive. He thought there must have been a previous relationship in which she had been abused or humiliated and he wanted to prove to her that he was different from the other men she had known.
    It seemed that he had failed. Perhaps he was too careful. She had allowed the advances in a disinterested way but had taken little pleasure from the contact. Inexperienced as he was he had realized that. Only once, when he became angry, had she responded at all. They had both been shocked by the encounter and he had taken care not to repeat his outburst. Her illness had provided an excellent excuse for abstinence. He could understand that she was always very tired.
    He had gone home at lunchtime to see her. He would let himself in at the front door and before even taking off his coat he would climb the narrow stairs and there she would be, in the little room she had turned into an office. The little room, where in the other houses in the street a baby slept. She would be leaning over the A4 sheets of plain paper on which she wrote, a fountain pen in her hand. She had refused to learn about computers.
    She must have heard him come through the door but she pretended not to. It was an affectation. She liked him to think she was concentrating so deeply on her work that she had not noticed. Then she would turn and exclaim. ‘Mark! Is it that time already?’
    He would kiss her cheek and go down to the kitchen to make tea and a sandwich while she finished her sentence and collected her thoughts.
    They would sit together at the kitchen table and she would talk about her work. She never asked how his day had been. Often she would need reassurance. Not about the quality of her writing – she believed implicitly in that – but because of some setback. Her agent had not been sufficiently enthusiastic about her latest novel. Attempts to break into the American market had come to nothing. He would tell her that of course it was a struggle but that recognition would come one day. Then he would wash the dishes and hurry back to school.
    Sometimes he could not make it home at lunchtime. Perhaps there was a meeting or a parent demanding to see him. Then he would arrive, late in the afternoon, to find her looking out for him, distraught. He hated to see her unhappy, but those moments, when she clung to him as soon as he came through the door, made everything worthwhile. It showed how much she needed him.
    After her death he never went to the house in the middle of the day. He preferred to walk into the centre of the town and sit in one of the cafés, watching the shop assistants in short skirts and clacking high heels, who hurried in to buy sticky buns to take away. And the harassed young mums with their babies.
    Today he bought his sandwiches at the school canteen and took them back to the staffroom to wait for Brian’s call, ignoring the conversation around him.
    ‘Have you heard the latest? The head wants a policy document on pastoral care. Pastoral care! Who has time for that any more?’
    ‘If the bloody Ofsted inspector can do any better with my Year