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136 pages

English

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In the library of a university college, in a small English town, a Turkish student, known to be a government spy, is found dead one morning, crushed between two rolling stacks. In the days that follow, puzzling messages relating to his death start appearing on the board in the seminar room where English language classes take place. Suspicion falls on the other students in the class as the police start to investigate their backgrounds and motives, and their teacher, Gina Gray, is drawn into the mystery. When Gina Gray sets out to discover who murdered her student, she is an unlikely detective: a harassed mother and grandmother with difficult teenage daughters and a baby granddaughter in tow, she has nothing on her side but stubbornness, bravado - and a detailed knowledge of English grammar. As the lives, relationships and secrets of the thirteen students involved begin to be revealed, the police uncover links with opium production in Turkey and with the Russian mafia. DCI David Scott, leading a murder investigation for the first time, believes that these hold the key to the murder, but as the police investigation stalls, two of the students disappear and another is killed. Told in alternate chapters from the point of view of Gina and of DCI Scott, the novel weaves and unravels a complex mystery, while exploring the edgy, combative relationship that develops between the two of them.

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	01 janvier 2013
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781780885940
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Penny Freedman studied Classics at Oxford before teaching English and Drama in schools and universities. She has a PhD in Shakespeare Studies and lives with her husband in Stratford-upon-Avon, where she lectures on Shakespeare and indulges her passion for the theatre. She has two grown-up daughters.
THIS IS A
DREADFUL SENTENCE
PENNY FREEDMAN
Copyright 2013 Penny Freedman
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 9781780885940
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
This book is dedicated to all my former students, who taught me as much as I taught them.
Contents
Foreword
1 WEDNESDAY: Conditional Clauses
2 THURSDAY: Investigation Day One
3 THURSDAY: Unreal Conditions
4 FRIDAY: Investigation Day Two
5 FRIDAY: Relative Clauses
6 SATURDAY: Investigation Day Three
7 SATURDAY: First Person Plural
8 SUNDAY: Investigation Day Four
9 MONDAY: Present Indicative
10 TUESDAY: Investigation Day Six
11 TUESDAY: Comparative Forms
12 WEDNESDAY: Investigation Day Seven
13 WEDNESDAY: Semantic Fields
14 THURSDAY: Investigation Day Eight
15 THURSDAY: Negative Sentences
16 FRIDAY: Investigation Day Nine
17 SATURDAY: Future Perfect
18 SATURDAY: Investigation Day Ten
19 SUNDAY: Second Person Plural
20 MONDAY: Investigation Day Twelve
21 MONDAY: Present Tense
22 Tuesday: Investigation Day Thirteen
23 TUESDAY: Concessive Clauses
24 WEDNESDAY: Investigation Day Fourteen
25 THURSDAY: Imperfect Tense
26 THURSDAY: Investigation Day Fifteen
27 FRIDAY: Present Progressive
28 SATURDAY: Investigation Day Seventeen
29 SATURDAY: Third Person Plural
30 MONDAY: Investigation Day Nineteen
31 MONDAY: Finite Clause
Foreword
I lived very happily for thirty years in the city which was the inspiration for Marlbury and I have many good friends there. I would not want anyone to think that Gina s jaundiced view of the city is mine. The characters who appear in these pages bear no relation to any of that city s inhabitants, and the places of learning have only the most superficial resemblance to prototypes there.
This is a dreadful sentence.
All s Well That Ends Well , Act 3 scene 2
1
WEDNESDAY: Conditional Clauses
If I had known England was so cold, I would not have come
Excellent
If I had known England was so cold, I would not have come.
My pen squeaks on the whiteboard as I write; it s running out of juice.
Farid?
If you had a better coat, you would not be cold
Laughter.
Very good
If you had a better coat, you would not be cold.
Valery?
If I had not got drunk last night, I would work better now
More laughter.
If I had not got drunk last night, I would work better now.
Spoken from the heart, Valery?
A silence. Valery shrugs. Now I look at him, he does look a touch grey, his hair unkempt, his clothes if not slept in, certainly not fresh off a hanger. Not your business, Gina. You ve done your mothering, remember?
Four thirty in the afternoon and we re doing conditionals - the perennial if . Their English is pretty good but conditionals still catch them out, as they do foreigners in general. Listen to The Today Programme or The World at One any time and you ll hear foreign diplomats and politicians speaking quite beautiful English, until they launch into hypotheticals and then everything goes pear-shaped. What they need to bear in mind is that tenses in English are not so much about time as about probability and uncertainty, actuality and unreality. I don t tell my students this: this linguistic philosophising would freak them out - as it may you, I realise. Do stay with me, though. You will need to follow some of this if you re going to keep up with my story, and the story is a good one: it has international criminals and fiendish plots as well as love, lust, revenge - and English grammar. What more can you ask for?
In place of linguistic analysis on this Wednesday afternoon in Seminar Room 5, I am simply drilling my students in the conditional forms, like Skinner s rats. I move on round the table. My class has segregated itself along gender lines, as do most classes of students, eastern or western, Islamic or not. And after the first week they sit in the same places every time. It s a comfort thing. There are thirteen students in the class and I usually make a fourteenth round the long table that has been created by pushing small tables together. Today there are only thirteen of us, though - Ceren, the Turkish girl, is off sick. I m not sitting down. I m on my feet at the whiteboard writing up their sentences with a black board-writer which is rapidly running out of ink. I think it s best that I don t sit down. There is a surprising fear of the number thirteen in some cultures - triskaidekaphobia, as we linguists like to call it - and not just the ooh it s Friday the thirteenth frisson. In Japan, hotels have no room thirteen and no thirteenth floor in high-rise blocks. So I m staying on my feet, though it won t actually do any good: today will prove to be unlucky for at least one of us, anyway - as unlucky as it s possible to be.
Later on in this story, I shall be asked by the police to draw a sketch of our positions round this table in this seminar room, so I see no reason why you shouldn t see it now. I ve indicated where Turkish Ceren usually sits, but her chair is empty today.

So, as I move on round the table, it s Ahmet s turn. He is ready with his example, smiling cheerfully.
If my father was a rich man, I wouldn t need to work.
If my father was - or what would be more correct, Ahmet?
Denis, the Frenchman, offers a clue.
If I were a reech man da da da da da dum .
Thank you, Denis, for that musical contribution. Yes. If I were . OK, Ahmet? The last remnant of the English subjunctive. You will hear people say If I was , but in this class, we aim for - what?
Perfection, they carol dutifully.
Exactly.
If my father were a rich man, I wouldn t need to work.
Asil?
If I drove more slowly, I didn t crash the car.
Patience, Gina.
Asil gazes at me. He is forty or so, a college teacher. He has done a stint of teaching in one of Turkey s remoter mountain regions and now he is being rewarded with a government-sponsored couple of years in the UK, doing an M.Phil at the University College of Marlbury. My job is to get his English good enough for him to write a dissertation on Turkey s claim to membership of the E.U. Affable and willing, he has, as we say in the trade, plateaued as far as English Language is concerned. He is one of half a dozen, all sent to us by the Turkish government, three of whom are in this class. Ahmet, his friend, is rather brighter than Asil, but then there is Ekrem. Ekrem was a mystery to us all initially - surly, idle, stupid - until we realised that he is the spy in the group - there to keep an eye on the others. And he is not enjoying it. He is bored by the work, and being known to be a spy must hamper his social life somewhat, I imagine.
We unpick Asil s sentence, discourse on the difference between If I drove and If I had driven and reach an acceptable version.
If I had driven more carefully, I would not have crashed the car.
Asil beams uncomprehending approval and I turn to Ekrem for his sentence. He is a bit younger than the other Turks - middle thirties, I suppose - but he is already running to seed. His belly bulges over the belt of his trousers and his heavy face is jowly and dark with stubble. He speaks without expression:
If I want, I can have.
Something in the air, the merest stillness of breath. More than irritation, I think; we are used to this kind of thing from Ekrem, after all. What then? Plough on.
That s not an unreal condition, is it, Ekrem? I asked for examples of unreal conditions. Yours is an open condition. If you say If I want, you might want something or you might not. We don t know.
He ignores me, gazes at the ceiling, drums his fingers on the table. Part of the problem, I know, is that he needs a cigarette. He suffers after an hour without a nicotine fix. We all sit and consider his horrid little sentence. I look round the table to where the women sit. Irina, to my left, is looking across at Ekrem with an inscrutable expression. I grasp the nettle.
Irina, can you turn Ekrem s sentence into an unreal condition?
Irina qualified as a doctor in Russia but is here, I learnt recently, at her parents expense, to escape the attentions of an ex-husband turned stalker. I can t help admiring her. She s got nothing going for her in the looks department, but it doesn t seem to bother her. She s got the build of a shot-putter, nondescript features and the kind of dead white skin that seems never to have seen the light of day, but I applaud her decision to dye her flimsy hair an improbable shade of red and to team it today with red lipstick, a pink polo-neck and a purple padded gilet which threatens to turn her into the Michelin man. She has impact; she refuses to be defeated by the genetic chance that made her to be ignored. She s built up that physique, working out on the rowing machine at the gym; she s turned her flat, mousey hair into an orange