Well-Schooled in Murder (34 page)

“We found a draft of a letter to you among Matthew’s belongings. Did he write to you last week?” Lynley took the piece of notebook paper from his pocket and handed it over to her.

She read it, nodded, and handed it back. “Yes. I received a note like this on Friday. Whenever he had dinner with us, he wrote a note of thanks. Always.”

“He makes reference to a boy who saw him. Evidently you got him back to the school after curfew.”

“He and Dad were quite involved in a game and time got away from all of us. I phoned Matthew on Wednesday to make sure there’d been no trouble. He said one of the older boys had seen him.”

“Had he been reported to the Headmaster?”

“Evidently not. At least not yet. I think Matt intended to speak to the older boy anyway. To explain where he’d been.”

“Would Matthew have faced disciplinary action for being out after curfew even if he was with you?”

“Apparently. The students are supposed to be responsible enough to get themselves back to campus on time, no matter the circumstances. That shows maturity, I suppose.”

“The punishment had Matthew been caught after curfew?”

“He might have been confined to the house for a week. Perhaps warned off. I can’t think they’d do anything else to him.”

“But to the other boy?”

Jean Bonnamy drew her eyebrows together. “The other boy?”

“The one who saw Matthew.”

“I don’t understand.”

It was a twist to the circumstances which Lynley had not seen until this moment. He had previously thought only in terms of Matthew’s house prefect—Brian Byrne—not reporting a boy missing during bed check. But now he saw an added dimension. If Matthew Whateley had been out after curfew on Tuesday night, so had someone else.

14

“This thing tastes like sawdust, Inspector! It’s disgusting. Must’ve been made last week. Fresh sandwiches! Ha! Someone ought to put that bloke in the nick for false advertising.” Crumbs from her cheese sandwich powdered the front of her maroon pullover. Sergeant Havers brushed at them with a scowl, distributing them generously onto the floor of Lynley’s car. He said her name in useless protest. She shrugged. “We could’ve stopped. We could’ve gone to that pub. Fifteen minutes to eat wouldn’t exactly put us in the dock for dereliction of duty.”

Lynley inspected his own selection, roast beef and tomato, and saw that both were rather too green to be considered wise for consumption. “It seemed a good idea at the time,” he said.

“Besides,” Havers groused now that she had his agreement, “we’ve not exactly got a reason to go rushing back to the school, have we? As far as I can tell, working through this flaming case is like stepping into quicksand. We’re up to our necks now, and all it’s going to take is one more blasted detail that creates one more blind alley and down we go. Suffocating.”

“Rather a lot of mixed metaphors, Havers.”

She scoffed. “
You
tell me what we’ve got. We started out with class differences. Matt Whateley running off because he couldn’t fit in with the la-di-da types at the school. Then we decided it was bullying, with Matt running off because he was afraid of some tough who was pushing him about. Then we went in for homosexuality and perversion. And
now
we’re playing with racial bigotry. Not to mention someone being out after curfew. Now, there’s a fine motive for murder.” She pulled out her cigarettes and lit one defiantly. Lynley lowered his window. “I don’t know where we’re heading with this muck any longer, and I’m getting to the point that I don’t even know where the hell we’ve been.”

“The Bonnamys confused the issue, didn’t they?”

Havers blew out a stream of smoke. “Chinese.
Chinese?
It’s not a go, Inspector. We both know that. We’ve a sick old man with an overactive imagination and a heart back in Hong Kong. And in the same house a lonely spinster daughter with fancies of her own. They see a dark-haired little boy who reminds them of the past and without any questioning, they assume he’s part Chinese.”

Lynley did not disagree. “It’s pushing things. But there’s something more to evaluate here, Sergeant.”

“What?”

“The Bonnamys don’t know Giles Byrne. They don’t know that he was once devoted to a Chinese student at the school—Edward Hsu. Is it mere coincidence that out of the blue they would tell us they’re sure Matthew Whateley was part Chinese?”

“Are you saying that the fact that Matthew was Chinese—accepting that as truth for a moment, which I don’t, by the way—was what attracted Giles Byrne to him in the first place?”

“It’s a thought, isn’t it? Because isn’t it peculiar that both Edward Hsu and Matthew Whateley are dead? Not only the two students with whom Giles Byrne was involved, but two Chinese students.”

“If you want to accept that Matthew Whateley was Chinese. And if he was,
who
was he? Patsy Whateley’s son, the product of an affair that her husband doesn’t know about? Kevin Whateley’s son, taken in and loved by the sainted Patsy? Who
was
he? What’s his story?”

“That’s what we’ll have to find out. Only the Whateleys can tell us.”

He made the turn onto the school drive. At the porter’s lodge, Elaine Roly was struggling to put Frank Orten’s younger grandson into an antique pram while the other child, disregarded for the moment, threw pebbles at the lodge’s bay window. Elaine Roly didn’t look up at the sound of the car’s passing.

“I should think a bit of time with those two would put her off Frank Orten for good,” Havers commented, stubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray. “Do you think she’s after him, Inspector?”

“She may be. But from what we saw this morning, he doesn’t appear to be encouraging her, does he?”

“Well,” Havers said casually in a manner that told Lynley he had inadvertently given her an opening that she intended to use, “when it comes to love, some people don’t need to be encouraged to hang on, do they?”

He ignored the question and accelerated the car. They swept down the drive and parked at the front of the school. When they entered the main foyer, they saw that the chapel door stood open and that the choir was gathered in the nave. Today the boys wore their school uniforms rather than the cassocks and surplices that had lent them such a celestial air the previous day. They were obviously engaged in some sort of rehearsal, for in the middle of what Lynley recognised as one of the choruses from the
Messiah
, the choir master stopped them impatiently, blew three separate notes upon a pitch pipe, and made them begin again.

“Getting ready for Easter, aren’t they?” Sergeant Havers said. “Under the circumstances, that’s a bit much for me. Glories and hallelujahs and one little bloke murdered right under their noses.”

“But surely not by the choir master,” Lynley replied. He was watching the rehearsal, his eyes seeking and finding the senior prefect.

Chas Quilter was in the last row of boys. Lynley observed him, brooding over what it was about the prefect that had caused him to feel such a twinge of apprehension from the first moment of their meeting. The choir master stopped the boys again and said, “Let’s go on with Mr. Quilter’s solo now. Have you the place, Quilter?”

Lynley turned away. “Let’s rout out Mr. Lockwood, Havers.”

Across the foyer from the chapel, two doors admitted visitors into the administrative wing of Bredgar Chambers. One door led into the porter’s office, the other into a corridor decorated with trophies won by the school’s victorious athletic teams. They walked the length of this to the Headmaster’s study, where Alan Lockwood’s secretary was working at a word processor. Seeing them, she got to her feet with an alacrity that suggested flight rather than welcome. Behind a closed door across the hall, the murmur of conversation rose and fell.

“You’re wanting the Headmaster,” the secretary announced. “He’s in a meeting at the moment. You’ll wait in his study.” That said, she brushed past them, opened Lockwood’s study door, and motioned them inside. “I can’t say how long the Headmaster will be” was her final cool comment before leaving them.

“Nice lass, that,” Havers commented when they were alone. “Has all her instructions down, doesn’t she? Red carpet treatment and all.”

Lynley took the opportunity to examine the photographs and drawings that documented the school’s history on one of the study walls. Sergeant Havers joined him.

The photographs spanned the last one hundred and fifty years, with fading daguerreotypes representing the earliest pictorial records. Across the decades, schoolchildren gathered at the base of Henry VII’s statue; they lined up in neat rows in front of the school; they marched in columns across the playing fields; they rode in heavy-wheeled wagons along the school drive. They were uniformed and clean and smiling, one and all.

“Notice anything about them, Sergeant?”

“No girls until recently,” she replied. “Thank God for the latter half of the twentieth century.”

“Yes, there’s that. And something else.”

She went from picture to picture. She pulled at her chin. “Minorities,” she commented. “Where are they?”

“Just the occasional face. Not unusual two hundred years ago. But surely a bit odd in the last ten years.”

“So we’re back to bigotry?”

“I don’t think we can dismiss it yet, Havers.”

“I suppose it’s something to play with. Why not give it a try?”

They turned from the wall as the study door opened. But it was not Alan Lockwood who entered the room. Rather, it was his wife. She carried a large arrangement of flowers in a shallow bisque bowl.

Her steps did not falter when she saw Lynley and Havers. She merely smiled fleetingly at them, nodded hello, and took the flowers to the table that sat in the alcove created by the wide bay window.

“I brought these for the council room,” she explained pleasantly. “Flowers make a room so much more welcoming, and since Alan is meeting with parents there, I thought that the flowers…” She rearranged three tuberoses. Their sweet fragrance was heady in the close air. “I’m afraid I didn’t get them ready in time. The meeting’s well under way. So I’ve brought them in here.” She moved aside the silver candelabrum at the table’s centre. “It’s a bit much, isn’t it? Both the candelabrum
and
the flowers.” She frowned, looked about the room, and took the candelabrum to the fireplace where she placed it on the mantel. It partially obscured the Holbein portrait. Apparently satisfied with this arrangement, she nodded and tucked a strand of grey hair back into place above her forehead. “I do all the flowers for the school. From our conservatory. But I’ve told you that, haven’t I? Sometimes I can’t remember what I’ve said and what I haven’t said to people. The first sign of senility, Alan tells me.”

“Hardly.” Lynley smiled. “Just a lot to remember. I should guess you speak to dozens of people every day. That’s a lot to keep straight.”

“Yes, of course.” She went to her husband’s desk and needlessly straightened a stack of folders that lay there, perfectly straight in the first place. The activity suggested that she had come into the study with a purpose other than delivering flowers.

“He works so hard and gets so tired that he doesn’t always think before he speaks, Inspector. Things slip out in irritation. Like that remark about senility. But he’s a good man, my Alan. A very good man. Decent. Respectable.” She found a pencil tucked between two of the folders and neatly lined it up with a pen. “Alan’s not appreciated as he ought to be. People don’t know what he does behind the scenes, and he doesn’t tell them. That’s not his way. He’s across the hall right now, meeting with four sets of parents whose boys might otherwise go to Eton or Harrow. Rugby. Westminster. But he’ll convince them to choose Bredgar. He does that all the time.”

“That must be the most anxious part of a headmaster’s job,” Lynley remarked. “Seeing to it that enrollment stays at a steady level.”

“But it’s more than that to Alan,” she replied. “He’s determined to bring the school back to where it was just after the war. That’s his mission. Before Alan came, enrollment was off. Exam results were deteriorating, especially the A-level results. But he intends to do something about that. He has already. The new theatre was his idea, Inspector. A way of attracting more students to the school. Well, the right sort of students, naturally.”

“Was Matthew Whateley the right sort of student?”