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122 pages

English

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The fourth in a series of crime novels featuring Gina Gray and DCI David Scott, Weep A While Longer sets cosy Middle England against a dark crime. Picking up her granddaughter from nursery one summer afternoon, Gina Gray notices a mother and child with a dog. A few hours later she sees their faces on the TV screen, victims of a brutal murder. DCI David Scott, Gina's semi-detached partner, is determined to keep her out of the investigation but nothing can prevent her from witnessing the case's terrifying denouement. The murder case is not the only thing preoccupying her, however. Her mother, her granddaughter, her job, her house invaded by her daughter's student friends, the costumes for open air Shakespeare in the Minster grounds and, not least, her relationship with David Scott, all combine to distract her. As the police pursue the killer, Gina's life at work and at home is running out of control. When the crash comes, just how bad will it be?

Informations

Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 octobre 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781784626983
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

Weep a While Longer
Penny Freedman

Copyright © 2014 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.Matador ®
9 Priory Business Park
Kibworth Beauchamp
Leicestershire LE8 0RX, UK
Tel: (+44) 116 279 2299
Fax: (+44) 116 279 2277
Email: books@troubador.co.uk
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
ISBN 978 1784626 983
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

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Contents

Cover

Foreword and Dedication

About the Author

Title Piece

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21
Foreword and Dedication

Acorns day nursery is an invented place, inhabited by invented people, but I would like to dedicate this book to the children, parents and staff of The Oaks from 1973 to 1983.
Other places and people in this book are also, of course, entirely fictional.
About the Author
Penny Freedman studied Classics at Oxford before teaching English in schools and universities. She is also an actress and director. She has a PhD in Shakespeare Studies and lives with her husband in Stratford-upon-Avon. She has two grown-up daughters.
Her previous books featuring Gina Gray and DCI Scott are This is a Dreadful Sentence (2010), All the Daughters (2012) and One May Smile (2013).
Title Piece

Lady Beatrice, have you wept all this while?
Yea, and I will weep a while longer.
Much Ado About Nothing 4.1
1

Tuesday 17 th July

Veiled Remarks
‘I don’t understand,’ Jamilleh says, ‘why the shops’ people are saying me always, Your right .’
‘ Your right ?’ I ask.
‘Yes. The shops’ workers, they say always this.’
‘Are they saying us You are right ?’ asks Farah.
‘No, is a question,’ chips in Juanita. ‘It goes like, Your right?’
Light dawns. I laugh. ‘Athene,’ I ask, ‘do you know what they mean?’
Athene turns stormy dark eyes on me and gives a little huff of impatience. ‘It’s like, Are you all right? ’ she says through barely parted lips. ‘Always everybody is asking this in England.’ She yawns. She is bored, as she has a right to be: her English is much better than the others’ and she doesn’t get much out of these classes. Also, she doesn’t like the Iranians: the Greeks’ view of themselves as Europe’s bastion against the Islamic world doesn’t really encourage mutual tolerance and understanding. And then there’s the current meltdown of the Greek economy: since her husband is here doing a government-funded MBA, I guess she’s wondering how much longer they’re going to be here.
Farah and Jamilleh stare at her, affronted – as they so often are – by the treachery of the English language; Juanita smiles in dawning comprehension and Ning Wu, the fifth student in the group, has decided to conform to stereotype and look inscrutable. I write on the board:

Are you all right?
You all right?
Yorright?
‘It gets squished up,’ I say, ‘because people say it so often.’
‘So they are asking me am I all right?’ Farah asks.
‘Well, no. They actually mean, Hello, can I help you?’
Her face brightens. ‘In the book,’ she says, ‘this is how they say.’
‘The book?’
‘The book we were study with Mrs Jenny. Emma Goes Shopping . In this book the shops’ people say, Good morning. Can I help you? ’
‘Yeees,’ I say, ‘that’s what shop assistants say in books, but very rarely in real life. Except perhaps in posh shops.’
They laugh. Posh is a recent addition to their vocabulary and they like the alliteration of posh shops , and the way I say it.
This is not, in general, an easy course to teach: popularly referred to as The Wives’ Course , it was given an official pc makeover to The Spouses’ Course a couple of years ago and then became uber-pc last autumn, when a young Brazilian woman, taking an MA in Women’s Studies, demanded that her boyfriend be allowed to attend. So it is now The Partners’ Course , though Rio, the partner in question, swiftly lost interest and found himself a job in one of the campus food outlets, where his English is, no doubt, improving by leaps and bounds. Everyone in the current class is, in fact, a wife. The numbers are always small and the course never pays for itself, but it is a kind of pastoral care for overseas students at Marlbury University, founded on the premise that men who have brought their families with them will study better if their wives are happy and, rather more tenuously, that happiness and speaking English are coextensive. There’s a flawed syllogism in there somewhere:

Students are happier if they are better integrated
Speaking English helps people to integrate
Ergo, learning English makes students happy
Anyway, the Student Union gives us a grant to run it and it’s a dogsbody course, usually taught by the newest recruit to the English Language department, and as head of department I wouldn’t normally be anywhere near it, except that I could see Jenny Marsh was really struggling with this particular group back in the autumn. Athene, Juanita and Rio, the Brazilian guy, were ganging up on Farah and Jamilleh, who spoke very little English at that point. They were suffering from severe culture shock and reacted fiercely to any perceived slur on their religion or culture. Ning Wu, from Shanghai, got caught in the crossfire and came to me to complain, so I swapped a nice quiet Cambridge First Certificate listening class with Jenny and took them on myself. It’s been hard work, and as I look at them even now Ning Wu is still sitting in the middle between Farah and Jamilleh to my left and Juanita and Athene to my right, like a one-woman UN peacekeeping force. We’ve found common ground, though: Acorns, for a start, the university day nursery, where my students all send their children and where I am frequently to be found dropping or collecting Freda, my four-year-old granddaughter. We rub along; I keep it light; we have a laugh.
We are laughing now at posh shops when Farah’s and Jamilleh’s faces freeze before my eyes and their smiles stretch into masks of panic. At the same time I’m aware of a noise to my right and I spin round to see a young man coming into the room. I run at him, flapping wildly. ‘Out! Out! Out!’ I scream like a demented farmer’s wife seeing her hens threatened by a fox.
He stares at me. ‘I was just trying to f—’ he says.
‘Ouut!’ I scream again and push him bodily from the room, slamming the door behind him.
I turn with my back against the door to find Farah and Jamilleh frantically bundling themselves into their jilbabs and khimars.
Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn . We were doing so well. About six weeks ago, you see, there was what can only be called an epiphany. It was early June and the first really warm weather of the year. Juanita and Athene were flashing brown shoulders in sleeveless T-shirts and they looked with pity at the Iranian women and asked if they had to wear those hijabs even at home. ‘Of course not,’ came the answer. ‘At home we wear whatever we like. At home,’ Farah told us, smiling, ‘we are beautiful for our husbands .’ And then it was Jamilleh, I think, who looked around, said, ‘Well, we are all women here,’ and started to pull off her headscarf. In a couple of minutes, they had both divested themselves of what I then, in my ignorance, would have called their hijabs and their long grey coats. The rest of us gazed in astonishment as they emerged, vivid, from their grey cocoons, two entirely Western-style young women with tight-fitting jeans, sleeveless tops, chunky jewellery and salon-improved hair – Farah’s lowlighted a rich red, Jamilleh’s highlighted in dark gold.
‘And now,’ Farah told us, flushed with her own courage, ‘we teach you this is not hijab.’ And so we were instructed. We learned that hijab simply means modest dress , though it can also refer to the headscarf, which is more properly called the khimar, as it is in the Qur’an, apparently. So the long, buttoned coat that Jamilleh had just taken off is not a hijab, nor is it a chador : the chador , we should understand, is the black cloak worn largely by peasant women. Farah and Jamilleh, smart young women from Tehran, wear the jilbab or, at the expensive, designer end of the market, the manteau , as in the French for overcoat. I was rather delighted to discover that there is fashion snobbery even in Islamic dress. I’m not sure how much the other students took in of all this but I lapped it up; always a glutton for new linguistic information, I’ve tucked it away and I’m waiting for an opportunity to show it off.
Since that occasion, as soon as we’ve all gathered and the door has been closed, they have shrugged themselves out of their outerwear as casually as anyone else takes off a coat and the dynamic of the class has felt subtly changed. It seems like a gesture of trust and I feel privileged, in an odd sort of way, to be trusted. Until today. Until three minutes ago when a wretched, rash, intruding fool blundered in and wrecked it. Because they’re not going to take the risk again, are they?
I apologise and soothe my fluttered chicks as best I can, and then, since there is no point in trying to go back to the listening exercise we were doing, and from which we had diverged anyway, I ask whether they’re all going to the end-of-term