Well-Schooled in Murder (37 page)

The information seemed to give the woman a small degree of solace, for she nodded, and looked towards the boy’s picture on the sideboard in the dining area. “Mattie wasn’t a runner. Knew that from the first, didn’t I? He wasn’t brought up to run away if things were a trouble to him. Faced things head-on, did Matt. But I don’t see why anybody would want to kill my boy.”

It was this question that they had come to Hammersmith to address. Lynley sought a way to lead into it. His eyes passed over the room, coming to rest on the shelf beneath the front windows on which stood the souvenir cups and the marble sculptures.
Nautilus
, he saw, had been removed, but
Mother and Child
stood next to a nude woman who lay in an oddly contorted position with her back arched and her breasts pointed towards the sky. The mother and child, he saw, were linked together in stone by the curve of the mother’s arm, an eternal conjunction, unbreakable and infinite. It was the metaphor he needed. His eyes on the sculpture, he asked the question.

“Have you any brothers and sisters, Mrs. Whateley?”

“Four brothers. A sister.”

“Do any of your brothers have difficulty with colours as Matthew did?”

She looked perplexed. “No. Why?”

Sergeant Havers returned to them from the kitchen. She carried a tray on which she had assembled two cheese and tomato sandwiches, a cup of tea, three ginger biscuits. She set this in front of Patsy Whateley and urged a quarter of a sandwich into her hand. Lynley waited until Patsy had begun to eat before he went on.

“The inability to tell the difference between colours is a sex-linked characteristic,” he explained. “Mothers pass it on to their sons. In order for Matthew to be colour deficient, he would have had to inherit that tendency from you, his mother.”

“Mattie knew his colours,” she said in weak protest. “Just a few he had trouble with.”

“Blue and yellow,” Lynley acknowledged. “The school colours at Bredgar Chambers.” He guided her back to the central point. “You see, for you to be a carrier of a sex-linked characteristic—in this case, the inability to tell blue from yellow—your mother would have to be a carrier as well. That being the case, it would be unlikely that all four of your brothers would have escaped being affected, because it’s a genetic mutation, something that gets passed along in the chromosomes when a child is conceived.”

“What’s this to do with Mattie’s death?”

“It has more to do with his life than his death,” Lynley said gently. “It suggests that Matthew wasn’t your natural son.”

Her hand still held the sandwich, but she dropped her arm to her lap. Part of a tomato slipped out and streaked red against the yellow of her dressing gown. “He didn’t know. Mattie didn’t know.” She got up abruptly, letting the sandwich fall to the floor. She went for Matthew’s photograph and brought it back to her chair. As she spoke, she gazed upon it, clutching the frame. “Our boy, was Mattie. Our real boy. It never made a bit of difference to us that he was born to someone else. Not a bit of difference. Never. He was ours from the time he was six months old. Such a good baby. Such a love, was Mattie.”

“What do you know about his background? About his natural parents?”

“Little enough. Only that one of his parents was Chinese. But that made no difference to me or to Kev. He was our boy, was Mattie. Right from the start.”

“You’d been able to have no children of your own?”

“Kev can’t have children. We tried for years. I wanted to have that artificial thing, but Kev said no, said he wouldn’t have me carrying another man’s child, no matter how it was managed. We tried to adopt. Years and years. But no one would let us.” She looked up, leaving the picture at rest in her lap. “Kev had trouble finding work that would last in those days, and even if he had, adoption folks didn’t find a barmaid suited to be a mum.”

Lynley saw how the puzzle was being completed and asked his next question, even though it was mere formality, even though he knew in advance what the answer would be. Circumstances had been conspiring to prepare him to hear it in a hundred different ways over the last two days. “How did you come to adopt Matthew?”

“Mr. Byrne—Giles Byrne—arranged it.”

Patsy Whateley delineated the history of their relationship with Giles Byrne: how he had come into the Blue Dove regularly from his home a short distance away on Rivercourt Road; how he had come to know the barmaid through their nightly chats; how he seemed willing to listen to Patsy’s tales of being rejected by adoption agencies; how he told her one night that a child was available if she didn’t object to the fact that he was mixed race.

“We went to a solicitor’s office in Lincoln’s Inn. The baby was there. Mr. Byrne’d brought him. We signed the papers and brought Mattie home.”

“That was all?” Lynley asked. “There was no exchange of money?”

Patsy Whateley looked horrified. “Did we buy our boy, you mean? No! We did nothing more than sign papers, we did. And then sign a few more when the adoption was final. Mattie was our real son right from the beginning. We never treated him otherwise.”

“Did he know about his racial background?”

“Never. He never knew he was adopted. He was our real boy. Our
real
boy, Inspector.”

“So you don’t know who his natural parents are?”

“Didn’t need to know, Kev and I. We didn’t care to know, did we? Mr. Byrne just said he knew of a baby we could have. That’s all that mattered. All we had to do was promise that we’d bring the boy up so as to allow him to have a better life than just Hammersmith. That was what Mr. Byrne asked us to do. That’s all.”

“A better life than Hammersmith? What exactly did Mr. Byrne mean by that?”

“The school, Inspector. In order to keep him, we had to promise to send Mattie to Bredgar Chambers, Mr. Byrne’s old school.”

“Maybe Giles Byrne’s penchant for things Chinese extended to females,” Sergeant Havers noted as they turned the corner from the Upper Mall onto Rivercourt Road. “We know he was fond of Edward Hsu. Why not fond of some female Chinese as well? Extremely fond, if you know what I mean.”

“I haven’t discounted the possibility that he’s Matthew’s natural father,” Lynley responded.

“He won’t be admitting that to us in a friendly tête-à-tête, Inspector. Not if he’s managed to keep it quiet all these years. He’s a fairly well-known public figure, after all. That BBC talk show, the political commentaries, the newspaper column. It might look a bit black against him, mightn’t it, if an illegitimate son came to light? Especially a mixed race son that he abandoned. Especially if the mother was considerably younger than—perhaps ruined by—our Giles.”

“We can’t be sure of anything, Havers, until we see what sort of link, if any, we’re forging between Matthew Whateley’s parentage and his murder.”

The Byrne house was only a short distance from the Upper Mall and the river. It was a three-storeyed, brick Victorian structure, without architectural merit other than that found in its passion for symmetry. This passion expressed itself in a repetition of windows—two on each floor—in the balanced ornamentation upon the front of the building, and in the design of the front door upon which knocker, post slot, and knob all lined up one beneath the other with recessed panels on either side. The door, Lynley saw, had suffered damage recently, for the wood was freshly scarred in several places and its white paint was smeared with streaks of dirt.

In the growing darkness, lights shone in the rooms at the front of the house, both on the ground floor and up above. When Lynley and Havers knocked on the door, it was opened within moments. They were not greeted by Giles Byrne, however, but rather by a beautiful Pakistani woman perhaps thirty years old. She wore a full-length ivory caftan of silk and a beaded necklace fashioned into a collar of gold. Combs held long, dark hair away from her face, and her gold earrings winked in the foyer light. She was obviously not a servant.

“How may I help you?” Her voice was low-pitched, pleasant, like a musical instrument.

Lynley produced his warrant card which she studied. “Is Mr. Byrne in?” he asked.

“Indeed. Of course.” The woman stepped back from the door and motioned them to come inside. The gesture drew the sleeve of her caftan back along her smooth, dark skin. “If you’ll wait there in the sitting room, Inspector, I shall fetch him for you. Please do help yourselves to a drink.” She smiled. Her teeth were small, very white. “If you’re still on duty, I shan’t tell a soul. Do excuse me, if you will. Giles is working in the library.” She left them, running lightly up the stairs.

“Not doing badly for himself in the love and companionship department, our Mr. Byrne,” Havers muttered when they were alone. “Or perhaps she’s someone he’s tutoring. Because he loves education. A real pedagogue, our Giles.”

Lynley shot her a look and nodded her into the sitting room to the left of the front door. It faced Rivercourt Road, comfortably but not ostentatiously furnished with well-made pieces that would stand the test of time and use. The dominant colour was green, present in the pale washed lime of the walls, in the moss of the two sofas and the three chairs, in the rich summer leaf of the carpet whose thickness muffled their footsteps. Across the top of a walnut piano that stood near the window were displayed an assortment of photographs, and Lynley went to examine these as they waited for Giles Byrne to join them.

The pictures acted as testament to the special gift that Byrne brought to his work as the host of one of the BBC’s political talk shows. In them, he posed with an array of governmental notables representative of every possible philosophical bent from Margaret Thatcher to Neil Kinnock; from an ageing Harold Macmillan to the Reverend Ian Paisley to a scowling Bernadette Devlin; from three successive American Secretaries of State to one former President. At the side of each of these, Byrne looked the same—sardonic, mildly amused, neither attached nor devoted to anyone. The fact that Byrne was able to keep his political philosophy hidden was what had made him such a success as an interviewer for the BBC. He attacked a problem or a personality from any angle, acting as no one’s advocate. He was a man whose acid wit and rapier tongue had torn apart many a cocksure political bigwig in his time.

“Edward Hsu,” Sergeant Havers was saying meditatively.

Lynley saw that she had gone to the fireplace above which hung two watercolours, both views of the Thames. They possessed that delicacy of brushwork and misty etherealisation of detail peculiar to Eastern painting. In one, trees, banks, and brakes rose out of a ground fog and seemed to float as effortlessly as the barge nearby on the water at dawn. In the other, three pastel-clad women took shelter from a sudden rainfall on the porch of a riverside cottage, their picnic left disregarded behind. Both paintings were signed simply
E. Hsu
.

“Nice work, these,” Havers said. She picked up a small photograph that stood on the mantel beneath them. “This must be Edward Hsu, then. A bit less formal than that snap of him in the chapel at the school.” Her eyes moved round the room several times. She looked back down at the picture, frowning, saying slowly, “Inspector, there’s something odd here.”

Lynley joined her, took the picture from her hands. In it, Edward Hsu and a very young Brian Byrne posed, smiling, in one of the boats on what appeared to be the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Brian sat between Edward’s legs, his little hands over Edward’s on the oars.

“Odd?” Lynley asked.

Havers replaced the photograph and walked to a cedar bureau across the room. On it stood a copy of the same picture of Matthew Whateley that they had seen in his parents’ cottage. Havers picked this up.

“We have Edward Hsu’s picture. We have Matthew Whateley’s picture. We have”—she gestured towards the piano—“a good half a dozen toffs and assorted swells. But only that one picture of Brian Byrne, in the boat with Edward Hsu. And what was Brian—three years old then? Four?”

“Nearly five.”

The two words had come from the doorway. Giles Byrne stood watching them. In the foyer behind him, the Pakistani woman looked like a study of light and dark in her caftan.

“It’s no secret that Brian and I are estranged,” Byrne commented as he entered the room. His footsteps were slow. He looked extremely worn out. “At his choice, not mine.” Momentarily, he gave his attention to his companion. “There’s no need for you to stay, Rhena. You’ve a brief to work on for court next week, haven’t you?”

“I wish to stay, my dear,” she replied and moved across the room soundlessly to sit on the sofa. She slipped off a delicate pair of sandals and drew her legs up beneath her. Four thin gold bracelets slid down her arm. She directed her eyes towards Byrne and kept them upon him.

“As you wish, then.” He went to a small coaching table on which stood decanters, glasses, and a bucket of ice. “A drink?” he asked Lynley and Havers over his shoulder. When they demurred, he took his time about pouring a straight whisky for himself and a mixture of several spirits for the woman. This done, he turned on the gas fire in the fireplace, adjusted the height of the flame, and carried both drinks to the sofa where he joined his companion.

If all this were an effort to stall for time, to marshal his thoughts, to assemble defences, or to demonstrate that he would control the interview, it also gave Lynley ample opportunity to study the man. Byrne was, he knew, somewhere in his mid-fifties, a man without any distinguishing physical beauty at all. Instead, oddities dominated his appearance. Quirks made him seem a caricature of himself. He was nearly bald, with a thin fringe of hair that clung wispily to his crown and a tuft like a forelock drooping onto his brow. His nose was too large, his mouth and eyes were too small, and, from forehead to chin, his face narrowed so dramatically that it resembled a perfect inverted triangle. He was quite tall and thin, and although his clothes appeared expensive—hand-loomed tweed, if Lynley wasn’t mistaken—they hung upon him loosely. His long arms dangled from his jacket, emphasising large, knobby-knuckled hands. These were jaundiced-looking, particularly the fingers which, on left and right hand both, bore the stains of nicotine.