Well-Schooled in Murder (13 page)

“Everything else is away from the main quad,” Chas explained. “Theatre and dance classrooms, technical centre, maths building, science building, sports hall, and the Sanatorium.”

“What about the boys’ and girls’ houses?”

Chas made a quirky face and rubbed the back of his wrist against his right temple as if in the need to discipline his hair. “Separated by the quad. Girls on south grounds, boys on north.”

“And if the twain should meet?” Lynley enquired, interested to discover how the modern independent schools—seeking to keep their doors open through a more liberal admissions policy—were dealing with the treacherous waters of male and female boarders.

Chas blinked behind his gold-rimmed spectacles and replied, “I expect you know, sir. Or you can probably guess. Expulsion. Generally with no questions asked.”

“Rather stiff sentence, that,” Havers noted.

“It does get the message across, though, doesn’t it?” Chas quoted solemnly. “‘The true-spirited Bredgardian does not engage in sexual misconduct of any kind.’ Page twenty-three of the code book. The first page everyone turns to
and
dribbles over. Wishful thinking.” He grinned, opened a door, and motioned them into a short corridor, newer-looking than the rest of the building. “We’ll go through the sports hall. It’s a short cut to Erebus House. That’s where Matthew Whateley’s dormitory is.”

Their entrance to the sports hall—an obviously recent addition to the school—produced an awkward suspension of a gymnastics lesson that was going on at a trampoline in the west end of the building. The small collection of pupils—all young boys—turned as a body and stared without speaking. It was decidedly odd. One would expect them at least to murmur to one another, to poke, to jab. They were children, after all. Not one appeared to be more than thirteen years old. But if any of them possessed that energetic restlessness so typical to the age, they did not show it. Instead, they fixed their eyes on Lynley. Their teacher, a young man in gym shorts and a jersey, said, “Boys.
Boys
,” but they did not attend. Lynley could almost imagine them heaving a collective sigh of relief when he and Havers followed Chas Quilter out of the sports hall and into the north section of the school.

A pebbled path led them past the maths building, winding along the lawn through a small but lovely grove of birches, and delivered them to the pupils’ entrance to Erebus House. Like the other school buildings, Erebus was constructed of honey-hued Ham stones. Like the others, it too was roofed in slate and devoid of climbing plants save for a single clematis that hung over a closed door at the east end of the building.

“Those are the private quarters,” Chas said, following the direction of Lynley’s gaze. “Mr. Corntel’s rooms. The third formers’ digs are just this way.” He opened the door and went inside.

For Lynley, it was unavoidable, this stepping back into the past. They stood in a different sort of entry hall than had been in his own house at Eton. But the smells were just the same. Spoiled milk gone sour and never mopped up, burnt toast disregarded on someone’s private cooker, clothes stiff with dirt and exuding a foul miasma of sweat, and heat from the radiator bubbling away, cooking all these odours permanently into the woodwork and the floors and the ceiling. Even when the house was empty of boys on weekends or during their holidays, the smell would linger stubbornly on.

That Erebus was one of the older houses was evidenced by the fact that the entry was panelled from floor to ceiling in what once had been lustrous golden oak. Through the years this golden hue had darkened, and generations of schoolboys, who found it impossible to attach sentiment to something merely because of its age, had gone to great lengths to finish off its lustre. The panelling was banged, battered, and brutalised.

The furniture in the entry was not in much better condition, what little there was of it. A long, narrow refectory table against one wall—the repository for mail, it seemed—bore the battle scars of generations of trunks, suitcases, tuck boxes, schoolbooks, and packages from home having been dumped carelessly upon it. There were two overstuffed chairs not far from this, both stained, both with their cushions missing. Between them on the wall hung a pay telephone with countless names and numbers scratched into the panelling surrounding it. The only item in the entry that could have remotely been called decorative was the house banner which someone had sensibly encased in glass on the wall. Even it had seen better days, for it was worn thin almost to transparency, and its image was indistinguishable.

“It’s supposed to represent Erebus,” Chas explained as Lynley and Havers inspected the banner in its place of honour, “the primeval darkness that emerged from Chaos. The brother of night. The father of day and sky. You can’t tell from the banner, any longer, I’m afraid. It’s awfully faded.”

“You’re studying classics?” Lynley asked.

“Chemistry, biology, and English,” Chas replied. “We all have to know the meanings behind the houses’ names. It’s part of the tradition.”

“What are the other houses?”

“Mopsus, Ion, Calchus, Eirene, and Galatea.”

“Interesting selection, considering the array of mythological allusions one has to choose from. The last two are for the girls, I suppose.”

“Yes. I’m in Ion myself.”

“The son of Creusa and Apollo. An interesting story.”

Chas’ spectacles slipped on his nose. He pushed them up, smiled, and said, “Third formers are up above. The stairs are this way.” He continued on his way, leaving Lynley and Havers to follow.

On the first floor of the building, no one was about. They walked down a narrow corridor floored in worn brown linoleum with walls painted a dirt-covering institutional green. It smelled exclusively of sweat and damp. At ceiling height, water pipes ran the length of the hall, curved down the wall, and disappeared through a hole in the floor. Doors lined both sides of the hall. None bore locks, but all were closed.

At the third door on the left, Chas paused, knocked once, announced “Quilter,” and shouldered it open a bit. He gave a quick look inside, said, “
Jesus
,” and turned back to Lynley and Havers. His expression told them that something was wrong. He did his best to cover the momentary rupture in his facade by holding out his hand with an apologetic flourish. “Here it is. Pretty bad. It’s hard to believe four boys could…well, see for yourself.”

Lynley and Havers entered. Chas remained by the door.

The room was mayhem, with magazines and books thrown here and there, papers underfoot, rubbish unemptied, unmade beds, cupboards gaping open, drawers crammed too full and overflowing, clothing strewn about in three of the four cubicles. Either a hasty search had been conducted in the room recently or the house prefect—whose job it was to see to it that the boys kept themselves in order—was not doing anything to make them toe the line.

Lynley considered the likelihood of both possibilities. As he did so, he saw Chas leave the dormitory, heard him opening and closing doors all down the hall, heard his voice murmuring in disbelief. Lynley had his answer.

“The house prefect, Sergeant. Do we have his name?”

Havers flipped back through her notebook, read, continued turning pages. “John Corntel said it was…Here. Brian Byrne. Is this his doing, sir?”

“More likely his undoing,” Lynley replied. “Let’s see what we have.”

The dormitory was divided into cubicles, each cubicle defined by white painted pressed-wood boards which rose about five feet from the floor and provided a small degree of privacy. Contained within the cubicle’s extremely limited space were a bed with two drawers built into its lower frame, a cupboard with the name of the cubicle’s inhabitant fixed to it with tape, and whatever wall decoration the boy himself chose as his personal statement of ownership.

It was intriguing to see the difference between what Matthew Whateley had put upon his walls and what the other boys had chosen. In the cubicle identified as belonging to someone named Wedge hung a collection of rock and roll posters, revealing a rather eclectic taste in music. U2, the Eurythmics, Pink Floyd’s
The Wall
, Prince, mixed with vintage photographs of the Beatles, the Byrds, as well as Peter, Paul, and Mary. In Arlens’ cubicle, bathing beauties posed languidly, their bodies well-oiled and clothed in fantasy-producing swimming apparel, surrounded by sand, striding Amazon-like across the dunes, arching hard-nippled and with Freudian explicitness into the foaming brine. Smythe-Andrews, the inhabitant of the dormitory’s third little niche, had devoted himself to a collection of photographs comprising a memorial to some of the more grisly scenes from the motion picture
Alien
. Anyone who had met a violent end was depicted in ghastly, stomach-turning detail. As was the alien himself, looking like a combination of chain saw, praying mantis, and what came out of the scientist’s machine in
The Fly
.

The fourth cubicle, by the window, belonged to Matthew Whateley. His choice of decoration was photographs of locomotives—steam, diesel, and electric—from an assortment of countries. Lynley looked at them curiously. They were arranged neatly in rows on the wall above his bed. Across one had been written “choo-choo, little poof,” a strange derogation for a young boy to leave hanging.

From the middle of the room, Havers said, “Less mature than the other boys. Everything else seems fairly typical to the normal thirteen-year-old.”

“If thirteen-year-olds can ever be said to be normal,” Lynley replied.

“True. What was up in your room at thirteen, Inspector?”

Lynley put on his spectacles to look at Matthew’s clothing. “Reproductions of early Renaissance art,” he replied absently. “I had a youthful devotion to Fra Angelico.”

She laughed. “Sod you.”

“You doubt me, Sergeant?”

“Completely.”

“Ah. Well, come and see what you make of this.”

She joined him in the cramped confines of Matthew’s cubicle where he had opened the cupboard. Like everything else, it was made of pressed wood, painted white, and, in keeping with the monastic atmosphere of Bredgar Chambers, it contained only two shelves and eight pegs for clothes. On the former were three clean white shirts, four pullovers in assorted colours, three jerseys, and a stack of T-shirts. On the latter hung trousers for both school and leisure wear. On the floor were dress shoes, gym shoes, and scuffed-up casual shoes. Into a ball had been tossed his games clothes.

Havers, Lynley saw, assessed the facts and drew her conclusion. “No school uniform here. Which means if he ran off, he did it in his school clothes.”

“A bit unusual, wouldn’t you say?” Lynley noted. “He’d be running off—clearly in defiance of school rules—wearing something that would immediately identify him as a pupil of Bredgar Chambers. Why do you suppose he might do that?”

Havers frowned, sucked at her lower lip. “Got some sort of message that he didn’t expect—we saw the telephone down in the entry, didn’t we? Anyone could have phoned him. He felt he needed to be off at once. No time to delay.”

“A possibility,” Lynley admitted, “except that his possession of an off-games chit to get him out of playing hockey that afternoon seems to suggest he had this planned.”

“Yes, there’s that.” She drew a pair of trousers from the cupboard and examined them absently. “Then I should think he wanted to be seen. He wanted to be picked up. Perhaps he wore his uniform as a means of identifying himself.”

“So someone he was meeting would know who he was?”

“That works, doesn’t it?”

Lynley was going through the drawers beneath the bed. As he did so, he saw Chas Quilter return to the dormitory where he stood, watchful, hands in his pockets, inside the door. Lynley ignored him for the moment, fascinated at what the drawers revealed about Matthew Whateley, and, even more, about his mother.

“Havers,” Lynley said, “hand me trousers and a pullover, will you? Any will do.”

She did so and Lynley laid them across the bed, took a matching pair of socks from the drawer, and stood back, looking down at the outfit he’d created.

“She’s put his name on everything,” he said to Havers, “which is no doubt required by the school. But look at what else she’s done for the boy.” He turned a sock down to reveal the numbers
3, 4
, and
7
fixed to tape. He reached for the trousers, and on the inner waistband alongside the boy’s name was the single number
3
. On the collar of the pullover again they saw
3
. Another pair of trousers was marked with a 7.

“Match the numbers so he knew how to dress himself?” Havers asked in disgust. “Gives me the flipping chills, that does, sir. Choo-choo trains on the walls and Mummy’s dress-by-numbers in his clothes?”

“It tells us something, doesn’t it?”

“It tells me Matthew Whateley was probably as good as suffocating. If he had any sense, that is. Was it his parents’ idea that he come to this place, Inspector?”

“It appears to have been.”

“So they wanted little Matt to fit in with the swells he’d be meeting in his new school. No slip-ups would do if he was to climb the ladder of social success. Starting at thirteen with his clothes all numbered so he put them on right. No wonder he ran off.”

Lynley was thoughtful, pondering the numbers. He replaced the clothes and asked the senior prefect to verify whether the requisite clothing allowed by the school was present in Matthew Whateley’s cupboard. Chas came to look it over and indicated that, aside from the school uniform, everything was there. Lynley closed the cupboard and drawers and said to the boy, “There’s no study area in here. Is there a day room in the building where the boys do their prep?”